MONDAY ‘Seriously, mate. I can only apologise for any misunderstanding or inconvenience caused by this unfortunate turn of events,’ mumbles Rock Steady Eddie humbly, through a mouthful of his own pie for a change.
We’re in emergency session at The Parametric Tinker, a temporary craft pub in Dalston. I coolly note Eddie’s contrition and suggest he gets another round in while I bitterly ponder the situation.
Summary: for the last month all my best ideas have been systematically stolen, to wit …
• The Breathe Block, a giant high-density dollop of mid-luxury housing shaped like a bath sponge, celebrating the triumph of rhetoric over science with huge structural ‘air-confidence bags’ that puff out a smart oxygen-caramel mix and suck in bad carbon, trapping it in sinister ‘smoke lungs’ and (who knows?) maybe compressing the bad carbon into ethical ivory in due course.
• An Iraqi parliament building designed as a deconstructivist hologram.
• The Shoreditch Shitscraper, an incremental pyramid partially built from the stylish recycled detritus of metropolitan life, e.g. itsu boxes, last year’s tweed, late Britart.
• A trio of linked Brazilian supertowers affording panoramic views of the southern hemisphere.
• A heartbreaking ‘premorial’ commemorating the deaths of all those yet to perish in unknowable yet tragic circumstances, constructed from sad wood and stoical concrete.
All of these and more have been appropriated and talked about pretentiously in the Creative on Sunday by a business rival. None other than the legendary Tim Hedgespam.
Yeah, exactly. THAT Tim Hedgespam The can-doer from the 90s. Early Blair adopter. Proud owner of 365 subtly different pork pie hats. Developer, regenerator, OBE and arsehole.
It’s not ‘officially’ him, of course. He’s using a sockpuppet. A sockpuppet in the thick sausage-like shape of Bauhau, the celebrity architectural dachshund who has been ‘writing’ for the CoS for a while now. Hedgespam is Bauhau’s latest owner, and by far the most unscrupulous. Not only has he been writing about ‘his’ ideas, he’s been selling them to equally unscrupulous clients. Bastard.
Talking of bastards, Eddie’s back from the bar. Chasers, too. No wonder he’s penitent. The stupid idiot shared my ideas with his stupid idiot brother-in-law Legal Brian, who’s in the same bring-your-dog Pilates class as Hedgespam.
‘I don’t blame you for having the right hump,’ he says, generously. ‘But right now we’ve got to focus on damage limitation, fucking the lad Hedgespam up good and proper, and making sure this never happens again …’
I tell Eddie I’m way ahead of him, swallow my scotch, tell him he’s fired as my fixer and walk out, a little unsteadily.
TUESDAY Revenge is a dinner best served in separate courses, each with a distinct and separate flavour. For starters, I intend to separate Hedgespam and Bauhau, thus depriving the intellectual copyright thief of his adorable barking mouthpiece.
WEDNESDAY Lunch with my old friend Darcy Farquear’say, the dandy socialite and freelance epic space commentator. He once owned Bauhau. I remember the delirious years of inseparability. The matchy-matchy, doggy-batchy, gaggy-waggy cloying sickness of it all. Darcy, like the flailing twat he is, still carries a photo of Bauhau in his wallet. A preposterous-looking quiver in a tulle fajita, with tiny biker boots.
Darcy’s back in London, having sold his smallholding in Cumbria along with its architectural theorist-in-residence, a border collie called Bess of Hardwick. The life of a rugged farmer/cultural chronicler was never really for Darcy. Apart from the lack of decent bars and his cow phobia, he couldn’t ever grow a full beard.
THURSDAY Ha ha ha, oh dear. An anonymous tip-off seems to have scuppered Arsehole OBE’s scheme to overhaul Tamworth’s historic Entrails Market.
What a SHAME. Hedgespam had been quietly working up a scheme for some shadowy global investors, keeping the outside of ‘Old Gutsy’ as it’s known locally but scooping out the good bits to make way for bag shops and semi-furnished equity.
Now it’s been rejected by the secretary of state, conservationists are dancing on its grave and Rock Steady Eddie has partially, anonymously redeemed himself.
FRIDAY Darcy has lodged a suit against Hedgespam in the Chancery Court of Canine Paternity, alleging misappropriation of mastery over an architectural dachshund.
SATURDAY The Creative on Sunday are terminating the impenetrably arch Woof over Your Head column. Having Darcy and Bauhau back in my life suddenly seems a small price to pay for Hedgespam’s downfall.
SUNDAY Plot-thickening in the recliner.
July 18, 2014