What can I tell you about my life? It’s a lost game, that’s all. Fifteen years ago I left Paris having lost the first round. I decided to play the second round and I lost again. Then I realized that you always lose. Only Bastards think they win.

Art School. Dropped out. Inevitable. Because I am a drop-out. Then Philosophy. Three years of asking whether Jean-Paul Sartre exists. Finally worked out the answer. Yes and no. At the same time. Really. It’s called superposition. Look it up.

Learned to paint in an abandoned opium den in Marseilles. Or learned to forget everything I’d learned before then. It took Picasso a lifetime to learn to paint like a child. And for what?

To get back to zero, that’s what. Like Samuel Beckett. Like John Coltrane. Like Pol Pot.

What I really wanted to do was to paint the truth. With primary colours. Straight out of the tube. I wanted to paint something beautiful and terrible and hard as steel that would make people ashamed of their lives. I wanted to paint the sound of a burning cigarette. I wanted to be Jean-Luc Godard with a paintbrush. I ended up chief face-painter for a troupe of Mongolian circus performers in the basement of a Shanghai noodle factory. In Shanghai.

The truth is though that I don’t know what the truth is. And even if I did, how would I know it was true?

1917. Marcel Duchamp enters a toilet basin into The Exhibition of Independent Artists in New York and becomes the superstar and enfant terrible of the Dada movement. 1947. Jackson Pollock begins throwing buckets of Dulux paint directly onto giant canvases rolled out on the floor and gets his photograph on the front cover of Life Magazine. 2015. I paint a giant existential aphorism on the side of a Chinese Laundry just off The Strand and get booked by a plain-clothes cop in a purple kaftan and a mugshot on page seven of the London Evening Standard.

So all I want to do now is to paint The Human Condition. Do you know what that is?

Forgive me, but I have to tell you. We’re born, we suffer, and we die. And we don’t know why. So consequently, our lives consist of waking up every morning and trying to think of something to do that will distract us from throwing ourselves out of the nearest window. But don’t tell anyone. Because no-one wants to know.

But how do I paint that?

There’s an old song by Ethel Waters. It goes: