Just another day at the beach...

As usual, I have been struggling to find time to catch up with this blog. The longer I leave it, the more things that come along that I want to blog about, which makes for interminably long posts…! But today I am going to limit myself to blogging about the fun I have had celebrating my birthday, and a few rambled digressions…

It was my birthday on the 19th. I’m now 35. Feels like a landmark. As K encouragingly put it, I'm halfway to 70!

We both took the day off work, and brilliantly, it was an absolutely gorgeous summer day - a mini heatwave, according to the BBC - and by far the best day to be out and about. I highly recommend mid-week days off! It makes you feel like you've worked two two-day weeks! We started our fun-packed and busy day by getting the 9.36 train to Brighton where we ambled around taking in the trendy, buzzy seaside town – and, rather unexpectedly, a fine neo-Nasrid building which is now the Brighton Dome concert hall and city museum - until finding the perfect spot for the morning's third cup of coffee, in the Pavilion Gardens.

The tower block in the background rather spoiled the effect of the turrets!

This guy busking on the French horn while standing on stilts was rather fun!


The point was to go to the Brighton Pavilion, where neither of us had ever been, and which - though I knew it was one of the earliest examples of Orientalist architecture in Britain - we knew very little about. It turned out to be a royal palace built by the Prince of Wales, later George IV, son of Mad King George, when he set up home in the society town of Brighton to escape from the pressures of being heir apparent. It also turns out to have the best interior decorative scheme in the Chinoiserie style that was so popular in the late 18th century! No photos inside, so I can't show you, but it was absolutely awe-inspiring in parts! The banqueting room and ballroom were particularly luxurious and overwhelming, including an amazing chandelier above the dining table, which hung from the claws of an enormous dragon. The whole thing weighed a ton and some of the king’s guests were scared to sit underneath it! I could sympathise! But visiting the pavilion was a real and memorable treat, and just enough outside of both of our areas of work to be a mini-holiday.

If it weren't for the grass, would you believe you were in Brighton?!

We were not the only people who had the bright idea of a trip to the seaside on a lovely English summer day - and Brighton beach was a far cry from the quiet idyll of Harris, or the delightfully relaxing day we spent at Bexhill at Easter... Despite the online warnings against doing so, we decided to get fish and chips from one of the stalls on the beach, so we could sit and look at the sea view, which we did, and they were not great quality, but the principle of the thing needed to be observed...!


It was crazily crowded, because of the school holidays, which naively we had not taken into account - but we got some good paddling in (no Kent method was attempted, though it was tempting apparently...) before heading back up the hill to the station... Alas, it was all too brief - we'll definitely go back and have a more extended wander round the interesting-looking shops and cafés, especially in the old warren-like part of town known as The Lanes - but we had to be at the National Theatre for 5, since we'd booked to go on a Backstage Tour! We were a bit early so we walked from Embankment and wandered along the South Bank in the sunshine, and I just took random photos of some of the things I love most about that part of London, since I don't often just wander around my haunts with a camera...

The view – in the foreground is Waterloo Bridge, which we often go over on the 59 bus travelling to and from Brixton, and from the top deck you get the best view in London: St Paul’s, the Gherkin and the City in one direction, the Houses of Parliament and the London Eye in the other, and on both sides the curl of the Thames. Just fab.

I have always loved the fact that this one part of the South Bank is completely given over to graffiti and skateboarders – and the fact that all the youngsters who hang out looking oh-so-cool and rebellious have no sense of being completely institutionalised by an area where these otherwise rather anti-social activities are perfectly allowed, even encouraged!

