The glorious David Hockney exhibition - A Bigger Picture

My serial moving habit is something I’ve written about before. We’ve moved house (take a deep breath here) an embarrassing 12 times in the last 25 years and I’ve got a sneaking feeling that we might do it again one day. 

But one of the places we lived when my children were small was Yorkshire, in a sweet redbrick cottage with horses that popped their heads over next door's fence and views over the rolling fields. They were happy days – days that came flooding back to me last week when I pitched up at the glorious David Hockney exhibition at London's Royal Academy of Arts.

Hockney is a Yorkshireman through and through. Now 74, he was born in Bradford, studied at Bradford Art College and seven years ago swapped the delights of sunny LA for life near Bridlington on the East Yorkshire coast. "On the road to nowhere," he told Andrew Marr when the broadcaster visited him in Brid for BBC Radio 4's Start the Week.

His new show, which includes oil paintings (many of them massive), charcoal drawings, sketchbooks, iPad paintings and short films, is a breathtaking tribute to the Yorkshire landscape. 

Hockney loves to observe the same place at different times of the day and during different seasons of the year. One of the most stunning collections of paintings is his 2006 Woldgate Woods series - he placed his easel at a fixed point and returned to the same spot countless times to capture it. Another room is devoted to paintings of hawthorn blossom, while the largest gallery features The Arrival of Spring on Woldgate, East Yorkshire in 2011 (Twenty-Eleven), a huge installation made up of 32 oil paintings and 51 iPad drawings printed on paper.

The colour in many of his paintings is vibrant and bold, with purple roads winding through the countryside, stripey orange hayfields, violet tree trunks and turquoise hills. Some critics, including his own former art teacher, have found them “too garish,” but I adored them. Their zinging colours are a dramatic contrast to the more muted hues of his earlier work but bring the landscape he loves dazzlingly alive.

The tiniest details rekindled memories of our far-flung Yorkshire days. A small, red-roofed farmhouse sitting squarely in a field, a tunnel of trees near Kilham and handsome Salt’s Mill – all these and more were the perfect tonic to a chilly midwinter's day.

David Hockney RA: A Bigger Picture is at the Royal Academy of Arts till April 9 2012.

Any Questions on BBC Radio 4 - and Jonathan Dimbleby's phone

Friday evenings are my favourite time of the week. I switch off my computer, pour myself a glass of Pinot Grigio and settle down to listen to Any Questions on the radio.

But this week was completely different. I jumped in the car with my son and hared down the motorway in the rush-hour traffic. We were in London by six, hopped on the number 94 bus to Oxford Circus and were just in time to join the long queue snaking round Broadcasting House (above) in the cold night air.

Everyone in the line had applied for – and got – free tickets to hear the live broadcast of Radio 4's Any Questions. Most weeks it’s hosted by schools and village halls up and down the country but this Friday it was coming from the BBC’s own radio theatre in the heart of central London.

By the time we got into the radio theatre, each clutching a cup of the BBC’s very strong tea, we were full of anticipation. “Make sure you turn off your mobile,” I told my son, who proceeded to give me a science lecture about why it was fine to have it on “silent.” After a few minutes of arguing, he gave up the battle and switched it off.

Just before eight pm, chairman Jonathan Dimbleby and the panel appeared onstage, looking surprisingly relaxed. To his right sat Tory MP Matthew Hancock and advertising boss Sir Martin Sorrell while to his left were shadow deputy PM Harriet Harman and TUC general secretary Brendan Barber.

Then they were off, sounding impressively articulate considering they were on live radio and had Jonathan Dimbleby and producer Victoria Wakely gesticulating when it was time to start and stop talking. As they whizzed through the planned strike by public sector workers, jobs for 16 to 24 year olds and inequalities in pay, Harriet Harman was by far the best panellist - eloquent, charming and thoughtful.

But then, just as Sir Martin Sorrell was in full flow about high earners, there was a faintly discernible buzzing sound from the stage. Victoria Wakely reacted like lightning. She reached inside Jonathan Dimbleby’s jacket pocket, removed his mobile phone and silently hurried offstage.

“You should have turned your phone off,” Sir Martin told Dimbleby, divulging his guilty secret to all the listeners at home. The Any Questions host had the grace to look embarrassed. “I was preparing to ‘fess up,” he said. “Thank you very much.”

At the end of the show my son turned to me. “You spent all that time telling me to turn off my phone," he said. "You should have gone and told Jonathan Dimbleby too...”