Breakfast in the Garden
23 May

You can see that everyone is breathing a sigh of relief as the longer days have now been matched by an increase in the ambient night and day temperatures and a clearing of the sky to a forget-me-not blue.

It's strange the way that climate and temperament seem to run together. The winter felt long. It felt as though it impinged on all aspects of everyone's life. And now the days are longer and the climate is milder and there is a greater sense of world's ease to be had.

I love it.

We've been taking the opportunity of dining with Mr Fresco - that's Mr Al Fresco. I can't remember eating out once last year so we are taking every opportunity we can.

There are other signs of the coming fullness of spring leading to summer. For example, high in the sky the first of the screaming swifts pursues its airborne food. I know they are swifts from that noise. Swallows sound completely different. and I know this from one of my birthday presents which I bought early thanks to money from my parents. It's a set of CDs entitled The Bad Birdwatchers Companion. This contains background information about the birds under discussion but also, and most importantly for me, there are recordings of the birdsong.

So, I now know that, when, in 2001, I thought I was watching swallows in the sky, I was almost certainly wrong. I was a bit more circumspect in 2006.

What else can I say. Well, the sun has begun its annual two month appearance through my study window. That's always a minor joy.

In the garden the astilbe and the Californian lilac are about to flower. The potatoes and onions which we have planted out are doing well. Even the solar powered fountain has come back to life although it is diminished somewhat. I can't imagine that we shall be using it next year.

My birthday passed happily. There were cards and greetings from family and folk via traditional and electronic means. But 56 is not a particularly momentous number and so there was hardly a sense of massed celebrations in the streets.

Surprisingly, Tate Liverpool did me proud by staging the Private View of their new Picasso exhibition on the day. The show covers the latter period of the artists life. Mostly, when it comes to television programmes and picture book anthologies, you only get to see works from Picasso's Cubist period or his blue period or his rose period. In other words, discussion of him as an artist stops in 1939. After that, he tends to be talked about in terms of his playboy lifestyle and his fathering of a child in his late 70s (I remember the BBC news story about that as being quite nudge, nudge, wink, wink).

So, this exhibition is a corrective to that notion. The six or seven rooms that make up the exhibition pay testament to an artist at the height of his powers. However, and this is the big however, I didn't really feel that there was anything here that was particularly earth-shattering. I got the sense of a man of immense energy and capability continuing to produce canvas after canvas well into his later years certainly because he could but also because he had to - he simply didn't know how to stop.

There were many works that I liked. Though not in the same league as Guernica, The Charnel House is still a powerful statement against violence. The wartime, Parisian paintings are, I suspect for many reasons, drained of colour. The Cockerel of the Liberation is a jolly work by comparison with a perky, colourful French rooster enjoying his freedom. The best room contained a sequence of paintings on similar themes of dead cockerels, owls, skulls and the like. They were a decade's meditation on themes of death, violence and mutability. Later variations on classic paintings did not stir the imagination quite so much.

So, I'm glad to have attended the exhibition and may even return. I found it filled out my understanding of Picasso's complete career. But it wasn't as illuminating as the Klimt exhibition of two years ago. Nevertheless, I just hope that they continue with the idea of having a blockbuster exhibition every couple of years or so.

Ross and I ate out afterwards at Pizza Express near the Echo Arena. It was an ordinary midweek in May. There were no concerts or conferences on at the Arena. And yet the place was packed out. I keep wondering if Liverpool is immune from all of the talk of recession. Certainly it didn't feel like a city with economic woes.

My other birthday treat was a visit to the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra's performance of Mahler's monumental Symphony No 3 under Vasily Petrenko. I have never heard this symphony performed live before. I was lucky enough, through Roland's good guidance, to get to attend the afternoon rehearsal and so I was attuned to the fact that we were in for something special. In fact the whole concert was superb. There was a standing ovation at the end. Not just one or two people but the whole audience. Me included. And that means that I've now stood twice for something that Mr Petrenko has done. I've not done that for anyone else before.