Simon Carr: The Kitchen Capitalist

The dark days are over - I now have my device

I've been using it - actually using it on a daily basis - for two weeks now. It's part of my regime. How well it works. What a benign effect it has. It was always going to be useful but it has revealed itself as a therapeutic device more active than Valium. Some people would pay thousands for this effect. Tens of thousands. Hundreds of thousands, even. Oh, yes, someone already has. Maybe it wouldn't have quite the same calming effect on you - you're not disturbed in the first place.

When you think of the pain, the pressure, the frustration of this project, how it has twisted me into a single black knot of horror that ... I keep drawing back from a full recognition of what I've been through. A willed ignorance is essential to get through these things.

And now I'm happy again. It's like a birth of some sort. Now I needn't be lonely any more. I have my device. My whole sense of the world has lifted. Goodness knows how this has been weighing down on me - in ways I hadn't realised the burden it's been. Against all odds, it is here. Against astronomical odds, it works and it is here.

Why do we do it? What is this about? All that driving round the country. Two years of meetings in studios, factories, lofts, and (very odd) people's houses. The drawings, the designs, the false starts and dead ends. That whole under-structure of part-time workers, moonlighters, fly-by-nighters. And China! What a hellhole. I'm being polite when I call it a hellhole. Why do we do these things?

It was a very nice house I had, you know; proper bricks and mortar in the only recession-proof part of the entire British housing market. To sell it in order to make this... thing, this gimmick.

It seemed a good idea at the time. And it seems a good idea now, but for the last year it has been like a tumour.

So why do it? The Government wants to teach entrepreneurship. Is it something you can teach? And is this entrepreneurship, or is it just showing off?

I've been doing this - whether the one or the other - ever since I can remember. I was aware of the facts of business as a five-year-old. I used to go into empty shops because I felt personal distress for the shopkeepers presiding over their public failure. I wanted to comfort them by almost buying the knitting machines or knife grinders they couldn't sell. I was a nice little boy, in some ways. But there it was, at five. One of the first characteristics on emerging from the domestic shell, as one does at that age. This urge has been an undiagnosed part of my pathology since the earliest days.

My multimillionaire friend, he laughs and says his driving force is to prove his enemies wrong. The doubters, the critics, the actively plotting enemies. But that doesn't answer why - why, oh, why - you put yourself in play in the first place.

simoncarr75@hotmail.com