That was absolutely the best night out ... great songs, brilliant set design, and we were greeted on arrival by Tower Bridge opening to let a tall ship through which was fun. It's 40 years since I last saw Guys & Dolls (gulp!) at the National Theatre with a very starry cast including Julia Mckenzie, Bob Hoskins and a very young Imelda Staunton - but honestly I think tonight was more fun. If my knees were 40 years younger, I'd have booked standing tickets - which really should be called dancing tickets! I must say I rather regretted my sensible, grown-up decision that we needed a seat. Still humming those tunea!

So glad that I, Claudius has proved every bit as engrosing as it was back in 1976 when it was cult viewing in the college JCR. (Two TVs for the whole college and much bickering over channels ... those were the days!)

I'm down on thrift this week, having just destroyed my printer, seemingly by recycling scrap paper. (Well, how was I to know?) But then I often find that looking after pennies ends up costing pounds in the end. So, no - I'm not going to refashion my worn-out denim into a Japanese boro garment that's likely to become a collector's item. Still, there was something very satisfying about the Japanese Aesthetics of Recycling exhibition that appealed to my (well-buried) inner Marie Kondo. I'd never been to the Brunei Gallery; turns out I used to walk past it every other week on my way to seminars that, sadly, have moved on-line since the pandemic.

Nothing was wasted. Handmade washi paper was made from old ledgers and used as wrappings for kimonos or other bulky objects. (Perhaps I should have tried that with my stacks of old book proofs instead of jinxing the printer!) This one was made from pawn shop ledgers; the writing reveals that the family who deposited a kimono never managed to redeem it. The recycled papers were rendered waterproof with persimmon paste. And can you imagine having a jacket made from wisteria fibre - which actually looks quite tough. Or a kimono made from advertising banners for violet soap or camellia oil shampoo? The exhibition is free, always a good thing! And on a sunny afternoon last week, I sat for a while in the Japanese roof garden, that I never realised was there, reading my book and enjoying my bird's eye view over the rooftops of Bloomsbury.

I came across this book purely by chance, after reading a blurb at the back of another strange book by the same publisher - and having read it in two sittings (it's only 100pp), I can honestly say it's one of the most disturbing I've ever read. Up there with Shirley Jackson's The Lottery. 'They' are purging an idyllic pastoral England of art and artists - destroying books and tearing out bookplates to efface the memory of bookish gifts. 'They' loathe people who live alone, people who make things, people who are self-sufficient. 'They' maim writers and promote blaring television 24/7. 'They' was published in 1977 but seems more horribly relevant today. Of course, the reader smugly identifies as one of 'us', not one of 'them' - and I'm not sure that's altogether healthy, either.

Woman at her Toilette, 1875-80 (Grr, why won't Blogger do captions like it used to?? And paragraphs?) This was painted in Berthe Morisot's own bedroom and if you look closely, you can see her Louis XVI bed. I can't even blame lockdown, or not wholly - but it must be a good five years since I was last at Dulwich Picture Gallery which somehow I build up in my mind as being A Bit of a Trek. But on a glorious sunny day last week, the Morisot exhibition was very much worth the effort. Though I do wonder what has happened to that lovely old mulberry tree in the gallery garden, which used to be weighed down with berries - not a single one!

Critic Charles Ephrussi (who owned The Hare with Amber Eyes ... I do love artistic connexions) said that Morisot worked with a 'palette of crushed flower petals.'

To avoid being bothered by lookers-on when painting out of doors, she would start work at 6.30am - and head home at 9 for a cup of coffee. As a night owl/vampire, I am always impressed by how much early risers achieve before I'm out of bed.

She spent her honeymoon on the Isle of Wight where you could rent two bedrooms and a sitting room in high season for £2 a week, including laundered bedlinen and gas lighting.

While in England, she met Tissot 'who does very pretty things that he sells at high prices ...he is very nice, though a little vulgar.' I'm inclined to agree - I've always thought that the 'ladies' at his shipboard ball were too showy to be quite ladylike.

I'd never have guessed this was Morisot - an Impressionist take on Boucher. I could rather fancy it hanging in my bathroom but the artist hung it in the recption room of her home.

