A Day of Culture

John and I had a day off last Friday. We took the train to Liverpool, to hit the galleries.

The only other time I've been to Liverpool was over 20 years ago. I was deciding where to set up home: I had to get out of London in the '80s (to somewhere I could afford to buy a house). I stayed with my brother, in Chester, and did day-trips on the train to various 'cities of The North'. I chose Sheffield, where I met John. And the rest, as they say, is history.

We started at the Walker Art Gallery. It's the perfect size, manageable in a morning, but big enough to house a wide range of periods, with some wonderful paintings.

There were some excellent special exhibitions on too: I love Toulouse-Lautrec, and they had dozens of his prints, including all those posters we know so well. Also (until end of Sept), the most extraordinary collection of glass dresses by Diana Dias-Leao (more in my Picture Gallery):

We had a lovely, lazy lunch in the sunshine at Albert Dock, then had a look round The Tate, which had a great sculpture room, full of vastly different interpretations of the human form, from Ron Mueck's creepy hyper-realism to Sarah Lucas's disturbing 'Pauline Bunny' made from stuffed tights.

We raced back across town afterwards, to catch the World Museum, but it was just closing, so had to settle for a glass of wine in a bar instead (shame...).

The drawings are of course my train sketches. I was a bit limited for victims on the way home and had to resort to drawing John - asleep, as always.

It was a bit of a long haul, because the train sat still for 35 mins, and we got very tired as it was horribly hot and stuffy with no drinks on sale. But the concentration does help to take your mind of things, so I did my best in adversity!