You are invited to the wedding of Jane and James on November 9th, 1780, near Winchester ...

The bride, a wealthy farmer's daughter, wore cream sprigged silk and this rather fetching shepherdess straw bonnet - and wouldn't she be pleased to know that 230 years on, it would still look fresh and pretty.

This is the first gown in the V&A's irresistible exhibition of wedding dresses (which is on for ages, so no need to rush).

Do not marry a young man, you know not how he may turn out. (A mother's advice to her daughter, 1801.)

The showstopper was the Norman Hartnell gown worn by Margaret Sweeny (You're the top, you're Mussolini, you're Mrs Sweeny ...) at her first wedding in 1933 - at the Brompton Oratory, next door to the V&A - when she invited 1,000 guests and got 2,000 gatecrashers. Fun to see old newsreel footage with her nine sulky bridesmaids ... and the V&A didn't breathe a whisper about her future shenanigans. 

 But just look at that wonderful dress and its 3.6m train ...
 This is how it travelled when the exhibition went to Australia.

I loved this stylish wartime dress made from unrationed upholstery fabric in shimmering synthetic silk, embroidered with buttercups. 

I couldn't help wondering how all those marriages turned out. If Mary, who wore embroidered white muslin in 1807, lived happily ever after, if Henrietta's rose-embroidered garters were fun on her wedding night in 1848.

As ever, I lose interest in the modern section when it's all about celebrities I've barely heard of (although Kate Moss's dress, I must admit, was exquisite) and designer dresses that have never been worn by real brides.

There was the dog's dinner dress, although the V&A call it a flower bomb ... not so much a meringue as an Eton mess.

There was this famously tacky dress by Bruce Oldfield - loathed by the bridegroom  - which when you see it up close turns out to be rather nasty polyester.

But look out for the exquisite detail on Lady Oxmantown's dress, with its seams stitched with tiny seed pearls. I can't find a picture but I've never seen anything like it.

What is missing from the exhibition is common or garden wedding dresses from the 1950s up to the present. Not dresses that cost as much as a house, but dresses bought in department stores or high street bridal shops or made by local dressmakers or the bride's mum. That's real social history, not what celebs are wearing for marriages that last five minutes. The V&A used to have a brilliant section on their website where you could upload your own family wedding photos. There were hundreds, going right back to the 19th century - but I looked yesterday and it doesn't seem to be there any more. Or if it is, I can't find it. It was always rather buried away and you had to know it was there. What a shame if they've dismantled it. In fact, I'd have scrapped all of the upstairs part of this exhibition and given the space over to bouffant veils and 1960s broderie anglaise and 1970s Juliet caps ... I'm sure they are there, stashed away in boxes all around the country. 

It wasn't planned, but it was a weekend of bluebells, books and baking.
On a damp spring afternoon, in ancient English woodland carpeted with bluebells ... you wouldn't know you were in London except for the rumble of trains and planes overhead.
Apparently 4.5% of London is woodland and 1.7% is ancient woodland, all we have left of the wildwood.
No matter how many years you've lived here, London always throws up surprises ... and I can't tell you how surprised I was yesterday to discover a real, old-fashioned bluebell wood, hazy with English bluebells, only a 10 minute bus ride from home, hidden behind a street of boring suburban semis. Yesterday was an open day but for £20 a year you can borrow a key to get in whenever you like.
There were bachelor's buttons, wild garlic, campion, yellow archangel, forget-me-nots and I expect lots more but I'm not very good on plant names.
It was a lovely spur of the moment outing that reminded me of filling jamjars full of wilting bluebells when I was a child ... #middleaged crimes.

For sure, I'll want to go - and I know there were four hour queues in New York. But my heart sinks at the thought that there are people who will book tickets for an exhibition a whole year in advance. This was only announced last night, but already it seems there's high demand ...
But I think I'll stick to my usual policy of leaving it to the last minute.

I was completely bowled over yesterday by the loveliness of this exhibition of boro textiles at Somerset House. There was that gentle buzz you get in a gallery when people are discovering something new and very pleasing and are really glad they came ...
It's only on for a few more days (last day Saturday) but anyone who's into quilting or patchwork would love it. And it's free. I'm very keen on free!
I admit, I'd never heard of boro. They were created out of poverty and need in rural Japan from the 18th century until about the 1920s and few survive as they were objects of shame.
Mostly used as futon covers, they were made from layers of recycled cotton rags, reinforced with sashiko stitching. To me, they looked liked an aerial landscape ... fields of stripes and checks, and buff and shades of indigo. Some of the more intense indigos made me think of looking out of a plane on a night flight. Ironically, they now sell in the region of £3,000 - £20,000.

