Museum, Exhibition, Casualty and the Sun

One of the joys of visiting London is wandering through back roads in Westminster. There is always something unusual to spot if you keep your eyes peeled. Today we walked from Waterloo, across the Thames, past the courts of justice to Doughty Street to visit the Charles Dickens museum.

Another joy is visiting one of the hundreds of cafes and good value eating houses. People say food and drink is extravagantly priced in London. This is just not true. There is good value to be found at every corner. You just have to search it out and refuse to pay exorbitant amounts of money.

Doughty Road is where Dickens lived as a young man and where he wrote Pickwick Papers. It is in a very desirable residence, very clean and wide. The museum itself is interesting without being hugely memorable. It seems slightly disorganised, not really knowing what it is trying to achieve. Certainly the way the National Trust has re-created Rudyard Kipling's house Bateman's is much better. The Dickens home seems to be more of a random hotch potch.

One of my favourite areas of London is Carnaby Street. Always interesting. It may be a throwback to the swinging sixties but you see some interesting sights and people and the shops are still very colourful.

Then it was on to the David Hockney exhibition. Very mixed feelings about this. Yes it was big, yes it was coulourful but is Hockney really a top class artist - somebody up with the greats of the art world? Many of the works were his portrayal of his native Yorkshire landscapes. But I had mixed feelings. Some of the works were grandiose in scale but I couldn't help feel that hundreds of other unknown artists living in the UK have just as much ability. Art can be very pseudo at times, as if people are afraid to go against the trends and admit that what they are looking at is sadly pretty average.

Got back in time to see another slit the wrist episode of Casualty on BBC 1. This one was totally depressing. An attempted suicide, a rape, children taken into care. Is this really the way we want to be entertained every Saturday evening - personally I think not.

Interesting to see that five journalists from the Sun newspaper have been arrested with regards to the phone hacking scandal. These are people from a newspaper that holds itself up as fighting for truth, honesty and the British way, a campaigning newspaper standing up for the public. The words hypocrisy and self righteous spring to mind.