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...