Just got the link to this... oh dear. I'm no early bird - scotch meat and sausage eggs - that should be sausage meat and scotch eggs. Not to worry, the work isn't scrambled, just my words.

In the last few days, I've really been hankering for a fully fitted on-site kitchen, with all the gadgets, toys and gizmos a bod could want. A residency at a restaurant would be heaven - to explore food within that context, explore some groovy stuff like jellies and blancmanges, develop some of the techniques I've touched on - icing a tiered wedding cake as a conceit - there would be decadence and glory in it's ornateness; seafood, shellfish, and the scallop, which has a very interesting history; sugar, and all it's forms: blown, whipped, boiled, toffee-like or frosted; I deliberately didn't use chocolate with it's strong association as comfort food, sex-replacement, a womans addiction - too much baggage - and it's brown. Sounds like a silly thing to say but brown can be unappealing, and this was all about presentation - the thought of eating these assemblages is another story, but removed by the perspex box.

I've said everything I wanted to say, got it out of my system, had a laugh, suffered a trapped nerve from stress, seen it go up like a dream and fall down like Colossus, encountered some oddballs who insisted they would eat it, some brilliant feedback and some comments that puzzled me ("Turtle Tits on Toast", about 'Charity begins at Home'). Give someone the opportunity to give their opinion and what do they come out with? Someone commented to me earlier this evening that it can be a bit daunting to write in someone else's book. What more can I do to make it accessible? - there, in the 'recipe book', online here, and I'm there most days for one or two hours - that's the way I work, and I wish others worked that way. I feel very strongly about the issue of public consultation and blog about it: madelainemurphy.blogspot.com/peek-boo. We have all suffered others decisions about how tax-payers money is spent - that sterotyped hetero couple outside Victoria Station, Southend On Sea, he returning from the London commute, she embracing him like he's returned from the wars. I have to consolidate the fact that there are parts of Essex still in the 1950's. (I haven't used tax payers money on this, I paid for everything myself, just before you start...)

It's given me a lot to think about. Above all, the constraints of working within a business - the Cafe Society has been brilliant, and have done everything to make the process smoother for me. I was surprised by one comment - 'the lemon muffin was lovely but the service was too slow' - unfair, I thought, watching the speed at which they work. If that comment appeared in my 'recipe book', did that person think that food on display was part of the business? Where was the line? Where is the line between advertising and display and something that transubstantiates itself into 'art'? Is so much of life ludicrous in the first place that rhyme or reason isn't saught? Is 'art' itself a matter of perception, or just a signature? To stimulate others curiosity is certainly a challenge, and maybe people do want visual chocolate, after all.

At least I can now work in the privacy of my own home again, and for that, I am eternally grateful.

I trundled in this morning with all my stuff - it takes a while to set up each day, and the staff at the Cafe Society are brilliant, and I try to keep mess to a minimum and work quickly. This morning, Tina, the owner, had arrived back from her holiday - she was away for 4 days, a testament to how hard she works, running two businesses - most people go away for a week, 8 days... two weeks. Not Tina. We had a chat, and she passed on to me some of the concerns her customers have - the raw meat I was using in my sculptures (if we can call them that, I reckon they're assemblages) was really offputting to customers. So, the first thing we agreed on was no more raw meat. That's okay by me.

So, 'Home is where the heart is' - and the heart had to be taken right out of it. This assemblage was designed to have a lambs heart sitting under the roof, and the gingerbread platelets and pasta evoked the beautiful shapes that can be found in microscopic photographs of blood. I thought an egg sandwich was a kind of homely food, and eggs are big on the agenda with me - my grandmother used to collect semi-precious gemstone eggs (about the size of  hens' eggs) and the egg as emblematic of a life-cycle is something that crops up regularly in what I do.

No heart in "Home is where the heart is'. The eggs were fried, not beaten or scrambled, but that's work for another day.

There's nothing worse than no way of telling the artist what you think - the art is there, in the public domain - 'site-specific', we call it - and we're wondering what on earth is that, who on earth made the decision to put that there and how much did that cost... a fine example in the newly-rebuilt Victoria how-many-lanes that have unravelled from the roadworks. Here we are: www.southendstandard.co.uk/news/8943172.__50_000_sculpture_for_Vic_Circus_is_revealed. 58 comments later, there are some sated critics lighting cigars. Public consultation is always a tricky business, and maybe that was sidestepped with Councillors looking for Value for Money. Blimey.

Here on my home ranch, considerably less storm-in-a-teacup - but some lovely comments, and some not so lovely, you'd wonder who would be so unsavvy to air quips that possibly belong elsewhere. Anyway, the 'veggie option' got me thinking about the ethical aspects of what I'm doing - I had thought about them anyway. My mother is an excellent housekeeper - nothing left to waste, food seasonal and freshly cooked or spiced and preserved (she still uses a recipe that includes gunpowder for her Spiced Beef at Christmas), and the old dictum 'waste not want not'. Quite a puritanical upbringing but having been a child during WW2, running a tight ship was part and parcel of doing one's duty. I consider it a challenge to produce what I'm doing with efficiency, conscientiousness, clarity and purpose.

To produce an artwork made from food that lives for only one day seems, on the face of it, to be hedonistic, wasteful, and trite, but for me - the outcome - the end product - is the stimulation in others to comment, the communication, shared or different beliefs.  I can see some of that happening in these comments, and with the dialogue that I have with customers to the Cafe Society, as I set up each morning. I value, just as much, the photographs that come from the artwork, and these will stick around far longer than what's in the back of my fridge.