I've been promising myself a blast of Hockney colour for weeks now and it was actually a mild - dry! - sunny afternoon when I finally made it to his exhibition of 'some very, very, very new paintings' only days before it closes. People were having lunch sitting out in Hanover Square, not quite picnic weather but seizing the moment. Hydrangeas, delphiniums and roses and crumpled gingham tablecloths felt like a hit of Vitamin D and felt wonderfully cheering.

But upstairs in the gallery is the 'Moon Room' of iPad paintings made outside Hockney's studio in Normandy. It was only when I noticed a photo in the catalogue of 88-year-old Hockney, back to the camera, sitting outside on a kitchen chair to 'paint' the night sky that it really brought home to me his unceasing wonderment at everything around him, reflections, silhouetted trees, the moon's corona, clouds; they felt eternal and peaceful - and we surely need that.

Rose Wylie is even older than Hockney but I wasn't bowled over by her exhibition at the Royal Academy; slightly frustrating as everybody else seemed to think it was witty and fun - and I was just thinking, oh, for heaven's sake, give me a paintbox, even I could do that.

But she remembers a bomb landing on her family home during WW2 - which did catch my eye because I've just finished reading A Chelsea Concerto, Frances Faviell's memoir of her time as a Red Cross volunteer in Chelsea during the Blitz.

Now, to be honest, Faviell is not a brilliant writer and I don't feel inclined to go on to read any of her novels - the friends and neighbours about whom she writes are cardboard for the most part and don't spring to life on the page. And yet it's riveting, maybe because she writes about a tiny section of London from King's Road to Cheyne Walk and the river, streets I've walked so many times - and you realise how Chelsea was hammered, night after night, by bombers aiming for the power stations and the river bridges. A lull in the bombing brings women out to have their permed, because no-one fancies being hooked up to a waving machine during a raid. Faviell has to measure her hips - 34 inches, an inch to spare on either side - strip to her undies and wriggle into a hole beneath a collapsed house to bring chloroform to a screaming man. One of her jobs was reassembling dismembered body parts for burial. And all this within a few streets of home. Eventually Faviell's own home takes a direct hit. She feels a warm arm around her neck, thinks it her husband - but it's the severed arm of her lovely friend from the flat upstairs, a young woman married only a few days previously and still on her honeymoon. It's a relentless, compelling read - and you do wonder how you would have measured up yourself; what amazing sangfroid and presence of mind and good humour people (mostly) showed. I can't imagine I'd have been much good for anything more than brewing tea with the WVS.