We watched the Brexit Debate on Channel 4 to get a better sense of the alternatives in advance of the vote on Tuesday.   My own view is that James Cleverley did a perfectly decent job of defending the government’s position, but it represents a compromise which no-one supports, neither fish nor fry;  Barry Gardiner was defending a position which is intellectually unreal, that the Labour party might be able to negotiate a better deal, without any evidence as to how or why;  Jacob Rees-Mogg has the benefit of a clear position, which is Brexit whatever the intellectual and economic cost;  and so the argument was won by Caroline Lucas in favour of a second referendum which would allow the voters to decide whether or not they like what is on offer.

I have neglected my East London peregrinations, so thought I would walk up to the Chatsworth Road Sunday market to do my Christmas shopping.

Up the canal:-

Through Victoria Park:-

Past St. Barnabas, Homerton, a ragstone church of the 1840s by Arthur Ashpitel:-

The old Homerton Public Library, opened on the eve of the first world war, designed in impeccable classical style by Sir Edwin Cooper:-

To Chatsworth Road itself, with market stalls and old shops and plenty of places for manicure, if that had been what I wanted, together with, as hoped, small, independent, gift shops, so that I was able to do all my Christmas shopping in one fell swoop (I can’t say which one or everyone will know what I am giving them):-

I should have said a bit more about the Fen Ditton Gallery, but the sun went in as soon as we arrived and I was too busy buying Christmas presents to take any photographs. The gallery occupies the ground floor of the old School House half way down the village which is a long way out from the centre of Cambridge through the straggling suburbs, but can apparently be reached by ferry from Jesus Lock in the summer. It’s a vastly much more sophisticated display than might be expected from a local craft shop because the selection has been made by Amanda Game, who for many years used to select the crafts at the Scottish Gallery before striking out as an independent curator. The current display includes glass by Toord Boontje, small silver spoons by Simone von Tempel, normally only seen in Collect and Gallery So in Brick Lane, ceramics by Clive Bowen, and books about the Fens by Paul Hart (and more, but their website doesn’t list the makers, only showing photographs).

This is a conceptual spoon by Simone von Tempel bought by Romilly:-

After lunch in Fen Ditton and a visit to the Fen Ditton Gallery, we went to see Stuart Pearson Wright’s exhibition Halfboy in the new Heong Gallery at Downing in the space which Caruso St. John have created out of the old bicycle sheds.

I have admired Stuart’s work ever since he won the BP Travel Award in 1998 and embarked on a big narrative painting, Tisbury Court 1999, A Tragicomedy which was dismissed by the Slade as illustration, but bought by Jeffrey Archer.   In 2001, he won first prize for his surreal picture of the Presidents of the British Academy, Gallus Gallus, which he had very effectively enlivened by adding a large dead chicken basing the composition on a roof boss in Norwich Cathedral.

His current exhibition is autobiographical, based on a cache of photographs which he discovered of his childhood:-

It follows his youth and adulthood, in a combination of fantasy, memory, melancholy and close pictorial observation which are very characteristic:-

We went to Cambridge to see Alison Wilding’s exhibition, On the Edge, in the new West Gallery on the ground floor of Níall McLaughlin’s recently opened building on Jesus Lane.

The building itself is good, if maybe a touch mannered in its use of raw stone:-

The exhibition itself is full of very beautiful work, some using carved English alabaster, one, Darts (2014), using bleached pheasant feathers mounted onto ridged plywood and painted chevrons:-

And a work Bedrocked (2013) which combines carved alabaster on a cast black silicone rubber base:-

I went last night to the opening of the very choice small exhibition of work by Tommaso Corvi-Mora, a potter/ceramic artist who runs a contemporary art gallery in South London, and Romilly Saumarez Smith, a bookbinder turned jeweller.   The setting which is Duro Olowu’s shop/gallery/treasure trove in Mason’s Yard, just by the back door of the London Library, inspires questions about the nature of contemporary craft and how it relates to the world of fashion and fine art which were being asked at the private view.   It’s a good place for an (expensive) Christmas present.

I was interviewed last night by John Tusa about what I was expecting to be my time at the Royal Academy, but turned out to be at least as much about the National Portrait Gallery, where he was one of my Trustees, and the National Gallery in between.   I had forgotten how many memories lurk not far below the surface which John was unexpectedly successful – probably as unexpected to him as to me – in resurrecting.   We never quite got to my time at the Royal Academy.   It probably needs twenty years passage of time to digest and then emerge half cooked from my subconscious.

Most of this week has been spent in attending the last of my RA Committee meetings:  yesterday, the Summer Exhibition Committee and Council;  today, the Library and Collections Committee and the Schools Committee.   When I arrived at the RA, I was encouraged to dump my attendance at all the committees as being too time consuming and a distraction from the real business of the RA.   But I argued, which I would still maintain, that they are the bread-and-butter of the institutional machine, the way in which the RAs keep a watch over how the organisation operates and interact with the staff.   Today, we had a long discussion over a possible acquisition in which Humphrey Ocean RA and Hughie O’Donoghue RA demonstrated their visual intelligence in talking about, and describing, works of art.   Maybe I will miss all those committees after all.

We had the Friends’ annual Christmas Carol Service in St. James’s, Piccadilly this evening, one of the best events of the Royal Academy’s ritualised year, partly because Lucy Winkett always manages to give it a good atmosphere – mostly secular, about the celebration of Christmas myth, but with the very faintest whiff of doctrinal ritual.   We sang all the best known carols – ‘God rest you merry, gentlemen’, ‘In the Bleak Mid-winter’ (Holst), ‘O Come All Ye Faithful’ (I think this is what I had to sing to get into my prep school choir), ‘Good King Wenceslas’ (an odd setting by Bob Chilcott) and ‘Hark, The herald-angels sing’ in a wonderful setting by David Willcocks, who was still Director of Music at King’s when I was an undergraduate (not that I made the effort to appreciate it).

We drove to Forest Hill through the infinite reaches of south London.   However often I go through it and however well I think I ought to know it, I find it infinitely baffling the way Rotherhithe bleeds into Southwark, which itself turns into Deptford, then through Brockley to Forest Hill, which we discovered is a hill, with a view all the way across London:-