Happy Christmas

Photo © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2010

I have been inspired by the current V&A exhibition on Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes to use this wonderful stage backcloth from the Wedding Scene in The Firebird - designed by Natalia Goncharova in 1926 - as my Christmas image this year. Though it deserves to be seen much bigger than this (click on the image above for a bigger version), preferably in the flesh - I saw it today and even though I was prepared for it to be big, it was astonishing. At over 10 metres wide, it's the largest object in the V&A's entire collection. But beautiful, and somehow wintry and Russian and therefore appropriate for Christmas.

We're heading for Edinburgh on Christmas Eve, to spend Christmas and New Year with my sister, who moved there a few months ago. She is finally - and very happily! - living in the city she loves (she went to university there), has a job in the sector she has been training for and trying to break into - editing/publishing - and using her Arabic degree. And I am just happy to have the excuse to spend time in Edinburgh, having only been back there a couple of times since she left university.

We haven't made many plans to do much once we get there - over the last few days we have been focusing our thoughts on actually getting ourselves there, since last week the Arctic weather conditions which we've been suffering from in the UK this month returned. Many Christmas travellers have had their flights or trains cancelled, and the roads have been a nightmare. It seems to be improving now - touch wood - and one of my colleagues successfully made it to Edinburgh on the same train route we're taking tomorrow evening...

We'll be cooking our traditional braised duck recipe for Christmas lunch, then after that the only other thing we have planned is a visit to the new Scottish Parliament building later in the week. In between we'll probably go for drives in the Scottish countryside and visit castles and quaint pubs and watch M R James stories on DVD and read big fat books. Can't wait.

So all that remains is for me to wish you all a very Merry Christmas and all best wishes for an excellent New Year - may 2011 bring peace and happiness to you all!

East Window

Yesterday we went with my parents to the Family Carol Concert at St Martin-in-the-Fields. K and I used to go to concerts there quite often but we haven't been for ages - perhaps because the repertoire began to seem a bit repetitive. We certainly haven't been since the church unveiled its new refurbishment in April 2008 - already 18 months ago, and particularly remiss of us since my mother worked on that fundraising campaign. So, while I very much enjoyed the concert - sung by the London Concert Choir, with some really unusual, quite folkish songs sung by them, and the hit parade of traditional carols accompanied lustily by us - I spent quite a lot of time transfixed by the new East Window.

St Martin's is one of London's gorgeous Baroque churches, built in 1726 by the architect James Gibbs. It has a wonderful open and light interior, heightened by the recent restoration of its plasterwork decoration, and its clear glass windows. Its original windows were blown out by a bomb in the Second World War, and as part of the refurbishment the church has commissioned a really significant work of contemporary art. Artists were invited to create a work that "embodied light" and worked in harmony with the historic interior, that would "challenge preconceptions and stimulate debate", as well as encouraging reflection and contemplation. So no small task. But the winning design - by husband and wife artist and architect collaborators, Pip Horne and Shirazeh Houshiary - has really achieved this.

The stainless steel framework ripples outwards from an opaque ellipse that seems to pulse at the centre of the window. I have to say that the resemblance of the window's structure to the crucifixion is the last thing I noticed, perhaps because I am not fully alert to Christian symbolism; but of the surprisingly little information about it I've been able to find online, this seems to be the first thing that people comment on - apparently, following an uncharacteristically tepid remark by Jonathan Glancey in the Guardian about how it resembles a cross reflected in water. But the eye is drawn to the ellipse at the centre, whose oval form recalls one of the key forms of the Georgian architecture around it. All the panes in the window are lightly etched, evoking a motif from Houshiary's paintings apparently, and these etched flecks grow more concentrated the closer they come to the central oculus, so you realise there is a sort of aura around it, which represents the crown of thorns. Of course that means the heart of the window stands for Christ but there is something profoundly moving - intellectually and spiritually - about it being entirely non-figurative, non-representational. An icon for our postmodern world. And because we were there on a wintry late afternoon, we could watch the amazing transformation of the window as the sky grew dark outside...

(with apologies for the not very good iPhone images - plus, as you can see, there was a rather tall chap sitting in the row in front of me!)

As the sun goes down, the ellipse at the centre of the window glows - embodying light, as the commission invited, and a kind of mystical evocation of Christ as the light of the church, the star guiding mankind to Jerusalem at the time of his birth, all those meanings, as well as just a pan-religious symbolism of light for God. We couldn't figure out how this physically happens - is there something in the glass itself that glows, or is it subtly lit from somewhere? If the latter, then the source of this light is entirely invisible, which just adds to the mystery and the effect.

It was a highly controversial design apparently, though I can't find out online exactly why this was. Much of the commentary seems rather patronisingly to focus on the fact that Houshiary is 1) a woman (another Guardian article calls the window "gynaecological"!!) and 2) Iranian in origin: it is therefore exotic, imbued with the inspiration she draws in her art from the 13th-century Sufi mystic, Rumi, non-figurative because her art draws on Iranian artistic traditions - bla bla bla. She might be Iranian but does that mean she is Muslim? My mother couldn't remember but thought she might be Zoroastrian. Anyway, Houshiary trained and has lived and practised in England since 1974. Would she like to be labelled "exotic"?

This is a discussion that is quite current these days, with the growing debate over what "contemporary Islamic art" is, if it even exists. Most contemporary artists surely prefer to see themselves precisely as contemporary artists, practising in a globalised world without borders between artistic disciplines, rather than as "a contemporary artist from Iran" or wherever. Do such pigeon holes make Westerners feel more comfortable?

I was rather shocked to read the comment - posted by 'Highby' in response to the gynaecological Guardian article - that Houshiary "had simply applied the Iranian style. Means, no pictures of humans. Just graphical elements - lines. Arabesques. Geometrical forms". To start with, there seems to me nothing "simple" about this window. And goodness only knows what Highby thinks an arabesque is. But it also smacked of the attitude I often come across in discussions of the Islamic style in art made for Christians or Jews in medieval Spain - what has come to be called Mudéjar. For a long time, the attitude among art historians was (perhaps still is) that if an art work was in an Islamic style, it had to have been made by an Islamic artist or craftsman; there was absolutely no way that a medieval Christian or Jewish craftsman would find the Islamic style appealing and be influenced by it. This always struck me as illogical because why would a wealthy Christian patron spend money on building a church or a palace or commissioning a carpet or a geometric ceiling in an Islamic style if that isn't what they wanted in their material surroundings?

