Read this book!!

I have decided to write separate thoughts in separate postings. I think this probably makes it easier for you to read them (if indeed you are doing so), as well as, later on, for me or you to find and link to them. So, some extra musings for today:

I have been meaning to share something with you for about a week now. There is a ‘gallery’ space by South Kensington tube station, which used to be a frame shop, but now stands pretty much empty, and is occasionally taken over by a temporary shop or an art installation. It is currently hosting a company called Stuff and Nonsense, which I can’t find online, but if you can’t get down to South Ken before 26 March when their ‘residency’ ends, I’d try a more concerted effort at Google than I have done. Basically, they sell designer lights. These lights are made out of stuffed animals. And not just any stuffed animals – stuffed vermin. The lighting they have on display in the window I have to walk past every day to get to work features stuffed pigeons, and I am pretty sure that at the beginning of the week there was a stuffed squirrel clutching a light, frozen in the act of scampering up the wall. This must have sold, as I don’t remember seeing it again. It’s a clever idea, and a very modern (postmodern?) take on taxidermy, but who in their right mind actually wants one of these lights in their home? The thought of it makes my flesh creep!

Something else I need to share: a fantastic graphic novel which I picked up yesterday afternoon in Clapham Books – a pleasant discovery in itself. It’s The Museum Vaults: Excerpts from the Journal of an Expert, by Marc-Antoine Mathieu (see the picture at the head of this posting), and no description can do it justice. It is one of a series of four graphic novels being produced in collaboration with the Louvre, which is a fantastic idea. There’s a really insightful interview with the artist here, about this and his other work, and one of the quotes describes it as “a kind of parallel world in which he examines, not the work [on display in the Louvre], but the discourse around art.”

The conceit is that “the Expert” (I love it!) has come to evaluate the contents of the subbasement levels of a museum so grand and old that its very name has been forgotten. He and his assistant spend fifty years exploring subbasement level after subbasement level, and their encounters with the various department supervisors they find along the way are existentialist musings on the very nature of art, in a simultaneously deeply comic and extremely profound way – the Flooded Gallery (“I was a guard before … now I’m a ferrywoman”), the Repository for Moulds (“All these moulds constitute the entire memory of the Museum’s statuary art”), the Fragments Room (perhaps my personal favourite, given my predilection for broken bits of pot…), the Restoration Workshop, where a minor paint touch-up is depicted as a precise surgical operation, the Frame Depot (of which there are some previews here)…

The idea that has stayed with me the longest is the chapter entitled “The Icon”, wherein The Expert muses upon all the slightly different variations which The Master created of You-Can-Guess-Which-Painting, which are subtly rotated so that no visitor ever has the same experience of the painting – “the interpretations are accordingly divergent and give rise to opinions, debates, interpretations and exegesis that, each time, only thicken the mystery a little bit more. Through this ploy, The Master wanted to represent the very mystery of representation” – though this mystery is threatened by the invention of “a magic box, a sort of camera obscura that can freeze the real and can reproduce it”, which will ensnare the painting and cause “the cold eye of exactitude [to] imprison the smile on exhibition that day”… Ahhh, just brilliant. I sat on Clapham Common in the sun and read this while eating my lunch, but I will have to read it again and again. What a wonderful way to give myself some well-earned time off from writing my own book!!

Have bike, will travel to work!

About 18 months ago, I bought my colleague Helen’s bike (for a ridiculously cheap price, I must say) – she had moved into a new flat and couldn’t carry it upstairs to store it inside, and there was nowhere else safe to park it (one of the problems of being a cyclist in London – we were living with K’s bike as a third housemate for about two years). It took me ages, and rather a lot of money (to be recouped by the money not spent on inordinately expensive tube fares), to get the appropriate gear together, and into a habit of regularly cycling to work, which eventually I did, and was starting to feel great from the exercise and the time outdoors, though the one drawback of not commuting (minor, in the great scheme of having a heathier lifestyle) was having so much less time for reading. The gods were clearly conspiring to get me cycling – every time I felt too lazy to bother, there would be some annoying problem on the tube (which happens about once a week – recently anyway), which made me curse myself for not having cycled that day…

Since we could not live with two bikes in the flat (and K’s bike had been much more expensive than mine!), I had to content myself with locking it up outside our block of flats, at the end of the row of garages, in the one place where there was any space to store bikes. The problem with this little area for leaving bikes is that there is nothing to lock them to – one of our neighbours who cycles everywhere has managed to colonise the only immovable object (an iron bracket in the wall) and she makes her bike look as old and unattractive as possible, which seems to work. A petition a few years to get the managing agents to erect a bike shed had come to nought, and this same neighbour has been trying for about the last ten years to get them to do something about bike storage, even to just put in some simple hoops to lock the bikes to – but they’re crap so they have ignored everyone.

