Disappointments
9 November

I know that I have been somewhat sour this year but I have a sense of increasing dissatisfaction with most things.

This sense of dissatisfaction has only been increased by a number of disappointments recently.

I had been looking forwards to seeing The Rules of Attraction for a while. Everything that I had read seemed to say that this was a spikey and caustic satire. In reality, Ross and I watched it with an increasing sense of boredom and futility. After the two hours' progress of its passage, we simply asked ourselves whether or not we had relished being in the company of the people portrayed and the simple answer came back that we hadn't. What a dreadful, self-centred, self-serving film it was.

Similarly, there was little enjoyment to be had out of the third Matrix film. I loved the first film which I first saw in the company of Rod from Seattle back in 1999. I was reasonably enamoured of the second film earlier this year even though it had its faults.

This one I sat through for Ross's sake. It had less of the overbearing quasi-religious symbolism of the second film and less and fewer of the self-indulgently long fight sequences of the second. But it still wasn't any good really. And not a patch on the first. That at least had a stunningly good and original idea. And I rather suspect that, as the production team were given more money to realise their ambitions, so they became more and more interested in grandiose spectacle rather than their original idea.

On the Sunday afternoon, we took ourselves down to the Walker Art Gallery to see their new retrospective of the work of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Neither Ross nor I enjoyed the exhibition. The luminescent colours felt overbearing. The symbolism felt oppressive and obsessive. And the latter part of his career seemed to have been built upon the very striking line of one woman's jawbone. Early photographs of the person showed that the strong and prominent jawbone had not been exaggerated.

One small but interesting anecdote showed Rossetti in both a romantic and a pragmatic light. His was so troubled by grief on the death of his first wife that he gave up writing poetry and bundled all of his manuscripts into the coffin with her. Several years later, when the Muse struck him once more, he had the coffin exhumed so that he could regain his manuscripts.

We took the opportunity to have a look a some of the permanent collection which we normally don't view - namely the early stuff. Once again there were Medieval and Renaissance works from all over Europe but not from England. As Andrew Graham-Dixon pointed out in the BBC's A History of British Art last year, we had a cultural revolution in this country which destroyed our indigenous religious art. And we are the poorer for it.

Those three disappointments above sort of link in with the complete lack of anything worth watching on television, the feeling that most of the opera I have seen this year has been OK without being brilliant, the lack of engagement with most of the films I've seen, the paucity of stimulation from any of the books I've read, the stale sense of lack of improvement around the house and in my relationship with Ross, the impression of entrapment I feel in the workplace.

So, it wasn't a very good weekend.