Inside half an hour two Metropolitan police officers from the specialist unit based at the airport arrived in a patrol car and demanded to know what he was doing, saying he had been spotted on a CCTV camera.
"I told them, 'I'm hardly a terrorist, I'm watercolouring'. One policeman said, 'you're not painting the airport, are you?' I told him I was painting the sugar factory. He said 'no one paints factories'. I told him Lowry painted loads of factories and made a mint. He got a bit touchy then."
For 15 minutes, O'Farrell said, one officer checked his identification on a radio while another searched his bag. "They said I had 'weird paraphernalia' with me. I said 'it's a flask of coffee and an iPod'."
O'Farrell said he had returned to the same spot a week later to complete the work and was interrogated again, by two other officers.
"I told them I was just doing a watercolour of the sugar factory. One of them said 'no one does watercolours of factories'. I told them about Lowry – it was groundhog day. It was extraordinary.
"Then one said 'I can see what you're doing now, I'd be a bit more concerned if you were painting the airport'. I remember from my art history that centuries ago in China artists were murdered in case they [painted] maps and roads. But in the days of digital photography I hardly think a watercolourist painting an airport would be some sort of international threat." The experience left him baffled. "I've been painting in Moscow, in Vietnam, Ukraine, and all I get round me are bunches of kids. If the police come by they're just curious about the painting. It's extraordinary what happened to me."
Apologies to those who are fans, and his work may be brilliant, but the novelist in this video comes across as obnoxious and stupid, playing up to a crowd of sycophants.
