I have been busy redecorating my flat.

A few weeks ago I decided to paint the walls in a similar fashion to Etruscan tombs and Minoan ceremonial temples, with butterflies, ladybirds, flowers, trees, naked men and women, fish diving in and out of silver pools, clouds and sunshine. Then I put up a few decorations. On one of the window sills, in shelves ranked behind and in front of the glass, on the corner wall built at right angles to the window, in a large cupboard at the back of the room and on various layers of glass boxes hanging round the skylight I arranged terracotta trays, sub-irrigated with flexible pipes that I painted to look like serpents, attached to two teevee-sized nutrient tanks, painted with neolithic chevrons, which hang from the walls and are hooked up to pulleys attached to a solar-powered mechanism which raises the tanks for watering, and lowers them for drainage. From all the trays, visible and hidden, burgeoned a forest of vegetable matter; courgettes, lettuces, peppers, kale, cabbage, land-cress, buckwheat, fat hen, comfrey leaves, yarrow stalks, onion bulbs, and plump red fruity shapes.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that, over the weeks, a mini ecosystem evolved. First of all tiny fish appeared in the irrigation pools, then filament-fine grass sprouted over the carpet, then miniature frogs and rodents began hopping and scuttling over my bookshelves until, a few days ago, I woke up to find an entire bonsai world had appeared in my bedroom; variegated flora, countless species of titchy lizards birds and mammals, mote-vole, peanut-wolf, crumb-buffalo, pinhead-caribou and even, under my writing desk, a diddy little neolithic tribe, who call themselves the 'Mimpi'.

Over the weekend, while I was away, the Yumei replaced my main sash-window with a stained glass depiction of 'the primal mother' - a huge burgundy and gold vagina, studded with crystals, which catches the morning sun and refracts it around the room in billions of rainbows.

Now when I get home, I am sprinkled with handfuls of petals from the Mimpi who float around the flat on their ingeniously constructed hand-gliders. Everyone else is hanging round, chatting, playing in pools, working at some job or another, or, for the most part, dancing, their strong exuberant limbs, ruddy from the sun and the open light, curving and springing to the music. As my eyes pass over them they cheer in joyful swathes of attention.

Its pretty good actually, better than the ikea furniture I did have.

The extraordinary yet hauntingly familiar life of the Mimpi, a panorama of their universe in a teacup and the story of what happened when they left my room, can be found here.