Of course the best thing is the second hand book market under the vast curve of the arch of Waterloo Bridge – I love browsing here. On my birthday, we scraped together our last few pound coins to buy The Blind Rider by Juan Goytisolo, which apparently he has said will be his last novel. I really like his writing (Cinema Eden is just fantastic) and I wanted to buy a book there on my birthday as a memento of that lovely day…

What we were less pleased to discover is that the area in front of the BFI – which used to be the best place to go for a drink in that part of London, and had wonderful long wooden bench tables which you had to share with your fellow drinkers, in a truly socialist South Bank experience – has been poshed up and turned into a terraza for fine pre-film or -theatre dining. The grungey BFI bar of old is no longer. We were quite disappointed to see that.

The Backstage Tour was fun and interesting, though perhaps would have been more so had we gone during the working day (ours started at 5.15), when more people would have been behind the scenes, in the art studio and prop stores, actually doing things. Also having been heavily involved in the backstage side of theatre when we were at university, I wanted to know more about where the stage manager sat, how they prepared for a show, gave their cues, how the lighting design worked etc etc… But we got to see the sets for the plays were weren’t going to see that night, including All’s Well That Ends Well, whose set looked great – a bit like A Nightmare Before Christmas in massive 3D…

It made me want to go and see it – though we have seen quite a lot of Shakespeare already this year: we had a trip to As You Like It at the Globe a month ago, with Jane for her birthday, which was brilliant fun as always at the Globe, and nice as well since it was a text I had studied for A-level and seen staged by friends as the Oriel College summer show. The second Shakespeare we have seen this year was The Merchant of Venice, an outdoor production in the Bishop’s Garden at Hereford, when we went down a few weeks ago for the 3 Choirs Festival – K’s father was local festival administrator this year (a bad case of ‘recycling deputy headmasters’, as he amusingly put it). We had a really lovely long weekend – in all these years of going to Hereford, where my grandparents also lived when they were alive, I had never been to 3 Choirs, but the night I arrived on the train (K went down for the whole week), we went off to the Cathedral for a performance of Bach’s violin sonatas by Rachel Podger. It was absolutely, stunningly beautiful. The acoustics of the unaccompanied violin in one of the most beautiful medieval cathedrals in England. And Rachel Podger was an absolute virtuoso – somehow she managed to make two layers of completely different sounds come out of her strings at the same time. Wonderful.

Anyway, The Merchant of Venice was good too – I don't think I had ever seen it performed. There was a nicely down-to-earth amateurish quality about the set but the acting was excellent (this company, The Festival Players, specialises in giving opportunities to up-and-coming young actors). It was an all-male production, which really makes you understand just how funny all the cross-dressing and mistaken identity of Shakespeare’s plays would have been in his own day.



But back to my birthday and the National Theatre. That night we went to see Phèdre, by Jean Racine, a 17th-century French playwright who drew heavily on the classical tragedies – in this case, the Seneca play Phaedra, which I had studied for finals (and, typically, could not remember all that much about…). This was in a translation by Ted Hughes, and I really loved the Hughesian poetry of it – especially since Racine’s original text was also self-consciously literary – but I think K is right in his assessment that it did not make for a very dramatic play. On top of that, we didn’t think the quality of the acting was very good – and this was the great Helen Mirren in the title role, and the leading man of the moment, Dominic Cooper. It was also directed by Nicholas Hytner, the National Theatre director, so it should have been brilliant – but it wasn’t, sadly. The two supporting actors carried the show and their acting abilities really shone – Margaret Tyzack as the nurse, who had a really wonderful voice, and John Shrapnel as Hippolyte’s companion, especially in the scene where he has to report his gruesome death. And the set was magnificent, in true National Theatre style – and somehow the changing light on the glowing horizon really managed to capture the quality of the light in Greece… So it wasn’t all bad!!

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Last Saturday, the birthday celebrations continued. We went fruit picking with my parents and my sister, at Parkside Farm just outside Enfield. It was a brilliant day out! We had a picnic lunch to start with, and all brought enough for several picnics, so we had far too much food…

My father is here seen wearing his Terry Pratchett hat. When he was wearing this at home in Shepherd’s Bush recently, some of the local Aussies passed by, and one of them asked him – ‘Are you a real wizard?’ !!

