People come to the bar where he drinks

People come to the bar where he drinks."Today, Hirst arrives at the Groucho Club in a pinstripe suit and orders an Aqua Libra. He is quite small, with a shuffling walk, heavy brows and a curt desire to get the interview over. Upstairs in the thick-carpeted Club Room where Groucho members gather to watch television, he curls his legs up under him in a saggy armchair, lights regular cigarettes in the early evening gloom (there is a single dim lamp), and asks if we can break off to play snooker after half an hour.He speaks flatly and plainly: "All kids draw and make things. I just never stopped." At first he twists his hair, and avoids explaining his art: "I'm a hypocrite and a slut and I'll change my mind tomorrow." His pinstripe suit is actually rather creased, flopping over his T-shirt and Seventies trainers like the kind of spoilt-rock-star pyjamas Johnny Rotten used to wear. A foreign art-buyer and his assistant interrupt us, and Hirst waves them downstairs to buy drinks on his tab Does he do all his own work? "I used to. I do as little as possible now, though, because there's no point.

I could say tomorrow, 'I want an office chair carved out of marble'. For me to go and learn how to carve marble would be 30 years' work .. and I'm not going to use it again. So you go and find somebody who can do exactly what you want, and hire them and have it done." Hirst scribbles ideas for his assistants on the back of cigarette packets and beer mats.The phone rings. It is one of Hirst's assistants, explaining that the tank containing his sliced cow and calf, due to be exhibited in the Tate's Turner Prize show, is in danger of leaking formaldehyde and alarming the gallery's authorities. Hirst listens for long periods, nods, swears, and tries to remember how they stopped his shark seeping.

This time the tank will have to be strengthened; it will take days; he arranges some meetings.Five days later the sculpture is still not considered safe enough for the opening of the exhibition. It's not the first time Hirst and his assistants have alarmed a gallery: last summer a plan to exhibit a dead cow and bull in New York, under the title Dead Couple Fucking Twice, their cadavers rotting and copulating with the aid of hydraulics, was blocked by health authorities concerned that the gases released by putrefaction could cause an explosion, or gallery visitors to vomit.Unrealised projects of escalating ambition and - potentially - repulsiveness are part of the folklore about Hirst, who says he collects colour photographs of diseases and was called "Omen" at school after the devil-child in the Seventies horror film. He has talked about entombing a whole herd of elephants in formaldehyde, even stitching together his own Minotaur from a bull's head and hooves and the corpse of a volunteer. Sometimes, he worries about such ideas: "I went into the Saatchi Gallery when the fly piece [A Thousand Years, a sealed eco-system of maggots, rotting flesh and electric insect-killer] was installed, and I found it really frightening. When I'm on my own it's all right, but when there are other people looking it's almost like Frankenstein - what have I created? I don't quite know why ... "All this gore and its implications and controversies make good newscopy, however.