So, no matter how many locks you have on your bike (and I had two), it matters not if someone drives up in a van in the middle of the night and just lifts it. Which is what happened last summer. I always knew that one morning on my way to work, I would round the corner and the bike just wouldn’t be there. And when it eventually happened, I did a double-take and wondered if actually I’d left it at work the evening before … but then I noticed that the tarpaulin lying rejected on the ground was mine, and there was a decided emptiness about the area. The caretaker was wandering about and I told him, “I think my bike’s been stolen” – “That makes five”, he said. Some bastards had just helped themselves. And there was nothing to stop them – at least now a security gate has just finally been installed in the gaping hole at the side of our building which just allowed anyone (including the local prostitutes and their clients, unfortunately) to just wander in off Brixton Hill. But trying to get our managing agents to do anything requires immense patience on the part of our residents’ association (of which K is now treasurer – ha ha!) and waiting a length of time comparable to the geological timescale.

I thought I might get a folding bike, which we could store inside, and arranged to try a friend’s Brompton for a couple of weeks, which are now extremely popular in London – but also really expensive, and I didn’t like the ride at all. There was also no way the tiny little wheels were going to get me up the big hill between Battersea and Clapham that is on my route, and which I had just managed to conquer when my bike was stolen! I wanted a real bike, but given how much I was going to be away at the end of last year, I decided not to think too much about replacing the bike, since there was no change to the problem of storage, the security gate still being a twinkle in everyone’s eye at that point. In the New Year, though, I decided I couldn’t wait for the managing agents to get their act together, and I just had to get a new bike and cross the storage bridge when we came to it. We now have a Ride2Work scheme, which another colleague had used, so I thought I would look into that. A bit like paying for an annual season ticket, your company pays up-front, and you pay them back by “salary sacrifice” (such an odd expression). I worked out the bike I wanted, which accessories I needed to replace and which new ones I wanted, and that my monthly payments for a year would come to £28.99!! In comparison with roughly £80 a month that I spend on travelling by tube! So I decided to go for it! Unfortunately it took Evans Cycles so long to process my voucher, that by the time it arrived I was too busy thinking about clearing my decks and writing my book to spend the time going back over my list and getting order numbers from their website and phoning in my order… But this week I finally took a couple of hours to do all that, and yesterday I collected my bike!

The picture’s at the top of this posting. It looks even grander than that in real life! It has an amazingly comfortable seat, and even has front-wheel suspension which makes London pot-holes a lot easier to cope with! I took it for a practice ride around Clapham Common yesterday afternoon, which was teeming with people since we’ve had a week of beautiful, sunny, spring weather. For old times’ sake, on the way home, I stopped to buy cheese at the deli on Abbeville Road, a really lovely shop- and café-lined street in Clapham, where we often used to cycle together, occasionally getting there in time for the Farmers’ Market – a habit we will have to get back into now that we both have functioning bikes again.

And thanks to another neighbour (one of the things I love about living in this block of flats is that you know your neighbours and they’re generally a really supportive bunch of people… more on that anon), our bike storage problem has been solved – completely unexpectedly – by her offering us part-use of her garage, which she doesn’t use to store all that much, and pretty much stands empty. So a happy ending all round! And tomorrow I will start cycling to work again! I just hope the gorgeous weather holds up…

Podgrams

That's just a great word - trust Stephen Fry to come up with that! I just wanted to share this with you - I've been listening to his Podgrams on and off since he started them, gosh, a year ago. Last night, while cooking (risotto - and very nice it was too!), I finally got round to listening to his most recent one (from last December), about language - the joys of language, and how sad it is that the enjoyment of language should be considered somehow elitist. Among many many other things. That doesn't even begin to do it justice. The risotto was done and I just had to keep standing in the kitchen listening until it was finished. I swear, I actually felt more intelligent afterwards. How wonderful to have the intellect massaged so sweetly by Stephen's dulcet tones and thoughts! I am going to have to listen to it again and again to get the full benefit - if only this blog could be so aspirational and inspiring! I loved his phrase, "I linguify for a living!" And the following passage struck home with me, having been someone who grew up on the Classics, and even has a degree in it, would you believe. On language being a defining part of who you are, he says:

In my case, it's in part a classical ruin, inherited boulders of Tacitus and Cicero bleaching in the sun, along with grass-overrun elements of Thucydides and Aeschylus, not because I was a Classical scholar, but because I was taught by Classical scholars, and grew up on poets, dramatists, and novelists who knew the Classics as intimately as most people of my generation know the Beatles and the Stones. Without knowing it therefore, heroic Ciceronian clausulae and elaborate Tacitan litotes can always be found in the English of people like me.

