I have been preoccupied by the discovery that macaroons were first invented in the eighth century:

I am very sorry to hear of the death of John Goto, a remarkable photographer:

I first came across his photographs of Prague – I think at the ICA – and commissioned him to document the changes at the National Portrait Gallery in the 1990s. He did this with a Russian panoramic camera which introduced a great deal of distortion, but they were, as I had hoped, much more atmospheric than most documentary photographs. Then, in 2002, we walked in to Tate Britain and found a room full of his works from his series ‘Loss of Face’ which were devoted to digital images from rood screens damaged on the orders of the Cromwellian iconoclast, William Dowsing. We bought four of them and have lived with them ever since:-

We had a tour of rural Hampstead, the bits we didn’t know. Starting in Downshire Hill:-

Then, Gainsborough Gardens:-

I think this is a cottage on The Mount:-

The garden wall of Fenton House:-

And some cottages on Admiral’s Walk:-

We ended up walking back down the hill to the local parish church. Hard to believe it’s London:-

I had never seen Benson and Forsyth’s 1978 Branch Hill Estate on the west hillside of Hampstead: an extraordinarily well-preserved model of its time, a year before the Thatcher election. It’s based on an Italian hill-town:-

It’s been such dreary weather that I haven’t been taking any photographs, but today the sun shone:-

Nice volutes in Bedford Square:-