I HAD a very jolly day in London last week, getting a serious fix of culture.

The morning was spent at Tate Britain, seeing the show of 20th century British life painting, All Too Human; the afternoon’s entertainment was at the Royal Academy and Charles I: King and Collector, a once-in-a-lifetime exhibition bringing together works of art from the king’s collection for the first time since his death at the hands of Oliver Cromwell and the parliamentarians in 1649.

Everyone I have spoken to about the RA show has raved about it: the glorious Titians and Giorgiones, the incredible Mantegna tapestries, the extraordinary Van Dycks.

The paintings and drawings by Holbein were, for me, the highlights – an uncompromising but exquisitely painted portrait of a somewhat ugly merchant, drawings of Thomas More and his son that were as fresh and immediate as the day they were sketched – but the struggle to see everything among the hordes of other punters almost defeated me.

I came away feeling somewhat dissatisfied.

Upon reflection, I’ve come to realise that my dissatisfaction was not just because I hated the fighting and jostling with people plugged into their exhibition description machines at the RA, but was actually more because I so much preferred the morning’s show at the Tate.

The portraits by Lucien Freud were every bit as uncompromising as those by Holbein a few miles away on Piccadilly but were just as breathtakingly beautiful (if somewhat different); there were paintings by Francis Bacon that I’d never seen before and found totally unexpected; the paint on the works by Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff was so deliciously thick and chewy you wanted to eat it; and there were paintings by artists I’d never heard of, such as Francis Newton Souza (who I didn’t rate) and Celia Paul, Cecily Brown and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye (who I really, really did).

Why was my opinion of the RA exhibition so drastically different to that of everyone I spoke to about it? It wasn’t, actually, that I disliked the show, just that the Tate one floated my boat so much more.

I shouldn’t have worried – I should never worry – that my taste is different to that of others, but I think we are all slightly concerned when our views diverge from other people’s.

It’s a desire to be in the same club as everyone else, to wear the same T-shirt, but how dull life would be if we all thought the same thing!

Thank goodness that I like this and you prefer that, it gives us variety and something to talk and argue about.

As my father used to say, it’s differences of opinion that make the bookies rich. I couldn’t agree more…