I did enjoy the occasional trip into this unfamiliar world though. Milano’s showroom was a portacabin. The warehouse was a big shed topped by a kidney shaped harlequin mosaic made by ‘Old Man Zanelli’. I never knew Signor Zanelli, but he was a figure of legend, referred to reverentially by the staff.  The company ‘Zanelli’, by this stage, seemed to be the same thing as ‘Milano’, but at one time I think they were two enterprises. There were different numbers in the Yellow Pages, but when you rang, you were greeted by the same gruff tones on both lines.

Milano was run by Otello Cavallo — and an English guy. I can’t remember what the English guy was called. He was nice, and very helpful, but the name Otello Cavallo is somehow more memorable.

Eventually, when Milano closed down, I paid a token sum for the kidney shaped harlequin mosaic and brought it to the workshop. I couldn’t allow it to be thrown away. It was part of a legacy, part of the history of British mosaic. I wanted a place in that history too.  It wasn’t that I liked the harlequin especially, but the object was symbolically important. The staff at Milano liked it very much.

‘Old Man Zanelli thought he might sell it to the Harlequin Centre in Watford’ they told me admiringly ‘but he never did.’ At the time I identified strongly with these mild but thwarted aspirations, and of course I still do.

I confess I understood the reluctance of The Harlequin Centre in Watford — Palace of Thatcherite Consumer Culture, to purchase Mr Zanelli’s running Harlequin, with his brightly-coloured diamond-patterned catsuit, and curious short truncheon. He cut a slightly sinister figure, an impression only enhanced by the anachronistic kidney shaped board on which he was mounted. He was not a slick, shiny symbol of contemporary consumerism. He was a richer, odder, creature from another era.

Historically, Venetian masks, like his Batman’s Robin-style one, were worn to protect the wearer’s identity during decadent pursuits, or transgressive behaviour of questionable morality traversing class boundaries. Furthermore there is a tradition of ‘Hellequin’ – found in French passion plays, in which the harlequin is an emissary of the devil, chasing the damned back to hell.  These were the worlds of Signor Zanelli’s harlequin.

A more appropriate icon for the Palace of Shopping in Watford was the jester in a clown-suit and a buffoon’s belled hat – a symbol that we’d all become fools and children now.

Grown up art at the Harlequin Shopping Centre, Watford.

Photo: Nigel Cox. Permission: Creative Commons Licence 2.0

I was feeling tired. I had three jobs, three children, and an open house for burglars. On the first occasion, my son and I came home with the shopping  ‘Who’s that, Mummy?’ he said.  ‘I don’t know — who are you?’ I growled furiously, grabbing a large man by the collar and pushing him against the wall. A skinny accomplice ran down the stairs with our possessions in some plastic bags, and my captive fought me off. Once they’d gone, I felt they’d been almost gentlemanly not to stab me.

Jobs one and three were similar – I looked after two delightful children, one French and one Colombian, starting at 6.30am and ending at 6.30pm, but job two – while all the children, both mine and my charges, were at school — was Mosaic Workshop.

I’m sure no one will ever have asked you this before’ an unknown voice said quite regularly ‘but could you make a mosaic that looks like ancient Roman remains?’ ‘What an interesting idea!’  Tessa or I would say brightly, not wanting to put off a potential client with an implication of unoriginality.

We made faux-Roman pavements everywhere – from Tunbridge Wells to Maida Vale, from Somerset to Chelsea Harbour. (I’m not making this up. I wish for poetic purposes the places would alliterate, Somerset to Sittingbourne for example, but I am sticking to the facts). Some were Roman figures, some were geometric floors, some were abstract/classical fusion (a style of the eighties much beloved by designers) and one – shown below – was Celtic-classical.

In one London mansion, a beautiful woman pushed an old-fashioned perambulator.  Her husband drove up in a vintage car. They commissioned a Roman bathhouse floor. At the front of the house workmen were constructing a marble bath in the centre of the room ‘In’ ‘arf gonna be cold in that barf’ said one of the workmen. ‘Marble dun’arf take the ‘eat out the war’er.’ At the back of the house the Renaissance garden was going in.

‘Mummy who’s that by the coats?’ said my daughter. ‘Not again!’ and we ran down the hall.

The Phillipino maids paid attention. ‘I care about beauty’ said the beauty. ‘In this house you are only to sweep with a besom’.

By the sixth break-in the lights in the sitting room were kaput and we couldn’t afford to mend them, so for illumination the burglars made a fire with some bills I’d left on the table. They stole my clock, and left the fire smouldering as we slept. Perhaps for us, like the rest of London, the time had now come to move house.

‘He asked if we have been approached by anyone to work on Buraimi Mosque for the Sultan of Oman’ I whispered, keeping Tessa informed.

I put down the phone. ‘Of course, it’ll come to nothing’ said Tessa, with characteristic rationalism. ‘Yes, of course, it’ll come to nothing!’ I said, trying to pretend I was rational too.

Mr Patel came to visit. He would be our sponsor, we agreed. ‘I will supply the drawings, and a significant proportion of the mosaic work will be in gold.’  ‘No problem’ I said. ‘You understand this project is important to the Sultan’ said Mr Patel. ‘Of course’.

We sent samples. ‘Very good work’ said Mr Patel. ‘Can we borrow the school hall to make a template?’ I asked David, my children’s headmaster. ‘Do you know anyone who’d be a good school governor?’ asked David. ‘Let me think about that’ I said, playing for time.

‘The Sultan wants textured gold’ said Mr Patel. ‘I’ll send you a sample.’ I said.

