I went to the Dürer exhibition at the National Gallery and loved it. What a delightful person he seems to have been - curious about everything, avid to learn and avid to share. I once saw his infamous woodcut of a rhinoceros, created in 1515 based on a written description and brief sketch by an unknown artist of a rhino that had been brought to Lisbon that year. It was comically wrong, armoured and mis-shapen, but meticulously detailed - it was so obvious he wanted to see that beast. There were some anatomically dubious animals in this exhibition too and then a heart-melting quote from 1520 when he finally got to see some of them for real at the Brussels zoo with its 'fountains, maze and menagerie... I have never seen anything more entertaining and pleasing, quite like a Garden of Eden.'

He spent ages using geometry to work out the proportions of the human form and learning from others who were willing to share their expertise. When he was 29 he met the painter and printmaker Jacopo de' Barbari and was anxious to understand Jacopo's approach to representing human promotion but he wrote that the artist 'did not want to show his principles to me clearly'. In contrast, Dürer made drawings of St Christopher for Joachim Patinir, the 'skilled landscape painter', for him to insert into his landscapes. 

I was struck by his frustration at how long painting took and how he preferred printmaking because you got so many more images for your time. He used to give his prints away on his travels. If only I'd sat opposite him on one of my train journeys... Mind you, he got some in return from other artists. I wonder what his fascination with detail and accuracy would have made of being given a photograph in return.

The very odd thing is that even though I looked long and hard at the intricacies of his images, and spent more than twice as long as the National Gallery's recommended time there, my memory hasn't brought a single one of them away with me.

On my way home I spotted a building site. I'm hankering after one of my own.