It’s the end of the week. Finally. Things have been slow and boring – yesterday I seriously thought I was going to fall asleep at my desk – but I didn’t. I just want to go HOME and not sit here for another half hour. Whinge whinge whinge.

I’m reading Picasso’s War. It is so good – just the sort of thing I need to keep the old grey matter going. I can’t – I just can’t believe the destruction that took place at Guernica. It’s beyond words. I was reading about the bombing while on my lunch break yesterday and was so deeply moved. The things humanity does to itself are just astounding. And all of Europe was horrified and up at arms – yet we allow these things to happen again and again. The author, Russell Martin, described the first time he actually saw Guernica – he was at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, where I saw the painting in 2000, on 9/11:

I looked at Guernica for a long time on that warm September afternoon, joined by thousands of people who had come to Madrid from every part of the world to spend a bit of time in the presence of what is widely regarded as the most important artwork of the twentieth century. None of us was aware as we stood across from the brutal, horrific, yet somehow mesmerizing images of Picasso’s war, that in those same moments the twenty-first century had been forced forever onto a new tack, that once more – as had happened in little Gernika – humans had transformed themselves into demons, and other humans suddently searched for reasons why.