Arts editor Laura Davis describes her hour as one of Antony Gormley’s Trafalgar Square statues

IT’S two minutes past midnight on June 1, and a loud beep signals that an email has been sent to my phone: “Congratulations you have been chosen for a place on the plinth”.

The rush of adrenaline that floods through me proves I have done the right thing in applying to take part in Antony Gormley’s One and Other project.

Up until this point, I was not entirely sure how I felt about the challenge. I had just entered my name on a website along with everyone else and left it up to fate.

In the early hours, with most of Liverpool asleep, there was nobody to share my excitement.

At 1pm in Trafalgar Square on Sunday, however, there were hundreds – and thousands more watching online.

By the time I was standing in the front platform of a cherrypicker with a 3ft fibreglass penguin, my initial euphoria had transformed into plain fear.

Under no circumstances, I lectured myself, was I to fall off.

Kimi, a 20-something from North Yorkshire who described herself as “creative, happy, excited”, was still valiantly hoolahooping to a backdrop of soap bubbles when I arrived at the level of the 5m-high plinth.

She stepped off, I stepped on, and just like that my hour had begun.

Months earlier, when I interviewed him about One and Other, Gormley said he didn’t mind what people got up to during their hour.

In fact, he hoped that among the 2,400 people taking part over 100 days there would be plenty who were not born show-offs.

He didn’t mind, he added, if they just read a book or had a snooze for 60 minutes.

A period of intensive research (watching the live webstream from the comfort of my living room) revealed that some people had done just that, while others had dressed as Godzilla and played swingball, sung opera, painted their faces to look old, worn a giant pigeon costume, recited Shakespeare, thrown down fairycakes, campaigned against genital mutilation and drunk Champagne.

I went for somewhere in the middle – deciding to make origami birds (my one and only party trick) and taking up a penguin statue that will feature in the Go Penguins public art trail in Liverpool this winter.

My dad used to make the birds for me and my sister to colour in when we were little – he’d been taught how by his father.

So there I was, standing in a space usually reserved for sculptures of kings, warriors and saints, and I could see hundreds of people looking at me, expecting me to entertain them.

THE pressure was suffocating as I opened my bag and took out a pack of paper squares.

I was just starting to fold it into a bird shape when there was a gasp of horror from the crowd – the garden parasol I had brought up in case of rain had taken off, blowing across Trafalgar Square like an enormous striped jellyfish and landing somewhere near the fountain.