Last night I went to see Jan & Barry, to catch up on what's been happening since I saw them last. As usual there was lovely food - curry and some gorgeous Indian pancakes - and gossip, good music, and Wii! I'm rubbish at these kind of things and yet it only takes about 3 seconds before I rediscover the competitive boy lurking deep within me. Most fun/exhausting was boxing. I guess I found my inner thug! Lovely to see you both! xxx

Today turned out to be really nice, although when I woke up I certainly wasn't expecting that. I hadn't made any plans, ostensibly because I thought it might rain, but really because I was sulking a bit because I've decided I hate summer. I don't, I just don't know how to use it properly.

But I ended up having a nice day pottering. I got some gardening done, did some stuff round the house, enjoyed some old music, drove the car with the roof down, ate well - thank you Waitrose! - and watched enough Dawson's Creek to make me sob like a baby. After all that I'm going to bed happy. Somedays I really don't understand myself at all.

Last night I could have gone to see Looking for Eric, the Ken Loach/Eric Cantona film. It's been well reviewed but it's a tricky proposition for me: I admire Ken Loach more than I actually enjoy his work; and Eric Cantona is just too much of a footballer for my licking. I'd need to be in tip-top shape to take that on, so I stayed home instead.

Today has been so dull I could have cried. Inside did was a little. So tonight I'm doing the sensible thing and going out to be sociable! Let's celebrate the start of the weekend with a picture of the rather handsome Thierry Henry:

I like dreaming, but they're never lovely ones in which Morrissey bakes me some scones and sings me a song, or Rufus gives me a cocktail and writes me an opera.

Last night I dreamt I had my wallet stolen. Why? Is my brain secretly worried about my security? Or does it just want to punish me during the eight hours when I'm not being annoyed by f*ckwits? Evil brain. So here's how it went:

Ema & I are sitting on the pavement in the road where my Mum lives, because bizarrely someone is performing two of Joe Orton's one act plays in front of one of the bungalows there. We're sitting watching when four men approach. I don't really pay much attention as I'm trying to watch the play, but I notice that one is dressed all in black and another asks if we're having a good evening. The next thing I know I'm lying on the floor, possibly with a foot on my back, with my face pressed into the pavement - and at this point I can feel the grit of the pavement on my face in my sleep - and someone is demanding my wallet and PIN numbers for my cards.

So thanks for that brain, now I'm anxious about being mugged!

It turns out I've completely misunderstood the meaning of the phrase "misery loves company". It apparently means "miserable people like other miserable people around them" whereas I thought it meant "miserable people enjoy a bit of company because it makes them feel better". Who knew!

I'm having a tricky week at work, people are making the day difficult and by the time I get home I'm too exhausted to do much apart from eat badly and watch TV. But I get bored of that pretty quickly so last night I went to bed at 9pm. I read for a bit then tried to sleep, but I wasn't actually tired so I went back online.

I ended up chatting to some random strangers, although they turned out to be just what I needed! Particularly the 29 year old student who talked to me about love, sex, Folk music and Wittgenstein until 1am.

I'm paying for it today of course....

It's been a frustrating day, spent mostly trying to work out how to encourage my colleague to put down his iphone, stop checking the cricket scores online and do some work. In the end I decided that he's old enough to know better so I just had a quiet word with my manager and let him sort it out. I'm tired of other people's f*ckwittage! Of course any kind of confrontation terrifies me so I came home feeling tired and fed up, and very nearly went straight to bed. But I resisted, and instead I'm cheering myself up with part 2 of my big arty day in London:

The Fourth Plinth

I sat on the wall outside the National Gallery to have my lunch:



It's probably the kind of place I would have stopped anyway as it's busy and a great place to people-watch. But now things are even more interesting as Antony Gormley's One & Other is taking place on the Fourth Plinth.

You must have heard of it: for 100 days a different person will stand on the plinth for one hour each, where they can do exactly what they want. It's a genius idea and completely inkeeping with Antony Gormley's other work, which is mostly about the human body and it's relationship with its surroundings. This is really the ultimate expression of that.

But what would you do up there? It's something that people have struggled with. As I watch now there's a balding man from the eastern region eating salad and chatting to the people in Trafalgar Square. The object of the whole project is to get a snapshot of the UK right now.

Lots of people have used their hour to raise awareness for charity, which is obviously very worthy but a bit dull to look at. Some people have dressed up. Some have sung. Some have danced. The best thing I saw was a man assembling an IKEA chest of drawers in the rain at 10pm one night last week - I was mesmerised! When I was there a woman was releasing balloons and blowing bubbles for charity, but I couldn't see what it said on her t-shirt so I've no idea which one.

