Depths

Thanks for your kindnesses yesterday. I’m gruntled again now after a great day in London.

First I walked past my all-time favourite car park (above) to which I nod each time I visit the Tate Modern. Today I was meeting my mum there to see the fantastic Klee exhibition. It was overcrowded in the first four rooms but there was plenty of space to enjoy the later pictures. One of which is a rug design that Klee kindly did for me. It's yet to be manufactured but you can see it towards the end of the exhibition: a rhythmic geometry in gorgeous deep colours and, dammit, not reproduced in a single postcard. I might have to go back and buy the catalogue. I might have to take up rug-making.

Then I met up with an old friend to talk about some teaching work we plan to do together in a couple of weeks’ time. And, as always, about shoes and ships and sealing-wax and cabbages and kings.

Before going off to hear some music this evening in the preposterous but magnificent Albert Hall we visited the Only in England exhibition at the Science Museum. People – if you care about photography at all, this has to be top of your list. Martin Parr has selected an enthralling 55 previously-unpublished photographs from the 1960s by Tony Ray-Jones who, before he died pitifully young in 1972, turned his humorous, compassionate and incisive eye on Englishness. Parr, hugely influenced by Ray-Jones, has included some of his own photographs from the 70s in the exhibition. I am biased because this is a chronicle of my adolescence, but whatever your age, wherever you're from, here is exemplary street photography. This is the Science Museum’s first ever art exhibition. Go and make it nearly as crowded as the Klee and encourage them to do more.

No time to comment today – I’ll be back.