Roses, a Palace, Pancakes, a Cathedral

I’ve got quite a bit of catching up to do. Don’t worry, I won’t give you a blow by blow account of the last two weeks, which have been somewhat manic, while I try to ‘clear the decks’ (i.e. most of my workload for the next three months) to free up my time to start writing my book … on Monday!!! No, just the highlights – and the highest (?) of these was that a week ago today we celebrated our 13th anniversary! K sent me flowers at work – beautiful, proper, long-stemmed red roses, 13 of them of course, that were just perfectly in bloom, and they smelt gorgeous too! It’s so rare to find roses that actually have a scent! The lady at reception called me during my lunch break, and I couldn’t understand what she was telling me, it was so unexpected – I thought a visitor had turned up for me out of the blue! But no… I felt rather embarrassed but also extremely chuffed as I walked through the Museum to my office – of course I bumped into someone almost immediately, who I don’t really know but who of course stopped and asked me if it was my birthday. Once in the office I had to show them off to the ladies, and word apparently got around because later in the afternoon, people were coming in from other offices to look at them!! This is how perfect they were:


I had to guard them carefully on the tube on the way to the restaurant where we were meeting – a seemingly endless almost-circuit of the Circle Line. It was a bit busy, but when I eventually got a seat and sat down, the bouquet was nearly as tall as me!! When the lady next to me got up a few stops later, she tripped on it and they fell over – when I picked them up, she said, “Oh what beautiful roses!” and a nearby gentleman said, “They were!” It was funny, but also one of those slightly uncomfortable moments where you make brief contact with your fellow passengers – everyone laughs, then immediately go back to being complete strangers…

We ate at the Bleeding Heart Tavern, where there has been a pub since 1746, which is now one of a group of French restaurants, all at slightly different levels of formality, housed in the tiny Bleeding Heart Yard, near to Farringdon station, in the ancient heart of the City of London. It had been recommended to us by friends aeons ago, and we only just got round to going. It was a lovely meal and really reasonably priced – and to top it all off, they brought us a chocolate cake with ‘Happy Anniversary’ written on the plate around it, on the house! It was the roses that did it… I think we're going to keep going back, trying a different eating establishment each time (working our way up to the grand restaurant)

A post-prandial drink (as my father used to say…) in the nearby Mitre, another historic 18th-century pub, and a late night walk along High Holborn to pick up the bus home… A lovely celebration!

(The roses are still going strong after a week – sitting here on my desk, behind my computer, looking increasingly dark and velvety as they mature. I sniff them when I need a moment of pause.)

--------------------------------------------------------------------

We continued the festivities on Sunday by going to Windsor for the day. Again, somewhere we had always intended to visit, but had never been. Amazingly (for us), we left promptly and were in Windsor by 10.30, and wandering around the palace by 11. The Queen was in residence, as the flag was flying from the top of the keep.


It was wonderfully quiet, partly because it was early and cold (that promised sunshine never materialised, but shone on Saturday instead, when we were in the library!), and also because we were visiting at the end of the Half Term week, so I guess the children were suitably exhausted and the parents preparing to go back to work. South Kensington was utterly packed last week, as it always is at Half Term, but it seemed busier than usual – museums are free, and in this economic climate they’re going to be an attractive option for families looking for entertainment on a budget. But apart from quite a lot of tourists, there were not many other people at Windsor, which made it more relaxing. A contrast, as well, from when we visited Buckingham Palace last summer – not out of choice, I might add, it was K’s mother’s birthday treat … though, in the end, it was quite interesting, but utterly besieged by what can only be described (and this is not intended in a disparaging way) as working class people. I thought it was utterly tasteless (I note I am using “utterly” a lot in this post) – the Queen deigns to throw open her doors to her poorest subjects for a few months in the summer, and charges them thirty pounds each for the privilege. Talk about redistribution of wealth.

Anyway Windsor was sort of similar to Buckingham Palace, in that everything is actually very modern, ‘medievalised’ in the late 19th century. I suppose it’s not surprising, as it’s a lived-in palace, so you can’t expect it to be historic as such, but it is somehow a little disappointing to discover, nevertheless – perhaps because we are fortunate enough to live our daily lives surrounded by history. The ‘Drawings Gallery’ was mostly filled with photographs of and paraphernalia associated with Prince Charles – not really sure why, unless it was supposed to inspire us all with pride at the life and works of our future monarch… Actually, pretty much the best thing about visiting the palace was seeing Queen Mary’s Dolls’ House, an absolutely fantastic, fully-furnished model of an aristocratic London house, in miniature (it’s on a scale of 12:1). Made in 1924, the house was designed by Lutyens, and the garden by Gertrude Jekyll! We decided that the best job in the world would be ‘Curator of the Queen’s Dolls’ House’!