I love this painting of Morisot's seven-year-old daughter 'catching goldfish' with the concierge's little girl - an inspired way to amuse the children while maman paints them. Do hope there was something down to protect the carpet!

I was thrilled to bag a ticket at long last to visit the Cosmic House - you have to be quick off the mark when they're released - and it's now top of my list of 'Best Things To Do in London for a Fiver.' The house was the home of Charles Jencks, the post-modernist architect who lived there until he was 80 (and I am lost in admiration if he still managed that spiral staircase, 52 steps one for every week of the year - and very impressed with myself, too, because I gulped when I saw it!). I'm not a fan of post-modernism but this eccentric house was fascinating to see - and even Jencks admitted that he had gone Too Far. It's so busy ... throbbing with ideas about life, the universe and everything, you feel exhausted looking at it. It did strike me as a very masculine home - his big, important ideas squashing any sign of the wife and young family who lived there too. (Tellingly, his daughter says that she didn't like bringing her friends home.) And I'm guessing that the person who designed the witty frieze of spoons in the kitchen wasn't the person who had to do the fiddly cleaning - though I suppose that if you can afford a Holland Park mansion, you can afford the staff to go with it. Frankly, I could live without my husband exercising his schoolboy 'wit' in the cloakroom ... the symmetrical double flush to the loo - one side works, the other doesn't - well, hilarious if you're 14, but the women visitors in my tour group all agreed that it verged on bullying and we wouldn't want to embarrass our guests for a larf. (Symmetrical soaps, too ... one tablet is soap, the other is stone.) Much use is made of MDF ... in fact, Jencks was really like a more high-minded Lawrence Llewellyn Bowen. You can wander round at your own pace - sit on the (very uncomfortable) furniture - and be very grateful indeed that you don't live with a clever clogs with an insatiable urge for DIY. What I really did love was the beautiful garden designed by Jencks'wife Maggie Keswick; I remember reading her book about Chinese gardens before what for us seemed a very adventurous trip to China back in the 1980s. And around the corner from the Cosmic House is the Best Horribly Unhealthy Lunch for a Fiver from here. Oh, those buns ... no seating, but if you're determined you can grapple with bun/coffee/monsoonal downpour whilst lurking in a doorway. Fuelled with 5000 calories (full disclosure: it was a cheesecake bun ... the whopping XXL Wimbledon bun filled with clotted cream seemed excessive even for me), I jumped on a bus to the National Portrait Gallery. Bad mistake - it was heaving. And it used to be such a calm, peaceful hideaway for discoursing with Brontes or Beatrix Potter. I hope it's just temporary enthusiasm and too much publicity for the revamp. Too hot - too crowded - too noisy ... I gave it just 10 minutes and went home.

I'm back ... a feel-good, exuberant exhibition of Andy Warhol's textiles has inspired me to come back to the poor old blog. Who wouldn't smile at dirndl skirts and summer holiday frocks printed with ice cream cones and toffee apples, flacons of 'Fanel No6' or even Argyle socks and baby bootees? A philodendron print dress in pink or gold - from Palm Fashions of Florida - was very Mad Men's wives - and only needed to be accessorised with a dry martini and a Virginia Slim. I rather doubted if the owner of the witty brushes and brooms frock ever needed to wield one in her own kitchen ... surely the help did the dirty work?

So many things I haven't written up (more for myself taking stock at the end of the year when it's all melded into one!) ... a brief holiday in Lisbon, a jolly visit to a new gallery with a teenage friend who is the best company, one mediocre memoir and a long, fascinating biography, an exhibition that most critics loved but I thought was mostly tosh ...

But I did love Piet Mondrian's amaryllis - I would never have guessed the artist - and was thrilled when mine from last Christmas belatedly pushed out a couple of flowers. (They seem to thrive on neglect but possibly not as much neglect as they get here!) Blogs, pot plants ... must try to do better!

PS I forgot to mention films in my round-up but this French film about a single mother struggling to commute into Paris during a transport strike is completely gripping and yes, absolutely as good as a thriller. Still in cinemas but only just.