And precisely the same could be said of the St Martin's authorities who chose this window design, which is so profound and beautiful and seems to engage both mind and soul, and work on so many levels.

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Perhaps next year we'll go to the candlelit evening carol concert - the 'family concert', of course, attracts families, mainly parents and grandparents with very young children, who don't much fancy sitting still and quietly through an hour's worth of concert and don't know any of the carols (apart from 'Away in a Manger') so can't join in. There was a particularly grizzly child in the row behind us, and a general low hum of children's restlessness all around us. Still it was fun and put us in the Christmas spirit. In fact with the recent Big Chill and the fact that we have booked our train tickets to Edinburgh to visit my sister for Christmas and New Year, we've been feeling cosy and wintry for a few weeks now.

This was my sister's little car at the beginning of the week:

Almost as much snow as there is car!

The snow has pretty much all thawed now. It happened quickly yesterday. Walking to meet K at the pub on Friday evening, I was slipping and sliding over compressed snow all along St Matthew's Road, but the next morning we woke up to the sound of dripping outside the bedroom window - the sun had come back and it was a little bit rainy. Not before time - I fell down the escalators at Brixton station the other day. I had my walking boots on but it was so slippy on the escalators that there was nothing to grip onto and I couldn't get up again. I floundered for a moment until someone helped me up - I never saw who, just a voice behind me that said, 'Up you get'. My thanks to that good Samaritan.

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I'm making stock and, while I write this, wonderful smells keep wafting up from downstairs. I'm using the carcass of the lemony roast chicken we made a few weekends ago (I froze it in the meantime!) when Gareth was supposed to come round for a long overdue dinner and catch-up, but poor him, his grandmother died and he spent the weekend looking after his grandfather and helping with funeral arrangements... I like making stock: it seems like a good wintry make-do-and-mend thing to do, and a good way to use up old bunches of herbs and random bits of celery and other veggies languishing in the bottom of the fridge. We're planning to use some of this new batch of stock in the rabbit stew we'll be making in a couple of weekends' time - Cornelius and Giles are coming to share it with us. Maybe Gareth will be able to make it over too.

Snow blanket

Photo taken by Nasa's Terra satellite on 2 December 2010, captured by the University of Dundee satellite receiving station, courtesy of the BBC

We seem to be finishing the year as we started it - covered in snow. But will it be a white Christmas??

Brixton brunch

The American mid-term elections have made me realise that it is already two years since I had my mini-sabbatical at the Metropolitan Museum - six weeks in New York just as the weather was changing to autumn and the trees were turning gold in Central Park. How fantastic that was. Though I don't think, in the euphoria surrounding Obama's election, we could ever have predicted how badly things would go for him, and how disappointing his premiership would become. Still, he's not God.

Today we had brunch with friends and this brought back really strongly memories of another autumnal brunch two years ago in New York, with Rebecca who came down from Illinois to visit for a few days. So fantastic to see her after so long, but terrible that we haven't really been in touch since then. I remember vividly that it was the day of the New York Marathon. We went along to a brunch place on the Upper West Side which had been highly recommended as a New York institution - Sarabeth's, that was it. You can't reserve for Sunday brunch so you have to go there and queue and put your name down for a table, and you can't have a table for 4 if there are only 3 of you queuing. So we were supposed to be meeting Lindsay - who was also on sabbatical in New York at the time - but she was late, because she'd been watching the marathon, so we had to put ourselves down for a table for 3. While we waited for the table to be ready we went across the street to have an emergency coffee in an unfriendly little place where a TV was showing Paula Ridley winning the Marathon just a few blocks away...

I can't remember what we ate at Sarabeth's but it was packed with New Yorkers having brunch and had a great atmosphere. Afterwards we wandered over to Central Park and through the dregs of marathon-runners sporting medals and those space-age cloaks they give you for warmth. We found a fleamarket and started to look around, and discovered that it was a really good one, with great craft stalls, and picked up quite a few things. I got a coaster made from an old map of New York, which showed the exact street that my New York apartment was on - East 87th Street, the building was actually called The Gotham!! - and K picked up some cufflinks made from old typewriter keys. He still wears these, and the coaster is on our study bookshelves, where we put our teapot.

All these memories came back today when we went along to the Ritzy to meet Ruby and Jesse and baby Ivy, and Teresa and Dan - all local Brixton friends and neighbours - for brunch. How lovely! After a scrumptious breakfast (eggs benedict - my current favourite!) K and I decided to wander through Brixton, since we needed to buy some olive oil. It seems in recent weeks some of the market stalls have started opening on a Sunday, so there is still a bit of buzz even though Brixton is generally very subdued on a Sunday. We wandered into part of the covered market we hadn't been into for years - Brixton Village - and discovered not only that quite a number of places were open, but also that it has been completely transformed!! It is now full of lovely little eating places, which all look packed with atmosphere and nice design, and I am sure all do variously delicious food. I would have been happy sitting down to brunch at any one of them. It felt like a mixture between being in a Parisian passage, or somewhere in East London which is a bit more comfortable with being self-consciously trendy than Brixton is yet. Actually it felt like being in New York!

Perhaps it was the fact that it was a Sunday, meaning that all the more usual Brixton market stalls were closed up for the week, but it made me feel slightly sad for the passing of the Brixton Market identity, which is not about trendy foody joints but about the kind of food that real people need to buy day to day. What's wonderful about the Brixton Market foodstalls is that they cater to the ethnically diverse Brixton population, so plantain and salted fish heads and ginormous sacks of rice are as ubiquitous as basic fruit and veg. I felt as if that identity was being a bit streamlined, to make way for the trendy coffee and deli places. But, if that's what needs to happen for Brixton Market to survive at all, then so be it. And thankfully not one of these new places was a chain, all were highly individual in their look and the type of food they were serving. I guess I'll just need to go back on a Saturday and hopefully be reassured by how the two aspects of this new Brixton Market identity are working symbiotically together.

