That whirring sound you can hear is the inner grinding of what passes for my brain. It is busy attempting, yet again, to come up with a money-spinning scheme for Lush Places.
My last, or so I thought, rather good idea – to write a best-selling children’s book about our cat, Molly, who lives under the tea trolley – surprisingly came to nothing. I couldn’t sell the thing even to my entirely made-up agent, who told me that my book was unpublishable. Too boring, said the imaginary agent.
My latest money-spinning idea is to become a painter of note. Painters of note, and of the rich and famous, get the big bucks. I am going to paint royal portraits, which currently are all the thing. My portraits will be of animals who believe themselves to be regal. I can’t draw, let alone paint, but that doesn’t stop other people so why should it stop me?
There has been an enormous amount of fuss about the portrait of Kate, the Princess of Wales, on the cover of Tatler magazine, that glossy posh mag for glossy posh people. She is wearing a fancy, floor-length frock and a second-best-in-show blue ribbon. Her hands are clutching the front of the fancy frock. She looks as though she desperately needs a loo. Which is quite endearing. I have long wondered, because I ponder the really important questions facing the world, what the British royals do when they really need the loo.
I quite like the portrait. It has been compared to a paper doll. I was totally enamoured with paper dolls when I was a child. I had my great-grandmother’s old oak chest stuffed to the brim with my prized collection. I would play with my girlfriends, dressing up dolls even more inanimate than our actual dolls.
Who knows what the attraction was? We would create hand-drawn new outfits for them. It is not an early addiction that you ever get totally over. I had to stop myself from cutting out an image of Kate’s paper doll portrait and making new clothes for her. I would put her in ripped-up fishnet stockings and Dr Martens boots. She’d look quite good sporting a mohawk. It would be fun to punk her up a bit.
King Charles has been punked up a bit. His first official portrait as King has been unveiled. It is by British artist Jonathan Yeo. It is very red. The red is intended to pay homage to the uniform of the Welsh Guards of which Charlie was regimental colonel for many decades. It just looks very red.
“You’ve got him,” Queen Camilla is reported to have said upon the unveiling. It is not known whether she was referring to the colour of his face when he threw that infamous tantrum over a leaky fountain pen. The portrait, it has been uncharitably noted, looks as though it has been got at by those Just Stop Oil protesters who like to chuck tomato soup at works of art. There is a monarch butterfly hovering over his shoulder representing, apparently, his transformation into monarch. Also, who doesn’t like a butterfly?
My first royal animal portrait is of Xanthe. She is the undisputed Queen of the paddock. Or so she believes. I blame the parent. She is Greg’s sheep, and he bestowed upon her the Order of the Greatest Sheep Who Ever Lived the day she arrived. She’s had airs and graces ever since. If she was really a royal she would be the sheep equivalent of the late Princess Margaret. Xanthe, too, is capricious, prone to sulking and to dominating conversations. I have yet to see her chain-smoking and chugging back martinis, but one never knows what goes on in a sheep palace late at night.
My Xanthe portrait* pays homage to Yeo’s depiction of the King. I’m really quite pleased with it. It looks as though those Just Stop Oil protesters have got at it with a can of tomato soup.
*POA
