This instalment of the Dalek Game is for Beatrix Potter’s beautiful A Tale of Two Bad Mice. I have mentioned before (“Scary“) how I like stories which play with the unsettling proportions of dolls houses. A Tale of Two Bad Mice does this, but with such loving detail that it isn’t scary so much as it is a solid, real little world – I used to get as frustrated as the mice did when item after item turned out not to be real: the coffee which was beads and the plaster ham stuck to its dish. Poor Hunca Munca and Tom Thumb.
The MS Society in Queensland has a holiday house for people with MS and their families on the edge of the broadwater at Runaway Bay. It is a beautiful location – it has its own jetty and pelicans sit on the pylons, schools of butterfly-bright sailing boats go out in classes and overturn and run into each other – but was used as a set for (I think) the second Flipper movie. As a result, in addition to the disorienting effect of halls built for wheelchairs and hospital beds, a number of the cupboards in the kitchen weren’t really cupboards at all – just doors nailed to boxes on the walls left over from the filming. I think they installed real cupboards a year or two ago, but I used to sympathise with the Bad Mice.
SO, if you would like to own this Dalek drawing (it is drawn in sepia ink on an A6 piece of paper: 5.8×4.1 inches), the original is available in exchange for a suitably generous donation to the MS Society. How it works:
Please email me a bid on or before next Wednesday 25 January with the amount of your bid (in Australian dollars): tanaudel at gmail dot comDepending on internet access, I may update this from time to time with the highest bid, but no guarantees. Edit: At 21 January, the highest bid is $100.If you make the highest bid over my reserve (which is “suitably generous”), I will let you know by email.The winner will then have to send me evidence of a donation to the MS Society of Qld.I will send out the art (and pay postage).Maybe we find out more about MS.Artist’s decision is final etc.
1 Feb 2012: The Daleks have gone to a good home and $100 to the MS Society – thank you!
Kathleen Jennings 
If only I wasn’t moving in two weeks and watching my budget. However, I will link a post to this on FB – if I can’t help one way I will help in another. I love Miss Potter, BTW. She was a fine amateur scientist … and only prevented from being a professional by her era.
Thank you! And I’d love to see more about that side of her life.
I have a very good Potter biography … somewhere in my mountain of book boxes. *sigh* The biography mentioned how dreadfully difficult it was to be an intelligent female in the Victorian era. The b*sterds wouldn’t give her a student pass for Kew Gardens, even though she was a major contributor of British specimens of mushrooms of other fungi. She was barely tolerated for her scientific illustrations of said fungi.
This is absolutely stunning! The chair on his head, unreal! Wonderful, simply wonderful!!
Thank you :)
A wonderfully creative piece of art for a very worthy cause. I’ll tweet it out to the world. :))
Thank you very much!
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