Spanish conversation

Life - which is to say, work - has rather got in the way of blogging over the last couple of months. Since getting back to work after my long summer break, it seems busier than ever, with more to be done by fewer people, and an air of uncertainty underlying everything, with cuts cuts cuts the only thing being discussed - in the media and in people's daily lives. "Keep calm and carry on" seems a useful motto, as always. That resolution - of getting my work/life balance under better control - has not so far materialised.

I had a nice trip to Granada last week, to attend the meeting of a collaborative research project with the Alhambra which we're now engaged in. The weather was gorgeous - 23°C on Sunday! - but cold in the mornings and evenings, or if you stepped into the shade. It was an intense course in Spanish conversation, which did me a lot of good. I had that experience which I have always admired in friends for whom English is not their first language - like when Silvia and Rosa came here for dinner at the start of October, two Italians researching aspects of Italian-Islamic artistic encounter whom I wanted to introduce to each other. Of course we all spoke English, but when I stepped out of the room, and came back in a few minutes later, they were still speaking English to each other. Or when, in Berlin in January, I went out for dinner with some German colleagues from the Islamic museum, who were all still conversing in English when I got back from a trip to the loo. In this case, I was in Granada with a Spanish colleague from work, and a French colleague from the Louvre whom I know well, and with both of them I normally speak English - but because the lingua franca of our project meetings was Spanish, we continued to speak Spanish at the end of the day when out for dinner, and when I bumped into the French colleague, Sophie, on Sunday morning, having a coffee in a bar on the Plaza Nueva, we conversed in Spanish, because it felt odd to switch to English. How funny.

An interesting trip, as well, for understanding something about the internal politics of Spanish academia - sad, though, that in a city as small as Granada, with so many important groups of people who are experts in their own ways in local Islamic cultural history, that they should all be competing with each other, rather than working together to form a powerhouse of academic study in this area. They share information with us, as outsiders, but not with each other. It was good, though, to understand for the first time that I am not the only one who feels the tyranny of a certain couple, who seem to want to control what anyone anywhere says about Nasrid art history, by pillorying anyone who dares to express a theory different from one of theirs. Good, also, to understand that there are people within Granada who do not believe that their work is gospel any more. It gives me renewed hope for the new generation of upcoming Spanish scholars in the Islamic field, as well as a sense of reassurance that if one of this couple slates my book in a review - which I feel is fairly likely, especially since the Spanish translation is about to be launched - that not many people will pay them much attention.

There is not much other news, or what there is, is too boring to go into. I am giving a lecture tomorrow evening - the first in a while - so my time and thoughts over the last few days have been focused on that. It is on my book, a sort of promotional event which I had to organise for myself, since my publishers aren't doing anything. Compared to the publishers of the Spanish edition who have just invited me to participate in a launch event in Spain in the New Year! Anyway. I've been collecting book sightings - it's been spotted in the bookshops at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and the American University in Cairo. It was in the Alhambra bookshops, and will hopefully be more prominently placed when the Spanish translation is out. (And a nice little plug for that came out recently in Granada Hoy, though with quite a few mistakes!)

But the best book-related anecdote so far is that a work colleague took a copy to present as a gift to the Sultan of Sharjah on a recent business trip, only to be told, "I've already got that! My daughter gave it to me!" So the Sultan of Sharjah has a copy of my book! The best book-related comment I've had is from the great professor of Islamic art, Robert Hillenbrand - chatting to him after his recent Islamic Art Circle lecture, someone asked us what was the book we were talking about, and Robert said - "Islamic Arts from Spain. You'd think, all the old chestnuts... But there is not a chestnut in sight!" I took that as high praise indeed.

The clocks went back this morning so now I have that strange feeling of my body-clock being out of kilter with what the clock on the wall says. Now begins the winter.

It's a crime

I haven't blogged for a goodly while - I'm sorry about that, and I will catch up with you soon. For the moment I wanted to share with you what I considered to be an amusing/appropriate shelving of a particular book on the third shelf down, captured in the WH Smiths at Heathrow airport last week... (Another delayed flight on the way to Spain, but more about that anon)

Three nights in the Sublime Porte

as the Venetians used to call Istanbul...

View over the Bosphorus towards the Yeni Cami (New Mosque)

I had the great fortune to be invited to join the RCA History of Design MA course trip to Istanbul earlier this week - they had booked to go in April, but due to the Icelandic volcano had to reschedule for now, which meant that some of the students could no longer come on the trip, though it was all paid for, so they had some extra places. I wasn't going to pass up the chance for a free trip to Istanbul, even if I did have to take annual leave!

The only time I have been before was, I think, 18 or so years ago, in a former life, when I was a Classicist - Richard and I went to do the British School at Athens Summer School, which was fantastic though I only vaguely remember it, and afterwards we took a bus to Istanbul, via a short stopover in Thessaloniki. Richard promptly got food poisoning (some dodgy prawns in a restaurant overlooking the Bosphorus) and I spent most of the 3 days we were there wandering around on my own, but not wanting to go too far afield since I was young and this was my first experience of the 'exotic' Middle East. Thinking about that on this trip, in light of all the other places I have travelled to since, which actually are in the Middle East, this former self seemed terribly naive. Nevertheless I had vivid memories of having visited Topkapi, and the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Arts - it may even have been this trip that solidified my interest in Islamic Art, who knows.

So it was a great opportunity to go back, albeit for another fleeting visit, as an Islamic art historian who actually knew a little bit about what she was looking at. Though I tried to impress on my colleagues, the course tutors, that Ottoman architecture was not my area, and I was there as just as much of a student as they. That didn't stop them from asking me questions about every conceivable aspect of Islamic culture and civilisation, some of which I could answer, most of which I couldn't.

But it was wonderful to go back and see again the major monuments - Aya Sofya, the Blue Mosque, Topkapi - and to visit places I had not seen before, like the jewel-like Rustem Pasha Mosque, a small monument perched above shops and completely lined with colourful Iznik tilework. I had a long list of places I would have liked to visit as well if I had had more time, and I tried to go to some of them, but a lot of places on the cultural map of Istanbul were closed for restoration projects. Istanbul is the European Capital of Culture this year, which means an injection of EU funds for restoration projects that are clearly direly needed - but a shame these projects were not finished in time for the launch of the Capital of Culture. We all agreed we needed to go back - but need to give enough time for all these restorations to finish.

