It’s difficult not to warm to Mad Tracey from Margate (‘I like Tracey ... I landed on my feet with that name’), the inventor of the Rothko Comfort Blanket for Private Views, however reluctant one may be to have one’s nose rubbed in other people’s bodily fluids and spiritual excretions. She famously staggered out of a solemn television debate saying, ‘I want my mum’, and loves her old Nan so much (as she memorably describes in one of the conversations recorded here) that when Nan dies she visits her in the funeral parlour to pluck her whiskers and do her nails as she used to when she was alive, and gets locked in, to inexplicable strains of ‘The Sun has Got his Hat On’. Titivating Nan in the Chapel of Rest suggests a Mediterranean earthiness and intimacy between the generations; warm-hearted, picturesque, unreliable, enviably stylish and uninhibited but given to unfortunate emotional outbursts and insanitary habits, Emin — exotic product of Turkey and a British seaside resort — surely represents everything that the English used nervously, disapprovingly but also a little wistfully, to admire about ‘foreigners’.

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