Portsmouth and Hampshire Art Society

Portsmouth and Hampshire Art Society Annual Exhibition, Portsmouth Cathedral, until August 10

I'm still strangely exhilarated by finding Rosemary's grave yesterday and now have no excuse not to be finishing my little essay on her. But one needs must keep busy and be out and about as much as possible. The Portsmouth and Hampshire Art Society send me an invitation to their show every year because I once bought a painting there and so today I went.

The Portsmouth area is rich in musicians as is reported here on a regular basis and it also has a thriving poetry community with several inter-woven groups meeting to pursue their different strategies. I'm less familiar with the painters, not having quite the same grasp of the genre and, while liking what I like, come to it with less of an idea why. Having as one's two favourite painters Vermeer and Maggi Hambling is a bit like having Byrd and Schoenberg as one's two favourite composers but there's possibly someone somewhere who does.

The exhibition had many angles covered from local scenes, landscape, portrait, pets, wildlife and some School of Mondrian. As with music, I'm mainly in awe of the skill involved because I don't know how it's done. There might be a trick to it- there is with writing- but I can see that even those pictures I cared less for took some doing. I'm not going to list names, firstly because that means leaving worthy people out and secondly because I didn't look them up beyond looking through the folder with their profiles.

However, the first one I really liked was sold and then I enquired about another. I sat for as long as it took to convince myself that one is only young and impetuous once and we may not be the young ones very long, went and had another look and then over to the desk to help them work their debit card machine.

Surely in times like these it is beyond the pale to be indulging in art. It's the sort of thing a spoilt brat Prime Minister would do, preferably with other people's money. So much of the walk home was spent justifying the extravagance - how I've spent very little on books this year, hardly anything on records and this month's Visa bill had nothing on it. I could have bought some shoes and I'll have to do that soon anyway but I'm due a few quid on the Premium Bonds this month. It's very much the same process one goes through when establishing ipso facto you are surely due a bottle of wine, really ought to support one's local chip shop or don't actually need to do some grim household chore until next week. The decision is foregone. It's only the reasoning behind it, if any, that needs filling in.

I'll collect Winchester 2 by Frank Clarke next Thursday when I will put a picture of it here so you can decide for yourselves if it was money well spent. It's a bit more expensive supoorting local painters than it is the musicians and poets but you are the owner of the artefact itself. There might be some patrician pleasure to be had from that but the point is to be able to look at it, the very thing. The front room artspace will thus be re-organized next week with Frank going into my eyeline from where I sit, Dave Brimage vacating that position after his long encumbancy and moving to where either my Lips & Bananas is, or it will depose the pastel shades of Gwen John and whichever moves out will most probably go upstairs to the library reading room.