Brief book update: Chapter 1 exists in an almost-complete draft, which I have decided to put to one side for a while before sending it off to my readers (I will have to have another sneak peak at the end of the week to reassure myself it's good enough to go), and this afternoon I have made a halting start to Chapter 2. Writing Chapter 1 was not just a process of getting the information down, but of understanding quite what this book is, and refining what I am going to be able to say in it: i.e. not, as I naively had in the back of my mind since the beginning, the last word survey text on Islamic Arts from Spain, which simultaneously meets a general and an academic audience. The format is just not long enough for that. I have had to cut out swathes of interesting thoughts, because fundamentally we have nothing in the collection that makes them relevant to the book. These thoughts - and probably even these texts - will get used elsewhere, but Chapter 1 was also a process of learning the art of compromise. Soon I will have to become proficient at the art of condensing thoughts into as few words as possible. So it's not an entirely positive feeling at this point, and makes starting on Chapter 2 harder than it should be. Anyway, tomorrow I am just going to dive in anywhere and get writing.

The Wonderful World of Byzantium

Last Sunday, I finally went to the Byzantium exhibition, the next ‘culture’ that the Royal Academy has decided to colonise. Wow. It is only on for a few more weeks (typical of me to leave it almost to the end), and I think everyone in London is trying to make sure they see it before it closes. It was packed! I got there as lunchtime was just starting, so during the two hours I was there, I experienced a comparative lull while everyone else went off to ingest some energy to get them through it. I walked straight through to the end of the show, and worked my way backwards – in my experience Royal Academy exhibitions are usually so huge that you are just too tired to take in the last few rooms, so I wanted to see what was there, and then focus on what I was really interested in – though unfortunately this meant that by the time I had got back to the beginning, lunchtime was over, and the first two galleries were jammed again. I felt so sorry for the several people I saw trying to go round in wheelchairs – one guy was particularly vocal about his frustration at not being able to see anything. I don’t think the height of the cases or position of the labels was very DDA compliant, so I really don’t know what he was able to see.

It managed to live up to all my usual gripes about Royal Academy exhibitions – terrible lighting, how can they get away with it? Objects are in darkness, or lit so that you can’t avoid throwing your shadow over them, or so over-lit that the surface of the object just reflects it back to you, and you can’t see any of the detail. Also, small objects with immensely delicate and detailed decoration, positioned so far back in the case that you can’t see a thing. I really must get into the habit of bringing a torch and a magnifier with me to RA exhibitions. They also seem to have developed a new habit of giving only (what we call in the trade) ‘tombstone’ information on the labels (which were in a new kind of reflective silver material which meant that there was no chance of seeing anything if you tried to read them at a sharp angle through the glass because of the long queue of people clustering round one object…), which gives you absolutely no understanding at all of the complex iconography of Byzantine art, where things were found or how they survived or even really why they were in the show at all. ‘Interpretation’ is never the RA’s strong suit, and they seem to have done away with it completely here. If you want to learn anything, you have to get the audio guide, which I am too much of a snob to do, since I hate the way it turns exhibition-goers into automata, looking only at what the machine tells you to. Or you buy the catalogue, which I had already decided to do before I even arrived. A nice traditional publication of the exhibition as it was, with the added bonus of essays by people who know what they’re talking about. And information about the objects – hurrah!

