This is my first blog – and I am too old to know where the ugly word came from. Blog: To walk with heavy feet through sticky mud to the sound of muffled drums.  Blog: An undigested pudding of a word. Never mind, I will try and enlighen it up for you. I care about words as much I as I care about paintings.

Take the great Spanish painter Zurbaran currently at the National gallery until January 24 2010. Well – take what he does with cloth; with the way it hangs from its weight and the weight of an almost dead saint. Saint Serapion who has been given a long dark room to himself. Go and see this painting and what be done with paint before it disappears back to America. You not have another chance. And while you are there try to ignore the bloodied; suffering poly-chrome sculptures (fine though they are). They sit uneasily with such a painter.  They were never designed to be seen in a gallery and lit in a static museum-like way. They belong in the streets, candle-lit and moving, brought out for the big religious festivals, like Holy Week. Or seen quietly in some dim ecclesiastical space. They sit, or lie uneasily - displaced – in a modern space.

London is a place for picnics – even in the winter – and I have two favourite picnic spots. Other Londoners seem to agree with me. The first is the enclosed garden space behind the church of St Paul’s Covent Garden. This is a place rarely found by tourists since, although it has four entrances, three are well hidden and the fourth is set back behind big wrought iron gates. St Paul’s is the actors church and the garden has many wooden seats with memorials carved on their backs reflecting this. Lunchtime here is a calm space for sandwiches, a cigarette, people-watching or just day dreaming. In the spring there is cherry blossom and in the summer banks of roses. The backs of old houses enclose the space.

My second picnic spot is St James’s Square off Picadilly. Huge and ancient plane trees make it shady in the summer and scatterings of daisies are allowed to bloom undisturbed among the younger people on the grass. I, being old and lame, always find a seat where I can admire the equestrian statue of William 1V, classically clad and on a frisky horse whose head always reminds me of a sea horse since its much too small. Everywhere, it being London, there are pigeons, waiting for sandwich crumbs and whose greedy nature make them a pest as they make for one’s feet.

Once, years ago, I was eating a sandwich under the portico of the British Museum (a great place for pigeons). Suddenly I noticed a one-legged bird. Then another. And another. They were suddenly everywhere. A nightmare of pigeons, hopping about with difficulty like a swarm of 19^th –century beggars.

I looked around an up and down. How could this be? Then looking up again at the great height below the portico I noticed a big suspended net protecting the stonework from these birds. They all has caught their feet in it and in their struggle to escape had lost one. Well – that was my conclusion. I never saw it happen.

And talking of the 19^th century, I live in a big leafy suburb that is full of early 19^th century villas. They take to the snow the way Christmas card does and the snow lies longer in the streets in a satisfactory way, silencing the end of the year, while the trees hold these white ice-cream blobs long enough to make a point.

Jurberry, December, 2009.