Walked in Dunwich forest the day before the storm, for shelter from the rain and to collect pine cones to wash and dry in the airing cupboard. Only collected a few, wondered whether it was illegal, 'take nothing but photos'...  how far can the 'thin end of the wedge' argument be stretched when there's pine forest over several acres in high winds?

It rains, has been raining all night, and the ends of the long pine needles hold droplets of water so that every tree sparkles and the avenues are lit up when the sun comes out, like Christmas on Regent Street.

                           Today there is a wind, and the skeletons of the cow-parsley rattle.

I read John Berger on the school bus; it is a lovely hand-sized book. He is talking about how we see paintings differently now from the way they would have been seen when they were first produced; the context is different, they're not in their churches or stately homes any more but in galleries, chosen and displayed according to someone's taste, and when we look at them now (especially if they're famous paintings) our thoughts are, 'I am standing in front of the original of this famous painting', what impresses us is its provenance and the fact that it has survived, rather than the story told by the picture.

He makes a comparison with the sort of collages people put on their pinboards in their rooms, of postcards and little notes and photos to display, this is what I like, this is me, look at my collection and see who I am - and the art displays in a gallery. This is what someone else has done, it is their choice of pictures and display. This is who I am, look how rich, how Christian, how British, how well-travelled I am.

I think of the paint colours on the walls of the Fitzwilliam and the effects they have on the paintings themselves; has the decorator changed the artwork, by choosing to display it on a wall painted mustard or olive when it might have been painted for a church interior? Perhaps Jim Ede's meticulous arrangement at Kettles Yard is more honest in its display; there's no attempt to disguise him saying 'this is me, this is what I like', and I come away with a strong sense of Jim Ede as the curator, stronger even than a sense of the artists whose work he has collected.

At school, there are displays in the corridors, put up in time for Open Day, displays which are designed to say, this is who we are, this is what we stand for. I wonder what galleries like the National are saying, in their choice of pictures and arrangements, and if they think they are speaking for us all.

I drove to see my parents, listening to retro sing-along music: Fleetwood Mac, Roberta Flack.

Dad is learning to use his hands again, after his stroke. 

Today was special. Dog and I went out early in the morning to Button End, where the light was low, the shadows were long and there was a heavy dew; everything was beautiful.

John Berger is talking about how we see, because we look, and looking is an act of choice.

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6.00 pm I like this decaying leaf, the way it stretches into holes like outworn tights, the windows it creates into the leaves behind it, the gradations of colour and the balance of browns, greens and yellows with the touches of grey. I wonder if colours 'go together' in some absolute sense; whether there's some mathematical symmetry about the shades and intensities that make them 'work', in the same way that, in music, notes 'go together' because of the proportion of hertz between one and another. Do colours clash in the way that musical notes can clash? Or are our brains conditioned to think that colours go together because we see them together in nature, and so we feel comfortable with them and 'know' they look right?

I have two new books today through the post, both by John Berger: 'Ways of Seeing', and 'and our faces, my heart, brief as photos'. I am in love with them already.

Plane tree bark