Alan came up from Manchester to help celebrate my birthday and stayed on for a couple of days. We visited various exhibitions together while he was here. The show of Joan Eardley's work at the RSA is wonderful. I love her paintings of Glasgow children. From the quick colourful chalk on sandpaper portraits of the faces of individuals to the much more elaborate groups in collages that incorporate elements of their environment you can feel their personalities bursting out.

It's fascinating too to look at the photographs of these kids in the east end of Glasgow that she used to help her portraiture. No wonder the city council wanted to raze those tenements to the ground and build decent homes for the post-war generation.

For something rather different we went down to the Botanic Gardens. In truth we went there to enjoy the gardens but there were a couple of exhibitions on in Inverleith House, the former home of the National Gallery's modern collection. They stick to a modern remit and currently are showing imitation girders mounted at decapitating height in a number of rooms. In the absence of attendants protecting the work (draw your own conclusions) I sneaked a picture.

The show in the basement was much more fun. It consisted of a small display case of odds and ends, a couple of posters and an excellent sequence of music videos inspired by and celebrating the works of a few contemporary artists including Peter Blake and Louise Bourgeois.

A songsheet was available so you could sing along with the video. In one mad moment Alan danced along as well. That may have been in the absence of other punters. We stayed a while but most punters did not dally. A man entered the room as we left it but still managed to catch the same lift as us back to the ground floor.

The Botanics have been familiar to me since we used to take the kids there in the sixties and I still think the best view of Edinburgh is from the lawn in front of Inverleith House. I've snapped it a number of times and did so again on Sunday. Playing with the picture in Photoshop I somewhat serendipitously produced the background image for the title of this blog. I'm rather pleased with it.

All that culture vulturing is hungry work and I'm glad to report that the cafes in the Portrait Gallery and in the Botanic Gardens provided us with excellent sustenance.