Hermione Gray & The Murdered Magician (2023)

There’s that quote from the movie, Forrest Gump, that famously goes: ‘Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re going to get’. Well, The Kick-About is like that too, so I’m not going to say too much about my response this week, except to say it could only have come as a direct response to the painting in question: Lucian Freud’s The Painter’s Room (1944) – or rather from my impulse to figure out the relationship between the objects in the frame.

My immediate thought was I must be looking at an improbable crime scene and that was when the fun began in earnest. In order to get this offering over the line, I begged and borrowed the talents of the kind and wonderful actor, Dan Snelgrove, with whom I’ve collaborated previously on the Chimera audio book. I suppose I should also say the following contains some pretty bad language and scenes of a sexual nature. Ha! How suitably Freudian – and in regards to that quote from Forrest Gump, be warned, for not everything that looks like chocolate is chocolate…