I painted my walls white today.

It was uninteresting.

I failed to get rid of the woodchip wallpaper, apparently the walls might fall apart if I do that, its a 300 year old house, the landlord would not be amused, so I painted them white. At least they are no longer dirty yellow in colour.

Whilst painting I thought.

I usually think that too much thought is bad for one, but today I did seem to come up with three good ideas. I know, 3 good ideas from me in one day is unlikely, probably why I have a headache now.

The second idea is that I can paint a picture of orchids and use it for my botanical illustration students and in a video animation for the Rude Mechanicals songs Orchid and Big Lies – which has the line “orchids grow best where seamen is spilt”, an old folk belief that orchids can only grow where animal seamen has been spilt.

The third idea was that my subconscious is sabotaging me. Its like that song by They Might be Giants, “Where your eyes don’t go a filthy scarecrow waves its broomstick arms

And does a parody of each unconscious thing you do”. Only mine isn’t just doing a parody of me, its deliberately preventing me from doing things. It looses the keys every time I need to leave my flat. It stops my ability to count every time money is mentioned. Every tiny glimpse of success it sabotages. On my graduation from Art School I sold all my rather grotesque 12ft oil paintings for vast amounts of money, a top gallery wanted to be kept informed about my work and I was given a year long residency. What did I do? Gave up painting and did live art instead. A couple of years later I was doing part time work as a model, I landed a job in a Sony ad which paid £4000 for one days work. My agency thought they were on to something and paid for me to train as an actor. What did I do? Had a brain haemorrhage that put me in hospital and took three years to recover from. Now once I would have said that I was not to blame for the haemorrhage, but now I wonder if it was actually self sabotage. Many other instances like this have happened, like sacking the drummer and violinist, which also meant the bassist quit, just as the band was beginning to get somewhere etc. So what I ask you now is – how do I stop self sabotaging? Do you get the same thing? And if so have you come up with any way of stopping it? Perhaps I should have part of me surgically removed? This isn’t so much an idea as a big question.

The first idea was to read Jeremy Henty’s poem Ugly Little Boy for the next Rude Mechanicals Naked Podcast. Jeremy was our drummer when the band started. Ugly Little Boy were the only lyrics he wrote for it (he liked to be known as Ugly Boy) but for some reason it wasn’t played that often although I thought it was very fitting somehow. Jeremy passed over to the next world two years ago. A friend of his got in touch with me recently which brought the lyrics back into my head. So i’ll be reading them as part of our next podcast.

Of course if I’d become a successful artist back in 1999 I would probably never joined the Rude Mechanicals, never met Jeremy, and not writing this blog now, and you wouldn’t be reading it.