I went to the party to celebrate the 25th. anniversary of St. John, the wonderful and austerely carnivorous restaurant established by Fergus Henderson, who was trained at the Architectural Association and has an eye for design as well as pigs, and Trevor Gulliver, also once an architect, in St. John Street in an old smokehouse in the days when, nearly impossible to remember, property was cheap owing to its proximity to the meat market.   I was reminded of the fact that we interviewed Trevor Gulliver to run the restaurant at the National Portrait Gallery.   At the time, he had a smart restaurant, Putney Bridge, on the banks of the Thames.   Over the years, I’ve had many memorably delicious meals at St. John and even more at St. John Bread and Wine in Spitalfields, as well as living as much as possible on their bread and doughnuts from Maltby Street. I salute their achievement !

I called in on the exhibition on Ladybird Books at the Garden Museum. For some reason, I didn’t have them in my childhood, although now I see them, I clearly should have done, not just for the quality of the information about garden and wildflowers, but for their illustrations, including books on the Seasons, written by Elliot Lovegood Watson and illustrated by Charles Tunnicliffe RA:-

The Ladybird Book of Garden Flowers was illustrated by John Leigh-Pemberton:-

It’s a long time since I’ve entered the portals of the Warburg Institute, where I did my PhD. from 1977 to 1986. Each time I go now I feel an exaggerated sense of memory and loss – the loss of the purest pursuit of knowledge across frontiers.

The cast in the entrance apparently is the sole survival of the original Cubitt house in the north-west corner of Woburn Square:-

The corridors are now lined with the ghosts of the past. Gombrich:-

Gertrud Bing who was Aby Warburg’s personal assistant, then Fritz Saxl’s lover (together they commissioned a house in Bromley by Tecton), helped establish the library in London and became the Institute’s Director after Henri Frankfort’s death in 1955:-

And Eric Warburg, the member of the family who was most closely involved in the transfer of the library from Hamburg to London, assisting the shipping of 60,000 books in two small steamers down the Elbe:-

I should feel more pleased than in practice I am at the clarity, authority and unanimity of the Supreme Court’s admirably lucid judgment, which may restore some degree of judicial authority to public life, including the re-assembly of parliament. But it also demonstrates very clearly how quickly public political values can be, and have been, corroded by a government determined to sweep due processes to one side, firing anyone remotely hostile or independent minded in the civil service, wilfully misunderstanding and misinterpreting the historic role of the civil service. It was a small thing, but indicative, that a spokesperson in 10, Downing Street spoke yesterday of remainiac Scottish judges, as if the judiciary is somehow bent. Unfortunately, it is 10, Downing Street which has been bent, corrupted by the folly of power.

In the summer he made small statuettes of his favourite historical figures:-

This is Gerry himself, appropriately gloomy and saturnine:-

It’s a folk version of the National Portrait Gallery. Gerry died five weeks ago and the question now is if and how it can be preserved as a monument to a private obsession:-

I was invited to visit a rather bizarre historical fantasy, constructed by a recently deceased Irish postman, Gerry Dalton, in his flat on the banks of the Grand Union Canal. He slept next door to a plaster model of Buckingham Palace:-

This is the Queen’s bedroom:-

The Green Drawing Room:-

St. Paul’s Cathedral:-

He was obsessed by history:-

He also was unexpectedly interested in modernism:-

Inside Chatsworth is a death mask of the Duchess of Devonshire:-

He made collages of the Battle of Waterloo:-

It’s a record of a strange and passionate historical obsession, recording palaces and their interiors in small-scale models during the winter.

I went to see the annual exhibition at Goldsmith’s Hall, the best way of seeing and understanding the practice of contemporary jewellery.

Downstairs, there are display cases devoted to work owned by contemporary collectors:-

Upstairs, I admired work by Romilly Saumarez Smith:-

And work by Lucie Gledhill:-

And Anna Wales:-

One of the more fascinating bits of recent writing about Brexit was the piece by Andrew Roberts in the Mail on Sunday which compared the supposed heroism of Boris Johnson in his plan to thwart both the law and the will of parliament to the actions of John Hampden in refusing to pay Ship Money, the Sons of Liberty in opposing George III and, most unbelievably, Mahatma Gandhi, as if Johnson belongs to a long line of great opponents of state rule and historic injustice. But he is not an insurgent, nor so far as I can see a rebel. He is Prime Minister of what was Great Britain. I don’t see him as a great defender of injustice, but someone who has been, unlike them, conspicuously and consistently amoral, without very obvious values and almost completely self-interested.

I like Bruton, with its still medieval character thus far surviving the onslaught of metropolitanisation and its long, one way high street with old shops, occasional Georgian houses and a museum that is so seldom open that I have never visited. There are small passageways which lead down steeply to the River Brue:-

On the skyline is the dovecote, thought to have been built as an eyecatcher for the Berkleys, the local grandees:-

We have stayed in Durslade Farmhouse before, the eighteenth-century farm, although not at all eighteenth-century in style, even in spite of the possible involvement of Nathaniel Ireson. It lies at the heart of Hauser & Wirth’s establishment – gallery, Piet Oudolf garden and Roth Bar and Grill – outside Bruton, with murals in the dining room by Guillermo Kuitca.

The stables:-

The grain store/granary:-

And the garden:-