But what objects! It was amazing to see all the real celebrities of Byzantine ivory carving in one room – and such a treat to be able to see their backs! I have, however, seen more icons than I needed to, but I had no idea how large some of them were! Something I thought was really interesting was that the large collection of 6th-century icons in the Monastery of St Catherine on Mount Sinai, in Egypt, was actually saved from iconoclasm by having been absorbed into the Islamic Empire some hundred years before the decree of iconoclasm (730-845) – so now it has one of the best preserved sets of icons from the whole Byzantine world. Nowadays, The One Thing That Everyone Knows About Islamic Art is that there is no figural representation (which is true only in religious contexts, and even then it is not universally enforced), and it seems to be entirely forgotten that other religions, not least Christianity, had their aniconic phases too. I thought the way they covered to and fro of artistic influences with Islam was a bit tokenistic (and they certainly focused on the ‘to’, but there was most definitely ‘fro’ as well, as evidenced by some of the ivories, and the palmette scroll designs in the repoussé silver adornments on many of the icons), and much more could have been made of this important topic – but perhaps that’s actually a subject for a whole exhibition in itself.

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You will be pleased to hear that my book writing is progressing well – I am nearly at the end of the second week of my research leave, though I am not quite on the verge of achieving my target of having a complete finished draft of Chapter 1 by tomorrow. This is because I ended up spending most of the first week gradually moving my accumulated piles of papers and notes and useful books from home into my new office in the Research Department at work, then sorting and filing these. Well, “it’s an essential part of the process”, as I was pleased to hear one of my new colleagues say to me! (And my desk at home has not been so clear for years!)

I decided not to be too worried about trying to over-achieve in the first few days, and I was giving a lecture two days in – to the Friends of Dulwich Picture Gallery (close to home at least) – so I just let the creative juices start to flow in their own time. Towards the end, Nick, one of my Asian Department colleagues, told me something very important, which immediately turned into my mantra – “Don’t get it right, get it written” (with thanks to his cousin). Now, as you know I don’t have a problem with getting things written, as evidenced by the length of my blog postings – whether they actually say anything interesting is another matter (and one I won’t invite you to comment on!). So, I am very nearly there with a complete first draft of Chapter 1 (which covers the early medieval period in the art history of Islamic Spain, focusing mainly on the 10th to 13th centuries) – trouble is, it’s already twice as long as the chapter is supposed to be. Turns out there are quite a lot of interesting things to say about the rather neglected (in art historical terms) Berber dynasties, the Almoravids and Almohads. So, I’m going to be spending a fair bit of time doing some serious polishing and refining, which is going to take me at least into the middle of next week, by which point I will be behind my entirely unrealistic work schedule. Sigh.

Two things that were keeping me going last week:

1) Catching up on the last seven episodes of Season 4 of Battlestar Galactica (not the original!) – with sincere thanks to Az for his episode pirating skills. Only three more episodes to go – ever!

2) Scandinavian crime fiction, in the form of The Ice Princess, by Camilla Läckberg (with thanks to Lesley for the loan). As people who owned the Complete Works of Henning Mankell before anyone else in the UK had heard of him (and, by the way, weren’t the Kenneth Branagh TV adaptations good? Hope he does more!), and now that Scandinavian crime writing is The New Black, it was with mild disdain mingled with curiosity that I embarked on this new discovery – though helped along by Lesley’s recommendation. I enjoyed it – it certainly helped to take my mind off my own stresses, at the usual two pages a night before falling asleep… But I am not sure it lived up to the hyperbole of the back cover (“a masterclass in Scandinavian crime writing” – er, no), and I thought that most of the subsidiary characters were rather stereotyped. There’s an insightful write-up on it at this blog – I actually though the “obligatory big knicker homage to Bridget Jones” was pretty disappointing. The main protagonist is someone who makes her career writing literary biographies of important Swedish women – and her “favourite literary heroine” is Bridget Jones?? Come on!

Still, I would read more books by Camilla Läckberg (especially if I don’t have to buy them!). Since then I’ve been splashing about in that strange myre you sometimes find yourself in when you finish a book and don’t have anything immediately lined up. I temporarily returned to The Gormenghast Trilogy, since I still have the third book (Titus Alone) to go. But though I love it, it is just too heavy-going for me at the moment – plus now that Titus is out of Gormenghast, discovering the big wide Modernist world, with new weird characters verging on the science fiction, have turned it into a very different, less escapist, reading experience. I will return to it another time.

So, I stopped off at the wonderful Bookthrift on my way to the tube station this evening, and picked up Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo – more Scandinavian crime fiction (it might just see me all the way through my own book project!), but I have read a number of plaudits for this guy, who died tragically young just after submitting the manuscripts of three crime novels to his publishers. I’ve enjoyed the few pages I managed to sneak-read on the tube on the way home, so I’ll let you know.