One lucky thing - they have just taken down the scaffolding in Aya Sofya, which for the last 17 years has been supporting the miraculous central dome, while they carried out restoration and conservation of the paintings. Thing is, last time I went was before the scaffolding even went up, so I am fortunate enough never have had to visit Aya Sofya in its scaffolded phase!

What was awful, though, was the vast crowds of tourists, all in enormous tour groups which get bussed in from wherever they're staying and then bussed out again, without putting any money into the local economy. It's cruise season apparently so you can have upto 3000 people from a single cruise ship suddenly turning up in the queue for Aya Sofya or Topkapi. It really did make the experience of trying to squeeze your way around these awe-inspiring monuments tiresome in the extreme. Not only that, but it can't be good for the preservation of the buildings. At the Alhambra they have a cap on the number of tickets that they sell every day, and if you're unlucky enough to get there after they've sold out for the day, you don't get in. But there seems to be no such regulation at the major Istanbul monuments, so they have streams of thousands passing through every day. In the small spaces of the Harem in Topkapi, people were clambering over marble fireplaces and fountains just to get round the other tourists blocking their way. Horrible.

But I think my overriding impression of this trip is that Istanbul is Europe. Compared to the other parts of the Middle East I have travelled to in the last 18 years, everything about Istanbul feels European - especially of course the Istiklal Caddesi, the main shopping drag leading up to Taksim Square, which is where the Europeans used to have their embassies in the 19th and 20th centuries (some still do), and built historicist buildings in the styles then popular in more western parts of Europe, but also used innovative styles like Art Nouveau - we stumbled upon the delapidated Botter House, which was rather a treasure, though no-one is looking after it. Marta felt like she had been transported back to southern Italy. I still got chatted up in the Spice Souk ("You want a boyfriend for 3 days?" Ugh) but - I tried to tell myself - there are lecherous men in abundance in Europe, it is not a Middle East-specific nuisance.

So - up with Turkey joining the EU, I say!

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18 years since I went to Istanbul last. Yikes. These are the kinds of things that make you start to feel old. It is 10 years ago since I got back from my doctoral research year in Madrid! I timed my return to Oxford in order to attend Bev & James's wedding - so that means it's their 10th anniversary on Thursday! (Congrats guys!!) K and I moved into our mostly unfurnished bedsit on St Clement's the day before I think, and I quite clearly remember: a) having to take a bath with no hot water, and b) K burning toast - as we rushed to get ready for their wedding...

Not only that - generation-defining icons like Twin Peaks is 20 years old (such clear memories of obsessively swapping notes with Ali the morning after, during double Geography lessons at school), and Back to the Future is 25 years old!! They're about to show an anniversary screening at the Ritzy! I wonder how it will have aged...

More prosaicly, last week I had my 8th anniversary in my job. I only remembered as I was walking out at the end of the day!

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So we've got Ed as new leader of the Labour party. Good. It seems only now that he's been elected - despite the small margin - that commentators are noticing what was clear to all: that he is suitably untainted by association with either Blair or Brown, unlike the other frontrunners. We all want a change. Still, there has been some witty commentary on the two Miliband brothers running against each other - 'Milidum and Milidee' being the best I think (courtesy of Jim Crace in the Guardian), though 'Milibandwagon' always amuses too.

Open City

This has been a good week for making the most of living in London.

It started with going to see/hear Raja Shehadeh at the Royal Festival Hall. K had managed to double-book himself, so I went along with Alison, and we had a great evening. He read from his new book, A Rift in Time, which grew out of family research he did into the life of his great-uncle, a political exile from the Ottoman government of Palestine, which is interwoven with his own contemporary story of struggle against the Israeli occupation. Then there was a Q&A led by the director of Profile Books, his publisher, then opened to the floor.

Perhaps unsurprisingly the questions were less about his new book than about his views on the current peace talks (pessimistic) and about the potential for challenging human rights abuses through legal means - something he has spent his whole working life doing, which he seems to feel others are now doing just as successfully, if that's really the word. His recent writings - especially Palestinian Walks - have been about trying to reclaim the land, and his approach to the crisis in Israel/Palestine is long-term and root-and-branch: that basically the settlements not only need to stop being built, but need to be torn up, borders got rid of, and the whole region turned back into something approaching the broader territory encompassed by the Ottoman occupation, shared and lived in equally by all races and religions. He doesn't seem to think that is far-fetched, but I can't see it happening for a very long time.

As Alison said, it was just so refreshing to hear someone so articulate talk in an impassioned but entirely fair and reasonable way about the situation in the Middle East, without giving in to emotion or point-scoring. He signed copies of his book - I got one for Paz and asked him to sign it for her in Arabic. That will be a nice Christmas present, and also a nice exchange for the book she just gave me, the fifth and last in Tariq Ali's Islam Quintet, personally signed by him when she went to hear him talk at the Edinburgh Festival last month.

Then there was a screening of a short film that a father-and-son team have made inspired by Shehadeh's Palestinian Walks - part interview with him, part 'dramatisation' of one of the most memorable scenes of that book, the encounter with a settler during a walk along a stream through the hills around Ramallah where he lives, and their discussion of whose land it is and which of them has the right to walk there. Very poignant.

But what made it so 'London' - if it isn't already great enough that we have access to this kind of event - was the fact that Michael Palin was in the audience, and Stephen Fry was 'performing' in the main hall just underneath us, and when we went down in the musical lift (the RFH choir sings scales at you, upwards or downwards depending on which way the lift is going! A sound installation by artist Martin Creed) there he was signing copies of his new autobiography, with a huge queue snaking round the main foyer of the Festival Hall. Alison and I casually walked past and stared at him for a bit, before heading our separate ways!

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Then this weekend it is Open House - when hundreds of the city's amazing buildings throw open their doors and let you poke around inside. We were a little more organised than usual this year - at least we managed to book ourselves onto a tour of the London Library, which is somewhere we've always been curious about (not being able to afford the £400-odd fee to become members and find out from the inside!).

