Newcastle really is a handsome city – it announces the fact from the moment you cross the river and curve into the station. Sunshine helps, of course. It’s looking a bit pinched in other ways, but that’s another matter.

Straight to the Laing and the café, but before I had my coffee I was sidetracked by the corridor display of domestic items: a teapot by Christopher Dresser plus crockery by Laura Knight and Eric Ravilious. His little tureen was a delight.

But I wasn’t there for household items. No, I was there to see Turner’s “Fighting Temeraire”, which is on loan from the National Gallery, and the exhibition surrounding it. As I walked round I felt a small surge of horrified interest in how a battle would have been fought by sailing ships atop a wooden crate riddled with gun holes. Lots of Turner’s watercolours, which – since I know one of the scenes he painted – included a great deal of artistic licence. Sometimes his painting are too undefined and blurry for my taste, and I wasn’t expecting that much of the Temeraire. Well, I was wrong. In the flesh, it is amazing. It blazes and shimmers and is utterly beautiful. Lots of artistic licence here too, but there is still pathos in the old ship that helped to defend Britain from Bonaparte’s forces being led to her death by a new-fangled steam tug. “Burial at Sea” next to it was equally breathtaking. It just glowed.

There was more about shipbuilding and industry on the Tyne, including one photograph by Chris Killip. Afterwards I went into his exhibition of “The Last Ships”. His eye is perfect, but it is perhaps the time he spent on the people and the area that was his invisible power. These photographs of the same street over the course of a couple of years in the mid-1970s:

My room is on the fourth floor and I have a perfect view of the Ionic capitals of the old Assembly Rooms. And of the buddleia sprouting from its masonry.