11/12/2022 0 Comments Lladro talismania![]() There she stayed until the year my grandmother died, when I retrieved the porcelain girl from her hiding place, and took her back to the flat I was sharing with my fiance. I thanked her, took the figurine home, and left the girl in a drawer at my mother’s house while I went off to study, travel, work, and share flats with friends. Not when she presented the figurine to me so generously, as the gift I’d waited for so long. Yes, I still wished I was as effortlessly slender as her – I knew even then that I would probably always wish that, for reasons I would never fully understand – but her dress was ugly, her hat silly, and what was she standing around waiting for anyway? Why didn’t she just get on and do whatever she wanted to do?Īnd so, by the time I turned 18 - as tall as the figurine (proportionately speaking), and most of that puppy fat finally melted away – I was ready to tell my grandmother not to give me the present to keep hold of that girl in her pink dress. She looked like a sit-quietly-and-be-good kind of girl a sugar-and-spice girl. She did not look like a girl who had ever been given detention, or got drunk on snakebite, or taught herself to play bass guitar. At home in London, all thoughts of her slipped from my mind and when I did see her at my grandparents’ house near Bristol, I began to think that this was not the sort of girl I wanted to be anyway. Gradually, as I grew older, the figurine’s powers began to wane. I tried many times to persuade my grandmother to let me take her home with me, as if just keeping her close would exert some sort of talismanic power but she would not be swayed. Through those miserable years, that figurine staring out beatifically from her perch in my grandparents’ living room seemed like a vision from a dream: a shimmering, unattainable image of a girl – pretty, slim, balletic. I was an overweight child, greasy-haired and myopic, and was bullied for a time at primary school. That’s another reason why just setting eyes on her triggers a cloudburst of contradictory emotions. I don’t look like the figurine, of course I never have. “That’s what you’ll look like one day.” And to emphasise the sincerity of her statement, she offered to give me the figurine when I turned 18 – a promise that she did, indeed, keep. “Isn’t she beautiful?” said my grandmother, an enthusiastic collector of Lladró. I had loved her passionately from the age of six, when I’d first noticed her standing demurely on my grandparents’ cabinet. The porcelain girl has been in my possession since 2000, when my grandmother Eunice gave the figurine to me in what seemed, then, a symbolic gesture, marking my passage into womanhood. ![]()
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