"Who are you?"

Grayson Perry's recent TV mini-series "Who are you?" made essential viewing for both of us, so we were happy to be able to catch the art works he made during the filming, on show at the National Portrait Gallery. The Memory Jar attracted much the biggest crowd, unsurprising given today's general concern about Alzheimer's. Christopher, the victim portrayed so poignantly by Perry, both on the small screen and through this pot, had been my contemporary at school, which brought it all home.

Earlier we had spent a couple of unforgettable hours in the company of late Rembrandt next door at the National Gallery.

Refuge artistique

For Caroline, France has long been where we should go and live, and not just France, but Gascony. It hasn’t happened, mainly because of my intransigence, born of timidity.

So, we are looking for a way that Caroline can at least spend a chunk of time in the Gers each year: this year, it was for the month of April, in this rented house on the edge of a fairly remote village. Suggestions for 2014’s sojourn gratefully received! Does anyone need a house-sitter?

Meanwhile, Grayson Perry’s final Reith Lecture this morning summed things up rather well, I felt: I was reading recently, he said, this psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz. He writes of a patient and during his course of therapy quite often he’d mention this house he had in France and he said oh he enjoyed thinking about how he was going to decorate it and refurbish it and arrange the furniture and it was one of his great pleasures when things got a bit troubling for him; that he would think about this and it would be very relaxing to him to think about these marvellous plans he had for his house in France. And then at the end of his course of psychotherapy, just as he was leaving he sort of turned and he said, “You know Mr Grosz,” he said, “there is no house in France. You do know that?” And I completely crack up at that because it really echoed with me about that place that he goes: his refuge where he’s an artist.

Bristol Family Arts Festival

Half term is big business for Bristol's many and varied palaces of culture. Nine organisations have clubbed together to make a trail through the City Centre: we followed part of it with the boys today, being based on Edmund's boat, visible in the centre of the photograph. This I took from the M Shed balcony, which gives a great 180 degree view over the Avon and Northwards.

You could spend a whole day in the M Shed itself, but we also packed in the best part of an hour at the Architecture Centre (model building making) and lit a candle or two in Bristol Cathedral, where we admired some weird fragments of mediaeval glass in the Cloister: finally, we visited the Library to choose a DVD. (We only just remembered to get it unlocked - something Cheltenham hasn't yet begun to require us to do.)

And the boys and I marvelled - each in our own way - at Michael Dean's "The Introduction of Muscle" exhibition at the Arnolfini. This occupies two rooms - one huge, one smaller. But "occupies" them with a total of five modestly-sized sculptures. "It's all about texture," the helpful gallery guide told us, encouraging us to feel the amorphous, coloured concrete objects. One was recognisable as a cabbage. Others resembled a tongue, a pair of arms, possibly someone's back. No "labels" are supplied. The black flooring and the (white?) lighting form part of the "show".

The boys enjoyed being able to run round: to put it another way, they took the fact that this was "art" in their stride. I had more of a problem: the acronym Grayson Perry gave us in his "Nice rebellion, Welcome In!" Reith lecture yesterday morning was MAYA, "most advanced yet acceptable". But is it?

Photography came under the microscope in the previous lecture. ("It rains on us like sewage from above.")  His advice to photographers seemed to be, make all your editions limited: "if something is endless, it's giving away part of its qualification as art." You can easily tell, Perry said, if a portrait photograph is art or not. "Are they smiling? If they are - probably not art."

In the Eye Valley

Having been in the Wye Valley on Monday, I today visited the Gloucestershire gardens of Eyford House and Rockcliffe, two properties separated by the River Eye. Each is wonderful in its own way. Last year Country Life voted Eyford England's favourite house, a judgement which I couldn't possibly query. Its garden certainly offsets the 20th Century house in a delightfully unassuming manner - hard to believe only one gardener is employed to maintain it all. Rockcliffe surely requires a far bigger team. Clipping the hedges alone would seem to be a full-time job. But for all the elaborate planting in Rockcliffe's eight acres of flowers, trees and vegetables, I prefer the naturalness of Eyford, with its grand view - not a single building in sight - and outlook over a cow pasture: I can't imaging a cow being allowed within miles of Château Keswick. Grayson Perry should have been here to compare them when researching for the final programme of his brilliant "In the best possible taste" series. And then there's Eyford's Milton connection, described by this plaque, hidden away down by the River Eye itself.

Another bear

Having had a full picnic of bears on Saturday (in Warwick), I was confronted with another a couple of days later, this time at the British Museum. Grayson Perry's residency ends this week, so we thought we ought to make the effort to catch it, to see what all the fuss was about. No regrets, particularly with admission to Room 35 at half price on Mondays for oldies!

The only photography allowed was outside, this being a detail of the pink bike parked by the entrance to Room 35: on it, Perry rode to Germany a couple of years ago, carrying his precious bear, Alan Measles, in a shrine mounted on the back. “The Germans were the default enemy," he explained, "and so they became a metaphor for all that was bad in my experience. Alan and I needed to make peace with our old imagined adversary.” Bravo!

“Only in Britain,” said a German present when Grayson Perry won the Turner Prize in 2003.