We’ve been sitting watching a very depressing film tonight (Glengarry Glen Ross) and the feeling of grubbiness that pervades the plot seems to make the whole thing feel really bleak despite its stellar cast. It has made me reflect on the way that beneath the gloss, things are often less perfect than they seem…

You often see shots of pristine pencils, all perfectly sharpened, all splayed out in a perfect fan. They’re immaculately sharpened to a crisp point. It’s obvious they’ve never been sullied by real use. There are no chips to their paint, not muck anywhere in sight and no dog hair. Particularly no dog hair.

I decided that the pot of coloured pencils that I was using on Sunday to try to make a dream a reality that was sitting on the coffee table would make a good analogy for the principle – yes, they are full of colour, but unlike the glossy stock images, these have been used. They’re chipped, some are upside down, their points are broken and worn and there is muck all over them. Furthermore, they're standing in an empty (though washed and clean) dog food tin!

Despite my desire to show them as they are, stray ball point pen along with a couple of chewed up children’s pencils from schools where I’ve worked included, I found myself cloning out dog hair from the shot. What’s that about? Dog hair – the bane of my life. It’s everywhere in this house. It’s on all of my clothes as well as every surface of every inanimate object inside the rats’ nest. Why then, when the shot was supposed to be about the reality of life and use, did I decide the dog hair had to go? Don’t ask me, maybe it’s to do with a need to say “it’s not all bad” (even though I know it’s worse than it looks). So, here is a manky shot of some life-worn pencils, along with a couple of usurpers but without the thing that really gives it its air of general shabbiness – the dog hair has gone. (Most of it anyway, one single strand remains.)