The period while I was (so to speak) waiting in the wings was in some ways difficult for me. I had no wish to trespass upon his own role in fronting the Longleat image with all of his considerable charm and showmanship, so I just got on with my own business preparing the bulk of my own work, both artistic and literary, so that I could turn it over to the service of Longleat once the time did finally arrive.

It is the murals that I have painted, on removable sheets of chipboard covering the walls of my private apartments at Longleat, which now stand as the greatest evidence for these years of laborious toil. There are indeed several ways in which these murals might be assessed. Some of them I categorise as cocoons - the idea of me being like a caterpillar who views all his own handiwork while looking up from the inside, with a feeling perhaps that this constitutes his vision of the universe.

I have painted several such cocoons, giving over the walls of particular rooms to such themes as The Ages of Man, or The Ages of History, or Noah's Ark, or A Mural of Formative Footsteps, or An Autobiographical Mural, or A Mural of Wessex Identity. Each cocoon furnishes a visual depiction of the way I see myself in relationship within some wider concept - various visions of the cradle that contains me, so to speak. They prepare me for identifying with those concepts, or even with the universe at large. Then there is Bluebeard's Collection where I have put on display the heads of my wifelets within a spiral staircase, or the Ancestral Heads in the other spiral staircase. Here are hung the heads of many an ancestor, whether patrilineal or matrilineal, but with the bulk of them in the New Banqueting Suite, up on the top floor. These two collections should likewise be categorised as cocoons, in that they both represent my ideas of broader family identification.

Then I paint another category of mural which might be described as therapies. They relate to the painting work that is prescribed for institutionalised lunatics, which furnish them with some visual depiction of all the anxiety that comes welling up inside, to enable themselves to regulate it, or even to modify its expression. Some examples of such therapies are The Paranoia Murals, or Mental Disorder, or The Quest for Compatibility between the Sexes, or The Transition from Prey to Predator, or Heaven and Hell, or Life and Death, or Food, or The Kama Sutra Mural (where I am ridding myself of my sexual inhibitions), or The Disco Mural (where I am urging myself to emerge from introversion towards extroversion). Or in yet another area, The Abstract Conversation Pieces exercise my organisational skills, which is in itself a therapy, as I prove to myself that I can orchestrate the work of several young art students so that the sequence turns out as a cohesive art display.

Finally there is a category for fantasies, which constitute the murals that I painted to decorate the walls of the nursery suite, where my children were brought up. My purpose here was to surround them with a fantasy atmosphere, where children of all races were displayed in a spirit of co-operation, not only with each other but also with the animal kingdom. I had the walls of four rooms to cover, for which I took the themes of Daytime, Night-time, Underground and Underwater.

As a result of spending a lifetime in the painting of these murals, I have never had the opportunity of displaying my work in a picture gallery, and thus getting to know what my market price might be. But it would have been absurd for me to forego the unique opportunity that I possessed to display whatever I might paint upon the walls of the palatial museum where I happened to dwell - in apartments that would eventually have a significant proportion of the West Country's tourists flocking to see them. What artist could have decided differently?

But there does remain some intention in the back of my mind that, one day, I might paint a retrospective sequence of new murals - an additional Age of Man perhaps, and an additional Age of History, plus another Disco Panel, and another Paranoia Panel, until all phases of my past work have been reconstructed and put up for sale in a belated exhibition of my work elsewhere than at Longleat. That way I should at last discover the prices that I might command for any subsequent commissions of my work.

The environment of Longleat has in fact determined the nature of my life, and even the style in which I paint, since I was from the outset formulating that style to concur with the decor and atmosphere of the rooms where I was painting. This didn't involve any slavish loyalty to precedent art styles. The lovely thing about Longleat is that it has always been, and still is evolving. There is as great a justification for displaying there how the Thynn family chose to live in the 20th century, as there was for doing so in Victorian times; and there is still ample scope for subsequent generations to leave their appropriate mark up on the top floor, in their lavish depiction of decor in the 21st century.