After my excited purchase of a shed-load of sharp knives, I gather all the glues, tapes, base-boards, and other stuff I think I might need, and head back down the M4 to Bath. Once there, I use a wheeled suitcase to drag all this stuff to the studio where I’m working, which is a bit of a mission as 243 dinner knives can weigh quite a chunk, and Bath has a lot of cobbles.

I take a quick detour to Hobbycraft and get completely freaked out at some random guy who keeps glaring at me over the shelving. It turns out to be a cardboard cut-out of Patrick from Sewing Bee. But I come back with a bag full of pins to stick all over the knives (because why not), so it’s all good.

I dip plastic knives in paint and arrange them into ‘wing’ shapes, and use others as sculptural forms against a black background. None of this is what I imagined I’d be doing when I took on this project, but it seems to be flowing, so I’m just going with it.

Naturally, now that I’m ensconced in the Golden City, I spend a lot of time flitting off to buy blutack, or tape, or pins, for which you’ll understand I’m using any excuse to drift off out for another coffee.

I find I’m ‘popping out for coffee’ a lot more frequently than usual because it gets me a reprieve from the endless versions of Nessun Dorma being busked all day around the Abbey. The guy with the trumpet is terrific – the first ten times I hear it. The slightly shaky soprano is…not my favourite. But I will say she does a pretty good job of hitting the high note at the end, and there is always a round of applause (though I suspect some of it may be relief that she managed it).

My studio is right next door to the cafe which doubled as Modiste in the show Bridgerton, so this becomes one of my new haunts. They have long, comfy sofas and teacups stuck to the ceiling, which makes having spent a morning glueing knives together feel much less bonkers than it did.

I’m now starting to get a clearer idea of the type of work I want to explore, and the big, horrible painting I did on day 1 is not it. So I pull it down onto the floor and start cutting smaller, better, paintings out of it. Part of me thinks I might use them as inspiration for proper canvas paintings. Another part of me knows I’m probably too lazy to bother. And a third part of me wishes I’d used fixative on the charcoal before kneeling and crawling all over it, as now I’m even more of a shocking mess than I was before.

When I’m starting to get gnaw-my-own-face-off hungry I go in search of something simple, like a baked potato. But I don’t see why I should choose a simple place to eat it, ergo I fetch up at the Mad Hatter’s. Nicely batshit if a little tired, the chairs are painted like playing cards, and there are lots of top-hats on the walls amid assorted Alice-y china.

One lovely day I get a welcome break from Puccini as two stonking guitarists set up on either side of the Roman Baths. One chap does The Sugarbabes proud, with a cheerfully melodic version of Push The Button. Round the other side, a young man (called Merlin!) plays Mona Lisa so tenderly it makes my heart weep.

I meet up with the cool dude from the market again, and he tells me his name is Infinity, and that he lives in a camper van which he is currently doing up. I am undecided whether to adopt him or kidnap him, so I settle for insisting we become friends and basically invite myself into his life.

The girl at the flower stall sells me some cellophane and a packet of flower food. When I tell her I’m painting knives to look like a bunch of flowers she doesn’t bat an eyelid. This is Bath after all.

At my studio, I arrange knives into patterns using blutack to stand them up while I fiddle about. I bang off a quick email to my local picture-framing guy (hell, yes, I’ve got one of those) asking his advice about what glue to use and what kind of base to try – so that the finished picture won’t be so heavy it brings down a wall.

And that’s pretty much it for another week.

I am exhausted. I’ve used eleventy-billion glue sticks, and a Glastonbury festival’s worth of plastic knives.

I’ve got to grips with the Park & Ride system, and learnt that I’m useless with other people’s door keys, most of which require me hanging my entire weight off the door handle as I turn the key. I’ve done nine days work in the studio, and I feel I should have more to show for it than I do. But then, I’m used to doing massive great paintings, so perhaps just working on a smaller scale is too unfamiliar for me to be objective? Either way, I know I’ll be buying another 600 or so knives as soon as I get home.

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