‘I received the gold sample today. It’s very good’ said Mr Patel.

Two months until Christmas. We scraped up the last of our funds and bought the gold. The mehrab’s half-dome was complex to calculate. Thank God Tessa is good at mathematics, I thought.

Mr Patel flew back to see our work. ‘I must show it to the Sultan’s people’ he said.

‘When can we buy Christmas presents, Mummy?’ asked my middle son. ‘Very soon’ I said. ‘Miss asked me where my shoes were today’ said my eldest. ‘Slippers are more comfortable’ I assured him.

‘I have bad news’ said Mr Patel. ‘The work is very good, but you have used the wrong kind of gold. We must buy a different kind, and do it again.’ ‘Oh dear’ I said, fixing Tessa with a glaring, suicidal stare.

It was the week before Christmas. ‘Will Father Christmas give us a Game Gear Mummy?’ asked my children. ‘I don’t think he will’ I said.

‘A mistake has occurred. I will send you the gold.’ said Mr Patel. ‘We will fix the mosaic next year.’

I was pleased to see the post office van, though the parcel contained a surprise.  ‘Congratulations!’ it read.  Amongst tens of thousands of competitors, First Prize in the Pritt Stick Christmas Card Competition 1991 goes to …. my middle son!  The box contained a Sega Game Gear.

It was a happy Christmas for us all. ‘Shall we buy some shoes in the New Year sales?’ I suggested.

We made a baptistery floor for a Catholic church in the north of England. Fixing it, we stayed with the priest. His house was bare and chilly. ‘Help yourself to breakfast’ he said. Rising early, we toasted two pieces of sliced white bread and made a pot of coffee. ‘ I see you’ve helped yourself to the expensive stuff’ he said disapprovingly. We felt ashamed.

We worked every day. The studio window faced the school opposite. When it was break-time my children waved from the playground. The house groaned with more and more materials. Fruit boxes of glass and ceramic of every colour filled the hall. ‘Don’t your children cut their feet on the splinters?’ people asked. ‘No’ I said.

Money got tighter. The phone rang. It was an architect working on behalf of an Australian tycooness. ‘She’d like to come to the house to see you’ he said. ‘That would be great!’ I lied.

The house was shabby. Two limousines pulled up. From one car, a uniformed man opened the door to a tiny, elderly woman on very high heels. From the other, the glossy architect emerged.

‘Well, Emma, I like your style!’ she said. And with those words, the marble mosaic floor for the penthouse of New York’s Pierre Hotel was commissioned.

‘I thought she’d fall down the holes in the floorboards’ I said to Tessa. ‘So did I’ she agreed.

We’d have to buy a noisy marble machine. What would the neighbours make of that?

Marble mosaic floor by Tessa, of much later vintage. Miranda in the workshop in Holloway Road. Fruit boxes still in evidence.

Mosaic Studio?

Over my dead body!

It had to be a word that suggested creative endeavour could be rooted in earnest toil and cooperative values. Verbally it should hold back the roaring tsunami of conservatism. What model could there possibly be?

Maybe Wiener Werkstätte (the Vienna Workshops) whose philosophy was: ‘Better to make one product in ten days than to make ten in one day’. I could understand the attitude, it was a challenge to consumer culture. Mosaic Workshop – that’s what I would call it.

We shared our house with a parliamentary correspondent. I had a baby, another was on the way. The strains of Dylan’s ‘Baby Please Stop Crying’ could be heard from the journalist’s room. He might not be there much longer, we inferred.

When he moved out, his room became my studio. ‘Not studio, workshop!’ I insisted.

I made mosaic samples and hawked them round some shops. Two days later, the phone rang. ‘Would you like to make two floors for a cactus house?’ a voice enquired. It was my first job.

Last week I went out for a drink with my former colleagues. The previous week, we’d closed our Holborn shop. Time, I thought, to tell some stories about Mosaic Workshop. Here is a picture of the cactus house floor, my first job.

Twenty-three years ago I was one of perhaps only three people in the UK to own a hammer and hardy.  I’ve put it to good use. At Mosaic Workshop we made a floor for London’s National Portrait Museum, cutting each cube with the hammer and hardy. The brief was to replicate the mosaic original, and if I say so myself, it wasn’t bad.

I used to be good at doing the jobs no one else wanted; working through the night, or getting up at four in the morning and driving hundreds of miles before embarking on a day of gruelling toil, only to drive all the way back again afterwards. It was this attitude that helped me land work at the National Portrait Gallery. These were the days before mosaic had become fashionable – now, thankfully,  the climate has changed.  Back then, if you knew the ropes, you were in with a good chance. If you were prepared to work for almost no pay in the cold, dark, midnight hours and drive a long way to get there, the job was yours.

If the pay wasn’t up to much, it was thrilling being alone in the Gallery. I explained to the staff how I would do the work; chiselling out the old marble, matching the cubes for colour and tone, and deep-bedding the new ones. I gave references and a ‘Method Statement’, which tells the client how you are going to do the job.  It reassured them I knew what I was up to. Then, tottering up the stairs with all my gear, I was let loose amongst the masterpieces.

I chipped away — chiselling noises resounding through the galleries and bouncing about the marble halls. If you’ve never done it, I can assure you that unless cubes have delaminated from the screed (started to separate from the sub-base) this is a truly foul job. A member of staff loomed up out of the gloom. I should be issued with a screen immediately.

‘What would happen’ she enquired, sensibly enough ‘if a piece of marble hit the Holbein?’

Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia, from the collection of the National Portrait Gallery. Artist unknown.