10 minutes
Punch the Monkey videos
Explore on social media the bittersweet true-life story of Punch the monkey, a baby Japanese macaque at Ichikawa zoo outside Tokyo. Rejected by his mother and other adults, he has been rebuilding his self-esteem with the help of a stuffed toy orang-utan larger than himself. Shameless sentimental anthropomorphism doesn’t get better than this.
31 minutes and 40 seconds
Parkrun
Run 5km with a few hundred other people – or walk some of it, if you prefer. Friendly, companionable, not competitive (much) and not judgmental. It’s a great mass popular event, free to enter and run by magnificent volunteers, in which around 200,000 people take part at 9am every Saturday, at about 900 locations around the country. The time given is mine on my last outing. Yours might differ.
An afternoon
Rose Wylie: The Picture Comes First at the Royal Academy
Paintings as big as Velázquez and as direct as Viz by the 91-year-old whom critics love to call “a rebel”. Joy, mischief and luscious brushstrokes. Elephants, celebrities and giant flies. A touch of the scabrous. What more could you want?
A day
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Go and see an Arts and Crafts masterpiece
You may well be close to a building from a time, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when idealism, skill and imagination combined with industrial wealth to beautiful effect. Even if you’re not, they’re worth the detour. Try for example the houses of Blackwell in the Lake District, Cragside in Northumberland, Standen in West Sussex, the Hill House at Helensburgh in Argyll and Bute or All Saints’ Church at Brockhampton in Herefordshire.
Evening
Dirty Business
Channel 4’s horrifying, compelling drama-documentary about the ways in which water companies, with the apparent connivance of regulators, have dumped raw sewage into the rivers and seas. With wonderful renditions of the sugared lying with which corporations try to justify the unjustifiable, and a nice running gag about modern jazz. David Thewlis and Jason Watkins, as two retired men taking on the behemoths, make one of the great double acts.
Illustration by Charlotte Durance