I have no idea why I associate Boris Johnson with rock pools, but apparently I do.  At least four of the pieces I am working on associated with Boris are related to rock pools.  I have a carpet, a box and a trunk on wheels, a small table all with rock pool tendencies.

Wolfish, one of the remaining David Wolfe pieces, is swimming in a coral reef in a tank, but apparently in my head Boris is all about rock pools. Perhaps the psychologists could have a think on that one. It is probably something to do with sex, although I am not aware of it.  Most of my work is related to emotion rather than sex in terms of whichever form things take, but the colours are usually a give-away in terms of the sexual element.

The furniture progress has been slow but Jemima Khan is going to be spectacular, Iain Duncan Smith is a lot of work, and Theresa May is yet to get off the ground due to lack of funds.  Darius Guppy is on pause as he needs a lot of sanding work.

I am starting to get psyched up for the book, so I will be doing some reading shortly in anticipation of Lucifer Ogilvie.  Not to be too cynical about it, but it would help a lot if Boris likes it, so I hope I can at least persuade him to read it when the time comes. My ideas seem to be developing somewhat, so hopefully it will be a funny and clever take on Conservatism through the eyes of the alternative Boris.

The games are on hold at the moment, I managed to salvage them from yet another broken computer. (my cat is very fond of computers, which is why I seem to go through five or six laptops a year, although she does not seem to share the same love of the PC).

I am seriously considering a short story about racism, since whoever manages such things has successfully persuaded us that protecting our own rights involves maligning other people’s.  Mind your Language, a programme which is usually denounced as racist in the UK, is massively popular in India and Pakistan.

Today we took a trip down to Troon beach and enjoyed watching some dude kitesurfing whilst I dug a large hole.  For some reason this was extremely therapeutic.

Waiting for my mother to come out of hospital is a big worry as apparently carers are supposed to go to the jobcentre when their charges are in hospital, and find extremely short term work to prevent them visiting their patients or catching up with house related work.  Eating is apparently unnecessary according to our benevolent government, as is keeping up your property since you are also deprived of any income for the property holding patient.  I wonder if anybody in government considers that since they already spend more on lunch than people who are ill get in an entire week,  perhaps they might like to consider those of us on a 24 hour commitment for sixty pounds per week?

Once I had enjoyed all of an hour on Troon beach, I returned to work and prepared the materials for the Theresa May piece, which I will be unable to work on until my income is restored, provided my mother makes a recovery.  Iain Duncan Smith is proving to be a fairly complex piece of work, since it has rather operatic overtones and a fairly deep level of expense.  I also need to test part of it to see if the ink will survive the process, although I did find a rather nice glass eye for it earlier this week.

Bordello Rhetoric may require some professional help for the hinges, as I have tried two types now and they are not working as well as I had hoped.  I polished a couple of lovely Georgian handles for it, and they have also rebelled, so it will be some time before I can consider this a success.

Boris without artifice,  which will probably be called Al once it is finished, is coming along nicely, but even when the design is finished, the work will only be a third of the way along as it is a technically complex and very novel piece of heavy textile engineering.  It is fascinating that textile artists will spend hundreds of hours on something that people maybe take 20 seconds to look at and write off, or on depending on how they feel.  I remember reading about another artist that had forgone her alternative career of being a GP to earn six pounds an hour messing with textiles and agreeing with her Indian relatives that she was probably making the wrong decision.

Two massive boxes are awaiting my attention, so I am certainly not short of work, despite not really having a hope of making a living out of it for another year or two.  I am not sure if Wolfish is really worth pursuing as it is a good three months of work to finish, for an animated and yet functionless bit of spectacular fun.  It might be worth doing for the sake of future Wolfe books, but I cannot help but think it is really just a nice picture, which I should then remake into a carpet.  I also have a chair to do for the Wolfe related work, which is going to be pending for at least another year.

So, things are coming along in their usual juggled and complicated way as I seek to create entirely new products which may or may not capture somebody’s imagination once they are finished.  You basically have to cling to the idea that somebody, somewhere will look at it and decide that you are a genius.  In the meantime you suffer messy clothes, messy hair and a messy life as you stagger about scraping together the money to do anything in the first place, in the absence of hope of the life you worked for before your loved one became ill.

I did manage to get the shoes for the shoe collection, so I hope to release them later in the year.  I think I should probably make them a priority for this year, as the prototypes will at least pay for some materials  if some mere mortal likes them.

In the meantime, I have enough to keep me working for about a week. Thereafter I will be seriously struggling to keep everything going, since I am responsible for making sure my mother has a home to come back to if she does not die.

Enjoy your bollinger.

Ina

Emotions are very odd things.  Back when I was escaping misery caused by my family by indulging in misery caused by the unpleasant backstage behaviour of Wolfe, I stopped writing my original book as I constantly asked myself why.  Why should I write the book, why would anyone read the book, why would I assume that I was the right person to write the book?

Whilst you can waste a lot of time on pointless projects, world events since then have indicated that I should have been arrogant enough to go ahead and write the book anyway.  Apparently few people have tackled the agricultural history of America with a view to the impending disaster of GM, and even fewer people care about it.  The history of marketing has been covered by a few people, but nobody has seen fit to link it to the history of psychology or the effects on the modern population, to the point that we now view survival as entertainment on TV and we are increasingly being encouraged to look on creativity as madness by a variety of corporate sponsored research studies.

