'A British-ish Flag' Olivia Winteringham, 2020

So, it's always nice to make plans but you need to keep an eye on the logistics. Else you might find yourself getting up at 5am to drive from the northern(ish) parts of Scotland all the way back down to Salford in order to catch a show at the Manchester Art Gallery for which you have 1pm tickets.

The show in question was Grayson Perry's Art Club, which we were seeing with our friends, Cathy and Pete. And quite contrary to the doubts I found myself having yesterday about my capacity to enjoy art in galleries, I absolutely loved it; it was bursting with creativity and joy.

I chose this piece to photograph because the Union Jack - or Union Flag, if you're a stickler - only has negative connotations for me. I hate nationalism and, more directly, my experiences of the flag over the last forty odd years have been uniformly negative. I felt a great deal of happiness from seeing the flag reclaimed in this way.

And after that, the four of us had drinks at Salut, followed by a late lunch/early dinner at Bundobust, in anticipation of seeing Grayson Perry performing live at The Lowry, this evening.

And it was quite a show. I'm not sure if Grayson set himself a challenge here: that is, to do a performance as a stand up. If that was the case, he seemed to have watched a lot of Harry Hill in preparation. But he introduced the show as "a kind of TED talk", which actually made some sense.

It was a show ostensibly about normality but querying what that really means. Ultimately, I think his point - although this was never made explicit -  was that we have normality for a reason, so that we can survive in large groups but that within that normality, we are all different and that we should embrace that.

Or maybe I'm wrong and it really was a show about starting a religion based around his childhood teddy bear, Alan Measles.