MONDAY Amazing. I’ve found a glitch in the Fibonacci Series.
You know the way those ‘golden spirals’ always looked so glamorously widescreen but sort of anal at the same time? Turns out there was a clerical error at Fn-2.
Yeah, apparently the sequence copier failed to put the 2 in italic when she was transferring it from papyrus to vellum. Nobody seems to know why. Perhaps she was an innately conservative mathematician who thought it was too dangerous to give forward-leaning emphasis to a number as it was about to hit one of several very difficult curves.
Maybe in her imagination she saw how an italicised 2 might set off a chain epiphany, rendering all subsequent drawn art ‘formulaic’. Maybe she thought a perfectly beautiful Fibonacci series would instantly kill anyone who saw it.
Whatever, the result was that Fn-2 braked a little too suddenly and skidded slightly. I have now corrected the entire series, making sure everything’s in italics, and it looks a bit like a Chelsea bun. I make no apologies. Truth is beauty. The world will be obliged to behold it.
TUESDAY Spend the morning in a nostalgic reverie for the International Style.
Experience a lunchtime transition to gloomy reality. Immerse myself for the afternoon in something called the New Global Fashion For High-Yield Contemporaneity. It sounds similar to the International Style but instead it makes your heart sore.
WEDNESDAY The world of epic time and space is all a-quimble. No sooner had the latest redesign of Doctor Who detonated like an expensive firework across the digital media sky than an ideas competition for the NEXT redesign was immediately announced.
I think everyone’s scared of Doctor Who fans not being in a permanent state of volatile expectation. As per the terms of the global licensing mandate, all Doctor Who interiors must ‘undergo a refresh’ once every five Earth years or once every 100 Whovian Nanobits if you’re some weird adult with an improvised costume and a forum name.
My fixer Rock Steady Eddie and I are rock-steady ready. We spend the whole of an extended pub workshop mapping out the parameters. Time and space are an illusion. But are they the same illusion? Or are they separate but mutually dependent illusions? Or is it the illusion of space and time that is itself the illusion?
We exchange knowing, wonky looks and go our separate ways, Eddie to the bookmakers to put a monkey on What the Inside of the Next Tardis Will Look Like, and me to my studio to produce it.
THURSDAY A long, busy day locked into my own hyperdriven thoughts as I bang out Doctor Who interiors to a Delia Derbyshire soundtrack.
First the Tardis, which I have designed to Eddie’s tight specification. ‘Like being inside a lava lamp but them ones with glitter in, also a few weird sofas round the walls for chilling out between leaps through time and space, what about unisex toilets but get this they’re uniSPECIES, a big fridge with everything like floating inside and it’s only the size of a matchbox, all the Tardis controls in the air so you just wiggle your fingers about and bosh, weird bits of floor that you walk on and turn invisible or naked depending what side of the watershed we’re talking about PS think glowing globules they’re always good.’
Next, a selection of alien interiors. A bubble of absence enclosed by sentient retardant foam. Solid inhabitable wood, where the molecular essence of a character can move through the grain like rot. Crudely-drawn pink cube hovering above a strange landscape ready to be filled in by the viewer’s imagination.
FRIDAY Submit my Doctor Who interiors just in time – the Monty Python lot want me to design a sustainable stage set capable of taking the live show ‘beyond death itself’. Start working on a hilarious gilded cage containing ironic comfy chairs, only to be interrupted by a call asking me to design the Christmas party at the Finnish embassy and then there’s a text seeking my resolution package for the Middle East, wait …
SATURDAY I’d nodded off in the pub with Eddie. All a dream. Wednesday to Friday was actually a dull trudge through invoices, accounts and design revisions for some buy-to-let arsehole in Cyprus.
SUNDAY Self-re-evaluation in the recliner. I’ve let Doctor Who down, I’ve let Monty Python down. Most importantly, I’ve let the Finns down. Will resolve Middle East next week.
November 29, 2013