Catching up with the year...

I haven't blogged about our calendar images for months - the last posting seems to have been in June. I thought it was time to catch up with the year - since I think, I hope, I am finally starting to emerge from the myre of intense busy-ness of, erm, most of this year. But I saw a friend from Cairo the other day, and while we were catching up over a very fine lunch at Carluccio's, sitting outside in the blazing sunshine of last week's mini-Indian summer, I was musing on how I was hoping I was about to move into a less busy period, and she said - "You said that last year". Hmmm. Something not going right there. Anyway.

Chapel of St. Mary Magdalene, Ludlow Castle © KR

July: this is the gorgeous round Norman chapel in the centre of Ludlow Castle, which really is one of the most beautiful sets of castle ruins in all of England. We visited last summer on a day trip from Hereford when we went down for a few days to celebrate K's mother's 60th birthday and retirement. I sat inside here for quite some time admiring the architecture while waiting for K to take about a million photos of it and the rest of Ludlow Castle. We had a lovely wander around the town as well, which is really picturesque, with a lot of surviving timber-framed buildings, and now well-known as a foodie destination. It was on this trip that I conceived the idea of giving my parents a weekend at The Feathers to celebrate their 40th wedding anniversary this year, since this is where they spent their honeymoon. This is what we did, and they had a really lovely weekend, indulging in quite a lot of memory lane. At the end of August, we had a great party for them - there are photos here.

Roman Theatre, Bosra, Syria © MRO

August: Last November/December I spent five weeks in Syria, based in Damascus, looking after an exhibition of world ceramics from my museum's collections. This is one the big trips I took last autumn which was one of the reasons for setting up this blog, to keep family and friends updated, but there was just no time for that - too much to see and do! While working on the exhibition, I had Fridays off - the Muslim holy day, when the exhibition was closed - and I tried to make the most of my time by taking a few out-of-town trips. Living was cheap, so from my per diem I could afford to hire a car and a driver and travel in relative luxury - this meant that I didn't have to rely on the vagaries of bus timetables, and could definitely go there and back in one day without having to worry and exhaust myself.

One of these day trips was to Bosra, in the far south of Syria, a small town built on and around the ruins of an ancient settlement - first for the Nabataeans, and while most of the standing ruins and monuments are Roman, there are also fascinating medieval buildings integrated into the older Roman structures. They are built from this amazing black basalt, so have a very different feel from your usual Roman antiquities, but it glows a gorgeous warm colour in the late afternoon sun. I was particularly taken by the Roman theatre, which is one of the best preserved in the entire world - unfortunately the Roman remains in the Middle East are rather neglected by Classical archaeologists, but they would do well to spend some time studying them. Because one of my research interests is spolia and reuse, I found this theatre fascinating, since it was reused as a citadel by the Mamluks (who ruled in Egypt and Syria between 1250 and 1517), who carefully enclosed the theatre within fortifications, turning it into a smaller version of a Crusader castle like Krak des Chevaliers, with a perfectly preserved Roman theatre at its heart. This is a photo taken standing on the stage looking up through the ruins of the three-storey scaenae frons, which was originally fronted with white marble and highly decorative details, such as these capitals.

Boating lake, Central Park, New York © KR

September: Wow, there is something so calming and idyllic about this photo of the boating lake in Central Park, with the Manhattan skyline poking up behind the trees and reflected in the water. It is exactly a year ago that I left for my 6 week sojourn in the States - taking part in a curatorial exchange with the Metropolitan Museum. This time last year I was in California, having adventures on the Greyhound, which I really will blog about properly sometime soon! K came out for my last two weeks, and Becca came down to visit us from Illinois - it was fantastic to see her after so long. This photo was taken on a walk around Central Park with her - so it reminds me of friends, and the beauty of New York in the autumn, of how much I love New York, and also of the first time I went there with K, when we were taking another walk around this boating lake - along the tree-line on the far side of this photo - and completely by chance stumbled on a lakeside amateur production of Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor. We sat down on the grass and watched, and it was absolutely fantastic. We were reminded of it last year when we went to see the same play at the Globe with K's family - it was brilliant there as well, but there was something about the impromptu, informal nature of the New York production that has always stuck with us. Afterwards we wandered off towards the Bandstand, and accidentally caught a flamenco performance, just as the sun was going down. That was a good walk in the park!