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Last thought for the day, then I’ll leave you in peace: have you noticed how the ad campaigns from our youth are gradually returning? And especially the characters that used to populate these ads? First it was Fido Dido returning to the 7Up campaign – now the bunny from Cadbury’s caramel has returned! (Remember – said in seductively hushed tones, with a slight hint of a West Country burr – “caaaaadbury’s caaaaaaramel”... Indulge in some nostalgia here). I have to admit, I didn’t think that chocolate bar was even around any more – guess that’s the point. But it makes me wonder – has the advertising world run out of ideas? Or is it just that the advertising world is now staffed by guys of our generation, nostalgic for the ad campaigns of our youth? Well, I am just glad the Wispa came back.

Fixing the Family Graves

Last weekend we travelled down to Swansea for a weekend away with my parents and sister. This was timed to celebrate my father’s birthday on 2nd March, and meant we were there for St David’s Day (he is called David because he was born the day after the Welsh National Day), and though I must have been there then as a child, I don’t remember, and it was quite an experience to get caught up in such outpourings of Welshness! That particular weekend it was made all the more exuberant because of the fact that Wales had been playing France on the Friday night in the Rugby Six Nations tournament – as soon as we crossed the Severn Bridge into Wales, the roads were eerily quiet and empty, and it felt like we were driving through the small hours, rather than 9 o’clock in the evening. Unfortunately Wales lost, and this gave rise to an awful lot of hanging and slow shaking of heads over the course of the weekend – and to shared moments between strangers that must have sounded rather enigmatic to anyone listening in who was not aware of the defeat in this game which is more of a religion than a sport in Wales.

It was tough getting out of London. As soon as I got to Brixton tube station, they were closing it because of signal failure at Stockwell – something that happens all too frequently while they work on the seemingly-endless “improvement works” (notice how these have been rebranded recently, so we can’t complain about disruption). I missed one bus, then piled onto another that came along soon after, and instead of going straight through to Victoria as I had initially planned, I made the split-second decision to get off at Stockwell and connect to the Victoria Line from there – I am sure this is what the signs up at Brixton had advised… As I was crossing the road, something felt not quite right, and I suddenly realised I had left our suitcase on the bus! With K’s wide angle lens in it and my father’s birthday present!! (my sister and I had his grandfather’s gold pocket watch refurbished – not exactly something you want to lose…) I ran like a fool back to the bus which had just pulled away from the stop but I banged on the door and yelled at the driver – “My suitcase! I’ve left my suitcase!” Fortunately, he opened the doors (they’re usually real sticklers about only opening doors at stops) and drove onto the next stop where I got off, having safely retrieved the suitcase. Phew. But then it turned out the Victoria line was suspended from Stockwell as well, and I can’t even remember now what I worked out I needed to do to get to my parents’, but of course by the time I did eventually get there (probably only about 20 minutes late in the end, having lingered in Wendell Park taking photos of crocuses wide open to soak up the sun) they weren’t quite ready to leave anyway. A quick stop at B&Q to pick up some provisions (we were also on a mission to clean and fix up the family graves) and then off to collect K at Richmond, which led us into horribly heavy traffic and took about another hour from there to get onto the motorway. But then we were off and, as always, heading out of London felt so refreshingly like sloughing off an old, tired skin…

We arrived late at our B&B – the very oddly-named Christmas Pie, but extremely cosy and welcoming, more like staying as a guest in someone’s house than somewhere you pay for. Excellent breakfasts too, and huge! Which was just as well as we had heavy work to do!

There are several family graves at Oystermouth Cemetery, in the wonderfully-named Mumbles, where my father grew up, once more of a sleepy fishing and holiday village than an outpost of Swansea, but this is where we spent most of our time (apologies to my father for saying this, but Swansea City proper does not have all that much to recommend it – though he’ll be the first to admit that the Council ruined it during reconstruction efforts after the extensive damage it suffered during the Second World War). Mumbles is lovely, on the other hand. Since no-one in the family really lives in or near Swansea any more (though that’s not strictly true) the family plots have got a bit run-down and overgrown, and on one of them, two of the corner stones had come loose, and my father wanted to fix them up before them went missing.

It was nice to see that the snowdrops had come out on our grandparents’ grave (significance of this mentioned in an earlier posting)


and that the new lettering had now been added to the headstone, so that my grandmother was finally there in her own right.


We set about picking out the fallen leaves and twigs and just generally tidying and cleaning and sprucing everything up.


