THE sun’s out, so what better excuse to wander over to Ashley Wood Farm just outside of Tisbury and take in the rather wonderful exhibition of naïve flower paintings by the multi-talented artist Lizzie Wallace. She’s spent a lifetime growing flowers and arranging swathes of them at weddings and functions from London to Devon. The finished collection of work was exquisite and judging by the plethora of red dots, very successful.

It was the culmination of a week of culture and inspiration which took in Messums Gallery, showing Tim Harrison and Joanna Still, an awesome pair of shows, epic in scale, ambition and achievement. Followed two days later by five hours in Tate Britain viewing their magnificent show of Freud, Bacon, Coldstream and Uglow amongst others from my old Alma Mater Camberwell School of Art.

Then to the Bridge Theatre, Tower Bridge to see local girl made good Hannah Stokely appearing in a superbly contemporary production of Julius Caesar, with Caesar portrayed as the idiot Trump. We took the standing-room-only tickets and headed for the mosh pit to be greeted by a rock band of Springsteen proportions, warming up for the arrival of ‘himself’, with roadies selling T-shirts, baseball caps, beer and posters.

Turns out the standing only audience became major players in the crowd scenes, with excellent marshalling from the roadies. Mark Anthony and his gang did well, but I thought we carried them for the final fifteen minutes and I notched up my first, exhilarating Theatre performance on the London stage.

On the food front. I finally took delivery of Sumayya Usmani’s book, Summers Under the Tamarind Tree and chose to cook the Sindhi Karri recipe on page 141, a simple enough sounding dish, but with lots of places in the proceedings where you can veer off-piste if you like and add your own take on the dish. It’s what the term OMG was made for. I was lucky enough to have an empty, quiet kitchen, so I could really focus on the detail of its simplicity and relish the joys of using new ingredients, or old ingredients in a new way. I’m certainly now a convert to turmeric, which along with fresh ginger, seems to be ‘on message’ for the health conscious these days.

A simple dish with extravagant flavours, deep, rich tertiary colours, the textures of cumin and yellow, popped poppy seeds, crunchy, golden garlic shards, warming hints of chilli, hugging a cluster of boiled eggs, I added quail eggs, but pheasant would work too, with glistening dark green curry leaves and a scatter of coriander to finish it off.