Colonnaded street, Apamea, Syria © MRO

October: This rather misty photograph - which probably looks better if you look at it a bit bigger - was taken at Apamea, a two kilometre long Roman colonnaded street in the middle of nowhere in northwest Syria. At Eid, the exhibition was closed for two days, so I was able to take an overnight trip - again, travelling by hired car and driver - to Krak des Chevaliers, staying overnight in Hama, and coming back south via Apamea, and Ma'loula - a small town just outside Damascus which is famous for its early Christian monasteries, now important pilgrimage sites. The weather in the north was grey and misty and rainy - apparently everywhere else in Syria that weekend there were beautiful sunny blue skies! - so that I did not get much sense of the amazingly fertile landscape in that part of the country, and walking around Krak des Chevaliers was a little bit like having been transported to deepest France or something...

However, early the next day, walking along the endless colonnaded street at Apamea, I was the only person there apart from, I think, three other tourists who quickly disappeared into the mist, and some rather annoying guys on motorbikes trying to flog me 'authentic' Roman coins and finds - I ignored them. But it was just so beautiful and atmospheric, as the standing columns of this once busy market street emerged out of the mist - parts of it were so well-preserved that you could still make out the forms of the shops. These small cubicles are exactly how the shops in Middle Eastern souqs still are today, set back in the same way from the bustling walkways - visiting some of these places where traditional ways of life are still so strong really does give you a better sense of how people must have lived in the past.

So this is the photograph we will be looking at every day for the next month. Happy memories...

At the moment we haven't written a single thing onto the calendar for what we're doing this month. For a brief moment, I thought - perhaps we're not doing anything at all, all month - what bliss! A quick flick through the pages of my diary put paid to that notion. Better start filling in the calendar...

Rest in Peace

On Friday, we said goodbye to K's grandfather, Robert - on the day before what would have been his 96th birthday. It was a sad day, because we were all still in shock at his passing. He was bright as a button until right before the end, a wonderful, intelligent old man, who loved to stir up dinner-table discussions about world affairs, who lived on his own and was totally independent - he loved to cook his signature dish, wiener schnitzel, from a recipe he had found on the internet!

Just over a month ago, we were all together in Hereford for the 3 Choirs Festival - where these photos were taken, on a lovely sunny afternoon, in K's parents' garden, before we all went our separate ways. Two weeks later - on the August Bank Holiday Monday (we were out having dinner with friends, sitting out in another garden) - he fell and had to go into hospital for a half-hip replacement. He was due to go on holiday to Switzerland the next day with K's parents, and he insisted they go anyway. By the time they got back, he'd have had his op, and be ready for them to take him home. But the day after going into hospital he contracted a mild chest infection, which caused his pneumonia to come back, and by the time we had a chance to visit him after work on the Thursday, he was in quite a serious way - he looked tinier than ever, lying in bed with a nebuliser to keep him hydrated and comfortable.

We had a good visit - Robert asked me how my book was going, and I could tell him I was working on my first set of proofs. K could tell him about Royal Collections Studies, the course he was heading off to that weekend. But he was starting to get a bit confused between near and distant objects, and kept pushing his bedclothes on and off. The ward sister wanted to talk to K about the family's wishes about resuscitation, and all the way home on the train K was phoning his parents in Switzerland, and his uncle who was away on a residential course, advising them to come back, and filling in his aunt and his brother on Robert's condition. We sat out on the concourse at Paddington Station for about half an hour while he finished updating everyone. Everyone came back, and it is a good job they did, since he just faded away, dying on Sunday morning, with his son by his bedside.

K had managed to get back to see him on Saturday afteroon - I hadn't had the chance to go back, since my sister and I were going down to the Cotswolds for Maryam and Ollie's wedding near Tetbury that Saturday. I had a call from K's mother during the wedding barbeque on Sunday afternoon to let me know that Robert had gone peacefully that morning. The awful thing was that neither she nor I could get through to K - by now ensconced in Royal Collections Studies - and there were several hours when he didn't know his grandfather had died.