Later on we went and spent a small fortune on daffodils to arrange on the top of the graves.

The real construction work was done on an older tomb higher up on the slopes of the cemetery, where two marble corner blocks had come loose, and K and my father mixed up some cement to stick them back on.


My father had once done a brick-laying course, and it turns out he can mix some good cement.


The Rev. Samuel Owen would be pleased to have his grave back in one piece, I am sure.


Oystermouth is a really lovely, atmospheric Victorian cemetery (it opened in 1883), which sweeps up the side of a steep hillside, and is surrounded by woodland. It has this wonderful avenue of large old cypress trees right down the middle of it.


Somewhat amusingly (at least, it’s amusing that such awards exist), it was shortlisted for the Cemetery of the Year Award in 2007. Quite a number of the old graves have been left to fall into ruin,


- the onus really is on the families to keep them up, and my father is just keen that, while we’re hale and able, we do what we can with ours. It really is a special thing to have a physical place where you can go and think about and remember your relatives – many of the people buried in these graves died before my time, or I only remember them very hazily from my childhood, but now my grandfather and grandmother are there, and though they’re in our thoughts and memories all the time, it really makes a difference to have a physical place to be with them. It reminded me of being in Syria during the Eid holidays in early December last year – after attending the Eid prayers at the local mosque, it is traditional for families to go and visit the family graves and to hang on them a wreath of an aromatic plant, a bit like rosemary for remembrance. I had two days off from the exhibition during Eid, and had arranged an overnight out-of-town trip to Krak des Chevaliers, Hama and Apamea (all of which was absolutely fantastic), but the driver I hired asked if we could meet an hour later than arranged (not by me!), to give him time to visit the graves. Then, as we were driving through northern Syria, all the cemeteries we passed were garlanded with these fresh green wreaths. It felt really special. I can’t really imagine what it would be like if your relatives’ ashes had just been scattered somewhere and you didn’t have an actual place to be with them. My grandmother was cremated (one of the most meaningful cremations I’ve ever been to) but I am glad her ashes were put in a casket and buried with my grandfather.

Having fulfilled our family duty, we went off for a big lunch of fish and chips, which surprisingly took a long time to find for seaside town, though we eventually ended up at Covelli’s, not far from where we started out. I can still feel the crispness of the batter on my haddock! It was wonderful! My mother and sister went off for a cup of tea (and secret birthday-card shopping) in Treasure – a shop which really cannot be missed during a visit to Mumbles (this was the shop window in honour of the rugby/St David’s Day - there was going to be a prize-giving the next day for the best dressed window, but we left before finding out who won...)


while K, my father and I went and clambered around Oystermouth Castle,


a rather impressive castle, dating from the 12th to 14th centuries, though sadly you can’t go inside since it is in too ruinous a state – my father says he has never known it open while he was growing up here, and doesn’t think his mother had ever been inside either. Some good views of the bay though from up here.


Swansea harbour has a very impressive tidal drop of about a mile.


We were so tired by the end of the day that we were almost falling asleep over our rather tasty dinner at Papa Sancho’s, home of the intriguing stonegrill cooking phenomenon, as well as being founded by, guess what, a former Welsh rugby star. Must have been all that sea air.

On St David’s day, the sun was shining, and we were back in Mumbles for a walk along the beach – though the tide was in when we started, so we didn’t actually get onto the beach until the very end. Le tout Mumbles was out doing the same thing, and it was all very jolly, with everyone sporting their daffodils (normally I get a load of funny looks if I go about with my daffodil in London), and the occasional leek.


We laughed at the interesting names on some of the boats

(this one's called 'Kangaroo Poo')

and saw the lifeboat coming back in from what must have been an exercise – it was really interesting to see how it gets hauled back in up the launching ramp, on what must be enormous chains.



My father can remember the boom going off in the bay to alert the lifeboatmen on duty that they needed to get their arses down to the boathouse. He said everyone else just stopped when they heard it.

We made our way to the end of Mumbles pier, built in 1898.


My father used to play here as a child, and apparently my great-grandmother and other relatives of her generation came here for entertainment. Nowadays there is a rather Disney-fied Welsh dragon slide


and some of those silly pictures with cut-out heads for your family to pose in for the cameras!


But it does have some rather fine Victorian ironwork.


We got down on the shingle and looked for nice stones – my mother found an enormous one to use as a doorstop, which no-one else offered to carry!


