Cultureshock

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Video transcript

Blue Tac and a Lesson in Life by Mel Robson.  

My name is Mel, I live in Billingham but I'm moving to Stockton soon and I like making models out of blue tac, fimo, plasticine- anything really that moulds. I get a ball of blue tac and then I just make stuff out of it, it's sort of weird because I don't plan it, it just kind of happens. I don't know what I'm going to end up with once I start; I just know its going to be something.

I get inspiration from the natural world. I like animals and mythology, dragons and things like egyptian gods, I find them very interesting and quite inspiring because they've got heads of animals and stuff like that and different body parts but I tend to make them out of blue tac and then after I've made it a destroy it and then make something else.

I also get inspiration from my guide dog. He's called Nial and he's a labrador and he's three years old. I've had my guide dog Nial for a year and a half and I've had my pet dog Storm, who’s a four year old chocolate labrador, since he was nine weeks old.

Nial goes everywhere with me really. He goes shopping with me, he goes to restaurants with me. He hasn't gone to the cinema with me yet because I think he'd just eat up all the popcorn off the floor that people have dropped. I think he's a bit quirky. He's left handed so he has to walk on the left-hand side of everywhere, which isn't so much of a problem, unless you want to go around shops and he decides to take you the scenic route to where you want to go and you end up spending an extra five minutes trying to get him to go in a straight line.

He's not too keen on working in the rain- he sulks. He barks at random things incessantly and you don't actually know what it is. He hates bees, he goes mental whenever he sees one. Generally just a bit strange to be honest. Lovely but strange.

One day Nial was fixated on a bush and he wouldn't play with his toys or anything and then I heard this tweeting noise and then I felt under the bush and there was a baby bird there, so I had to pick this bird up and I stuck it on top of a shed out of the way, until I had put Nial in the house anyway, out of the way because he was trying to kill it. This bird was a bit stupid, it threw itself off the top of the shed so I had to go and pick it back up again and I put it back under the hedge to see if it's mother would come back for it even though it couldn't fly and I waited all day but she never came back so I picked him up again because I was worried about the cats getting him so I hid him under a plant pot while I went inside and then I came back out later on I put him on top of the plant pot in the middle of the garden to see if it's parent would spot it again but it never.

By the end of the day we found this birds nest when my mam came home so we put him back in his nest and then Nial was fixated on another bush and it turns out there was another baby bird in there, which I hadn't seen earlier. I tried to catch it but the stupid thing ran away and ran under the hedge and I went round one side and Nial did like a commando crawl, lioness stalk, went round like a panther in the jungle, pounced under the hedge, grabbed hold of it and killed it and he brought it back out and dropped it in front of the other dog as a little gift. The other dog wasn't interested in it. It kind of poked it with his nose and walked off. He wasn't very impressed. A few days later, Nial got hold of the other bird again but we managed to get it off him but he'd had all of it's flight feathers then so we put it back in the nest but I think it's flown off now, properly fledged.