Obviously I've applied for a place - I'd be an idiot if I didn't! They're picking people randomly but in a slightly complicated way to ensure they get people from every area and cover different ages and both genders. I'm crossing my fingers still but the odds are against me - apparently the further away from London you live the better your chances as less people apply as it's further to travel.

But what would I do? Well, my plan would be to do nothing. Not just sit there and text like some people have been, but just stand still, like a statue the plinth was designed for. But then I read something in the Guardian, where a woman who was sat doing nothing was heckled by the driver of an open-topped tourist bus who shouted something like, "Do something! 25000 people applied for that spot, you should be changing the world!" which is more sense than we've come to expect from bus drivers! So in the unlikely event that I get a place I've no idea what I'd do!

BP Portrait Award at the National Gallery

This is something I look forward to every year! I love portraits, they're so interesting and really do tell you things about the people being painted. You'd think that with the advent of photography they'd have died out, but you only have to visit this to realise they're more popular than ever.

Interestingly the style of portraits seems to have become more photographic with each year, to the point where you find people pressing their noses to the canvas to look for brush strokes. Some of them take the realism to another level, and capture people in a lifelike way that photography could never manage.

It's a great exhibition, lots of interesting faces, particularly one large painting of an older woman with white hair and very blue eyes. You just don't see that kind of face represented anywhere so it was a real treat to see.

But inevitably my favourite was of a handsome young man:



Pretension alert! The colour, subject and the way it's painted remind me of Caravaggio, but I also just enjoyed the handsome young man.

As always it makes me want to get myself painted! Anyone know any good artists?

So London was fabulous! I wish I'd stayed there!

I was in London yesterday for a day of arty things, which made a nice change although inevitably when I woke up in the morning I was tempted not to go. I tend to avoid London in the summer as it's packed with tourists and doesn't feel relaxing, and as I can easily go any time it seems silly to put myself through it. But August is looking like a quiet month so off I went.

Gilbert & George

I love Gilbert & George! When I got a full time job one of the first things I did was go to Cambridge and buy a big pile of books, including a big fat book about them, which was rather a pretentious thing for a 19 year old to do. It had great pictures in it but it also had very long and dull essays in it by a German academic, so it went unread and many years later I sold it online.

I didn't see a solo show of theirs until quite recently and was disappointed - it looked like something anyone could do on a computer, somehow it looked cheap. But then there was a huge retrospective of their stuff at Tate Modern and suddenly it all made sense again - it was stunning, and you could really appreciate how clever and funny they were.

This is their first exhibition since then, and there's so much of it it's showing in two places, so my first stop was Hoxton.



As you leave Old Street tube it's impossible not to think you've come to the wrong place. The area is very run down - lots of blocks of flats, scruffy shops, derelict buildings - it's the reality of inner city living and comes as a bit of a shock to a country boy whose idea of a city is the glamorous West End. But then you turn down Rufus Street - how joyous that felt! - and suddenly there are hip and interesting places to eat, and on the corner of Hoxton Square is The White Cube gallery. It seems almost like an arty prank to put it there.

The pictures are great: huge, colourful, and far more playful than their other stuff. They make me smile, which is the kind of reaction I like to Art.

The second half of it is on at a gallery just of Picadilly, just down the road from The Ritz, which couldn't be more different from Hoxton! Amazingly all those pictures don't feel like too many. They were great, I may go and see them again.

Royal Academy Summer Show

I went to this for the first time last year with Thom, and absolutely loved it so it now has a place in my summer schedule. It's a big collection of contemporary art, by both amateurs and well-known artists, which I guess represents the start of Art today.

There are rooms full of it, loosely grouped by medium, and they're nearly all for sale. You get given a little catalogue as all the works are identified by just a number, there are no long explanatory labels near them. The smart visitors bring pens so they can make notes of the things they like. I ended up typing the numbers into my phone so I could research them when I got home, although I do wonder if the catalogue had the numbering wrong as the stuff I liked seem to have little resemblance to the stuff I found online later!

The portraits are particularly good, as are landscapes. It all falls apart slightly in the abstract room though as some of it looks a bit like the stuff we did for A-level Art, and not in a good way. Or perhaps it's just a deliberately 'naive' style and I'm missing the point?

The most crowded rooms are the ones filled with small pictures and prints - the affordable stuff! Although not actually that affordable! I loved this:



I could see that in my house, but at nearly £2000 that's never going to happen! But that was a cheap one, there was another beautiful painting I loved that was £48000 and astonishingly the artist had only been painting for two years. It's madness, but people were buying. Recession?!

They also had an Antony Gormley sculpture, one of his wire rod ones, where if you look at it from the right angle there's a void at the centre in the shape of a human figure. I loved those, they're so clever. In fact I love all his stuff. And him. But at £230,000 I'm never going to get one, which is a real shame.

I may have bored you to tears with Art now, so I'll finish the rest later.