A last look at the Lighthouse (which dates from 1794)


and we wandered back along the bay to Mumbles, where the farmers’ market and “dragon festival” in honour of St David’s Day had really kicked off!

(and I always thought the Welsh were a short race...)

After some rather fine lamb burgers,


and some purchases of fine local produce, not to mention some free Welsh-cakes, we headed off to Joe’s ice cream parlour, home of legendary Swansea ice cream since the 1920s. My father remembers the owner, Joe Cascarini, always doing his accounts in the corner of the shop. This is a Swansea legend apparently – as is the ice cream, and I must say it was possibly the smoothest, creamiest vanilla ice cream I’ve ever tasted. I had a rather fine strawberry sundae.


We gave my father his birthday present,


which he seemed very chuffed with, and I was glad again for not having lost it on the Number 2 bus!! (Since then, my mother has bought him a chain to go with it from Ebay)

We stopped off briefly in Swansea city centre, for K to take photos of Swansea castle, another fine structure of which much less is standing than at Oystermouth – in fact, I had absolutely no idea there was another castle in Swansea! My folks went off to explore the Welsh Tartan shop (!) while I busied myself with taking photos of the fountain in the main square, where the water had been dyed red for rugby/St David’s Day. There were posters up everywhere warning people that “this dye could stain” (really?)! It was rather macabre actually, though compelling, and I couldn’t stop taking photos, just as most of the kids around couldn’t stop dipping their hands in, just to see if they came out red…


And then we set off back to London. It was good going until we got within spitting distance, and then the traffic almost came to a grinding halt – what you might expect, coming back into the Big Smoke at the end of the weekend, but much much worse than anyone had remembered it, and it took us an hour to get a couple of miles. The cause of the problem was revealed to be a major two-car collision at the junction with Chiswick. Rather horrible really – it looked as if it might have been fatal. So we didn’t get home quite as early as planned, but my parents managed to return the Streetcar we had hired, just in the nick of time. (That’s a great service by the way, and it has done us proud, not least on trips to Swansea – the first time being a car emergency in order to make it to my grandmother’s funeral on time. A bit of ring composition, here, perhaps?)

Damascus - and Waddesdon

A quick note to share these beautiful photographs, taken by my colleague, who co-ordinated the ceramics exhibition I worked on and lived with in Damascus for five weeks at the end of last year - she has captured some really serene and beautiful moments in the life of that great and ancient city, as well as some of the other places in Syria which she managed to get away to visit during her rather stress-packed extended stay there. Check them out.

And while I am on the subject of photos - this now being March (where does the time go??), it is time to share with you our calendar image for this month.

Waddesdon Manor, Buckinghamshire © KR

This rather grand façade is the back of Waddesdon Manor, the extremely over-the-top home of the Rothschild family, built between 1874 and 1889 to house both them and their important art collection, and which we visited at Easter last year. Among the objects in this collection are an ivory casket painted with designs in the Islamic style, made in 12th-century Sicily, and a fine lustre flower pot from 15th-century Valencia. I had suggested a trip with the sneaky hope that I might get to see either of these objects, but sadly the gallery displaying highlights of the collection was closed, or we did not find it - though by that point I didn't care too much, since it was supposed to be a day off from work! The house and its furnishings were that weird kind of construction that seems to have been so popular among the late 19th-century super rich - I encountered many more examples among the 'Robber Barons' of New York, when I was in that august city last autumn, and was searching for traces of the fever for the 'Moorish' style that was so popular among international wealthy elites. The Waddesdon collection is largely French and 18th-century - not at all to our taste - encased within a glamorous house that also purports to be from that period, but is late 19th-century. It's a little bit weird, but exceedingly opulent, and we decided just to give ourselves up to the aesthetic experience, which was refreshingly unrelated to anything we know or really care about!

Getting there by public transport was a challenge - we had quite a long walk from and to the station, and were not very impressed with all the other visitors who swept past us up the long drive in their 4x4s, and not a single person stopped to offer us a lift...! The walk was pleasant, though on the way back a snow blizzard started up, which we were not at all prepared for - but it was beautiful, and the thing I remember with most fondness about the day.

More soon - when I have time to write - about our very pleasant family weekend away in Swansea. It's my father's birthday today! A good omen, I think, given that today is also the day I have moved into an office of my own to begin the work of writing my book, which can no longer be ignored - and the day my sister starts a new job! And a beautiful warm sunny day as well, so it almost felt like spring - a true new beginning?