Then we hit the fields!! We picked up a load of empty punnets and a cart which we trundled around behind us as we picked ever more and more fruit and vegetables and eventually completely filled it! I had decided I wanted to try making jam so everyone really got carried away on my behalf, especially with the berries – there is also something completely addictive about picking fruit! It was just so wonderful to be outside in the sun all afternoon (we have actually had several weeks of an actual summer here in England!!) – and a brilliant family thing to do. My sister and I have really fond memories of doing this with our grandparents in Herefordshire, and on that day there were loads of kids getting carried away in the bushes, as it were. Occasionally a loud cry would ring out – ‘I’ve just found the biggest raspberry in the whole world!’

Does anyone know what a ‘Himbo’ is??


My mother and my sister both pretending to be raspberries!

The farm had developed this ‘table-top’ system for growing their strawberries which meant you could pick away without having to bend down and break your back! Very civilised!

Some, ahem, ‘low-hanging fruit’, which we quickly picked! These strawberries - warmed by the sun - were so sweet and tasty!

Stained hands after blackberry picking (and some judicious munching)!

Our cart weighed down by our pickings!

K defeated by hunter-gathering!

We have been living off plums, sweetcorn, spinach, marrow, french beans and raspberries all week – the blackberries I have pureed and frozen, in preparation for making ice cream, though some of them I have baked with apples in a pie we are going to eat with my sister tonight; the raspberries and strawberries have been sorted, hulled, weighed and frozen, while I work out how on earth one makes jam…!

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After what seemed like an interminably long car ride from Enfield to Brixton – with all the punnets of fruit very carefully packed in the tiny boot of my sister’s (bright orange) Daewoo Matiz, we finished the day with a Victoria sponge birthday cake at home! I had made the sponges in the morning before setting out to the farm, and we filled it with strawberry jam bought from our lovely friendly deli on Abbeville Road, Jersey cream bought from the farm, and strawberries we had picked with our own fair hands! YUM!

They brought the candles!

It didn’t last long…!

Our Scottish Idyll

A week ago, we travelled back to London from the Outer Hebrides. It was a bit of a shock to the system, but we were so chilled out from our truly idyllic holiday that we were ready to cope with anything! I had never been up to the Western Isles of Scotland - where my grandmother's folks came from - but we so badly needed to get away from it all, that nothing seemed more appealing than renting a cottage in the middle of nowhere for a week (I wish it had been longer!) and doing nothing more intellectual than going for walks, looking at wildlife and visiting ancient standing stones... And it more than lived upto expectations! The weather was typically unsettled for a British summer, and on a couple of walks we got absolutely soaked to the skin - but we also had a couple of really gorgeous days. K even went swimming in the Atlantic!!

I have uploaded a larger selection of photos from the holiday to my Flickr site, which you can see here or by clicking on the thumbnails on the right of this page, but the following is an even more select and, as we might say in the museum business, 'interpreted' version of our idyllic holiday...

We flew to the Isle of Lewis on a teensy tiny plane from Edinburgh - it actually had propellers!

The Isle of Lewis is where the famous Lewis chessmen were found in the 19th century - over 90 Viking chess pieces made out of walrus ivory which are now divided between the British Museum and the National Museum of Scotland (my sister and I went and paid homage to them in Edinburgh during the few days we spent there before meeting up with K to fly to Lewis), and Stornoway airport - which is not much bigger than this room - has this fine wooden statue of one of the bishops sitting in the middle of the conveyer belt! There are other statues in the ferry terminal building, and near the site at Uig sands where they were found. We wanted to visit this site but didn't have time - a reason to go back!


We hired a car at Stornoway airport - not necessarily as easy as that sounds, since we arrived on a Sunday, and Sunday closing is strictly observed on Lewis and Harris. Front page news in The Stornoway Gazette the week we were there was the proposal to start running a Sunday ferry service to the island, and the fact that the ferry that was due to ply that route had broken down, clearly a sign of divine retribution. I'm going to blog about that separately - there were some excellent quotes. Anyway, my sister was our driver for the week - she'll hate me posting this photo!!


