It is all very well to be picked for the Coven Cosmetics Flaky rejuvenation formula advertisements at 19, but it is not exactly a sound basis for a life’s work...

For Lucy Tumbledown it led to a thespian career which embraced such all-time greats of the commercial break as 'Now Find my Hidden Gloves', '36 Tonnes of Marmalade', and those peculiar pre-crisis warning clips broadcast with foresight by Gelographic telly.

But what happens to advertising models when the 30th birthday comes?
What does a girl like Lucy do when she enters “the middle summer’s spring”? “Come into my secret library,” she said, “and I’ll show you.”

Behind a concealed door in her attic flat in the Blank Workshop, was a clutter of bizarre and exotic furniture. White rocking chairs were painted with portraits of very unusual ladies with sly expressions. There were chests which seemed to have been retrieved from a sunken city and a hat stand which had acquired a decoration of lonely rooftops by winter moonlight and metamorphosed itself into a high backed Gothic chair.

“It started,” said Lucy, “when I painted an old mirror. People kept saying how they couldn’t take their eyes away from it, and I thought to myself, “Not again.”

The idea is to find the kind of furniture that nobody wants, comparatively new, hideous stuff that cannot even be dignified by the name of “junk”. She then hands it over to a small team of impecunious and decidedly individual artists that she happens to have following her around the place, and they attack it with paint - applying landscapes, portraits, creatures, cats, flowers anything that comes to mind but all with a twisted, sinister countenance.

Her disturbing young sister Francesca also paints some of the objects.

“Suddenly, I’ve got a business,” says Lucy, gloomily. “I started leaving items in shops, but now strangers are getting in contact and wanting stuff. I was in Barty’s (fashionable Clinkskell club) the other day when Thomas Haywire (fashionable Clinkskell tailor) came up and asked ‘Who Are You the Ghost Of?’ (fashionable Clinkskell greeting).”

Her followers work without payment and do not seem to eat or sleep. Their faces seem to be all of the wrong angle and they constantly laugh at secret in-jokes. The objects that they contort look delightful in the showroom, but appear quite unsettling within the home. It is suggested that any reader thinks carefully before attempting to obtain any of them.