They have just finished a renovation and expansion project, and members of the architects firm were there to talk to us about that, which was interesting, but actually I wanted to know more about the Library! Basically it was founded as a gentlemen's club for the intellectually lofty, from what I could make out. We couldn't go into the reading rooms which was a shame, though we peered voyeuristically into them from the corridor. There were hardly any "members" around - the librarian who was taking us round thought perhaps they were all out enjoying Open House. More likely they stayed away from all of us! The stacks were fantastic though - with cast iron grilles allowing you to look all the way up or all the way down through the floors (not good if you have vertigo!) and with book-shelf height carefully worked out to avoid the need for ladders. They have a very individual cataloguing system which is entirely alphabetical within its thematic sections - in the "Science & Misc." part of the stacks (excellent!) 'Fishing' was followed by 'Flagellation' which was followed by 'Flags'!

After a restorative coffee, we walked from St James's along to our next port of call, the 'Roman baths' underneath King's College on the Strand. No-one seems to know when these were built, though possibly they're Tudor. From the horrible busy-ness of the Strand, we passed into the deserted square mile of the City of London - it is always so strangely empty at the weekends, when the business people that populate it during the week seem to stay away. We wondered as well if everyone was off looking at the Pope, as London did seem strangely empty yesterday. We were heading for the Guildhall where we spent a few hours - K got excited by the 15th-century Great Hall and crypts, I got excited by the fact there is a Roman amphitheatre underneath it!! Which was only discovered in 1988!!


We also visited the 1:500 scale model of the City of London on display in the 'City Marketing Suite' behind the Guildhall, which shows you what the skyline of central London is going to look like once all the current and projected skyscraper projects are completed - intended-to-be-iconic buildings which already have names ('The Shard', 'The Pinnacle') which are going to completely dominate The Gherkin and ruin the view. But quite fascinating to see it visualised in this way. There was a good interactive and a rather charismatic architect there answering people's questions.

We dipped in and out of quite a lot of Wren churches, which you seem to fall over on every corner in that part of the city, K making use of his recent purchase, the Pevsner for London's City churches. It was revealing of quite how much rebuilding was done immediately after the Second World War, since this part of the city was pretty much destroyed by bombing in the Blitz. We checked historic photos of where we were walking on the Museum of London's iPhone app, Street Museum. They don't have many photos on there yet, but it's a really interesting way of looking at and thinking about where you happen to be standing. We were going to go to the Bank of England, but this was the queue when we got there:


It reminded one of the queues you see on the news sometimes when there are reports in, say, Argentina of the country's economy being on the brink of collapse. K wondered whether they all thought they were going to be given money when they got inside. Perhaps they all knew something we didn't. Still, it's amazing that this many people turn out to look at buildings on Open House!

We got the bus home to Brixton, and because we weren't quite ready to go home, we went to visit Lambeth Town Hall, which was also Open, and got a personal tour by Lib Dem councillor and former mayor, Daphne Marchant, which was an idiosyncratic experience. Though we had come to that meeting of the Planning Committee last year - at which our Residents' Association successfully challenged the Lambeth College development next door - it was interesting to see the Council Chamber and hear a bit more about what goes on behind the scenes.

After that we went to experience the beer garden of our local pub.

Time to join Facebook?

I have had some really nice letters, cards and emails from people, congratulating me on the publication of my book. However, one of the pieces of correspondence that awaited me on my return to work was a little more strange...


Written on a typewriter, from an Italian gentleman named Bruno Filipponio, this letter assured me that he "ardently desired" a copy of my book, and without explaining why he was not in a position to pay for it, requested me to send him a free copy, for which he offered me in exchange a book entitled Pironti: Osservazioni e chiose su vernacolo e dialetto (I can't find any trace of this book online, and it's not altogether clear what it is about - the Pironti apparently being a noble family from Ravello, with distinguished scions going back to the 13th century...). Though this book was "a treasured family heirloom", he was nevertheless willing to deprive himself of it in order to receive a copy of my book - would I agree to the exchange? It went on in yet more purple a fashion: "I know that I ask much and offer little, I know that I seem brash and boorish in my request....", and that if I was not able to "satisfy" him, could I reply quickly - even if briefly - "in order to avoid a long wait and a yet more bitter disappointment"...?

I put this aside for a while, having several hundred emails to deal with after what was effectively 6 weeks out of the office, then turned my thoughts to it again a few days ago. I wrote a quick reply, which Luisa kindly translated for me, confident - since Lisa's photo of my book on sale in Venice - that the book was available in Italy, and anyway why couldn't he order it online? It's not prohibitively expensive... (though the fact that the letter was written on a typewriter suggested the correspondent might not be au fait with the interweb...)

But something about the rather poetic way it was written made me wonder who this Bruno Filipponio was, so I Googled him, and quickly discovered that he had been an Olympic torchbearer for the Rome Olympics in 1960! But yet more curious - I came across a posting dated January of this year, on the blog of a Catalan Professor of Philology, Mariàngela Villalonga, who had also received a letter from Bruno Filipponio. And not only that, but the quotes she gave from the letter ("desidero ardentemente", "E' un caro ricordo di famiglia, ma sono pronto a privarmene pur di avere quanto ho chiesto; accetta lo scambio?") showed that it had been worded in the exact same way as my letter!

Like me, Mariàngela had gone online to find out who this chap was - and had found reproduced on the website of a Bolognese company the exact same letter as ours, just with the titles changed, of the book requested and the book offered in exchange; she also managed to find identical letters from our correspondent, received by Italian writers in 1977 and 1963! And that an Italian friend of hers receives a letter from him every time he publishes a new book!

Bruno Filipponio has been scrounging books off their authors for nearly 50 years!!! I wonder if he has ever bought a book in his life?? Indeed I presume that the books he offers in exchange are books previously sent to him by their authors, perhaps decades ago!

Mariàngela suggested that perhaps we should start a Facebook group for authors who have received letters from Bruno Filipponio! It is the first time I have actually been tempted to join Facebook!!

Snapshots

I have a fair bit to catch up on from the last month, but I thought I would write it around snapshots of what I have been doing and seeing in that time.

Owls in the British Library

Well, as I had been warned, the British Library was absolutely packed over the summer, and unless you got there by 10 or very soon after, you could pretty much kiss goodbye to the idea of getting a desk or finding an empty locker down in the cloakroom... People resorted to interesting lengths to reserve desks for themselves - I spotted this one in Rare Books as I was popping out for a coffee break: a little cloth owl, and a bashed-up old notebook. Later on in the day I remembered to look and see whose desk it was, and it was occupied by a very respectable-looking middle-aged Japanese lady - she was working away surrounded by piles of bona fide-looking rare books, with the toy owl still in the same position...

