The Owl in Aviators

Searching through my notebooks recently I found, scribbled cryptically at the corner of a page, “like a fat man peeling quails’ eggs.” And a few pages later, “eyes so big he looked like an owl in aviators.” What was I going for with the quails’ egg thing, I wonder? Some sort of juxtaposition about unexpected delicacy and physical size, maybe.

Often notes from the past like this, while sounding kinda beguiling, have lost their immediacy and applicability. I s’pose I must have been thinking of something as I hastily recorded them, but God knows what it was.

Whereas my crappy similes have a weird transience, others – really good ones – stay in the mind for years. Decades. This week I was reading an autobiographical piece by Henry Winter, one of my fave football writers. He mentioned having a brother, Tim. Timothy Winter, I thought, and immediately after, “…comes to school with eyes as wide as a football pool.” Now there’s a line from way back; a poem we did at high school, and a simile that seems to make sense on some level way deeper than language given that no-one knows what a football pool is.

A writer of prose whose similes stay in the memory is of course Raymond Chandler, particularly on facial expressions. Here are two very different smiles, for example:

"Her smile was as faint as a fat lady at a fireman's ball."
"His smile was as stiff as a frozen fish."

Perhaps the real reason that “like an owl in aviators” hasn’t made it out of the notebook and into a story is less to do with its lack of quality and more to do with the fact that my workmanlike prose doesn’t suit it.

​I’m not Charles Causley or Raymond Chandler. In future, I’ll leave the poetry to them.