After exhausting ourselves traipsing around the State Apartments, we went off in search of lunch, which we found in the marvellous ‘Crooked House of Windsor’


located on officially the shortest street in Britain!


What a Dickensian confluence of circumstances!

We wandered around some more and eventually found our way to the very lovely Horse and Groom pub, right opposite the back door to the castle, where we sat in the window with our drinks, until we noticed the queue forming for Evensong, soon after 5, which we then went and joined. This was half-ploy to get into St George’s Chapel, which is closed on Sundays unless you attend the services – but is also a lovely thing to do, and the kind of thing I never would have experienced unless I knew K. But the Chapel is definitely the element of Windsor that is most worth visiting – and the most authentic too, being a genuine 14th-century monument.

(This is one of K's wide-angle photos)

The main part of the nave was all in darkness, and we were guided into the choir, which was candlelit, as we were there at twilight, and extremely impressive, with its wonderful rib-vaulted ceiling, contemporary with that at Westminster Abbey, and the choirstalls bedecked with the arms and achievements of the Knights of the Order of the Garter, for which this is the chapel. Enamelled copper plates of every knight that has ever been a member of the Order, since its foundation in the 14th century, are attached to the backs of the upper stalls – I was sitting next to John Major’s stall, who is clearly one of the current 24 Knights of the Order. All this really makes it a unique place to sit for an hour and hear beautiful monastic chant, sung that evening by the Lay Clerks (I guess the choristers were still on Half Term too), and to look up and around and be filled with beauty, as the sun gradually faded outside the stained glass windows. The two clerics who read the lessons and prayers were certainly at the top of their profession – imagine being almost the private chaplain to the Queen – and they had perhaps the most sonorous voices I have ever heard. They did a good reading – particularly the first one, which was a reading about Elijah in the wilderness, from the Old Testament, and vividly dramatic. We weren’t allowed to linger long at the end of the service, but this will be a beautiful place to return to. But how wonderful to experience it that way for the first time!

Since the trains back to London only left once an hour, we had missed the 6 o’clock by the time we emerged from the Chapel, so it was back to the Horse and Groom for some puddings (a gorgeous melting chocolate pot for me, spotted dick and custard for K), and then a gentle amble down the hill to the station in time for the 7 o’clock train. A really lovely relaxing day off.

--------------------------------------------------------------------

Tuesday was pancake day – Shrove Tuesday – which would seem to be a peculiarly English thing, according to this pancake-focused blog on the Guardian website which I had some fun browsing that night!

Of course we made pancakes – too many, it turned out, which we finished off last night, which is against the law apparently. Doing a baked dish with stuffed pancakes always sounds like a quick thing to do, but this one wasn’t, although it was delicious when it was eventually ready, at about 10.30! Pancakes rolled around a stuffing of shredded spinach, pine nuts and red onion, stirred up with ricotta, bechamel and parmesan, seasoned with nutmeg, and smothered in tomato sauce and more bechamel. Delish.

K has given up alcohol for Lent (again), which meant he was really grouchy when he came home from work last night!

--------------------------------------------------------------------

Today I visited Salisbury Cathedral on our departmental away day. It was fantastic! All the more so because something clicked with me that should have clicked before. The first thing was the discovery that William Golding lived and taught in Salisbury, footsteps from the Cathedral…

… and the second was that Salisbury Cathedral not only has a spire on top of its central tower, but that this spire, which was added in the early 14th century, is the highest in England, at 123 m (404 ft) tall. According to the Cathedral’s website, it weighs 6,500 tons, and our guide pointed out to us how the tall Purbeck marble columns at the crossing have bent under its weight.


All this gave me a whole new perspective on reading Golding’s The Spire, a remarkable book which I read last year, an historical imagining (one can’t really call it a novel) of the feverish obsession which drives the dean of an unnamed cathedral to believe God has instructed him through visions to build an immense spire, but his obsession causes many casualties – physical and spiritual – along the way. I found it a difficult book to read, because you really find yourself caught up in the protagonist’s fevered mental state – but it’s an amazing work of literature, and one that is all the more meaningful to me now that I have realised that Golding was inspired (ha ha) by the very real monument at the end of his street.