My first attempt to see Van Gogh's Sunflowers was abandoned when I saw that queue wending out of the National Gallery and into Trafalgar Square ...
So this morning I made sure that I'd be there five minutes before the gallery opened.
And as I rounded the corner,  there was the queue ... down the steps, into Trafalgar Square.
But what do you know, they were all tourists and school parties, maybe it's like that every morning. And when the doors opened, they dispersed or stood in the entrance faffing about.
And so I moved like greased lightning ...
And queued for about two minutes to see The Sunflowers and stayed there for half an hour drinking them in.
I'm painting with the gusto of a Marseillais eating his bouillabaisse, which won't surprise you when it's a question of painting large SUNFLOWERS ...
I've seen both paintings before, but they haven't been seen together in London since 1947. (Can you imagine the queues if they ever brought all six of the surviving Sunflowers together?)
The National Gallery's Sunflowers from 1888, painted for Gauguin's bedroom, is the top image. The Amsterdam copy below dates from January, 1889.
I pondered ... I think I prefer ours. (The glass was slightly more intrusive on the Dutch painting.)
And then I thought about the day a few years ago, when I spent an afternoon locked in a vault at the Van Gogh Museum ...
And held the letter to his brother - feasibly blood-stained, or maybe just spotted with age -  that was found in Vincent's pocket after he shot himself, just 18 months or so after completing his Sunflowers. It felt at the same time shockingly intrusive and such an intimate connection more than a century on.

I wonder if I'll ever get the chance to see the rarest Sunflowers of all, hidden away in a private collection? It did cross my mind on St George's Day that, queues or not, how lucky we are to have such wonderful free exhibitions.

Okay, I admit, I have to be at a loose end to write about TV programmes.

And maybe that's why I'm such an unreliable critic.

Sorry. Remember my initial enthusiasm for Norwegian noir?

I couldn't make head nor tail of it by the end of the series.

And how could I possibly have thought that The Crimson Field was better than Call the Midwife?

What was I on? Does my Yorkshire Brew habit completely drown my critical faculties?

Like many of you, I suffer from incurable bouts of PAST (Post-Aristocratic Stress) manifesting as Sunday evening dependency on opiates sugar-coated in period costume. Women who suffer from PAST are often particularly susceptible to triggers from wartime.

Sadly The Crimson Field turned out to be Downton Goes to War, mildly enjoyable but emotionally uninvolving. Scriptwriting by numbers ...

Nurse with a shameful secret in her past. Check.

Let's have another nurse with a darker, more dangerous secret. Check.

Mean, kleptomaniac lesbian nurse? Two for the price of one. Check.

Nurses running away from something? That'll be all of them.

Equal opportunities statement. As all VADs must have secrets, even the cheerful youngest nurse has a teeny-tiny, not very interesting secret. Check. Bless her.

As for the shocking finale ... I won't give it away, but it's so obvious what's going to happen that they might have let off a howitzer blast to alert you.

However ...

After a four hour orgy last night when I watched Quirke from start to finish, for once I can confidently say that this series is seriously classy.

Adapted by Andrew Davies and Conor McPherson. From John Banville's series of crime thrillers (written as Benjamin Black). With a cast that includes smouldering Gabriel Byrne and Michael Gambon.

Set against the underbelly of de Valera's 1950s Dublin.

With lovely shots of Dollymount strand and Georgian fanlights.

There has been some carping about it in the Irish papers - but I thought it was excellent.

We were probably the only people in the audience who didn't know the story inside out. Believe it or not, I have never read anything by Jacqueline Wilson -  but all of us, aged from seven to I'm not saying,    but the oldest person was me, thoroughly enjoyed this lovely stage adaptation of Hetty Feather, based on the story of the Foundling Hospital. It's only on for a few more days locally, but it's about to go on tour. Orphans and circus skills, a brilliant elephant and some wonderful circus horses who made the grown-ups laugh even more than the boys.
There's an interview with Jacqueline Wilson here and a trailer here. 
They didn't have anything like this when I was seven!
Now, of course, we must have an outing to the Foundling Hospital.
Voted 'best show we've ever seen' by two critics who can be counted on to speak their mind very loudly on the way home.