Stagecraft

The room was a bright white, with the composed atmosphere of an art gallery. My shoes made an imperious tapping sound on the polished wooden floor. High above, subtly recessed lighting bathed everything in an unshowy luminance. It was the full experience, one had to admit.

The body-length box dominated the middle of the room, but it was only when you got up close that its human scale really became obvious. It was what, 20 steps from the gallery’s opening to the plinth it sat on? It prepared the visitor.

I walked towards it, a keening sense of excitement building as I stepped forward on the polished wooden floor. This was absolutely going to work.

Standing alongside it, the workmanship was clear. Thank you, Morrell Art Productions SW14; never a duff job, those guys. A mahogany frame holding four lightly tinted reinforced glass sides, with a wooden base inlaid with memory foam. Plenty of room for one’s arms, and a spare 6 inches either side with raised squares for the display of key objects. Lovely. Two beautifully drilled and finished holes in the top glass panel for that all-important oxygen, ensuring this was not, contrary to initial estimations, a coffin.

‘All good?’ hollered Alan from Morrell, appearing in the entrance.

‘It’s amazing,’ I replied, giving him a wave.

We stood together looking at it.

‘Reckon you’ll be alright in there?’ he asked, passing me the bag of decorative and storytelling items for the case.

‘Oh yes,’ I said, all eagerness and enthusiasm. ‘Well, thanks to you I shall!’

As we stared at the box a little inward giggle scrambled up the back of my throat. The very thought of it. And even then this was only one part of a much, much grander strategy. This day was already a good day.

On Tuesday morning, there was a knock at around 10. Majid the postman smiled as I opened the door.

‘Morning… Big one to sign for…’

And so it was. I scribbled onto the screen with one hand as I took hold of the 4-foot-long tube, like grasping an awkward dog. Even in this digital era, architects seem still wedded to the drama of printing things out on massive sheets of paper. Perhaps it helps justify the costs, which had similarly scaled ambitions. But I didn’t mind. There’s something exciting about rolling out 2 square metres of paper plans on the dining-room table, weighing down the corners with glass ashtrays. The game is afoot and all that.

It took a few minutes to fathom how to read the plans, even with the centre-light blaring down. There was a key to the symbols in the corner, but I’m new to all this really. Eventually I twigged. Once you found the high street at the bottom, it all made – I want to say, ‘sense’?

My first foray into the property game, this, and nothing so dull as some forgettable one-bedroom flat in a borough no one’s ever heard of. Oh no. The coffee shop had closed down with three months left on the lease, so I’d nabbed it for a song, which freed up some cash for the architectural adjustments that would make the plan work. It must still resemble a coffee shop, of course, otherwise people wouldn’t come in. But the alterations I’d brainstormed with Storm and his team were an absolute kid’s book of delights.

The front of the coffee shop would work just as before. Let them come. Gaggia machine, pastries, moderately ludicrous descriptions of bean flavours scribbled on a blackboard. Tick, tick, tick. But then as one walks farther into the seating area to the rear, things get a lot more interesting…

The ceiling will gradient from the original dull beige to a painted trompe l’oeil resembling nothing less than a late August sunset over Jaipur. Birdsong will gradually be discerned from recessed speakers. Actual birds are also encouraged to frolic, entering the space via a nut-and-pipe system that connects to the rear. (Seen you and raised you, Owl Café.) The tile flooring gives way to fake grass and box hedging as the punter, muffin and enormocino in hand, wanders back in search of seating and succour. The transition is deliberately provocative. ‘Are we inside or out?’ ask the coffee-curious. ‘This café makes me nervous,’ a woman in her early thirties will say. ‘Why are there no seats? And why is there a man hanging in the sky holding a bunch of flowers, Mummy?’ Ah, the questing minds of innocent children, always straight to the heart of the matter.

Your questions are salient and timely, young scamps. For ’tis I, in the harness in which I hang, made of fabric coloured to appear invisible against the ‘sky’, in which I hang for four to six hours daily, wearing a pale blue suit, holding a bunch of flowers, feet 2 inches above the floor, one foot forward, as if I’ve stepped out of the sky. I’m told it’s terribly affecting. I toyed with calling it ‘Love From Above’ but that felt too on the nose, so ‘The Limitless Potential for Encounter With One’s True Object of Desire’ it is. Long titles show you’re serious.

But back to all the doing that must first be done! The build phase commences on Thursday and, all being well, the scene painters will begin the sky fresco in early February. I have to tell you, I can’t wait.

A smudgy orangey six-by-four photo sits above my fridge, a relic of when photos were seldom and papery. Ten children are sat at a long table covered in coloured card, industriously crayoning under the watchful eye of their teacher.

‘It’s not what you paint, it’s how you look that makes you an artist.’ That’s what Miss Rogers, our art teacher, had said. I loved her, of course, without knowing what that meant yet, feeling it instinctively. The interest she took in our class was so honest and delightful. She had the carefree charm of the funny people we watched in sitcoms while we waited for our hair to dry before bedtime. I might have been only 10 years old, but I somehow knew she had provided us an adult truth more far-reaching than any of the stern policies our own parents had thus far shared.

We did our best work for Miss Rogers, each of us hoping to win her affections with works that brought innovations of all kinds to the staid world of paints, felt-tips and crepe paper. She didn’t know it, but she was a legislator: she’d made the rules, with a careless mussing of our hair in reward for paintings variously ambitious, garish and tacky. Our destinies were chosen, our audiences set.