Over and out.

Happy 200th Birthday Mr Jones!

Today we did something rather unusual. We went to church. While that in itself is pretty unusual (though the third time I have been to church in as many months!), that wasn't the half of it. Today was the 200th anniversary of the birth of Owen Jones (1809-1874), the Welsh architect and designer whose theories of design and polychromy were fundamentally inspired by his early experience of the Alhambra Palace in Granada, where he lived and studied for six months in 1834, and whose magnificent publications of its buildings during the 1840s were the first major work to employ the newly invented technology of chromolithography, in order to represent his theories of the use of primary colours in the original decorative scheme of the Islamic palaces. These books were also almost single-handedly responsible for the Victorian discovery of the Alhambra and of 'Moorish' design, and were perpetuated through all his later work, at the Crystal Palaces at Hyde Park (for the Great Exhibition of 1851) and at Sydenham, where he designed and erected an 'Alhambra Court' - a 3D version of the Alhambra palaces in microcosm, in the heart of south London, in the Grammar of Ornament, which became an immensely popular and widely-used design textbook, and in the foundation of what became the South Kensington Museum, now the Victoria and Albert Museum, where I have the great privilege to be a curator. Jones is very current in our thoughts these days, since the 19th-century revival of Islamic Spain and dissemination of its designs, primarily through his work, will form the fourth chapter of the book I will soon be writing, and my colleague Abraham Thomas has curated a display which will open at the V&A on 28th March (until late November), in time to celebrate his bicentenary. During the second half of this year, we will be working together on turning this display into a fully-fledged touring exhibition. More on that anon, no doubt.

So Abraham had the bright idea, because Owen Jones's birthday fell on a Sunday - today - to attend the service at Christ Church in Streatham, which was designed and built in the Byzantine style (though with Islamic inflections) by Jones's brother-in-law and protégé, James Wild, in 1841 - the V&A has several of Wild's original designs in the collection, for instance here. Jones conceived the interior design, of which all that survives is the painting in the apse ceiling, and the decoration of the capitals.


This church is basically at the end of our street - it's a 20-minute walk up Brixton Hill. I had tried to visit it before, during one of the two-week breaks I like to take from work in the summer, in order to explore London - but I had come at a time when the church was closed and there was no getting in. I had made a note of the vicar, Father Tricklebank's (what a fantastic name!), contact details, and Abraham got in touch and let him know that we were coming. There was quite a contingent of us: myself and K; Abraham and his girlfriend; Kathryn who did her PhD on Owen Jones and is our fount of all knowledge; Sonia who is working at the V&A on Indian textiles and has discovered interesting links to Owen Jones through the history of the Museum's collecting (which you can read more about in her recent article, here); and Charles, who was one of our curators of prints and drawings until his retirement a few years ago, and another expert in the 19th century.

Father Tricklebank put us on the order of service, and even mentioned us in his address - he had been doing a spot of reading, in preparation for our visit, and brought attention to the fact that Byzantine and Islamic styles had been employed in the design and decoration of the church, and that this regard for other faiths and cultures was reflected in the congregation of the church today, which is largely African and Afro-Caribbean. It was gratifying to see so many people in the congregation - as Charles commented, about as many as you might expect on a slack Sunday in 1846... There was also a baptism on the order of service, of a very sweet Nigerian baby who was being christened with the fantastic name of Chisom Pureheart Obiesie. It made you think of Arthurian legends, and the setting was right for that! This was the first baptism I had ever been to. It was very high church - I think they are Anglo-Catholics, and I must say I found it difficult to distinguish between this and the memorial service we attended for Ralph Pinder-Wilson last month at the high Catholic church of Our Lady of Victories. K went up to take Communion - I am never sure if he does this out of genuine residual faith, or if it is because of his academic interest in the working of churches. Probably a bit of both.

After the service, they welcomed us to look around and take pictures, and go up to the gallery, to get a closer look at the capitals and organ (which had Egyptian-style papyrus designs on its pipes). Several members of the congregation came up to ask us more about Owen Jones and the history of the church. The layout of the church reminded me of the synagogue we had visited during Open House weekend last September, the New West End Synagogue in Bayswater, also High Victorian and decorated internally in a neo-Byzantine style, but from the 1870s - indicating how influential, but also avant-garde, Wild's church at Streatham had been.