Sheep on the road were a major hazard! We would often veer round a blind corner and have to come to a screeching (er, well not quite!) stop because of sheep traffic! There were sheep everywhere!!


Most of the roads - certainly on the Isle of Harris - were single track, and there were passing places every few yards where two cars could pass each other. I think this photo perfectly encapsulates the pace of life and traffic conditions on Harris!


Actually so does this one. Sheep in the bus stop! I love it!


This was our cottage - on the eastern side of the Isle of Harris, in a village called Cluer, which is along the coastal stretch known as 'The Bays'. This is a series of little inlets, with houses perched to take in the amazing views which, on a clear day, stretched across the Minch to the Isle of Skye. The cottage was perfect, and we were so lucky to find it - the lady it belongs to was just starting out in the holiday cottage business. When we were looking back in February - remarkably organised for us, I thought at the time - every single cottage on Harris was already booked, more than a year in advance sometimes! Until someone recommended someone who recommended the owner of this cottage...


This photo was taken from the hill just behind our cottage - you can just see the roof and its lime-washed walls - but it shows the setting and the gorgeous wide open sky and sea-scape. This was also taken at about 11 o'clock at night - there was so much daylight up there, that it did not get truly dark until very late, and then only for a few hours. We went for a late evening walk, up the slope behind the cottage, to see the ruins of the traditional blackhouse where the family lived until the early 20th century, when many Hebrideans moved into 'modern' houses like our cottage, which was built in the 1920s.


This was taken around sunset - which we didn't really see from our side of the island - but it was a particularly clear evening, and you can see the rugged outline of Skye on the horizon. The sea inside the bays was always amazingly calm and flat - I think we worked out that Cluer meant 'shelter' in Gaelic, and we could see why. The only sound we could hear from our cottage was the gentle lapping of waves - and the occasional sheep. Sitting on the bench out front, looking out at the view, it was almost impossible to believe we were in the same part of the universe as London.


We tried to make the most of the view by having breakfast outside most days - in this case it was a gorgeous sunny day, but my sister has some good photos of K or I sitting on that bench in waterproofs and under umbrellas determinedly reading our books in front of the view... It wasn't often particularly cold, just annoyingly wet!


The sky was always amazing too - just how much of it there was, and how quickly it changed. I thought it was amazing how you could see the weather coming towards you across the water.


It was the kind of landscape that lent itself to panoramas and my sister and I (who have the same camera) discovered the panorama setting on our cameras - and never looked back! (though oddly mine all came out strangely purple)

Two panoramas taken near Arnol on Lewis, on a little walk we took after visiting the traditional blackhouse museum - the lone figure in the top photo is my sister, and K in the bottom photo.

I also loved the contrast of colours in the landscape, and how the colours endlessly changed from one day or one moment to the next. Also the physical contrasts in the landscape - from rugged mountain to stunning sandy beach, or grey metallic waves to deep blue loch. This view shows the summit of one of the mountains on the east of the island shrouded in cloud, and the yellow sands and turquoise waters of Scarista beach on the left.


We went for a memorable walk on the far side of that mountain - to the ruins of a 15th or 16th-century chapel (Rudh An Teampull), on a bleak promontory overlooking the sea. It was really blustery that day, as you can see from the gusting waves in this photo - and the blurs from raindrops on my lens...


This was the first walk on which we got completely soaked! Amazingly, though, the strength of the wind that day meant that my trousers were almost completely dry by the time we had walked back to the car...

K was in his chapel-photographing element!

Atmospheric view of the cloud-shrouded mountain out of the chapel's ruined window

We did also visit a church which still had its roof on, though it was no longer in use - the 15th-century church of St Clement's at Rodel, on the south-east tip of the Isle of Harris. There was some amazing funerary sculpture, including this interesting combination of a Celtic cross (there is a Celtic interlace pattern carved on the other side) with the Christian scene of crucifixion, carved in the amazingly hard but glisteningly crystalline local black rock.

