National Gallery

I'm tired and I need a wee but I'm staring at a painting. It is a painting from the 1500s, I think it is silly. A woman side steps towards me, she is wearing a shirt and a name tag that suggest she works for the gallery.
"Do you like it?" She says, nodding at the painting with a smug smile.
"Not really" I reply, glancing at her in my best 'leave me alone, I'm tired and need a wee' way. Her smile becomes more smug, she knows something about this painting that she desperately wants to share with me, because it will make her seem clever. I don't let her. "I think it's silly," I continue, "Jesus doesn't look like that".
She says: "hhha", it's not a laugh, but a word she uses to illustrate the fact she finds my comment amusing, "how can you know what he looked like?". I can see she's the sort of person who likes to ask questions that she thinks people can't answer, it makes her feel special.
"Because I've seen him." I say slowly and loudly, like my Grandad would if he were talking to someone from another country. I look at her face and raise my eyebrows slightly.
Still smiling, she turns and shuffles away. What a rude lady.

The National Gallery makes me sad, there's too many paintings. If it were a person, it would be waving it's arms around going "LOOK, look at my paintings, aren't they brilliant, they're worth billions and billions of pounds. LOOK AT THEM, no, don't ACTUALLY look at them, they're all the same, that's why we've put them in these rooms all on top of each other and next all to each other in rows, APPRECIATE THEM. NO, what did I say - don't LOOK at them, just know that they're worth more money than you could ever imagine, walk quickly round so that you can *say* you've seen them and feel all arty and clever, I mean, what more could you want? The boring ones are in big sparkly frames so you don't have to stop or think about them at all. JUST APPRECIATE THEM."

However, I do like the National Portrait Gallery. I don't know why, it's just much better. I like all the faces looking out of the walls at you, I like the fact you can walk into a room and see some of the most famous writers, artists, actors and politicians all together, like an incredible party, you can imagine what they'd be saying to one another and why Noel Coward would be standing next to Vanessa Bell and who would be most likely to get thrown out for fighting, who'd be the most drunk and who would be sitting in the corner looking lonely...

On the other hand, something upset me deeply. I saw a portrait of James Joyce, painted in 1935, he was... old. And ordinary looking, and a bit sad. He's one of my favourite writers ever but it never crossed my mind that he was actually a man, with a face and a comb-over and... trousers, he was just the thoughts behind the words in the books. Not a person. It makes me feel sick to think about.