There are a lot of good and bad things about living in London. For the plus points, when the M25 is turned into a steel ringed border I’ll be safely inside it away from the barbarian hordes. There are also endless great things to do or move to Bradford.  Following my own advice (for once) I have been to several of the current crop of exhibitions including one at the British Museum about the Sythians.

Me neither.  The Sythians, it transpires, had a huge and influential empire back in the day in Siberia but clearly very poor PR skills as I’ve personally never heard of them which is odd.  My suspicions that they might just be an invention of a deranged and dusty professor in a museum cupboard  were further aroused because the maps on display seemed to suggest that Siberia included the Black Sea.  Not when I last studied geography it didn’t.  In fact Trip Advisor describes it as “Russia’s only seaside resort area”, not I imagine the sort of place when artefacts could be entombed in ice for centuries, unless the Russian idea of a day at the beach is decidedly different from ours and said treasures including what looked to my not wholly untrained eye exactly like a brown shag pile rug circa 1963.

The Sythians were nomadic and poorer than church mice but managed to amass enough golden treasure to start a very large shop.  Really? And not by the time honoured method of looting and pillaging but bespoke stuff in solid gold.  Hardly essential items, one would have thought, for people who ate grass and had to pack everything up and stick it on a horse every couple of weeks.  Not the work of a moment to explain why, for example, they would have needed several thousand identical buttons as they struggled across the icy wastes searching for food.

However, don’t spend any time worrying about it because it’s closed.  Get down to the newly tarted up Hayward Gallery and see the fabulous photos by Mr Grusky of this parish and don’t be put off by his slightly Sythian name or the fact that there is only one thing on the cafe menu that doesn’t feature copious quantities of kale.  Including on the children’s selection.  So, so last year people.

This week’s award for a top day out must go to the Cezanne exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. Not his greatest works – never mind unfinished, more like barely started and way too many of his plain, unsmiling wife but, as ever, the beauty lies in the detail.  On one of the explanatory signs in a room with his later work it says that eventually he ended up just painting his neighbours in the south of France or, in curator speak that is an art form in itself, ‘generic stoic rustic peasants’, urban peasants being a bit thin on the ground.  A headline that puts ‘Freddie Mercury Ate My Hamster’ into thirdplace, trumping even ‘Fashion and Despair’.  Well worth a visit.

Men. Dont  read this before breakfast because it will give you indigestion and raise your blood pressure.  I am today a type far from unknown to many of you; a woman in full rant mode.

First a disclaimer.  I do not hate all the men in the world; some of my best friends are men, decent men do exist (I could probably even name a couple if pushed) but what the hell is wrong with the rest of them?

My normal level of deep apathy about most things has been breached this week by the story of the behaviour of men supposedly working for a charitable organisation in Haiti.  The country had been devastated and off the top of my head I expect the survivors wanted medical aid, food and clean water.  Perhaps eventually sanitation and housing. What they got was corruption and so-called aid workers paying a dollar a time to have sex with their children whilst simultaneously  issuing sanctimonious statements about third world poverty and colonialism.

How much longer are women going to tolerate this?  Harvey Weinstein, Presidents Parties and now even the self styled do- gooders.  In Margaret Atwood book ‘The Handmaids Tale’ she writes of a futuristic society where the state controls all the few remaining fertile women.  My advice, gents, is to get a move on with an improvement movement because it occurs to me, and I cannot be alone, that given we already have sperm banks our need for men to exist AT ALL is up for debate.

Imagine, Ladies, a world where you didn’t have to park your car somewhere you felt safe to return to after dark.  Where people didn’t constantly interrupt you, push ahead of you in queues, cut you up in traffic. Where you could get into a railway carriage without checking if your only fellow passenger was a dodgy looking male.  Where you could confidently leave your window open on a hot night without it being seen at a future trial as an obvious invitation to be raped.  And this is in 21st century Britain.  If I were to list the restrictions on women in other countries it would bring the internet grinding to a halt and  for the life of me I don’t remember signing up for the whole world to be run for the convenience of men.  Maybe it’s time for a bit of a re-think.

I was in a black cab the other day where the driver was giving us, his very captive audience, the benefits of his thoughts on Uber.  (An alternative taxi service that isn’t ridiculously over-priced and given to boring it’s passengers to death with its adolescent philosophy). My female companion, far too polite for her own good, did nothing to discourage him, the words ‘I wonder if you could possibly shut the f**k up?’ not springing as readily to her lips as they would to mine but bear in mind, lots of us HAVE had enough and increasingly ARE prepared to say so.

Sort yourselves out, men.  Make acting like a caveman as unacceptable as smoking indoors.  Be aware, very aware, that time is not on your side.

The best laid plans etc etc.  I had planned a thought provoking few words on water but that will keep.  Actually it was water that distracted me – another cold, wet, winter Saturday led me to spend the afternoon at the cinema seeing what is hyped as Daniel Day Lewis’s last film, God willing, which serendipitously allows me to use my favourite new phrase again.

Actually there’s not a lot of fashion and a good deal less detail about the couture process than I had hoped.   Despair was there in spades.  It cannot be denied that DDL is a great actor but there is something about him that just oozes pretension and this is not just based on the testimony of a chum who worked on ‘My Left Foot’ and told me that by the end of filming there wasn’t one of the crew who wouldn’t have happily chopped off both of his feet, or chucked his trolley out of a top floor window with him in it.

The success of a portrait lies in revealing the soul of the sitter.  Whatever you do,  it shows on your face and never more so than in big close-ups on screen and however well Mr Lewis acts, I can’t move very far beyond thinking that he doesn’t seem like a very nice person.  I could be wrong.  It’s not likely.

Other than Lincoln, which – plot spoiler alert – doesn’t end happily, I haven’t liked any of his films. ‘There will be blood’ would have been more accurately described as ‘There will be shouting.  A lot of shouting’. I didn’t see ‘The Last of the Mohicans’ but I wouldn’t be a bit surprised to discover that the rest of the tribe threw themselves off a cliff after the first day’s filming and ‘Gangs of New York’ was more shouting and fighting.  With gangs. In New York.

One of the few plots surprises in ‘Phantom Thread’ is not that his wife tries to poison him – I imagine she took quite a lot of persuading not to do away with herself at the end of the first hour.  Of several hours.  This film goes on. And on. And on.  Never mind retiring, I’m impressed that anyone lived long enough to get to the end.  Next time you get out your dressmaking scissors Dan, use them to chop out the surplus two thirds of this marathon.

Lesley Manville who plays his sister – and why is she called Cyril for pity’s sake? – is just pure Mrs Danvers but without the laughs.  His wife is very beautiful.

Another film showing this weekend is ‘Coco’ which I though might be about Chanel until I checked.  It’s actually a Disney cartoon but on reflection I wish I’d seen that.  Probably not such good acting but certainly prettier dresses and a good deal less despair.