A few strokes are able to transform a blank page into the expression of an emotion, a still moment. The reluctance to disturb perfection--a few dashed lines hurried off, like a few choice words that say what is essential, finding the right key. Sometimes you think these direct, fresh, "open" sketches, are much more interesting than the finished article. Stokowski said something similar when speaking about rehearsals: something completed vied with a startling experience. This blank space, preserved in the Cezanne; Saskia's eyes lovingly caught; the strength of Ruben's Hercules; a brilliant, vivid satyr by Watteau, red in claw; Breugel, with his intermingling of the secular and the religious.

The paper open to the ink; the human hand open to the human heart...

Down to 'the tanks' at Tate..something like Beneath the Planet of the Apes. Got caught in a light strobe-my two minutes of fame producing guffaws of laughter from a few tourists. The books under the bridge tightly packed together, very reassuringly. Brilliant 11 0'clock light and a cool breeze on your face A few notes of Piazzolla striking out urgently, the choppy waves of the Thames as jagged.... Off to see the fantastically inventive Heatherwick. Awestruck before his creativity. Fidelity to natural limits. If one knew how shape responds instantaneously to different pressures, repetition,  materiality would be poetic, unfurl like a snail, reveal a different space, an angle that no-one in the universe had previously seen. Then to the more familiar small oil sketches (Constable) and the wonderful walking into the silence of the room that holds the 15 th century tapestries. No-one ever visits these rooms.

You think to yourself: London, Paris, New York (and Berlin, says the dougal) are still real cities.