This was the painting - Hawksbill Bay, 2020 - that drew me to Tate Britain yesterday to catch the last day of the Hurvin Anderson exhibition. To think I nearly missed it: too hot, too cranky from being too hot, never heard of Hurvin Anderson ...it's not reproducing very well here, might be the unfortunate contrast with Mrs M's pink! Well, it was the heat-drenched colour that lured me - but the poster on the Tube, if I remember correctly, cut off the greys on one side. And this exhibition was about memory and belonging, and memory, of course, fades over time. One of the paintings that drew me back again and again was monochrome - unfortunately this is the only image I can find. The wet,concrete unwelcome of the Birmingham where Anderson grew up ... but those reflections shimmered. (I'll own up to feeling some personal nostalgia for puddles and damp; perhaps I should revisit this in November when I've had enough!) I watched part of the the film that was being shown - Handsworth Songs - but an hour-long film proved too much as an add-on to an exhibition when all the seats were taken and I was reflecting on cups of tea ... I'll catch up with it online.

Country Club:Chicken Wire (2008) is about racial and economic segregation, keep-out, them-and-us ... but that chicken wire! Each link different, and I swear it looked as if it might bounce ... what a painter!

So sad that's he gone. He was so joyously full of life and ideas that would have kept him busy had he lived to be 150. I'll own up to not having hugely enjoyed his Serpentine exhibition - heavens, it was thronged when I went, what will it be like now? - mostly because it was just one long Insta-opportunity for the tiresome posers whose only response to art or anything else is I Woz Here. But how I remember the sheer'wow' of walking into his 2012 exhibition at the Royal Academy and the exuberance of his Arrival of Spring as we emerged from lockdown. I visited the Serpentine on a glorious spring day and remember wondering how many more springtimes Hockney had left, and wishing him still a few more. I've just happened upon this rather sniffy comment in the Guardian: 'Nor can this artist escape his own vernal temperament, which infuses even shedding trees with that slightly chill impression of possibility that presages spring.' But how joyfully optimistic to have a vernal temperament and always to see the coming of another spring ...

Of all the paintings I saw yesterday when I was tootling around (one big exhibition, three little ones) this was the one I most wanted to take home with me. But who wouldn't love a Winifred Nicholson. (POA as the list is in my handbag and I can't be bothered rummaging.)

Long-listed for the Booker Prize. Short-listed as possibly the most tedious, banal, pretentious load of tripe I've ever had the misfortune to fall asleep over. (Book group. Goes without saying.) The Guardian reviewer - surprisingly - sums it up well. If only there could be a warning sticker on anything produced by graduates/teachers of creative writing programmes! I stand by what I said. But heavens, I must have been in a cranky mood when I wrote this!

I never imagined I could be so engrossed in a novel, translated from the Norwegian, about one small family scratching out a living on a tiny island where nothing much happens except weather. But the seasons pass and life happens and change follows and even on an island there are dreams and disappointments. It is beautifully written - in language as spare as the landscape - and beautifully translated by two co-translators. (I wonder how they managed that so seamlessly?) This is the first book of a quartet and I've already ordered the next one.

You wouldn't look at this and immediately think Lucian Freud, would you? And I can't say I've thought of pairing daffodils and celery, but don't they look fresh and springlike? It was the sparkling glass jug that initially caught my eye at the National Portrait Gallery and this was the painting that I paid a second visit to on my way out. I wanted a postcard but they'd already sold out, even though the exhibition only opened a couple of weeks ago - so I guess I'm not the only one drawn to it. Late Friday afternoon proved to be a lovely time to visit, no crowds and lots of room to stand and stare - and Freud always repays standing and staring. To my surprise, I ended up spending three hours there, barely time to grab coffee and cake in the crypt of St-Martin-in-the-Fields before meeting my friend for the theatre. Perhaps predictably, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry proved far too mawkish for either of us - and it came flooding back to me how much I hated the book - but the staging/design/lighting is quite brilliant, and whoever designed the dog deserves an award.

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 hair 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's 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.