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

4.30 I've been writing obituaries about a Jewish musician whose manager stole all his money; the man who invented the suspension for the Mini; the man who sorted out the IT issues at Terminal Five.

Dog and I go for a walk, the fields are bare but there's a lot of sky. Mostly it's still green, but some of the leaves are turning and there's a sense of decay and settling mists. 

Playing old Simon and Garfunkel in the car, bought at a

CD fair in the Conservative Club Hall in Southwold. I have 'So long, Frank Lloyd Wright' going around in my head as we walk, and when we get home, I look up Frank Lloyd Wright on Google to see if I like the architecture any better after the song (which, it turns out, isn't really about FLW in any case). It doesn't excite me much, but probably because I never knew a time when his style hadn't yet been invented. I look at a virtual tour of the Bueller House; Frank and I part company when we get to the 22 carat ceiling. 

I liked the colours and textures of the submerged leaves in the puddles.

9.30 am This is where we are sitting, this is how my desk looks this morning; welcome to my world. It's Sunday morning, but not feeling like one - Sunday morning has been for sitting in pyjamas with J (daughter) eating Readybrek and watching catch-up trash telly ... Strictly, X Factor, Come Dine With Me, Don't Tell The Bride (her choice, that last one, I am often too squeamish to watch the ending in case it goes wrong). This morning, this is not happening, because yesterday, we took J to start her university course, so she is in her new room - or having breakfast in hall, or out for a walk, or who knows - and so she is not here and the house is empty, as Husband and Dog have gone out to the woods, and the Next Stage, the empty nest, begins.

I go out in the garden barefoot, because she is not here to stop me (she despairs of the state of my feet); there is no bright sun this morning to illuminate the red leaves of the climber whose name I've forgotten - it begins with Q to denote the five-ness of its leaves, which doesn't seem to me to be its most striking characteristic - but the dew gives them a soft gloss.

The sunflowers are putting on a brave show. I like their mixture of mathematical precision and blowsy untidiness.

Today's main task is to write obituaries and deal with students' personal statements. The endings of lives, and the beginnings of adulthood, summarised and distilled in three or four succinct paragraphs, highlighting the successes (whatever that might mean to that person) and glossing over the weaknesses and the failures, trying to find a coherent narrative through the chaos of a human life. T talks in his personal statement about trying to make sense of the mess of his existence, trying to tie up loose ends - he is reading Frank Kermode at the moment, we've been talking about A Sense of an Ending, both Kermode and Julian Barnes.