Alex Bell – fantasy author

I tried so hard to resist it, I really did. The astonishingly rapid growth of my gorgeous Great Dane has left me somewhat poverty stricken of recent weeks. Not only have I had to buy her a new collar, harness and safety belt recently (we’re onto extra large sizes now, people), but she has also killed some of her toys and started trying to eat the fluff inside them, which means they’ve had to be chucked and replaced with new ones. It is simply amazing how quickly a bill in the pet shop adds up. I have also spent a positively frightening amount of money on books recently.

So my plan was to cut back on all non-essential expenditure for a while. But after seeing the Roadkill Toys on Dragon’s Den last week, I have not been able to stop thinking about them. They are just so unbelievably cool – I want them all! I can’t afford to spend that much money buying the whole range but I have lost the battle with myself, and this morning I ordered Grind the Rabbit:

Is he not perfect? There’s blood and guts coming out, and a tyre track on his back, and a fluffy tail, and a crazy bloodshot eye – I mean, honestly, what’s not to love? Plus, he comes in a body bag with a toe tag! What an awesome, awesome little product.

I love everything about the website: http://www.roadkilltoys.com. And as I can see that they have new products coming, I’m going to have to try not to visit the site for a while because I don’t know if I’ll be able to control myself. I can’t wait for Grind to arrive so that I can arrange him on my bed. He’ll probably give my Siamese a bit of a turn to begin with (she hates things like that), but I’m sure that Grind will soon fit right in with Suki, Moose and the rest of my gang.  They are, after all, quite accustomed to the weird things I occasionally bring home.

This is my skeleton.

His name is Erin. He was a present from my parents for my twentieth birthday. I think the only thing that can really top him gift-wise is the beautiful violin I got for my eighteenth. I love my skeleton – absolutely love him to bits. This is his winter outfit, and that hat is a genuine Victorian antique that I bought for him especially on Ebay (sometimes I use it as a hiding place for my Siamese’s toys if she’s keeping me awake by playing with them on my back when I’m in bed). Erin is a gentleman of quality – he wears only the very best. In the summer he wears an outfit that is worth a grand total of five hundred pounds (I let him borrow my Ralph Lauren sunglasses when I’m not using them).

The point is that not only is Erin exhibit number three in my Wunderkammer, but he is also my invaluable writing aide, friend and confidante. Seriously, I can tell him anything – he’s very discreet. And if I’m having a problem with whatever book I’m writing then Erin is sometimes able to suggest a solution. Of course, he only talks to me at night when the rest of my family have gone to bed, and even then he only whispers. It’s only when he decides to go downstairs in the middle of the night and start playing on the baby grand piano in the dining room that my parents and I have . . . had words about him. But I’ve told them both before: Erin goes, I go. It’s as simple as that.

Most importantly of all, he gives me an excuse to buy silly hats – because I’m not really buying them for me, I’m buying them for him.

This dead Bigfoot foetus was given to me by the Queen of the Faeries in return for my saving her life this one time.

There isn’t much more to say about it really, other than that it sits on my writing desk with my Feejee Mermaid and helps me come up with cool ideas for books.

I really love weird, shrivelled up dead stuff. It’s the reason I got chucked out of law school. But that, my friends, is another story entirely . . .

I love weird stuff. I think I get it from my Dad, who has always had a fondness for the ghastly and the ghoulish. He tried to instil this love in us kids from a young age. I took to it like a duck to water. My brother, alas, is a little more normal, but that’s his loss.

During my twenty-two years I have collected an impressive collection of weird and wonderful things. I do, in fact, have a wunderkammer. Oh, yes, I do.

A wunderkammer, for those who are unfamiliar with the term, is more commonly referred to as a Cabinet of Curiosities. Also known as a Cabinet of Wonder or a wonder-room.

I have now generously decided to share some of these wonders here on my blog. I know, I know – I’m just too good to you, my two or three multitude of readers. Gather round, people, gather round and witness the astonishing, unparalleled spectacle of the bizarre and the fantastic, here (and only here) at www.alex-bell.co.uk: 

Okay – moving straight on to my first curiosity, which I found quite by accident when I was six. As a little kid running around in my ribbons and bows I loved Disney’s The Little Mermaid. For years Ariel epitomised the way I imagined mermaids to look. But then I learnt about the Feejee Mermaids. Now that I’m all grown up, I get much more excited about them than I ever did about Ariel. Over the years, my tastes have veered away from the sweet and the sugary towards the macabre, the grotesque and the horrible (my Dad is so proud). And Feejee Mermaids, in case you don’t already know, are shrivelled, semi-mummified, ugly-looking things. 

In 1842, a man called Dr J. Griffin arrived in New York with a real mermaid he was said to have caught near the Feejee Islands in the South Pacific. Circus luminary P. T. Barnum persuaded him to showcase her in his travelling circus, where she was viewed by hundreds of people all over America.

Later it was said that the whole thing was a hoax and that Griffin and Barnum had known each other all along and come up with the scam together. Apparently they learnt that the mermaid was a fake soon after they acquired it from a seaman because it wasn’t a mermaid at all but rather a fish tail sewn onto an ape’s upper body.

Eh? Now, all right, Feejee Mermaids are fiendishly ugly things, but I find it hard to believe anyone would be fooled by a fish tail sewn onto an ape. Still, the fact remains that the term Feejee Mermaid is now pretty much synonymous with fake mermaid. The original Feejee Mermaid was said to be lost in the fire that destroyed Barnum’s museum so it will never be known for sure whether she was genuine or not.

Personally, I believe that she was real, but that’s probably only because when I was six, playing on a beach in Singapore with my little brother whilst my parents sipped cold beers nearby, I found what appeared to be a fossilised/mummified mermaid washed up on the sand. Without my parents’ knowledge, I took her back to the hotel, packed her in my bag and brought her home with me. Now she lives in my bedroom and is a constant source of fascination for my cats.

And here she is, the first wonder in my wunderkammer – my very own, marvellously ugly Feejee Mermaid. Feast your eyes and be amazed: