Day 68. Painted from memory. (9/3/19)

(Soundtrack: bizarrely, randomly, the 12" version of Pop Muzik by M has turned up in my Apple Music catalogue. So I'm listening to that. Because it does exactly what it says on the tin. It talks about Pop Music. I remember hearing it for the first time, one afternoon in 1979 on Billy Butler's show. My response? "Are we going to talk about how much this is clearly Devo?" And nobody ever really did. Pop Muzik is the most Devo you can be without actually being Devo. And if you don't know who Devo are, that's fine but you should probably listen to more music.

Anyway, that ended and now we're back on Was (not Was)' (Return To The Valley of) Out Come The Freaks) because it was close to hand and I fancied playing it again)

One of the points where I started to admit that I may be slightly advancing in age was when I realised that I was starting to enjoy the odd afternoon nap.

That was basically frowned upon while working at HMV. Though there was an in house DJ who I later found out was more than inclined to nod off under his desk while nobody was paying attention. Allegedly.

I've had a little afternoon nap. J was watching a couple of episodes of a Netflix show that I wasn't up for committing to, so I turned off my mind, relaxed, floated down stream and had half an hour of blissful absence.

I'd woken at 6:30. Which isn't what you want from a Saturday morning. By 7 I was playing FIFA. By 10 I was ready to head to town for the car. The ad hoc nature of last night's unexpected night out meaning that I'd travelled in, parked up and expected to head home about 6-ish. That plan was abandoned quite quickly. The only thing better than a plan coming together is the complete and total desertion of a plan in favour of a 'let's see what happens' mode.

Dropped at the station, took the train in, knew J was intending to hit some work on her final degree piece (post Grad, leading to Masters, so far advanced from anything I've ever studied) so I thought I'd catch up on a couple of things that I fancied seeing.

There's a new Beatles museum in town. On Mathew St. Which is a decent place to have a Beatles museum. The wrinkle with this one is that it's owned, run and curated by the Best family: Roag, son of Mona who opened the Casbah Club and Neil Aspinall, Beatles roadie who went on to run the entire Apple Corps for the four lads who decided they wanted a business but didn't want to be businessmen.

So they had stuff you hadn't seen. And some of it was incidental. And some of it was magnificent. Macca's bass amp that had sat in the Casbah club for decades, a Futurama guitar George had used on the German recording session that produced the single that drew Epstein's attention. That's the kind of thing I can look at for ages.

Before that, though, I had a quick walk to The Walker (Art Gallery), home of one of the Holbein Henry the Eighths, the famous When Did You Last See Your Father, a Rembrandt 'Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man', a Mona Lisa which was once believed to be 'The' Mona Lisa but is actually just 'a' Mona Lisa, and currently a Leonardo at 500 exhibition.

Da Vinci drawings all over the country, celebrating the 500th anniversary of his birth. And in The Walker we have a single large room dedicated to a history of Da Vinci and a handful of drawings.

Studies of the nature of musculature, sketches to develop the look of fabric for planned paintings, designs for a seven metre tall equine statue that was never completed and then saw its half finished form used for target practice by the French army of the sixteenth century.

History is genuinely full of utter plebs. And we never really develop.

All of this may sound slightly underwhelming but it's actually absolutely breathtaking.

I'm stood in a room in 2019, with my face inches from a sketch made by a man who was born half a millennia ago.

And there's this one picture: a study of a woman. The notes indicated that Leonardo had spent very little time on the facial features, concentrating instead on one of the most elaborate hair arrangements you could imagine at that point. And the hair is intricate, every strand brilliantly, beautifully, captured. But the face was what got me.

Brief pencil strokes, subtle lines, the perfect image of a woman who died over four hundred years ago, looking as though it may have been set down on paper yesterday.

No gap between now and then, just this incredible 'minor' work of genius showing a genuine living breathing beautiful human being.

I couldn't hear the room. Time stopped and all there was was this picture. And I was nearly in tears.

And that's how I spent Saturday morning. Small moments of beauty in the heart of the city. Wonderful.