Madrid is a city I first discovered as a student. Franco was in power (just), black widows skulked the smartest barrios and the regular taxicab from the airport was a black and chrome rococo Fiat 2300.

But if, like me, you went by rail, the journey could take three days. The tilting train was an eccentric design by Alejandro Goicoechea and José Luis Oriol. The Talgo (for Tren Articolado Ligero Goicoechea Oriol) made only fitful progress. I described the pleasures (hard bread rolls, jamón, wine) and pains (heat, dust and ennui) of the journey from Irun to the capital in an essay competition and won the prize of a year’s supply of Carlsberg Special. That was the first time I profited from writing – so, on the whole, I have fond feelings towards the city.

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It’s not that Instagram has changed photography in the way the invention of photography changed painting in the 19th century. It’s more radical than that.

The photo-sharing network has actually become photography. Launched in 2010 as a free mobile app, Instagram now has over 500 million users a month and is estimated to be worth over $30 billion.

It gives the world’s two billion smartphone users access to a global marketplace of imagery. Photography is no longer the province of professionals. Nor are family snaps consigned to neglected memorial albums. After nearly 200 years, photography is realising its potential. If you wanted an example of disruptive technology, here it is. We’re all photographers and curators now.

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The best account of a country house weekend was by Harold Nicolson, diplomat, diarist and, as resident of Sissinghurst, an expert with first-hand knowledge of his subject. In a celebrated essay, he described the languorous guests, chafing dishes, hot bacon under silver cloches and insistent drizzle outside the French windows. He exposed what he called the jade and lobster of the Edwardian period.

The best account of the English country house hotel is, however, by Robin Hutson, son of a south London heating engineer, who rose from pot-washer to GM to become a proprietor of genius. In one of Hutson’s Pigs, you have an ambience that is sophisticated, but relaxed. A fastidious eye has chosen everything, but not in an intimidating or controlling manner: authentic comforts are understood and addressed.

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I am not a casual sexist – my sexism is calculated and determined… – but why shouldn’t the advertising world acknowledge interesting distinctions between the sexes?

Last month, Unilever, manufacturers of cosmetics, cleaning products and edible fats (and one of the world’s biggest spenders on advertising), pledged to stop using sexist stereotypes in its commercials. From now on, its adverts for products such as Dove soap, Radox shower gels and Sunsilk hairspray, will portray more “authentic and three-dimensional” women reflective of new advances in gender equality.

At Cannes Lions, the advertising industry’s annual Mediterranean love-in last week, Unilever marketing director Keith Weed revealed that just two per cent of advertising presents women as intelligent or managerial. His plan to disrupt the ugly convention of portraying women as a docile and compliant playthings has begun with a revamp of the campaign for Lynx deodorant.

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The street value of acrylonitrile butadiene styrene is going up. ABS is the plastic used to make the Lego bricks. It lends itself to precision moulding and most parents will know only too well the sharp spasm of agony felt when treading upon a carelessly abandoned brick while creeping out of a child’s bedroom at night.

There may be enough Lego in the world for every single person to own 86 bricks, but demand still beats supply. This week, the announcement that Lego cannot meet its Christmas orders will inflame hysteria and inflate prices. Plastic bricks may be a better investment than gold.

Lego lust has already stimulated an international crime wave. A New York woman was arrested for stealing 800 box sets. A syndicate of thieves specialising in Lego emerged in Phoenix. There have been Lego-related truck-jackings in Watford Gap and armed burglaries in Australia. The once innocent children’s toy has become a vulgar object of feverishly traded novelty among adult mouth breathers.

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I very much enjoy images of beautiful, naked women. Titian and Rubens, of course. Renoir less so, a little saccharine for my taste. The sometimes transgressive Klimt and Schiele, naturally.

Playboy, too. Tom Kelley’s famous centrefold of Marilyn Monroe in the magazine’s first edition of September 1953 is one of the history of art’s great female images. If any blue-nosed puritan or shrieking feminist disagrees, I’d be happy to debate how it compares to Ingres.

But now Playboy’s nudes are taking their place in history with the Old Masters. Which is to say, they are no more.

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There was something seriously wrong with the Victorians. Their architecture has an inclination to ugliness that defies explanation by the shifting tides of tastes. So much of it is wilfully challenging, even visually hostile.

After millennia of experience, jobbing builders and, since 1834, professional architects acquired certain rules about proportion and detail that were generally agreed to work well, both practically and artistically. These so many Victorian buildings contumaciously defied. We look on them now with blank horror.

Of course, the thing about taste is that it does change. What is acceptable in one era is despised in the next, only to be revived later. The Bloomsbury aesthete Lytton Strachey said we can be absolutely certain that nobody will want to revive the Victorian era. Half a century later we had Laura Ashley.

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