After milling and looking for half an hour or so, we went off to lunch at Brazas on Tulse Hill, which was really an excuse for K and I to try a relatively recently-opened local restaurant which several of our neighbours have raved to us about. It was excellent - very much a place to be returned to many times. This even led to talk of celebrating Owen Jones's birthday every year, or founding a gastronomic society in his honour!

After a somewhat lazy lunch, the others, very commitedly, set off to travel to Kensal Green Cemetery, one of London's great Victorian cemeteries, where Owen Jones and other Victorian worthies of his generation are buried. We wandered gently home, having taken absolutely no form of transport other than our feet all day. How wonderful!

This week in 1809 was a vintage week for births - Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln were both born on Wednesday! Some other names came up over lunch, but the only one I can remember now is Edgar Allen Poe. Sadly Owen Jones is not quite so renowned these days, and is not getting any of the press coverage that Darwin is getting (the BBC are doing a whole season on him!). We're doing our bit though, in our own little way. Happy Birthday Mr Jones!

Hundreds attend global warming protest...

My sister just emailed me this. I think it's excellent!!


The day it snowed already has an official name - people are referring to it as "Snow Monday"!

Is there more to come?

What a gorgeous almost-spring-like day we’ve had in London today! And how completely different from the weather this time last week – when we were walking home from the deli in Clapham, where we had gone to stock up on cheeses (yum!), and the snow started blizzarding on us (and stupidly I had decided against bringing my woolly hat…)! The snow of not-quite a week ago is almost all gone now – the weather has been so cold that it took ages for it to start to melt, and then really only on the roads and busy streets, where there was car and foot traffic (and eventually buses again), but in the residential side streets, where apparently enough grit could not be spared to stop them icing over, the snow compacted under the trudge of commuters’ feet into a glacial layer of ice that creaked under your feet until you slipped off it. Our Tescos shop could not be delivered this week because of the snow, so we had to actually go to the supermarket on Wednesday night (something we try to avoid as much as possible!) and I ended up having to walk down the middle of the road to get there, stepping into empty car-parking spaces to avoid being run over by the cars creeping up behind me. The pavement was just too icy. It made me think of other countries which are actually used to snowfall where people unquestioningly do the public service of sweeping the snow off the pavement in front of their house. Someone told me something ridiculous – that people were actually being advised not to grit outside the front of their houses, because if someone were to slip anyway, they could sue you for not gritting enough! So you should just not grit at all! Can this really be true?? If so, what a disgustingly arse-about-face litigious Health-And-Safety-obsessed society we live in now!

Eventually on Thursday it started to rain a bit, and the ice and snow started to dissolve. It has not completely gone though – there are frequent mounds of compacted snow sprouting up from the grass, remnants of snow-people. A very enterprising person, or group of people (since the snowfall really seemed to pull people together in a 'spirit of the Blitz' kind of way, as I heard someone on the radio describe it) built a little snow-family on the communal lawn in between the two blocks of our flats, right where I pass in and out every day. It had a snow-mother, a snow-father and a snow-child, really well done, with clothes, and eyes, and red ribbon to make smiling faces! During the week, as they have melted, they have increasingly leaned in towards each other in a rather touching way, as if they were huddling together against the warmth. Today they are just three little different-sized mounds sprinkled with carrots. Whoever built them has obviously reclaimed the scarves and ear-muffs that originally decorated them.

I did notice that some daffodil shoots have started to appear, and some snowdrops are out. Seeing snowdrops always reminds me of the touching memory that my grandfather always picked my grandmother the first snowdrop of the spring. We planted some snowdrops on their grave when we buried my grandmother in December 2007, and when I saw the snowdrops on the lawn outside the Ritzy in Brixton, I wondered if they were growing down in Swansea. We’ll all be going down there on a family trip at the end of the month, so if they are growing, I hope they’ll still be out for us to see.

In honour of the almost-spring-like feeling of the world emerging from the snow, I bought some daffodils from the florist outside Brixton station. Daffodils are certainly one of my favourite flowers - they’re so bright and optimistic against the winter! They’re blooming nicely in the window of our sitting room. But is there more to come? The snow has gradually been moving across the rest of the UK, and heavy snow showers are apparently forecast for London again next Tuesday. It’s strange to think that while we’re in the grip of this ‘big freeze’, temperatures are soaring to inconceivable heights in Australia (47ºC!) and people are dying in forest fires. I am relieved to read on Bev and James’s blog that they’re ok, but it must feel far too close for comfort. And with such extreme weather conditions on either side of the world, how an anyone deny that global warming is a fact??