Some of the tombs in the graveyard were overgrown with wild fuchsias - again, I love the colour contrast of the red flowers with the grey of the stone and the cloudy day. I first encountered wild fuchsia bushes when we drove around Ireland years ago pretending to be research assistants to our friend Jason who was doing his PhD fieldwork trip - there the hedgerows were overgrown with these beautiful flowers. I have a special connection with fuchsias, since I used to eat them when I was a child! I would pick them off the bushes growing in pots outside my grandparents' house! I guess it was the nectar in them that made them sweet - but there is also just something so inviting about the flowers' elegant beauty...

On one day we drove a loop around the Isle of Lewis, and took in a number of ancient sites, including the standing stone circles at Callanish - these are older than Stonehenge apparently. In fact, the rocks in this part of the Outer Hebrides are said to be the oldest in the world. At Callanish we got absolutely soaked to the skin again - I think you can see the rain falling in this photo of one of the smaller stone circles (there are three at this site):


After drying off over baked potatoes and coffee in the visitors' centre, we visited the main stone circle, which was awe-inspiringly looming and ancient.


Over millennia, the texture of the stones has weathered into amazing patterns.


We got back to Tarbert - the tiny town which is the capital and main ferry port of Harris - in time to attend the evening's entertainment at the Harris Hotel: a slide lecture by local historical boffin, Bill Lawson, interspersed with Gaelic songs, sung by a local school girl. It was really nice to see that the tradition of passing on the old songs through the generations is alive and well. Bill's talk that night was about St Kilda - the remotest of the Hebridean islands, 40 miles from the nearest land. Life there was extremely hard, and the island was finally abandoned in the 1930s, though there has been a military radar station there since the 1950s. Nowadays you can visit on a 12-hour round-trip 'seatrek', which is something we had intended to do - until we found out how expensive it was! We didn't get out to sea at all (not even to the Shiant Islands to see the world's oldest puffin!), but if we go back - and go back for longer - we will save up for it.


Bill talked about the island's history, geography and ecology - he had spent time there in the 1970s, when he used to catch a ride with a fishing boat, and spend a week there until they picked him up on their way back in. Those St Kildans were hard - I took this photo of one of his slides, a historic photo showing the men of the community in the late 19th century, I guess. They used to make their living by climbing at night and barefoot up the sheer rock face of precipitous sea stacks to hunt for seabirds, which formed their main diet, but they also sold the feathers to folks on the islands closer to the mainland, for stuffing pillows etc. Young men of the island wishing to get married had to demonstrate their ability to engage in this way of life - and therefore their ability to support a family - by climbing up a rock called the 'Mistress stone', one flat rock leaning precariously on another rock and over-hanging a sheer drop to the ocean! It was really an amazing community.

Of course the main industry on Harris is the production of tweed - one reason for all the sheep! - and I must admit that we got rather obsessed with tweed during our holiday. Tweed has a rather bad (not to mention hairy) reputation, and while you can certainly buy the stereotypical hairy herringbone cloth, most of it is very beautiful, high quality, warm and resilient fabric. A lot of the cloth being made today is dyed in very modern, bright colours, and some of the tailored jackets we saw for sale were really contemporary in their design - even some really gorgeous tweed-covered shoes, which alas I couldn't afford, though K and I did nearly bankrupt ourselves by buying bags, hats, and in his case, 5 metres of cloth to have made up in to a suit!

We visited this tweed warehouse in Tarbert,


where the bales were stored by colour - it was really beautiful, and there was a wonderful warm, woolly smell in there. You just wanted to roll up inside some of these bales and snuggle up!


This is the cloth that K bought for his suit - we just have to find him a tailor in London that is not too exorbitant!


