Decades ago, in a previous existence, I worked at BBC Publications. In the seventies its management excised Gustave Courbet’s painting Origine du Monde from John Berger’s Ways of Seeing – the book that followed from his tele films. I don’t remember the editorial point Berger was making with the picture, but I do recall my scorn and thoughtfulness at this act of censorship.

Times have changed. Thirty years on even grey-suited corporate men wouldn’t raise a collective eyebrow at a well-painted minge in a book about art. We, the viewers/readers, can make up our own minds about what turns us on or off or shocks our sensibilities.Truth is, not much shocks us now. Things that ought to don’t. Art-n-sex doesn’t and good job too. I doubt I’d have bothered with ‘Seduced: Art and Sex from Antiquity to Now’ at the Barbican if a friend hadn’t lured me along to the private view – or lured me along to view the private parts.

The Armani brigade was there, languidly circling round Pan and the Goat, sleeping nymphs, The Rape of Ganymede, Lot and His Daughters, Homosexual Male Anal Sex Kneeling, The Private Pleasure of Prince Murad Son of Shah Jahah, Erotic Scenes by Hishikawa Morohira, Ilona on Top by Jeff Koons, Joe, Helmut, Scott, Lou by Robert Mapplethorpe, Blowjob by Andy Warhol. I got a bit bored. The content was repetitive and almost every overheard comment invited a snigger: ‘Love the colours’, ‘Wonderful use of light’.

Wandering round it doesn’t take long to confirm that sex without desire isn’t all that interesting. And human desire’s more complicated than these images could ever hope to explain.I liked Julião Sarmento’s transgressive paintings of scarce bits of body – Biting, Fucking and Missing, Licking and Coming, Dying, because they suggest so much more than they show. But what hacked me off about the exhibition was Where were the Lesbians. There’s loads of copulation and buggery but if you want to know what on earth lesbians do you won’t find enlightenment at Seduced at the Barbican. There are a couple of romping girls by Thomas Ruff, a pair of scrawny crones by Hans Bellmer, and another pair of scrawny crones by Egon Schiele, and that’s about it.I don’t think it’s entirely the curators’ fault. There only ever were twelve lesbians and most of those are now dead or accounted for in civil partnerships. Actually there’s only me and one other still floating – she’s a feisty lady in her eighties from the Home Counties. A retired dog breeder. You know those Soulmates adverts in the papers: long weekly lists of Men Seeking Women, Women Seeking Men, Men Seeking Men and then under the Women Seeking Women heading there’s only ever one and it’s her. She wants to go rambling in the Himalayas. Well, why not. I’m up for it. Better than all that hanky-panky on the Barbican walls.

Worker wasps and male wasps are in a strange state. Sated on over-ripe plums, disorientated by cold, they’re buzzing and irritable and at the end of their lives.

I was told to be at Cheltenham Town Hall before nine in the morning to go through technical things for my talk scheduled for ten. At the hotel I got up before seven to get ready leisurely, go through notes, have coffee. At first I thought they were flies in the small claustrophobic room. Then I realised they were cross wasps and phoned the desk. The night receptionist said he’d be right up. I wrapped a towel round me. It wasn’t the sort of hotel to provide flowing white bathrobes. He zapped three wasps with the room-service prospectus and scooped them onto hotel writing paper to show the duty manager. He kept saying he was so sorry and I kept saying it wasn’t his fault.

I felt disadvantaged in this small space with him and the wasps and me without my clothes on. As he closed the door the buzzing resumed. With autumn wasp-zapping, brothers and sterile sisters go for cover until the war’s over then come out angrier than ever. I phoned again. The young man returned. I think he was from Somalia or Ethiopia. Anyway he had those tall thin serene looks. I hoped he wouldn’t think my calls a ruse by a more than middle-aged lone woman to get him into her hotel room. He zapped again. He got four more. He said he was so sorry. I said it wasn’t his fault. He closed the door. The buzzing resumed.

