I have been meaning to take a photograph of New Zealand House gleaming across the lake in St. James’s Park and this morning I remembered.   It looks like a rather alien spaceship hiding behind Carlton House Terrace, as indeed it was when it landed in central London in the early 1960s.   I remember being bemused that Ian Nairn was so enthusiastic about it –  ‘full of small virtues, of the accommodating kind for which one will willingly forgo a grand gesture’.   But, unlike Nairn, I have never seen the view from the roof:-

I attended the opening of the new China Exchange in the old telephone exchange building on Gerrard Street.   It’s an initiative of Sir David Tang and the Prince of Wales to foster Anglo-Chinese cultural relations, including art, calligraphy and Confucianism.   As it’s the Chinese New Year (is it the year of the sheep or the goat ?), the event began with Chinese dragons serenading
the Prince and Camilla en route to eating dumplings in Dumplings’ Legend:-

There was then a line-up, speeches and a short piano recital by a Chinese Harrovian:-

I don’t normally pay much attention to the architecture of the great portico leading into the Royal Academy courtyard, but – in the fierce winter sun – I realised how fine some of the decorative detailing is.   The façade was designed by Robert Richardson Banks and Charles Barry Jnr., in March 1867, but it’s not clear who was responsible for the sculpture.   Someone must know.

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I had a cup of tea today in the newly refurbished viewing room at Hazlitt’s, one of the most old-established (and reputable) of the London Old Master dealers.   Its viewing room used to be all old-fashioned plush, redolent of the conservatism of the market, but has now been modernised so that twentieth-century work, including a great Howard Hodgkin, can be hung alongside the Old Masters:-

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I was able to attend only the last of Penelope Curtis’s Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery tonight.   The series as a whole was called Sculpture on the Threshold and has been about the way that sculpture is viewed and constructed in different settings and in space.   The last was entitled The Ensemble and, like – I assume – the rest, ranged widely historically and provocatively, including The Temple of the Four Winds at Castle Howard, Stourhead, as well as contemporary work, Roger Hiorns and Rosemarie Trockel, not always understood as formally related, ending up, as she began, with Rilke.   I wish I had been able to go to them all.

I have realised that it was fatal to do a post about the London Hospital without explaining what I was doing there.   The short answer is that Romilly went into hospital last Wednesday with a small blood clot and is still there under observation.   I am really grateful to the well wishers from around the globe.

For two days, we were able to enjoy the view:-

It certainly makes a change from the old London Hospital which is due to be developed as the new Town Hall:-

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