I gazed over at the two lads who were knocking out part of the front wall of the flat. I’d always hated the gloominess of my little basement digs. I felt instinctively that Miss Rogers would approve of these alterations and preparations. Soon everyone would be able to look anew, see afresh. And, dare I say, learn?

My upstairs neighbour, Roger, had voiced concerns about the structural effects, but I’d put him at ease. No dug-out oligarch’s disco dungeon, this! And the architects had assured everyone that replacing the front of the apartment with reinforced glass would add value to the whole block. I assured them it was modernism and upgrades, dialling down the performance-art dimension. Let those dice fall where they may, but on another day. Who knows how many will actually care to linger and drink in the view of this, the world’s very first ‘Romantopticon’? Surely better not to create anxieties about merely potential threats at this stage. I gave the two busy workers a cheery wave and made a facial expression of hearty goodwill and common purpose.

Wednesday morning was all London plain, unending grey sheets pulled firmly down like blinds. I had just emerged from the tube at Old Street roundabout. The station, despite years of surrounding gentrification, remained a reminder of the car era’s bury-the-pedestrians principle, all grim tunnels and dank walkways.

But grey’s a great background for colour, I find, and 10 minutes’ brisk walk east and the old mood had lifted as I approached the cool canalside office that was my destination.

The thing about digital stuff is, you’ve got to be a revolutionary. There’s simply no point creating your own version of the Jammie Dodger or the custard cream. Your new e-morsel must redefine the very contours and topography of biscuitdom.

This all-or-nothing quality was something I found terribly appealing. After all, what was my own project if not a my-way-is-the-entire-highway attempt to reset what a sloth-like culture called ‘romance’? The team at Unthk embodied the anything-goes peppy get-go I thrive on, so I knew we’d be on to a winner with the app part of the equation.

Existing body-toning photo apps are strictly for your entry-level developers. Sure, you can project an ideal, gloss up your hair and thin that paunch, but I had something more… comprehensive in mind.

The algorithm Edward and team have come up with is nothing if not merciless in its commitment to creativity. Its ambitions for me are as high as those that I would hope for from myself. Higher, if anything. Samuel, the fresh-faced developer leading my highly agile team, handed me a bundle of print-outs.

‘Print-outs! How analogue!’ and I softly punched his upper arm.

‘Yeah! Still, you’re gonna want to see it all laid out, I reckon…’ and he started to arrange the A4 sheets out on the four old school desks that formed the office’s main communal workspace. The logic was simple yet overwhelming, imperious yet almost unbearable. One app, yet millions of profiles to choose from, all of them somehow me. One of those ideas where success is the moment someone yells at a pub table, ‘Why hasn’t anyone thought of this before?’ Well, quite.

Together we reviewed the algorithm’s first flush of creativity:

#	Name	Height	Salary	Location	Hair	Fun Fact	Picture Props
1	Ralph Peat	168.6	£22k	Keswick	Brown	Freckles	Tank helmet
2	Jez Bump	172.4	£40k	Chiswick	Blond	Coke habit	Coldplay wristband
3	Gary Partling	169.5	£150k	NYC	Mousey	Doesn’t know own middle name	‘Blessed emoji’ t-shirt
4	Alan Framp	157.8	£N/A	Hove	Toupee	Can limbo	Complicated briefcase
5	Chris Tools	182.0	£250k	Antibes	Bald	Still buys CDs	Leatherman tool
6	Clive Watson	165	£50k	Ipswich	Loose perm	LARPing	Inflatable sword
7	Terry Sparks	190.4	£29k	Glossop	Side-parting	Antiques fetish	Pictured in armour

The app had really got into the swing over the weekend, probing every nook and cranny of human variability, its hound-like nose truffling for the good stuff.

I confess, in just a few minutes, in their wildly different ways, I’d fallen in love with them all. What a pageant of manhood! Such a palette of gentlemanly possibilities, each with my face reimagined with every tolerable twist of genetic and social status. Once we hit a million variations (Wednesday around 8.47pm, if progress continued at the current clip), this thing would be ready for the world. But would the world, for its part, be ready for this #AllofMe era?

You can always see farther, so keep looking – that’s the mantra. Together, by detailed plans and programmed actions, we can divine and define the chemistry of our intentions. That sounds a bit perfume ad, sure, but I’m paraphrasing from that historian’s TED talk. Ultimate awareness born of mathematical certainty and sheer hard work.

These efforts aren’t gimmicks. Many people make that mistake, don’t beat yourself up about it. I’ve just found a way to live in the present. That may sound obvious, but it isn’t. Most people are either 10 minutes behind the now, or stuck in the foreshadow of hopes based on where two further decades might take them. For all the artistry (and computational expense) involved, my approach keeps me absolutely bang up to date. No true artist cares about ‘legacy’ – your gift is to be in the present moment. Simply, I am all of me.

Sometimes my head aches for days. I call it the pain of plans, the weight of wonder(ing). On these occasions, I will retreat to the sofa bed in the lounge, farthest from the noise of the street, to recuperate. Absolutely no caffeine, head steady under duck-down pillow, a light duvet, and lie inert until it all passes. (I keep a notebook and pencil under the coffee table, but I’ve never had an idea worthy of the name in this state.)

To be alive is to be alert to everything everyone else might have missed, to be sure. And though I (we) detest the time lost to reverie, there’s always the delicious possibility that the avenues of the mind that we wander down in slumber might take us somewhere new.

I will see you everywhere. You will see me everywhere. We will smile and everything about us worth caring about will be registered, swallowed and understood. For we are becoming inevitable, you and I. As I write these words, even with the gathering heat at the temples, I both know this to be true and almost unbearable. What wonder awaits.