No pictures — I’m an artist

chocolate pot. You can see it in that picture opposite. Mrs Matisse was a very understanding woman.”

When I’m not selling life insurance , I’m also an artist. The show gave me an idea. I’ll hold a Rosengard in the Studio show.

When I got home to my flat I looked around my own studio — aka my living room. In a corner by the window was my monkey

— a full size model monkey that once almost gave my new cleaner a heart attack.

Next to him was a four feet square framed signed photograph of Mohammad Ali surrounded by Joe Frazier, Ken Norton, Larry Holmes and George Foreman. Close by was a Victorian birdcage with the dead, stuffed, faded, yellow canary that had fallen off his perch, a twelve inch tall Victorian porcelain beer mug in the shape of a bear, a brass watering can (a result of a mistakenly raised hand at a charity auction; I don’t have a garden) and an unused brand new bicycle with flat tyres leaning against it. On the table stood a metal torch holder from the 1936 Berlin Olympics. One of the American Jewish athletes, in an act of protest against Hitler, had kept running straight past the stadium and into Poland with it. Or so the man in Portobello Market told me.

All this was just in one corner.

I glanced over at the deflated rubber chicken on a bookshelf lying between the History of Jewish Immigration in Britain 1840 -1920 and His Way, a biography of Frank Sinatra. I suddenly understood that, just like Matisse, my own oeuvre comprising 156 self-portraits over the last 25 years have been profoundly influenced by the treasured objects surrounding me.

I decided it was time to blow up the chicken.

I turned on the TV. The Simpsons was on — the episode where Homer’s household rubbish is taken as a masterpiece of art by an avant garde art dealer, catapulting him briefly to artistic fame. I knew this was no ordinary serendipity. A higher Homeric power was obviously telling me something. Clearly it was time for a new Rosengard Period. I got up from the sofa and emptied my kitchen rubbish bin on the living room floor. I had enough there for my first exhibition.

I took a large blank canvas and painted in huge black letters: NO PHOTOGRAPHS and stuck it on the wall inside the door.

I’m now just waiting for the Japanese and Chinese tourists to turn up. “Leave your cameras outside in the hallway, please”.

I decided it was time to blow up the chicken