We got into a very cosy habit working with Juliette - my arrival time in the library was slightly erratic and she would always save me a desk. We moved around a little bit - she got a bit bored of looking at the mustachioed Italian who alternated his beige or grey cardigans on a weekly basis...

It was an immensely productive month - as Glaire commented in an email, I was obviously ready to do this. I sent off my book proposal and sample material, and got about halfway through revising the thesis. Some of it is not very polished, and I created work for myself in some ways by deciding to add a new chapter - by turning my object appendix into an object-focused chapter - but I feel very satisfied with how much I got done. Plus I felt extremely relaxed by the end of it, and not at all keen on going back to work - especially with the 'age of austerity' looming and no-one quite knowing what is going to be in store for museums and heritage institutions in the upcoming Comprehensive Spending Review...

With Nick at Blickling

We got away for the Bank Holiday weekend (typical late August weather, as you can see from the photo!!) and went to visit Nick in Norfolk. We had a rather crazy weekend staying with him at his mother and stepfather's, along with their 3 young grand-daughters (all under 5), the parents of their daughter-in-law, Nick's brother and his wife, and four labradors!! It was actually great fun, though we slipped away during the day, to take in the gorgeous Norfolk countryside and exercise our National Trust membership cards a little - not being drivers, we don't get to do that very much! K had a bunch of places that he wanted to visit for various research reasons, and it was great just spending time with Nick and catching up. We also got to be the first dinner guests at Suzie & Drake's wonderful thatched cottage, which they had only moved into 2 weeks before!


The South Bank had a Morris dancing festival - inspired by the sarcastic remarks apparently made by Sebastian Coe at the opening ceremonies of the Olympics in Beijing: in reaction to the acrobatic Chinese dancing, he quipped that in London in 2012 we could instead look forward to the performance of 5000 Morris dancers. South Bank took him at his word, and pop artist David Owen created some memorable Morris dancing related images - one of them was (ha ha) Morissey, waving a bunch of wildflowers; another was the famous head from the bookcover of A Clockwork Orange, wearing a flower-festooned hat... But I liked this Star Wars Stormtrooper the best!

We actually didn't see any of the Morris dancing, but we did go to hear The Imagined Village playing at Queen Elizabeth Hall, which was excellent! The night before going back to work too, so I certainly was not sitting around at home moping over my 'back to school' feeling...


People have been emailing me to tell me they have spotted my book for sale in far-flung places! So far, the furthest-flung is the American University of Cairo bookshop - in Cairo! But this photo was taken by Lisa, "in an academic bookshop in a narrow street in Venice, about two weeks ago"... You can just spot it there in the middle on the top shelf!

Have you seen my book for sale anywhere exotic? I'd love to know!


I had one day back in the office last Monday, then went off again on a 3-day courier trip to Munich - installing a few pieces in an exhibition that is soon to open at the Haus der Kunst, commemorating 100 years since a major Islamic Art exhibition held in Munich in 1910. This one has a combination of 'historic' objects - which had been shown at the 1910 exhibition - together with contemporary works, which seems to be a current trend in exhibition curating in Germany these days. The exhibition in Berlin which I couriered in January took a similar approach. It was early days in the installation - I was the first courier - but I was impressed by the quality of the pieces. The Haus der Kunst is a rather ugly Fascist building - it was built in 1937, and seems ironically to be one of few buildings in Munich that actually survived the Allied bombings in 1945 - though they seem to have turned it into quite a thriving cultural and exhibition centre.

Munich was lovely - I had never been before - and it was really nice to catch up with Marion (hello! I know she reads this!). The Glockenspiel in the picture above is one of Munich's major tourist attractions - it is installed in the impressive belltower of the neo-Gothic Rathaus, though it dates from the early 20th century. It commemorates two events from Munich's history. Everyone gathers in the main square for 11 o'clock when it starts to play, and there is a great cry of approval when the Bavarian jouster knocks his Austrian opponent off his perch - lots of fun!

But what a busy week! I was giving a lecture yesterday - in a study afternoon on Seville - so as soon as I got back from Munich, I had to think about that. No wonder I feel like a zombie today!


And last, but by no means least, our calendar image for the month - K's grandfather, Robert, who died this time last year. This lovely photo of him was taken during the war, when he must have been in his 30s. He didn't change a bit all his life!

The Incident of the Rhubarb Tarte Tatin

It was Friday the 13th, and I quipped to Andrew by email, "I hope I don't burn the dinner!" Hmmm. I had chosen a fancy dessert recipe from Olive to wow our dinner guests, and also to use up the last batch of rhubarb from K's parents' garden. First problem - I haven't cooked with rhubarb much before, and had never made a tarte tatin, and found upon reading the recipe closely that this was supposed to be done in blini pans or in a Yorkshire pudding tray with four indents, neither of which I had. So a single tarte tatin in a cake tin it was going to be. Then came the issue of making the caramel base. I discovered the hard way (er, literally) that when the recipe says butter and granulated sugar, one should not use caster sugar to make caramel.

After two attempts (the first with golden caster sugar, the second with normal refined caster sugar, just in case its goldenness had been the problem), K was dispatched to the local corner shop to procure granulated sugar, and hurrah! all proceeded satisfactorily with caramel production. I made a nice arrangement of the rhubarb bits on top of this, and I must say the tarte tatin did look beautiful when it was turned out. I don't have a photo unfortunately. Andrew was presented with the first slice and we all waited for the verdict - poor man, having been put on the spot, he did a valiant job of keeping a straight face. I tried a bite of mine - decidedly sour!! What happened to all that sugar in the caramel??? Plus the recipe suggestion of serving this with mascarpone was not a good choice.

With lashings of caster sugar, the dessert was eaten, but lesson learned - always test a new dessert recipe before serving it to one's dinner guests!! Alas, I feel this episode might go down in personal legend - "remember when you did that rhubarb tarte tatin for Alison and Andrew....?"

