Wonderful Christmas present

My son Tom treated me to a visit to the Post-modernism exhibition at the V&A for my Christmas present. It was a fascinating exhibition. It really took me back to being an art student in the early eighties. There was a display of the kitsch exuberant furniture produced by the Memphis design group which I had seen previously at the V&A in the eighties. There were costumes and videos of iconic pop musicians who provided the sound track of my youth. There were displays of graphic design – including some early editions of i-D magazine. I recall a fellow student working on the magazine when it was a tiny A5 landscape magazine consisting of illegible pasted up typewriter text and photos of street fashion. Little did I think that I would be seeing her work exhibited in the V&A thirty years later.

The finishing touch to a great outing was to have a late lunch at Yotam Ottolenghi’s restaurant in Islington, where I sketched as we waited for a table. I discovered Ottolenghi’s wonderful vegetarian recipes through the Guardian newspaper, so if you love vegetable recipes, I’d recommend just about any of his recipes, which you can find on their website.