What a cliffhanger ... how am I going to wait a week to find out what happens next?

And what will I do with my Sunday evenings after the finale next weekend?

And why aren't British television series ever as good as this?
I'd have traded ten more series of Downton Abbey for another half-hour last night.
But do you really believe that Sergeant Brody would do that or will there be a twist at the end?

What with the Olympics (I'd better warn you, this blog will be an Olympic-free zone) and the Jubilee (although it seems hardly any time at all since the last one), I suppose the V&A had to do an exhibition of British Design. But I did feel that I'd seen it all before - and very recently, too, given last year's Festival of Britain celebrations.
Still, it got me out of the rain after a very damp walk in Kensington Gardens.
The only thing that stopped me in my tracks was the very beautiful maquette for John Piper's window at Coventry Cathedral.
I've never been there, but I can't imagine that you'd get close enough to see the lovely, subtle detail in the glass.
Then it was the Skylon, and the Mini, and the mini ... heigh-ho, and the Dyson. It was all just a bit familiar. But I suppose it would be.

I was so fascinated by Jeanette Winterson's memoir Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? that over the weekend I simply had to watch again the wonderful BBC adaptation of her novel Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit. I knew that this was life transmuted into fiction, but not the gospel truth.

In fact, real life was much bleaker and more terrifying.

I am often asked, in a tick-box kind of way, what is true and what is not true, in Oranges. Did I work in a funeral parlour? Did I drive an ice-cream van? Did we have a Gospel Tent? Did Mrs Winterson build her own CB radio? Did she really stun tomcats with a catapult?

I can't answer these questions. I can say that there is a character in Oranges called Testifying Elsie who looks after the little Jeanette and acts as a soft wall against the hurt(ling) force of Mother. 

I wrote her in because I couldn't bear to leave her out. I wrote her in because I really wished it had been that way ...

There was no Elsie. There was no one like Elsie. Things were much lonelier than that.

Oranges was written when Jeanette Winterson was only 25. Now she must be over 50, and Mrs Winterson is long dead; her barking mad, Pentecostalist mother-by-adoption, whom she always refers to as Mrs Winterson or Mrs W and never as mum. Oranges, so Jeanette Winterson says, is 'for anyone who is interested in what happens at the frontiers of common sense.'

Mrs W lived on the edge, waiting for Armageddon, with her funeral money sewn into the curtains and two pairs of false teeth, matt for everyday and pearlised for best. She burned books, but could extemporise a more religiously-satisfying version of Jane Eyre.

She was terrifying, dangerous, and undoubtedly wreaked lasting damage upon her daughter who nevertheless comes to realise that, 'She was a monster but she was my monster.'

For all the havoc and pain she wreaked, there is a grandeur to Mrs W and I can't really understand how Jeanette Winterson walked out the door, never to lay eyes on her again.

And I know that I'd love to sit down with the monster and say, 'Now tell me the story from your side ....'

(Nothing to do with the book, but I didn't know that Jeanette Winterson has a food shop in Spitalfields. Having read this, I realise that I've been in there many a time admiring the chocolates.)

Could I call back in half an hour, said the person I rather urgently needed to talk to for work.

Do you think I could?  When the new Persephone Biannually arrived only ten minutes ago and I've got a tin of homemade chocolate shortbread ...

I think I'll survive.

If anybody missed the enchanting French film from about ten years ago, Être et Avoir, you can download it free of charge here. The code is EXTRAFILMTHURS

What a shame that it all ended in tears. I hadn't realised.

This is not a food blog ....

Although I accept that slightly burned sausages, mash, caramelised onions and lightly steamed asparagus - washed down by half a bottle of supermarket Rioja - possibly don't qualify as one of the great culinary classics ...

I still really enjoyed it.

I don't think I'd really enjoy one of those fantasy dinner parties when you invite famous characters for a sparkling conversational evening. Much as I'd love to meet Samuel Pepys, I doubt whether he'd really want to meet me. And he'd probably be far more interested in seeing what was on television than expanding on whatever he got up to on page 1098 of his diary. (Sorry, Sam, no BBC2 as I have yet to face up to last week's digital changeover.)
But as I was reading Martin Gayford's lovely book, I kept thinking that I'd love to go for a walk with David Hockney.
Even better, to have gone on one of his musical road trips in the late 1980s ...

I suppose my musical drives around Los Angeles were a kind of performance art ... I'd just got a little house in Malibu at the time, and I was driving around to explore, playing Wagner a bit loud to test the speakers. Then I suddenly thought, 'My God! The music matches these mountains.' So slowly, I choreographed a drive starting from the house. I finished up with two: one about thirty-five minutes long; the other an hour and a half. I could time them with the sunset. I'd tell people that they had to come at a certain time and they couldn't be late because nature is doing the lighting. There'd be, for example, the great crescendo in Siegfried's funeral music, and you'd come round a corner and as the music rose you'd see the setting sun suddenly revealed. It was like a movie... I did it in an open car so you could look around in every direction. I knew what speed to go at, when to press my buttons to change the music ... It was like conducting the music really.


Wish you were there?