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The nice thing, however, was that we had a dinner party at all. It has been far too long since we had people over for supper, and this is one of the very nice outcomes of the time I have off work at the moment. Five whole weeks! I had so much annual leave to use up, having taken almost no holiday over the busy last few years, that I decided to take a big batch of time off in the middle of the summer - when it is usually quiet anyway - and spend it in the library, finally starting to focus on how to turn my PhD thesis into a book... I get two different reactions to this:

1) "Don't work too hard / Make sure you actually give yourself some time off!"
2) "Five weeks in the library! What bliss!"

I fall into the latter category myself. Two weeks in, and I am feeling immensely relaxed! I have said before that I don't really know how to relax like normal people - I actually really enjoy going to the library, and it is wonderful just to have the time to read things. I made a list of books and articles that have been published since I submitted my thesis in 2002 - not too long fortunately - and have been working my way through that, but also reading the odd other article, which I'm interested in but isn't directly relevant... Plus - I have space in my brain! And time to get round to things I have been meaning to do for months! Like write emails, send people photos or references I said I would send them, and just see people and be sociable!

The British Library is a pretty sociable place, as I have noted before, and I have been meeting friends for lunch and coffee and a post-library drink. Now Juliette has joined me in Rare Books, on her own PhD sabbatical, and we're getting into a habit of taking our packed lunches outside at 1, to sit in the sun for half an hour or so, and debrief... K will be off work too soon, so the 3 of us will be chilling out together...

And two weeks in, I have nearly a complete first draft of a book proposal! Reading the thesis again after 8 years was an interesting experience, and I was gratified to discover that it wasn't too awful, and that mostly I still agreed with myself... It's a bit dry and in some places overly defensive, but that's what makes a PhD different from a book, and that's what I have got to work out how to tackle. I've even had some positive feedback from the professor who supervised me for the beginning of the process, but didn't see it through because he went off to the States to be a hot-shot museum director - amazing to have some actual feedback as the viva was such a let-down... But water under the bridge an' all.

So - the next dinner party is planned for just over a week's time, and I'm already plotting the menu. I'm starting with the dessert first this time...!

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And finally...

Signpost, Chenies © KR

Our calendar picture for this month. A very English country road sign, but for K one which conjures up the places of his childhood. Chenies was where his grandparents lived, both now passed away. It was exactly this time last year that we were in Hereford for the 3 Choirs Festival, unknowingly spending our last days with his grandfather Robert... Perhaps a little sombre for the kitchen calendar, but it prompts some happy memories.

Henry Moore and the Jets

K ponders the Harrier, one of the two fighter planes in this year's Duveens Commission

That title might suggest this posting might actually be about Henry Moore, whereas the only link is Tate Britain - and I just couldn't resist the rock'n'roll title, Henry Moore being possibly the person I least associate with rock'n'roll....!

James commissioned us to go along to Tate and assess this year's Duveens Commission, Harrier and Jaguar, by artist Fiona Banner - so we thought we would combine it with going to see the Henry Moore exhibition before it closed. Nothing much to say about that - apart from, as K observed, grouping a whole load of Henry Moores together in an enclosed space does nothing for one's appreciation of his wonderfully abstract creations. Each one needs to be contemplated on its own terms, the way you do when you stumble across them as public sculpture, but in an exhibition environment, after a while you get fatigued by the requirement to give each one an equal share of your intellectual capacity...

The most memorable thing for me was the room dedicated to the series of drawings he made during the Second World War, especially of coal miners in Yorkshire, and of sheltering women and children in the tunnels and platforms of the London Underground. Inevitably the hundreds of sleeping figures take on the ghostly feel of Moore's signature 'recumbent forms'...

But to the Jets. As an aviation journalist who appreciates art and museums, James was keen to know what we - as two curators - thought of the current installation of two fighter planes in the neoclassical surrounds of the Tate's Duveen gallery, the implication being they had become art objects rather than objects of destruction. I am going to attempt to get my thoughts on all this in some sense of order for him here.

The first thing is that it is completely awe-inspiring. You see the jets first as beautifully-designed objects, and then you remember that they are designed that way in order to be more effective killing machines. This creates a sense of tension and awkwardness inside you which is the essence of the artist's intention, I think. This is especially so with the Jaguar, cleverly shown upside down, so you find yourself admiring the sleek engineering of its under-carriage, and then discover you're face-to-face with its gun ports.


I don't know if I'm using the correct terminology to describe any of these bits of the plane, and in fact my utter ignorance of this type of object was also part of what disconcerted me about their display. I didn't know if what I was looking at had been 'interpreted' by the artist in any way (and the text on the wall panel didn't clarify that for me, even when I finally read it) - I didn't know if the suggestion of feathers painted on the wings, nose and tail of the Harrier Hawk were put there by the artist or whether they were part of the original design of the planes; I didn't know if a Jaguar normally looked that shiny. Having watched an interesting short film about it on the Tate website (what a joy, may I say, to listen to an artist being so articulate about their work), I now know that the Jaguar was stripped back and polished for the exhibition, but there was something unsettling about my ignorance at the time I was looking at them.


I wonder if this is a female response? Most of the men visiting the galleries seemed inexorably drawn to the planes and seemed to want to 'explain' them to the women they were with - I suppose a symptom of making Airfix models as boys, and all wanting to grow up to be fighter pilots... One man - and this was extremely perturbing - posed for several photographs standing astride the long nozzle projecting from the front of the Jaguar, so blatantly phallic. These photos were being taken by a female friend or partner who seemed to think it all very amusing, but you felt you were intruding on something too intimate - not to say vulgar and rather pathetic - to be out in the open like that.

I felt the planes were poised as if they had just come to land - crash landed in the case of the upside-down Jaguar, though obviously there was no damage to it. The Harrier was just hovering with its nose a few inches off the ground, as if it had just plunged through the roof and caught in the branches of a tree or something - though the curator in me wanted to know more about the superstructure supporting it in that position... There was something slightly sinister about the 'greyed-out' appearance of both cockpits - I felt if I looked too closely I'd see someone in there, a dead pilot perhaps.

I suppose that was the tension surfacing again, the fact that you are so strongly aware of these objects' original function - these are both actual decommissioned planes which have seen action in recent international conflicts: the Jaguar was in Desert Storm. I felt happier - if that's the word - comforted even, that this meant they were authentic - that we were not just looking at them as gratuitous symbols of conflict, they had actually been there. Though, again, the tension, the unsettling awkwardness...

