I've been trying to catch up on the various exhibitions that have been running all summer before they close and the one that really grabbed me was devoted to a painter I'd never heard of, Giovanni Battista Lusieri.  He did the most meticulously detailed landscapes in watercolour.  They are absolutely lovely.  The exhibition (which runs till 28th October) also features a large number of drawings for paintings that he never got around to completing.  There's a quote from him somewhere saying that he enjoys colouring in so much that he gets lost in it and hasn't time to get on with new work.  So he was storing up colouring work for later but got involved in various enterprises such as helping Lord Elgin get his marbles and died before he could get around to it.

The thought of death wasn't far from my mind in the Cameo the other day.  After sitting through 15 minutes or so of ads and trailers, just as the feature was about to start, the man at the end of my row left the room.  An annoying time to be caught short I thought but as time went on and he didn't return my eyes wandered to the shadow beneath his seat wondering whether it was in fact a shadow or something more sinister.  If it was it failed to explode so no harm done.

The film was Ruby Sparks.  It's a silly story about a writer who dreams about a girl and then writing about her she materialises in real life and by writing he can make her behave however he likes.  The transition from thought to reality works surprisingly well and you can almost believe it's not such a silly story after all.  But it is.  However it's entertaining and amusing and touching and all that stuff so if for example you've been made redundant and need cheering up then it would fit the bill.

Last night's SCO concert had a bit of silliness in it too.  I seldom if ever buy a programme and often have forgotten what music is going to be played so I arrive without preconceptions and just take it as it comes.  The first piece had various oddities in it.  I was sitting by the percussion so had a good view of the striking of a gong that was semi-submerged in a bath of water (well it looked like water but I suppose could have been gin).  That made the saw-playing by another percussionist unexceptional and the short shouting match in French between a trumpeter and a horn player run of the mill.  I was irritated in quiet passages by a low background noise that I took to be the hall's central heating but since it didn't occur during the other pieces must have been part of Mr Zender's soundscape.  He being the man responsible for turning some pretty little piano pieces by Debussy into this slightly daft fifteen minute experience.