I am looking into the basement gallery of the Sunday Painter. The ceiling goes up two storeys. I can see the glass of the shopfront windows, way up there. I can’t really step into the space of the gallery itself — almost all of it is taken up by a huge wooden boat. It’s swollen, wall to wall to wall and floor to ceiling (probably). My Mum is standing next to me and we look together, bottom to the top. It is so big, it makes us so small. ‘Big boat’ // ‘Fucking massive’ // ‘Don’t swear.’ It’s Dominic Watson’s Vinegar and Piss.

It is a massive ship made of wood reclaimed from old Wendy houses. The timber is laid in panels, all pink and blue and treated to withstand the weather. There are dead leaves and splinters and spiderwebs all caught in corners. You can walk through the boat. The panels bounce and bow, underfoot and through my shoes I can feel the actual construction of it. The playhouse windows line up with the ceiling, so gallery spot lights beam down into the dark belly of the ship.

There’s a water feature: a head spouting water is trapped under a glass fronted trapdoor. A noble bust would be statuesque, except: his eyes are wide, he’s grinning madly and sprouting up through the wooden floor with jam tarts on his nips. A leg is bursting through the ceiling, the foot all spindly and long, like some inverse of Baba Yaga’s house or Howl’s actual Moving Castle.

Stickers are layered and peeling. Disembodied feet creep up ladders. Disembodied heads gaze out into the blank beyond like cctv cams with joke shop fake noses (on closer inspection, the nose is actually a finger crooked downwards). A big round head with a steam pipe at the top blows a chunky stream of sick out of its puffed up cheeks. The sick is like a solid golden arch, actual mass, waxy and rippling with custard creams bedazzled into its surface.

I sneak over the squeaking floorboards and through the boat’s back door. From behind, it feels even larger. The huge vertical wall of the stern boxes me in and looms over me like a tower block. There are shelves high up with three gingham knight’s heads, wearing knitted chainmail hoods/balaclavas. I describe them to my Mum who is peering out of the back door, telling me she has bad knees, head poking out like she is the fourth in the complete set of tea-cosy templars.

We schlepp back out, walk through the park, find a pub garden and I buy my Mum an Aperol. We sip through straws that jostle and clink ice cubes up against each other. Mum says she liked the boat, very creative — ‘I don’t know why anyone would make that, but I’m glad they did. I couldn’t make that, I don’t think I’d want to, but I’m glad they did.’ I nod and process the surprise of finding myself at an age where I am happily agreeing with my mother. I feel this way about most art: I don’t know why this exists, what mysterious conditions made this necessary, but I am glad this has landed in front of me. Like I have come home only to be served a fully plated up, complete hot dinner.

I unfold the press release and my Mum tells me to read out the best bits: ‘the boat is a portrait of contemporary England, a nation adrift, regressed to some childlike state of sick, piss and Wendy houses. It’s talking about cartoon violence (KAPOWWWW WABAMMMM) all flat and exaggerated, and political unrest. Because, I guess, since 2016 at the very least, public life has been put through this bad vibes portal. Out the other side, everything is carnivalesque and tragic — that’s what it says, ‘carnivalesque and tragic’, I swear — it’s like a fever dream. Politicians are sad grey men with their mouths downturned, stock image NPCs who do nothing as our collective national boat sinks and sinks to the bottom of the barrel and down here a tin of beans is £20.

‘Other politicians are like cartoon villains. They cackle off-screen, luridly red-faced, sweating like chilled ham — and actually ACTUALLY I think this is the point: we can’t even really make fun of them because they’re already cartoons and anyway, they’re actually evil. The country is literally on fire and I am not surprised there’s riots again this summer.

‘There was once a time when you bought mini St George’s flags and clipped them onto the bonnet of your car, because England had a shot at the Euros. Now I can’t walk out the station without wincing because I don’t know if that cross means fascists or Jude Bellingham. And I still want it to come home this summer because in my heart of hearts, I think I am unfortunately actually English. But the saddest people in the world post AI slop about how they’re the new Knights Templar. They want to send you back to Mombasa or Gujarat, so we can go and be unfortunately English there instead, probably because they don’t feel as unfortunate about it as we do.

‘And I guess that’s why someone would make that great big boat. Because England is great big boats. Roman legions with their catapults and horses and Viking longships and Anglo-Saxon hollowed out logs skimming over the fens and Empire and the tea clippers and Royal Navy mutineers sailing pirate ships round the Caribbean and oxbridge twats rowing down the Thames and the East India Company’s trade monopoly sailing into the bay of Bengal to chop the thumbs off all the weavers. The only boats I know are the Uber boats that go down to Greenwich, I see them pass under the bridges when I drink orange wine on the riverbank with my friends. Yeah, yeah, that’s it. I don’t know boats, I know water.

‘But if England is great big boats, then this great big boat is Great Big Britain and we have to schlepp through the damp crummy underbelly of it. Of course it honks of old piss like an underpass. Of course the boys are vomming custard creams, all chaos and madness. Of course I look up at the windows and gasp at the beauty of the glass ceiling, gallery spot lights beaming down into my eyes. I love air fryers, I love lime bikes, I love elf bars and I love Bukayo Saka — that’s my understanding of British Values, so I’d be in there hurling biscuits with them too, given half a chance. I used to joke about fucking off but I think that ship has sailed — this is my lot, these are my lot. Sometimes art shows you who you are, and serves it up to you on a plate, like a hot dinner.’

My Mum blinks behind her sunglasses, sips her Aperol.

‘It says all that on one side of A4?’ // ‘It might as fucking well’ // ‘Don’t swear.’