When it’s sunny, as it is this morning and was yesterday, I take a short detour on my morning walk in order to walk up the side of Green Park.   I like the views of the grand mansions which back on to the park, shut up tight after the entertainment of the night before.   It starts with Lancaster House, built for the Duke of York in 1825 by Benjamin Dean Wyatt with an interior by Charles Barry and now used by the Foreign Office.

Immediately to the north is Bridgewater House by Barry, where parts of the Orleans collection were hung and could be visited by artists on the recommendation of an RA:

There’s a curious building just south of Bridgewater House which looks as if it’s stranded on the beachfront at Brighton:

The facade of Spencer House is hard to see, protected as it is by shrubbery.   But at least one can see bits of John Vardy’s detailing and remember that for much of the postwar period it was converted into offices for the Economist:

Some time before Christmas, I was approached out of the blue by an editor at Harper Collins and asked if I would consider writing an introduction to a new paperback edition of Penelope Fitzgerald’s first novel, The Golden Child.   I accepted because I am a great admirer of The Blue Flower and my interest was piqued.   It’s a novel about the internal workings of the British Museum.   My text was more severely edited than anything I have ever written and a passage was deleted at the request of the company lawyers.   Now, only a few months later, the edition has appeared.

We spent much of the day – this year as in other years – at Collect, the Crafts Council’s annual exhibition, now at the Saatchi Gallery.   It has the great benefit of being increasingly international with galleries from Amsterdam, Frankfurt and Korea.   As last year, we particularly admired a set of teaspoons designed and made by a young Korean silversmith called Ja-kyung Shin in which the bowl of the spoon is replaced by crumpled silver:

Yesterday, the Bethnal Green Academy.   Today, St. Paul’s School on the green fields of Barnes beside the Thames.   I had been asked to be the Apposer, who is required to listen to four expositions on recondite subjects in public and then comment on them.   Not an easy task as the subjects included quantum computers, the extent to which T.S. Eliot was a truly modernist poet, the building of robots in synthetic biology, and the theory of a just war.   It’s impossible not to compare the discrepancies in opportunity between the state and the private system, except to note that St. Paul’s was, at least in its origins, the product of a highly egalitarian desire for free education of poor scholars from ‘all nacions and countries indifferently’.