You worry and wonder this week about the value of your experience and your contributions. Summer school teaching is going well, as ever, the students are enthusiastic about learning art history using London’s many wonderful museums. You too get inspired, re-energised by art and history and the questions and conversations they provoke about society and the present. You finished teaching yesterday evening in St James’ Park with a little seminar in the dappled light beneath a a London Plane tree. A group of students from Japan, Italy and China were discussing questions based on a recent visit to the V&A; questions regarding Beauty and Purpose, the Purpose of Beauty and the Beauty of Purpose no less.

In the afternoon you’d jogged them around the National Gallery, starting with Robert Venturi’s arch postmodern Sainsbury Wing extension after briefly glossing Hans Haacke’s witty contribution to the Fourth Plinth outside in Trafalgar Square…