Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert wise-cracking their way through one of the last rom-coms before a very distant cousin of mine was instrumental in imposing moral standards on Hollywood.

That cousin, who was the scourge of the movie industry, died before I was born, and his favourite movie was The Song of Bernadette.

I daresay he'd have disapproved of sassy Claudette, as the spoiled little rich girl on the run from her daddy, who meets a cynical out-of- work hack on the bus to New York.

Okay, so she borrowed Clark Gable's pyjamas. But when she's forced to share his motel room, he hangs up the Wall of Jericho - a curtain dividing the room - and it doesn't come tumbling down until right at the end.

Barbara Stanwyck in Forbidden is a much racier story. Of an adulterous love affair and illegitimate birth and sleazy newspapermen raking up dirt. 'Two hours of soggy, 99.4 per cent soap opera ...' said director Frank Capra. You wouldn't think that it was nearly 80 years old. I guess that's what happens when librarians take off their specs, take out their savings and take themselves off on a cruise to Havana.

The man in the row behind me was boasting that he'd seen seven movies back to back the day before. But two's my limit. Even during London Film Festival. Some of us simply don't have the stamina.

It is the year of the cabbage. After some fine specimens in Edinburgh last week, what do I find at the RA today but ... more cabbages.

(I'm sure I saw a few Brussels sprouts as well.)

I don't think that I'll ever be bowled over by the Glasgow Boys.

Although my brother might persuade me to change my mind when he flies down from Aberdeen to see them next week.

They are certainly the men of the moment as there's three exhibitions of their work currently on in London.

PS Do read this story about the cold and hungry little girl in the painting.

My real reason for visiting the National Portrait Gallery yesterday was to see the Thomas Lawrence exhibition that has just opened.

He painted this portrait of Queen Charlotte when he was only 20, with no formal training as painter, and having been granted only one sitting by the Queen.

But look how that young boy has captured the sadness in her eyes, only a year after the first descent into madness of King George III.

There were other haunting faces in this exhibition, so real - you'd think - that they might have stepped out of their frames to engage you in formal, polite conversation. Lawrence seems to have had a way with those who were old and frail, like old Lady Manners who was 89 when he painted her sitting erect but twisting a lace handkerchief in her knotted, arthritic hands. He painted William Wilberforce in retirement, his body wracked by pain but goodness and good humour shining out from his face.

There was hardly anybody in the gallery yesterday and my guess is that the average age of visitors was well over 60. I enjoyed the quiet and the sense that everybody there was engrossed in the paintings ... but what a shame that so many will ignore this exhibition because it isn't 'fashionable.'

It could be a scene out of Dickens or Wilkie Collins.

But before anybody's imagination runs away with them, this isn't Bill Sikes ...and he's only buying a newspaper.

Still, you can't imagine the lengths that pioneer photographer Camille Silvy went to, to capture that gloaming effect.

I wonder if he would have liked one of these?

Flagging behind Cornflower's book group, I have just finished the Lost Man Booker Prize-winning novel Troubles, by JG Farrell.

I had a nagging feeling that I might have read this back in the 1970s. I had a strange sense of déjà vu about the Majestic Hotel and yet even by the end I couldn't decide if I was only imagining that I'd read it once before. In fact, that slightly disoriented 'what am I doing here?' feeling is rather appropriate to the mood of the book.

You'll either find Troubles achingly funny ... or you'll be bored to irritation by its melancholy pace. Major Brendan Archer is still traumatised by his experiences in the trenches when he arrives in Ireland to claim the young woman he acquired as his fiancée in a fit of characteristic vagueness while he was on leave. By now it is 1919 and the Irish countryside is overrun by Sinn Feiners and Black and Tans. Angela's father Edward Spencer, loyalist to his teeth, is the owner of the Majestic Hotel that serves as a metaphor for the decrepit British Empire. The Majestic is a tour de force ... inhabited by old ladies smelling of lavender and mothballs, overrun by feral cats and brought to the point of collapse by every kind of rot and the blanched, hairy roots of overgrown vegetation in the Palm Court. The Major is soon released from his engagement but months pass and a terrible inertia keeps him living (in hysterically funny discomfort) at the Majestic.

It took me a long time to read this novel .. well, a week, which is slow-going for me ... and eventually I realised the sheer skill of Farrell's construction. There's no chapters, the only breaks are intermittent news reports from elsewhere in the crumbling Empire ... and like Major Archer, all you can do is read on, carried forward by inertia, unable to extricate yourself from the Majestic Hotel. Very clever. And very funny.

Especially for Darlene ... a garden with no strange men lurking under the chairs.

And a wonderful pair of stripey socks.

The Artist's Sister in Her Garden by Joseph Bail.

Midsummer by Sir James Guthrie.

Don't you think that the angular lady on the right might have been Miss Jean Brodie's maiden aunt taking tea in the garden?

That silver teapot caught lovely reflections. I wonder who polished it?