Points, paints and punters

Richard Farley's exhibition A Life in Dance runs for another couple of weeks at Gallery 16 in Henrietta Street, near the Covent Garden market. Richard was a principal dancer with the Royal Ballet, and in the course of his career took lots of photographs of his colleagues both performing and at leisure. Though I'm not up in the ballet, his show is a wonderful document of his career, and there's stuff in it for the likes of me as well as for the dance fans. Informal shots of the company on the train to a provincial show and in digs; Bussell climbing up the shelves to retrieve a pair of ballet shoes; Fonteyn doing running repairs on hers. For me, it was well worth the trip to the Smoke.

The which I did in a typically odd way. I took our little country railway to Croydon, then took a bus [Aye: free!] over the hill to the edge of Brixton, where I picked up another train. At points on the route, the views towards the City of London are impressive - not quite like the view of Paris on the swoop down to the Pont de Sèvres, but striking all the same. The Shard building site, however, looks like a taller, thinner version of the Chernobyl sarcophagus. But Croydon seems quite exotic - bet that wasn't the first adjective that comes to most readers' minds! Fancy trams swishing past, eavesdropped conversations in languages I didn't know. But from there northwards for a few miles, the area is desperately run down.

Art yesterday: Miss is trying to get us to revisit drawing, so I battled away with two bananas, half a red pepper and a green eggbox. It might have worked had I started by working out the proportions of the eggbox, but I suppose it was a good exercise. I approached it with watercolour pencils, which for me are the most treacherous of media, though they can be very rewarding. The difficulty is in remembering how each pigment reacts to water: some are very strong, some hardly diffuse at all. But I guess it's no different from other media - you always treat cadmium red with great respect, else it dominates the mix. That kind of learning is one of the advantages of being taught to mix all colours from the three primaries: alizarin crimson is a more forgiving pigment, though a much colder colour.

My latest court sitting was awful. It had been two months since my last sitting, and I did not cover myself in glory. We did justice, but not crisply. Well, we had to send down a couple of sad cases, both of them young people destroyed by chronic alcoholism. One had offended so many times that a bench had issued an ASBO, and we were dealing with two breaches (by being drunk in a public place) plus a public order offence. Defendant took it on the chin, and we'll at least have given one liver a brief holiday. Next up was a familiar face, released on licence from prison the day before: assaulted two acquaintances in town and spent the night in the nick. Back to prison for the rest of the sentence, plus a bit more for each of the assaults.