Sunday 1^st November 2009

In Madrid I’d been thinking, after this stained hotel bathroom at least my own won’t seem so bad.  As you know bathrooms are a sensitive issue with me, ever since Frankie-Doreen Gunn, in the 80s, withered the one in my old flat, which did have an avocado suite, never replaced in 14 years there. Although the avocado suite wasn’t the issue.

Besides, so often home is a let-down after hotel.

But no!  On returning, I plunged. In the downstairs bathroom, the shower screen leaking, the plaster work diseased, a definite whiff. What if Frankie-Doreen comes round! And then, everywhere I looked, scuff marks on the walls (in the Museum flat in Prague, Anthony Mottram trolls round with a pot of specially mixed paint, a very rare off-white, touching up where the cleaner has bashed by with the vacuum. And this is someone who claims to despise moisturiser-users), not a piece of furniture unscratched, dented, pieces broken off, lights not working, chipped china…

Oh for a proper complement of staff!  With eight full-time staff you could begin to scratch the surface of the work to be done in a three-bedroom terraced house, such as this one.

There are always five hundred jobs outstanding in the home, aren’t there?  Have you ever counted? No matter how hard you try, the number remains the same.

With a furniture restorer on site, a builder/electrician/plumber, a fabric/upholstery specialist, an archivist/secretary, a carpet mender, a picture framer, a trained cleaner, an advanced shopper and sourcer, a gardener, you could at last make progress.

Then, yesterday, it was Eddie Sedgewick’s talk and launch of his website at The Chelsea Arts Club. It’s famous if you’ve heard of it. Eighty per cent of the members were a dead ringer for Maria Aitken, the actress.

But that’s not the point. The talk was so inspiring; all my troubles evap.

Eddie Sedgewick is a successful artist, was at school with Robert Nevil and I have known him since 1977.  We saw him briefly the other day when he presented some wonderful fabrics he has designed at Ligne Rosset.  ‘Success’, though, is a paltry notion when you consider what he said, quite irrelevant really. He spoke of how he makes art out of wherever happens to find himself. In the 1970s, that was Railton Road, Brixton, London. If that means nothing to you, take it from me, it was urban deprivation, crime, drugs, racist police, embittered Afro-Caribbean community, truly an awful place. He lived there with Robert Nevil, above a male brothel. They were burgled every day. The Police said they were fools to live ‘amongst coons’.

But, as Eddie put it, ‘I invented the place around me.’ It was the same, years later, when the 7/7 bus-bomb went off right outside his window, in Tavistock Square. This horror he forged into art. Even in reality, in his view, it became art: ‘The forensic people, when they had finished their work, wrapped each part in blue plastic. They wrapped all the trees and bushes. I suddenly thought, ‘It’s a John Christo’. Then I thought, ‘What an awful thing to say.’ Then I thought again: ‘No, that’s how it is.’

This is the essence of Poor Little Rich Gay life. The raw material is re-shaped, transformed into something else. For those of us with a smaller gift for invention than Eddie Sedgewick, it is money that wrenches the life into the desired position. And money, as we know, can give you wings or it can be ruinous.