Right, that’s the week’s catharsis out of the way. Now to start thinking about the lecture I have to give in ten days’ time!

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow!

As you might have heard, it is snowing in England! We have had more snowfall in the last two days than London has seen for about 20 years! I certainly don't remember seeing anything like this for a good long time - if ever! Normally you get a few damp flakes that just don't settle, or do and almost immediately turn into annoying sludge. Not this time! We've had more than 15 cm of snowfall in London, and it only stopped actually snowing around 4pm this afternoon. Public transport was in complete meltdown - there were no train services into London, all the buses were suspended, which was amazing, and every single line on the tube was suspended or suffering from severe delays. Except, for once, the Victoria line! K decided to work at home today since he was supposed to be going for a meeting at the Tower of London, but all routes he would normally take to get there were not operating. I had no such excuse, though I had to wait a long while for a District line train at Victoria, and South Kensington station was closed due to staff shortages, so I had to walk through the sludge from Gloucester Road - and my feet were utterly soaking and freezing cold by the time I got to work!

I was expecting some visiting researchers from the Louvre who were flying in from Paris this morning - and though Radio 4 was full of reports of airports and runways closed, I had to proceed as if all was ok, and see if they turned up. Of course they didn't - all flights from Paris to London were cancelled all day today - but one half of the team travelled over on the Eurostar, and arrived without incident - early in fact! So it was a good job I was there, so they could proceed as planned with the samples of glaze and body fabric they had come to remove from a late 14th-/early 15th-century storage jar made in Islamic Spain, which are going to be analysed by thermoluminescence as part of a research project the Louvre are conducting on an object in their own collection. The analysis results will hopefully indicate place and date of manufacture, as well as tell us about the ingredients used in making the glaze. The XRF was going to happen tomorrow and this equipment was due to come over on the plane - it has been an utter nightmare to organise, and colleagues and I have been working on setting this up for over a month. And then, a little bit of snow, and all is cancelled. Sigh. At least I have an unexpected free day tomorrow - if I can get into work again! As our trusted Mayor said on BBC London news this evening, "It's the right kind of snow, just the wrong kind of quantity"!!

So, here is a little photo-diary of my journey to work in the snow today:







It was at this point that the batteries finally died on my camera, and I simultaneously dropped my lens cap to be irrevocably lost inside a flurry of snow. So that brought an end to my photography fun for the day. K went for a walk in Brockwell Park - perhaps trudge would be more apt - and took this photo on his iPhone:


There is something rather sepia and Victorian about it. He said some people were building an igloo!!! Even the youths from the local gangs were out building snowmen!

There's a wonderfully apposite article here about "London's day of innocence" - how the great smoke reverted to a giant playground for a day, as credit crunch blues were forgotten!

Other cities - Winnipeg, say, Moscow or Bergen - cope with snow, subdue it and go to work through impeccably gritted roads. London isn't like that: it rarely copes with anything; these days, it masters nothing. Equipped with a loveably tragi-comic public transport system, our capital fails on a daily basis. The poor suckers who live here get - at best - inured to this hopelessness. Yesterday London was so hobbled by the snow that the situation was even worse than hopeless: usually six million Londoners get to work by bus; yesterday there were no buses; the tube was even more spectacularly unreliable than usual... Just for a day Londoners got hit by something special.

And good old Guardian, always on the lookout for the nation's wellbeing - they printed these endlessly useful and delightfully practical instructions on "How to make the perfect snowball"!

Pinch Punch First of the Month

I always beat K to this – it takes him a while to wake up to what day it is, let alone what date! Anyway, welcome February! I say this with a huge sigh of relief that the intense January I have just had is over. Not that, in the end, I think February will necessarily be any better, just different, and it’s a state of mind. Phew, January was suddenly ridiculously busy, a sudden avalanche of work… Partly self-inflicted as I have crammed into January and February all the appointments and other deadlines I could not attend to during my three-month absence at the end of last year, and the upcoming absence when I go and write my book… But it’s not just me – I get the feeling that everyone feels under pressure at the moment. This is going to be a busy year… There’s a certain element of nervous panic, too, as I near the moment (2 March - coincidentally my father's birthday) when I have to start writing the book – one day a week to research it has never been enough, and over the last few weeks I have fallen back on my default ‘imminent deadline’ mode, which means I am reading, reading, reading at every spare moment, on the tube, after work, all weekend… We have reverted to our old habit of going to the British Library on Saturdays, and spent a very companionable day yesterday in the Manuscripts Reading Room – K looking at actual manuscripts (describing ceremonial at Henry VIII’s court), while I took a break from Spain and worked on making some final amendments to my article on ivories decorated with the technique of incrustation, which took me to Egypt and Sicily, and was rather satisfying, since – though I say it myself – I think it is a good article.

