A dose of art

I should be more grateful for living in Edinburgh. There aren't too many places where you can pop out on a whim to see some Turner watercolours. These are part of the permanent collection of the National Gallery, but are only show in January when it's dim. Mr Vaughan was very kind to do this, but he obviously never realised that the light in a gallery could be artificially controlled.

I like the way the Portrait Gallery always has some wee exhibitions in the gaps between the headliners. In particular the quirky things they put on next to the cafe are always a delight. They currently have some portraits generated from death masks in an Edinburgh collection. The results are eerie, beautiful "photographs" of people who, in most cases, died before the invention of photography.