But it was as good a way as any to go - he would have hated losing his quality of life, gradually losing his marbles, which had been totally bright and sharp. He would have hated being looked after, having to go into a care home, or a granny flat at K's parents. All that we knew, but it was still hard for everyone to say goodbye when they weren't ready. Especially since next weekend, his younger grandson - K's brother - will be getting married. But now he joins his wife Betty, who he missed so much over the last few years.

There was a reception at The Bedford Arms, a pub in Chenies where, as K commented, we had never been together when he was alive. We sat outside as the sun came out and ate chocolate éclairs, of which there were far too many - Robert would not have approved! Afterwards, we walked them off by walking back to his flat in Little Chalfont, repeating a walk K and I had taken when we were there last Christmas, through woodland, surrounded by fields and gorgeous views - you would hardly believe you were only half an hour outside London. We had tea, talked about him some more, and then began the rather awkward task of identifying the things in his flat that we would like to have. It seemed tasteless, but K's mother and uncle have to embark on this completely practical task themselves now, and it was the first thing we could do to help. Robert and Betty liked to collect nice things, so they have some gorgeous pieces of furniture and lots of paintings and ceramics. I have no idea what we would do with half of the stuff K put on his list (which included two bookcases), but one feels certain things should stay in the family. And it also looks as if Robert's generosity is going to help us to be able to buy somewhere, possibly even somewhere bigger than we could have considered otherwise.

Thank you Robert and rest in peace. You will be missed.


We were exhausted by the end of the day - from general tiredness (K had been on the go non-stop during Royal Collections Studies - what he described as 'art history boot camp'!), plus all the emotion from the day. We went straight to bed, but of course that was the night that our obnoxious neighbours on Hayter Road decided to have another late-night party out in their garden. We refer to them as 'the bastards', though I can assure you that other, less affectionate words have been used. This has happened on and off throughout the summer - about 7 or 8 times by now. It almost makes you wish for bad weather.

Since our block runs parallel with Hayter Road, the rooms on that side of the building back onto the gardens of those houses - so there is always the odd night when you get disturbed by neighbours partying or sitting out late in their gardens. But this has been more than a one-off - earlier in the summer, it was happening every weekend. And since we sleep on that side of the building, we hear everything as loudly as if it were happening in our very bedroom - somehow the acoustics work that way. Even tightly-closed double-glazed windows (an unpleasant prospect on a hot night) and ear plugs do not allow one to sleep - or me anyway. K somehow manages to sleep through it all, with only the vaguest awareness of being disturbed.

The last time it happened, I finally called the council's noise control 'hotline'. They have a 'rapid response unit', but it took them an hour and a half to get round to us. Since I had called at 2am, it was getting to the point where the neighbours were chilling out a bit more - normally they go till about 4am. The council's 'noise service operators' (!) have to assess the noise level from within your flat, and of course - typically - by that time it was not too bad. But they went round and spoke to the neighbours anyway (by cycling down Hayter Road to and from work every day, I had worked out which was the offending house), which seems to have done some good, since it has been quiet for a couple of months. We reinforced it last time by writing them a letter and saying we would continue to report them to the council, and that they should be aware of the legal action that the council can take against them.

This time, however, I didn't bother. I just needed to get some sleep, and I couldn't face the prospect of staying up through the night, waiting for the noise control team to turn up. This weekend was the last chance I have had to work on the conference paper I am giving at SOAS on Friday, and I needed to get a good night's rest. So I took my pillow and a spare duvet and went and slept on the futon in our study. K was completely oblivious.

I told Kate Hoey to shut up

The thing was, I didn't know it was Kate Hoey, which I am sure added insult to injury.

For those who do not know, Kate Hoey is the MP for Vauxhall, which is in Lambeth, where we live. She was at a Town Hall meeting that we attended a couple of weeks back. K is now on the committee of our Residents' Association, and he and two other committee members had been nominated to speak on behalf of our block of flats at the meeting of the Planning Application Committee, in objection to a massive new development that Lambeth College, who occupy the neighbouring site to our block, are planning to build. This will be the same height as Brixton Hill Court, blocking out our light, quite a lot of the views of sky and trees that many flats see at the moment, as well as having an impact on our privacy, on light pollution spilling over from illuminated classrooms, and the noise from games and social activities in the garden and games area they are planning to put right on the other side of the low wall which separates us from them.

