And here's one I prepared earlier

Yes, it's a genuine Airfix DIY Rothko kit. All you do is take the multi-coloured planks, fold Flap A, cut on dotted line B, while applying special clips F and Z, insert the cormthruster with your bared teeth, count to ten, light blue touch-paper and retire to safe distance.

Price 10/6 from all good toy and model shops, c/o Nostalgia Trips Ltd c.1967. Hammer, nails, glue, pins, parachute and craft knife not included. Motorising kit 6/6 extra. For impression of finished model, see box-lid (lower illus.)

I used to love all that sort of thing when I was a kid: Meccano, Hornby trains, Airfix kits erratically clagged together with mountains of polystyrene cement, KeilKraft model planes. They were great: you made them out of bits of balsa wood and tissue paper and finished by sloshing them over with a mind-bendingly powerful solvent called Cellulose Dope, to make the tissue go taut and airworthy.

I don't suppose that 11-year-olds are allowed to buy things called Dope these days . . . Of course, being naive back in 1972, it never occurred to us to abuse solvents; we just thought that getting stoned out of your mind was a trifling occupational hazard of pioneering miniature aviation.

There was a real craze for making these planes at my school (started by me, actually) and to be honest we were more worried about the strong possibility of the model room exploding. Just to alarm proponents of the Nanny State a little more, Dope (cellulose, for the use of ) was also incredibly inflammable.

Curiously, we managed to avoid either becoming drug addicts or burning the school down. Perhaps it's simpler sometimes just to trust children. They will not always succeed in modifying their life expectancy (a lesson here for modern parents, methinks).

Perhaps under the influence of too much Dope, I seem to have wandered rather from the aforementioned planks; or are they perchance Infinitely Adjustable Linear Pigmentation Spatial Realisation Elements?

They were on display at the Pompidou Centre in Paris last summer and I've been keeping them up my sleeve for a rainy day or at least a slightly less cold one in January.

As it happens, I'll stick with calling them planks 'cos I'm not that bright. I thought they were quite cool but was immediately struck by the thought that it was a Rothko kit. And Hey Presto! Five minutes later I found a real Rothko.

Apology Number One: I find that I have forgotten to note the correct name for the planks and their artist. I'm genuinely embarrassed about this as I greatly dislike failure to give credit where due, so if anyone can identify the piece, let me know . . .

Apology Number Two: I have never got Rothko and have yet to work out what makes him world-class (I have to tread carefully here because one of my regular readers really rates him and she knows lots more about art than I do).

To place one coloured rectangle over another once strikes me as a rather modest achievement; to make a habit of it seems, frankly, dull. I've always found it hard to accept as world-class anything that smacks of one-trick pony. Warhol and Lichtenstein spring to mind.

But then, art is like that. I get Pollack, I don't get Matisse. He's too decorative for me, I always find myself asking: What does it do? What's it for? Mind you, I used not to get Cezanne until I took the trouble to find out what he was trying to achieve. After that I thought he was brill, so maybe there's hope yet for the other guys.