At one point we got back to our own side just avoiding

At one point we got back to our own side just avoiding a head-on collision with a police car I remember the shocked look on the driver’s face I expected them to turn round and pursue us But they didn’t. Maybe they understood about old people in country areas having somehow to get from one place to another.In her first year in the nursing home I visited her regularly. I took her out for a drive once or twice, but she wasn’t comfortable. Was I sure the handbrake was off? Did that red light mean we had run out of petrol? Where was the intolerable draught coming from? So we stopped going out for drives. Confined to a wheelchair, she would sit in her little room contentedly watching telly all day, and would cheerily chat about this and that whenever she got a visitor.I only visit her occasionally now.

First she lost interest in the outside world, and now she hardly registers what’s going on in the nursing home When I do visit, I’m soon bored, soon yawning “You don’t have to stay, Duncan,” she tells me softly I look at her. Pink face, golden hair, mild and blue eyes; damaged and defenceless. “Off you go,” she says, suddenly decisive.Jean and me, sitting side by side We sit there in silence staring at the covered window. When her head bows and she dozes off, I open the door long enough to exit, then seal it again with an unavoidable clunk.I’m outside the hollow space, looking down at it No sign of the old- young figure inside, muffled and warm.

I walk round the magical sculpture, fascinated and saddened by a pair of dimming headlights.Kerry Stewart: Stephen Friedman Gallery, W1 (0171 4941434), to Saturday.’Personal Delivery’, Duncan McLaren’s book on contemporary art, is published by Quartet (pounds 12).. Neurotic Realism

Saatchi Gallery, NW8
As one would expect, exhibitions in the Saatchi Gallery are enjoyable and interesting in many of the ways that advertising is interesting. They don’t move you or last in the mind, but they are smart, well presented and just a little in front of the game. Charles Saatchi generates a lot of publicity, yet never says anything much to illuminate the motives for his operations in the field of new art. This is probably an ad-man’s instinctive feeling for image rather than meaning. I don’t wonder about his reclusive personality very much, but here’s a question. Why don’t we see more photography when he shows off his purchases?One might have thought that camerawork would be a natural interest for a man whose fortune comes from glossy presentations Apparently not.

Anyway, the best work in the Saatchi Gallery’s new show is photography by Paul Smith, who has a couple of dozen self-portraits as a lager lout, as a drug-taker, and as a soldier. He was indeed a soldier, and saw some action in the Gulf War. Smith has something to say, and although these are not pleasant pictures one shouldn’t call them “neurotic.”This also applies to the other four contributors to the exhibition. Saatchi identifies them as belonging to a tendency he calls ” New ,” the title of the show and an accompanying book. The publication reproduces the work of other youngish artists who will be seen in the vast gallery spaces of Boundary Road later this year. Far from being neurotic, however, they appear confident, successful, inventive and more or less happy, just as “creative” people in the advertising industry usually are. The idea that they are contributing to some kind of new artistic movement is way off the mark.I wrote about Brian Griffiths’s sculpture when he appeared in a rather jolly “New Contemporaries” exhibition two years ago.

He hasn’t advanced very far in the meantime, so his work still looks like that of an art student. His sculptures are made out of a variety of materials, but are mainly composed from cardboard boxes held together with sticky tape. They mimic the control panels you find in television studios, flight decks or other hi-tech places. Griffiths has recently been trying to expand his method, tending towards big installations, and this is what we find in the back room of the gallery. It doesn’t quite work, probably because the installation is too flat and pinned against the wall. In other words, it’s not sculptural enough.The large central room is occupied by Tomoko Takahashi, who was born in Tokyo and lives and works in London. She has devised an installation that is both grandiose and banal.