After his fourth visit I stopped being nice or awkward. It was getting late. I didn’t fancy going under the shower. I said I wanted another room. He said he couldn’t do anything until the duty manager arrived, but he was sure I wouldn’t be charged for my stay. I said I didn’t care about the money, it wasn’t billed to me anyway, and all I wanted was to get showered and dressed and out of the bloody room.He came back and zapped again. His technique was very good. It was the way he kept his eye on his prey then went for it. It occurred to me Basil Fawlty would have zapped badly and I’d have streaked inconsolably through the breakfast room and Sybil would have had a thing or two to say.

The young man took away more corpses on the hotel stationery. I was worse than discordant. The duty manager phoned. I said I must must must must must move into a wasp-free room. I told her I was a writer who was giving a talk and this wasn’t acceptable. It was hell on earth. She said she was very sorry but the hotel was full, but if I went down to breakfast she’d have the room fumigated by ten o’clock.It occurred to me Basil Fawlty would have fumigated badly and I’d have arrived at the Town Hall an hour late for my event and covered in DDT. I couldn’t be bothered to tell her that not only was I a Literary Festival writer, but that my talk was at ten o’clock. What did she care about me and my art and my career and my public. Two more wasps had chosen to rage against the dying of the light in the bath. I pulled on my clothes, put on some make up and huffed off, wild, unwashed, unbreakfasted and unprepared. When I returned in the afternoon for my suitcase the wasps were quiet. The duty manager knocked twenty pounds off the bill. A pound a wasp perhaps.

An exhibition by the Burmese artist Htein Lin at Asia House in New Cavendish Street ends on 13 October. It’s of paintings done secretly between 1998 and 2004 when he was in Mandalay then Myaungmya prisons, accused by the military government of planning opposition protests and of supporting Aung San Suu Kyi.

I was alone with his work yesterday afternoon in the gallery. Without canvas he used material torn from the cotton prison uniforms. Friends smuggled in acrylic or dyes but what to paint with was a problem. He used a syringe, cigarette lighter, toothpaste cap, a cup, a toothbrush, his fingers and feet. He said painting let him breathe and was no air in his cell. His paintings swirl with colour and defiance, as a fight against entrapment. The peacock is a symbol of liberation in Burma and his Escaping Soul is like the tail of a peacock splayed from a man’s head. He paints prisoners meditating to Buddha, or maimed and shackled, or queuing for food. He paid to smuggle his paintings out. One warder bribed to do this took the money then thought the paintings were coded escape maps so burned them. Htein Lin’s marriage didn’t survive his six-year confinement. But he’s now living in London with his second wife, the then British ambassador to Burma Victoria Bowman. Buddha, brave monks, Aung San Suu Kyi, Htein Lin, Victoria Bowman, this is the true Burma I like to think.

I went to the exhibition because John Berger spoke of it and I’d heard him reading from his new book the night before. John Berger’s an inspiration as a writer and a man. His conscience is always there yet he writes of the space between words, the unspoken, the inflexion, paradox, silence. And he always makes cherries and greengages and the spread of a bird’s wings seem as wonderful as they truly are. It’s strange to hear him answering questions. He becomes inarticulate as he struggles not to use the wrong words.

His new book is letters from a woman to her partner in prison. He reaches out to prisoners everywhere. Somewhere else he writes of how ‘literature is inimical to all hierarchies and to separate fact and imagination, event and feeling, protagonist and narrator, is to stay on dry land and never put to sea’. I like it when he writes of art as revenge to the innocent, or when he quotes Andrea Dworkin whom he admired, saying ‘I have no patience with the untorn, anyone who hasn’t weathered rough weather, fallen apart, been ripped to pieces, put herself back together, big stitches, jagged cuts, nothing nice. Then something shines out. But the ones all shined up on the outside, the ass wigglers, I’ll be honest, I don’t like them. Not at all.’

Which brings me to myself and my own dissatisfaction – with this blog and website stuff to begin with. I believe I use it to try to shine up on the outside. Self-promotion. For example those reviews I quote – I could have included a few stinkers but I left them out. Maybe I’m trying blogging as a valediction – goodbye to computing, emailing, texting. One more clamouring voice signifying very little.

I’ve had a rough weather year. Time for guts and honour, big stitches, to make a change, to move, buy a ticket, put to sea. I’ll put Berger in one pocket and Dworkin in the other have some currency in my bumbag and think of Htein Lin as I sail away.