So, picture of the month from our 2009 calendar:

Grand staircase, Crystal Palace © KR

This is one of the pictures that Kent took of the Grand Staircase at what was once the Crystal Palace in Sydenham, when we went up there for our memorable walk on New Year’s Day last year. Walking around the ruins of Crystal Palace gives you a curious sensation of discovering the vestiges of some ancient Egyptian temple in the middle of rural north Europe – the concrete sphinxes of the old Egyptian Court now nestle in amongst deciduous trees and a cover of fallen, rotting leaves – and nothing is that old anyway, it all dates from the 1850s, and was only ruined in the great fire of 1936. But that sense of dislocation from time and place makes it a magical site to visit.

--------------------------------

I have decided that a blog – this blog anyway – is a bit like a scrapbook. I collect things for it during the week and when I have a little bit of time, sometimes at the weekend, I sit down and stick them all in. What is weird about it is that it is sort of public and private at the same time – public, because it is stuck (or written) on the aether, private because you have absolutely no idea if anyone is looking at it… Is there anyone out there?

Here are some of the things I have collected this week (apart from another cold):

- a new pair of glasses:


It’s about three years since I had an eye test, and the last time I did an intensive period of writing (writing up my PhD) without having had my eyes tested for a while, I developed migraines – the Hildegard of Bingen flashing lights variety, though I am not aware of having received any divine visions. I figured I didn’t want them to develop again while I am writing my book in the spring, and it did turn out I needed a new prescription. It is also a long time since I had new frames – I was too impoverished, and kept reusing old ones – so this time I treated myself to a new look. They’re still tortoiseshell, but lighter, and I decided to go square. They’re also Giorgio Armani!

- some Iraqi coins:


On Monday we took some Iraqi curators out for lunch, who are spending a few months undertaking placements at the British Museum, under the auspices of the World Collections Programme. It was wonderful to see how much more upbeat they are than previous visitors we have had over the last few years – they actually said that for the first time they feel full of hope for the future. One of them was from Basra – his family was forcibly resettled to the north of Iraq by Saddam Hussein but they have recently gone back. Amazingly, they seemed to be really happy with the way the British army has handled the situation in Basra. It was possible to laugh about all the fish options on the menu – “I eat fish all the time in Basra [it’s a port city], I don’t want to eat fish in London”! One of them was a specialist in Islamic coins. After expressing disappointment that we didn’t have any Islamic coins on display (we have very few in the collection), he dug into his wallet and gave both of us a set of the new Iraqi coins. They seemed really proud of them.

- Carnivàle:


We have been Lovefilm members for years – it’s brilliant, films or TV series you missed or are nostalgic about or were too young ever to see come right through your front door and you can watch them in your own good time! I had once read something about a new HBO series, Carnivàle – I am not sure if it was even aired in the UK – so I put it on our Lovefilm list and the first disc arrived some time ago, but we were a bit unsure (not to mention too busy in the evenings), so we only just got round to watching it last week. We’ve had the second disc since then, and I’m completely hooked. K is not so sure. But it’s just Twin Peaks-y enough (and not just because of the presence of Michael J. Anderson) to keep me interested. Only two episodes per disc though, which is very annoying! (our Lovefilm deal is only four discs a month… which, realistically, is quite enough)

- more Obama hagiography (with thanks to Karen):

This is really touching – I only watched it once, but the chorus has been haunting me all week.

Rosa sat, so Martin could walk - Martin walked,
So Barack could run - Barack ran,
He ran and he won,
So that all our children could fly.

What is great about all the coverage of Obama at the moment, is the utter absence of cynicism – it’s so refreshing to just really believe in someone for a change. Have you noticed how Jon Stewart is like an innocent young child idolising a hero at the moment? Of course I know there are cynics out there – I am just choosing to ignore them.