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by Bill Drummond

I don’t think I have been more scared since pulling out the automatic rifle at The Brits in 1992 and squeezing the trigger.

And all I had to do was step on the raft made from my bed as it floated on the calm waters of the Grand Union Canal.

. Initially I wanted people to imagine I had sailed all the way up the Grand Union from London on my bed with my ‘host’ of daffodils.

But when I realised that no one was going to buy that, I decided to just call it a ceremonial entrance.

Earlier in the morning, I had deconstructed my bed in my flat in London, loaded it into the back of the Transit along with four empty oil drums, stopped off at a Halford’s to buy some straps, driven up the M1 and M6, picked up the 440 bunches of daffodils from the flower market, parked under Spaghetti Junction and got to work.

With the help of a couple of colleagues, we soon had the frame of the bed back together, the oil drums strapped on underneath and the 440 bunches of daffs in newly bought black plastic buckets.

I used a freshly cut branch to be my pole, put on my leather coat and launched the raft this being the scary bit. The actual journey that I did was not more than 400 yards.

Even then it was a struggle to keep it going in the right direction and not just going around in circles. But none of the buckets of daffodils slipped off, I kept upright and did get to the destination that we had planned to.

When I looked at the photographs that my friend Tracey Moberly had taken of the whole affair, it all seemed to make sense. Don’t ask me to explain or justify.

For me the grandeur of the pillars holding up Spaghetti Junction outdid the Arc de Triomphe, the perfect place to make one’s entrance into Birmingham, ceremonial or otherwise.