The warehouse was run by the daughter of an elderly lady who still makes tweed out of her home in the hamlet of Plocrapol, close to Cluer along the wonderfully-named (and rather beautiful) Golden Road. We went to visit her a few days later. All the weavers on Harris voted at one point - I think in the 1960s - to maintain their traditional way of life and preserve the nature of these 'mills' as cottage industries, rather than having it mechanised in factories as was the proposal at the time. Thank goodness for that.

This is Mrs Campbell demonstrating how her 70-year-old loom works - she pushes the pedals with her feet, and said it was just like riding a bike! The shuttles made an amazing crashing noise as they shot back and forth along the warps...


Just outside the barn where her loom and small shop were was this amazing view of lochs and sea and mountains - why would you ever give that up to go into a factory building? - and twines of wool drying in the sun.

It seemed to me many times as if the inhabitants of Lewis and Harris had managed to resist all the bad bits of 20th-century modernisation and maintained a genuinely 'sustainable' lifestyle - the kind of lifestyle that we city-dwellers and environmentalists all want to get back to now. If only we had never given it up in the first place!


These were not our bikes, but we did encounter a lot of cyclists, valiantly touring round mountainous Harris - including one guy on a Brompton, the kind of folding bike you expect to see on a London street but not at the top of a mountain pass! I think we just burst out laughing at the poor man! As K pointed out, we'll probably hear about him on the news in a year or so - the guy who cycled from Land's End to John O'Groats on his city bike...

At this little cafe at Tarbert, I first experienced real Scottish smoked salmon, from the Salar Smokehouse on South Uist, just a few islands south of Harris so very locally sourced! And my god it was amazing!! Once you have tasted this, there is just no going back to that soggy pink stuff that comes in supermarket packets - this was rich and flaky with lots of body, just fantastic. We bought some in a local shop to bring back with us, and on our first night back in London had a lovely dinner with new potatoes and asparagus with lemony mayonaise dressing... Yu-um!!


But one of the true glories of Harris were the golden sandy beaches on its west coast. I mentioned K went swimming! This was the first occasion - the day had started lovely, but by the time we had made our slow, relaxed way to the beach at Luskentyre, it was early evening, and was starting to cloud over. We thought we would still go for a walk - this is my sister as a lone speck walking along the shore of this stunning beach -


then K decided he'd go for a swim anyway! This is him testing the water!


He changed and jumped in so quickly - before he changed his mind! - that he forgot to take off his glasses, and there were some awful few moments after he had splashed into the sea when they had fallen off and he was feeling around the bottom to try to find them... Thank goodness he did!

Our last day on Harris was thankfully gorgeous and sunny, so we ended the holiday very much on a high note. A very good tip from our neighbour at the house next to our rented cottage led us to Hushinish, at the end of a long road which meandered along the edge of West Loch Tarbert. Beautiful views culminating in another gorgeous sandy beach with almost no-one else on it!!


We took a picnic lunch, and just could not stop admiring the view!


Another panorama which captures it a bit better perhaps.


Having swum at Luskentyre on a cloudy blustery day, K couldn't not swim at Hushinish in such gorgeous weather - here he is demonstrating the 'Kent method' of getting wet, none of this fannying around with wading gradually further and further out and wetting yourself bit by bit in the cold cold sea...




He did say afterwards that his heart felt like it had stopped from the shock!!

We certainly did not want to leave our Scottish idyll the next morning, which dawned clear and bright - this was the view of Skye on that last morning:


It was everything we could have asked for in a holiday, and we felt so relaxed and refreshed from it, and amazingly did not get ill in the usual way of things! It was just so clean and clear up there, it felt like you couldn't possibly get ill! To acclimatise ourselves back to London, and to defray the usual sense of anti-climax that you feel on getting back from a lovely holiday in the middle of the afternoon, we stopped off en route at the handily located pub, The Dog House in Kennington, and had drinks with Cornelius!


Happy happy holidays!