Looking on creativity as madness is a particularly dangerous and limiting viewpoint.  It does not benefit the world, it does not benefit the creatives.  The only people it benefits are the companies that would much rather you wanted to buy something.  If we allow this to continue, alongside the view of science being superior to nature as justification for destroying the very efficient natural resources we have left, we will be unable to make progress and the planet will be destroyed.  It is no coincidence, for example that our Victorian ancestors used their free time to indulge their whackier ideas with the additional benefit of a liberal view to products from the colonies dispensed by the local chemist.

This book has strayed back into my to-do list in the last few days as I consider how to go about dealing with my Boris Johnson book.  I have a fairly complex plan for this book, which is a bit more literary and a bit more fun than my previous comic strip style books to alleviate the Wolfe melancholy.

Hence, I am considering the matter of how different people, neither of whom I have met or plan to meet, have a different effect on one’s confidence and general sense of self.  Wolfe turned out to be a thoroughly depressing and very limited person whose obsession with money and women rendered him very boring unless he was speaking.  His speaking, which is technically fascinating, is limited to what he believes will extract the most in terms of immediate sales, at the expense of long term respect, which has left me with the feeling that a potentially great man has rather sold his soul for the gratification of the immediate.

Gratification for the immediate is all very well, but as aims go, it gets boring.  Boris has a different set of limitations, and in many ways he is also trapped by ambition, but not in the ways you might expect.  I shall explore this alternative way of viewing Boris in Lucifer Ogilvie, but for now it is producing a new development in my work which I am finding quite challenging.

I think overall that there is a long way to go with my work before I am happy.  I am doing something original at least, which presents its own challenges in terms of setting the bar I am happy with and taking it further.  Several of the existing pieces will be modified shortly, and a completely new set added as I throw a few ideas around and develop the product.

My friend is at pains to tell me that I should view all work as finished and ingratiate myself with potential dealers, that my pricing is nonsense and that I should not be too concerned about development.  My response is as follows:

• The pricing is at cost – cost of labour, cost of material replacement, cost of storage – were you to purchase my items in a shop it would have to be at twice that price – yes I am flexible on prototype pricing, but the prices as they are reflect an accurate costing of the effort and are in fact quite low.
• Ingratiating myself with dealers when I am not totally happy with my product is a waste of time – I am not so vain as to assume that everything I do is marketable or in fashion. That isn’t what the work is about anyway – this has been a period of self development in which I have been forced by circumstance to look for validation via something other than money or other people.
• Making 3d objects has its own reward in the form of developing a range of skills that you do not get by buying things or even learning them.  I have previously complained to the BBC about this very topic as they seem to prefer encouraging children to buy the things they want instead of making them.
• Writing as a form of expression is also useful and makes you more confident about other things.

So, despite my lack of funds and pension, I am certainly a well rounded person these days, with an aim in mind.  I now have to figure out why musing on Boris makes me feel so much more validated than musing on Wolfe, which made me laugh a lot, but also made me feel very damaged and unhappy.

Such is the adventure of the imagination that is being stuck in the house, wondering what happened to the twenty hour days and the burning ambition you used to have, wondering how the hell you will survive with no family, no money and no pension because you were kind to your parents and left with nothing but your lust for obscure carpets.

I have finally given up on the Gamebia Project, as the flannel continued from the apparently bemused project leader in The Gambia.  The last straw was his failing to identify his own phone number on the email account central to the project.  I am usually more stubborn about forcing things to work, but this was too tiresome.  The last thing I need is another person who apparently thinks feeding himself is some sort of big favour to me.

So I am back on track with the Boris Experience.  Biographies have been read, philosophy has been skimmed, furniture now has resin to finish the first pieces.

So then, Jemima Khan, Darius Guppy, and Bordello Rhetoric, the first furniture pieces will be complete in the next month, enabling me to concentrate on Iain Duncan Smith, Theresa May, and a few other surprises.

I have also started work on another epic carpet, which is provisionally entitled Boris without artifice.  Boris has apparently reawakened my subtle side, although Bordello Rhetoric is as flash as I get, which is extremely blingy.

I am considering an application to Four Rooms once I have got to the point of doing a press release and released Lucifer Ogilvie, the alternative Boris Johnson.

I was laughing rather today, as I considered that not one but two ex boyfriends over the years had thought they were being disparaging when they asserted that I would much rather be shagging Boris.

“Any sensible red blooded woman would.” was my rather bemused reply.  “Apart from his lack of responsibility with women, and his horrible sister he is approaching perfection.”  I see from one of the biographies that Rachel is friends with the Earl of Glasgow and family, which figures given my experience of them.  The biographer referred to them as qualifying her as linked with the blue-blooded, and the Glasgows are not a particularly good example of that.

In the real world, Boris is probably too scruffy for me. I share his love of scruffy vanity, and so I appreciate a snappy dresser.  I rather like to see a chap dressing beautifully whilst I shuffle about in rancid plimsoles and glue covered clothes.  I avoid brushing my hair and tend to have at least one bit of wool and some paint stains.  Two vain scruffs do not a pretty sight make.

Anyway, that is the news, currently.  I am considering turning the blog over to doing reviews of luxury goods, since that will inevitably put the website on a better footing for future work, so perhaps I will take a crack at that in the near future.

Ina