another fantasy art work

Apologies, last night's posting was put up without having time to proof-read it, as I heard the crunch of car wheels in the drive while I was still typing.  Reading it just now I spotted two 'maybe' in the same paragraph, so I should have taken one of them out.  The process whereby once you've used a word once you are more likely to use it again used to be called Lexical Facilitation when I was at university, though it may be called something else now, or have been disproved as a phenomenon.  Proper journalists check their copy, pull out the Thesaurus and think of synonyms, hence the invention of the Popular Orange Vegetable, aka carrot.

It is difficult to make Birds custard while someone watches you.  The thin yellow liquid seems to take forever to thicken, and there is a terrible temptation to add more custard powder, despite having measured the correct amount in the first place using a proper measuring spoon.  If you succumb then by the time you get to the pudding course the custard has set to a thick gloop.  Last night I resisted the urge to try and speed the process up, unlike the previous time that my parents arrived while I was still making custard.  It turns out that my mother doesn't like custard anyway.

We had an idea for another fantasy art work, this time for the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square.  A while back I bought a couple of pouffes in a sale, nice squidgy round ones covered with knobbly fabric in a geometric tribal design, that is intended to look like recycled kilim rugs, but was probably made in a factory somewhere for the upholstery trade.  I got them for overflow seating, for when we have more than a couple of people round, and the rest of the time they are tucked out of the way in the downstairs part of the sitting room.  On Saturday we had friends to supper, so one pouffe was brought upstairs.  After the guests had gone the cats reappeared, and one promptly claimed the top of the pouffe as his own and curled up there.  They went on using it until we cleared it away before my parents could fall over it, and this morning the Systems Administrator put it back for them.  I sometimes think our cats might be hopelessly over-indulged.

Anyway, we decided that the fourth plinth should have a gigantic cat curled up on it.  The S.A. favoured ultra-realistic carving in white marble, but I thought that had already been done with Alison Lapper, pregnant.  I want a kitsch cat made out of fake fur, like one of those imitation cats they sell in Nauticalia that are slightly too small, but this cat should be much, much too big.  Really worryingly large.  And I think it should purr at random intervals to disconcert passers by.  The S.A. thinks that finding weather proof fake fur could be a problem, but I'm sure it could be done.  We are the conceptual artists, we don't have to make the blessed thing ourselves.  Like I said, Damian Hirst doesn't paint all his own dots.