This is a view taken out of our window when it was snowing in February (I can't believe that was just this year!!). Lambeth College is the low building you can see to the right. Potentially this will be replaced by a building as high as the block on the left.

Our committee representatives were keen to stress that we are not against the redevelopment of the Lambeth College site, which seems inevitable - the buildings are old and inadequate and it is obvious that there needs to be better education provision in Brixton. But we were keen to make our point that the planning and design process has not properly taken into consideration the impact on our flats, and on the tight-knit community that has existed here since the block was built in 1936.

One of the great things about where we live, and perhaps about Brixton (or even London) more generally, is the expertise of the residents - so our reps were a professional solicitor; K who daily works with issues relating to architectural planning, especially the interplay of historic and modern buildings; and a retired thespian, ready to tug at the heart strings. To speak on our behalf, they all had to register their names with something called 'Democratic Services' - it seemed to me that anything that needs such a service doesn't seem very democratic, but there you go...

The committee called for a large delegation of residents to support them, and happily a good number of people turned up - which made the difference, because there were 3 planning applications on the agenda, and the Chair took a show of hands at the beginning to see who was there for what. We had the most supporters so our guys went first!

I must say it was an eye-opening experience - I'd never been in Lambeth Town Hall, which was fascinating in itself and I wanted to spend time just wandering around the building, which has a strange shape by virtue of occupying a corner spur between Brixton Hill and Acre Lane (there are some then-and-now photos here)... But I had never been to a Council meeting either, so that was interesting - utterly bureaucratic, puts you off getting into politics.

We didn't take to the Chair at all. He seemed intent on influencing the other committee members against having a site visit to Brixton Hill Court, which was the main outcome our representatives were asking for (a deferral of the decision on planning permission until they have properly assessed the implications for our site). When he asked a question after our 3 had given their presentations, he completely ignored the two of them who were obviously drawing on their professional expertise, and went straight for the retired thespian (a woman), whom he clearly perceived as someone less threatening to him than the other two. Happily, they both jumped in to back her up! Ha ha...

But the heroes of the evening were the two Tory Councillors - who would have thought that a bunch of Brixton residents would have come away praising Conservative politicians to high heaven!?! They were dead against the modernisation plans and very keen to press for a site visit, which will go ahead at the end of September. We were all so chuffed at the outcome that we went to the pub for a celebratory drink afterwards! How often do you go down to the pub with a whole bunch of your neighbours??

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So how does Kate Hoey come into all this, I hear you cry? Well, sitting behind us was a group of people who were clearly attending the meeting for one of the other points on the agenda. As soon as the Lambeth College presentation started, they started talking amongst themselves. It sounded like they were reading the agenda out to each other, so I turned around and told them this was currently being read out by the Planning Officer. The lady whom I now know was Kate Hoey said "This is something else". It seemed to me that that would be a reason for not talking over it. They stopped for a moment, then after a little started talking again - so I turned around and said, "I am sorry, we can't hear". "Sorry, sorry", old Kate said, and that was that for a few more minutes. Then they started talking again! I was pretty fed up by this point (our guys had started making their representations), so I turned around, gave them a look, and said sternly, "Do you think you could prepare your presentation outside??" This seemed to finally shut them up, and a bit later when another member of their party joined them, they did indeed go outside.

It was only afterwards, as we were walking to the pub, that one of our neighbours said, "Did you see Kate Hoey was there?" and then I realised who it was I had told to shut up! Thing was, absolutely everyone from BHC was pissed off at their inconsiderate talking, and chuffed that I had taken a stand. And this made me more pissed off with her! There we were, trying to exercise our democratic right to object to this new building development going ahead and making the lives of Brixton Hill Court residents a misery for ever more, and she - an elected Member of Parliament! - should have had more respect than anyone else there of that attempt to have our voices heard!

More unfortunately - as we left the meeting room after our agenda item was finished - I managed to slam the door in the face of the Principal of Lambeth College!! That was not deliberate...!