It isn’t that easy and I am convinced Marlborough is the best place for Rhys.” He admits he would have abandoned his battle if Rhys’s results had not been “significantly better” than the three Bs and three Cs that Marlborough has set as the minimum standard for entry into its sixth form.For Mr Gray, his son’s A-grades in all the subjects he intends to study at A-level – maths, physics and chemistry – are a vindication of his son, and undermine the school’s case that Rhys is “unwilling or unable to profit from the educational opportunities on offer”.In a 50-page school statement detailing Rhys’s behaviour, Nicholas Sampson, the master, said Mr Gray had unrealistic expectations of his son’s academic capabilities. “If I feel I have been badly treated or let down by somebody who has behaved dishonestly I will look for reparation,” he said. “Most people I know think I’m a bit obsessive, in that I would invest disproportionate effort in righting a wrong. They think just let it go, but if I think I have been stitched up or taken advantage of, then if there’s a way of achieving reparation, then I will work as hard as I can to achieve it. So I’m sure there’s a measure of that in this.”But [this is] more about how to achieve the best outcome for Rhys. You can’t confront someone at the last minute with the need to find an alternative school place. “If you embark on litigation then you had better budget for it.

I am confident that we have a good case but it is always unpredictable.”The school has said the expulsion is for Rhys’s “behaviour and attitudes”, and the teenager admits he has accumulated about 400 “chits” at school for minor offences.Mr Gray dismisses suggestions that his battle is a rich man’s whim. A dead shark doesn’t deal with death; it is dead! Well, actually, when I do some stuff I really do deal with some things.” The things his autobiographical novel, My Fault, deal with (mental and sexual abuse, alcoholism, stamping on cats…) are not pleasant But his work is at least, he says, true. The question of what is art is “very, very simple”, he reckons. “Would the person do it if he wasn’t being paid? This would eradicate all of contemporary art! You don’t pickle sharks in your shed for 20 years because you believe in it So basically it’s sausages But not as useful. Because you can’t eat it.”Perhaps surprisingly, the outspoken Childish has won a number of fans among those more famous and influential than himself Not that he’s in awe of them. “Blur? Well, Graham used to come to our gigs and stage dive off a one-foot stage on to his face .. Mudhoney genuinely liked us and helped us.

But they were one of the few people who are not totally involved in their career and had no problem with the fact that I didn’t like their music at all. Kylie rang me up and asked me if she could use one of my poetry book titles for an album title, and she was very polite and very nice. And she used to send me things now and then so I used to send her some things. I think that was when she was interested in being a bit more rough I think she got over me. She realised that she doesn’t want any rough at all, ha ha!” Not that he’s more impressed by rough. “The bloke from the Libertines, the wayward one, he’s never managed to meet me,” he adds. “They say, ‘This brick deals with …’ and it doesn’t deal with anything.

They experience themselves through others.”Billy Childish’s work, on the other hand, is all about experiencing himself. “I’ve ended up leaving every time I’ve been supposed to meet him. Channel 4 must be “well funded to be able to snap at the heels of the BBC”, he said, and consideration given to keeping ITV’s public service dimension, when analogue switch-off makes it commercially unviable.. And so basically that probably means I wouldn’t be able to sell any pictures.” He shrugs, but not regretfully “It’s not the art that’s important, it’s who you are. Because I don’t believe we’re here for no reason, I’m not a nihilist.”I think I believe him, even before he tells me, as a parting by-the-way, about his father and brother, the father and brother he wrote about in My Fault, the ones he says almost drove him to murder “My brother is a painter,” he explains “My brother is the opposite of me. He went to grammar school, the Slade and the Royal College and he got all of his qualifications.