The polished, seemingly silver-plated, precious-metal surface of the Jaguar now reflects the architecture of the galleries enclosing them, and more than one person was taking photographs of this artistic reflection. This is deliberately part of Fiona Banner's effect - the Tate built with the funds from slavery, in the neoclassical style that was the symbol of empire at the time it was built, now housing these modern symbols and tools of empire. The display works because of its environment, in a more successful way than I have seen for a long time - seeing the planes in that space generates thoughts and feelings which I can't imagine thinking if I saw the planes in a airplane hangar or in an aviation museum. Perhaps I would, but there is something about the creative intent behind stripping and decorating them in this way, the whole idea that they are now art, that makes you look at them in a completely different way. Well, it provokes thought, and that has to be a good thing in an art installation.

So thanks James for our own commission! My head was so deeply buried in the ground during the last few months that I didn't even know about it, so I'm grateful for the excuse it gave me to start to reopen my eyes to the outside world.

The constant composter

Wool drying, Lewis & Harris, Outer Hebrides © KR

This month's calendar picture - the only one in colour, just because of the beautiful contrast of colours it shows, which is so typically Scottish, or so typical of what we now associate with the Outer Hebrides. This was taken outside the home and workshop of Marion Campbell, the tweed weaver we went to visit on Harris last summer. There is something amazing - but I suppose not all that surprising - about the way the earthy colours of the wool echo the colours of the hills on the horizon.

I haven't blogged about this year's Hebridean holiday - there are just not enough hours in a day to get down here all the things I would like to write about, all the thoughts that pass fleetingly through my brain... I have finally got round to loading up some images on Flickr, a selection of about 50 out of the 400 or so photographs I took, mainly of amazing landscapes, and K and my sister pulling silly faces... The home-movie, The Langass Witch Project, is worth a watch though! (We climbed Beinn Langass, and I was trying to figure out how to photograph the amazing views from the top, and had the brainwave that a panoramic movie would capture the scene much better than a series of stills - but my endeavour was rudely interrupted...)

This year we were on North Uist, where my sister has been living since November, which is the second-most northerly of a string of five islands linked by causeways - though the word 'islands' is in some ways a misnoma, since they are potted with so many lochs and bodies of water that it doesn't feel much like a landmass sometimes. As with Lewis and Harris last year, the landscape is almost achingly beautiful, with such contrasts from one view to the next - ragged mountains on the horizon in one direction, miles-long sandy beaches with transparent turquoise seas in another, undulating treeless peaty moorland all around you, suddenly interrupted by the bright colours and heavy scent of the machair, meadows which grow behind the sea and before the peat, which were covered with wildflowers and teeming with wildlife, full of species of flora and fauna I had never seen in my life before!


We spent most of the time outside - a wonderful change from being cooped up in libraries or offices or galleries. K bought a small book about the archaeology of the Uists, which had a helpful gazetteer in the back, and we used it as the starting point for long walks in different parts of the islands. The joke became that the archaeology consisted of piles of stones in different configurations, be it chambered cairn, or Iron Age wheelhouse (the oldest 'buildings' in Europe apparently!), or medieval chapel... In fact it didn't really matter, it was the walk there that counted. One feature we thought particularly beautiful was the dun, or artificial island built out in the middle of a loch, linked to the land by an ancient causeway. The dun usually had a structure built on it, a cairn or a burial mound or domestic structure. You'd see them all over as we were driving around.


This time round we stayed in a B&B, run by a rather eccentric Dutch artist - a wonderful place in a beautiful setting, but he had quite strict breakfast times, which sometimes involved having to talk to strangers (other people who were staying there) without having yet imbibed sufficient quantities of coffee to have properly woken up! So we didn't get as much sleep as I would have liked and I did very little reading (only got through one book), and it confirmed us in the view that self-catering is definitely the way to go - memories of that gorgeous little cottage on Harris last year... But the infrastructure for that kind of tourism doesn't exist on the Uists yet, somewhat surprisingly. I was only partly joking every time I saw a run-down blackhouse for sale, about buying it and doing it up and renting it out... (especially since our house-buying plans in London are rather on the backburner these days)

So many stories and happy memories - slightly embittered by the personal difficulties that my sister has been having, and her indecision about what to do with her life. It seems she might be moving to Edinburgh now, where she was at university - I won't mind! I love Edinburgh, and it will be great to have the excuse to visit it more, plus it will be easier to get to see her, since getting to the Hebrides is not all that easy (one of its charms, of course) and can be rather expensive. We might try the Inner Hebrides next year, especially since there is a possibility that my parents might be about to move there... (Hmmm, don't think I should be taking it personally that my immediate family are all moving away!)

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I've done a neighbourly turn this afternoon, which I am feeling rather self-satisfied about. I have donated a good load of the compost we have been making for over a year now to the friend of a friend, who lives two streets away and has an allotment. It's all very well composting our food waste, but the bin was getting full, and though it goes down as the waste rots, ultimately it seemed a bit pointless if we weren't going to do anything with it. I tried offering it to the Brockwell Park Community Greenhouses, who were very nice about it but understandably have to observe DEFRA health and safety guidelines about the compost they use being made on-site; then a colleague of K's said she was sure her friend Honor would be interested.

I commandeered an abandoned barrow (I quickly realised why it was abandoned - it has a flat tyre), and borrowed some trowels from Lisa, the lady who technically owns the compost bin, though about 4 or 5 flats have been composting in it for a good long while now - then started excavating. It's quite good stuff! Amazing to see what all our food waste turns into! Lots of worms, which is apparently a good sign! Honor happily carried away three heavy bags worth, and will be back in the autumn for more! She gave us a lovely looking lettuce and two amazing courgettes in exchange - and it just seems so good that it will actually be going to some use. And it's created lots of space for more good composting! So now I can carry on composting with a clear conscience, and it has impressed K, I think, who was always a bit dubious about our compost. So good turns all round!

¡Campeones del Mundo!

'Pulpo Paul' - as they call him in Spain - predicts the Spanish win (100% success rate for this psychic octopus! I just want to know who on earth first thought of asking an octopus to predict football results!?)

and about time too!! Spain have been not-quite-achieving for so long but they are worthy World Cup winners - though, being a quarter Dutch, it was ever such a slight dilemma knowing who to support...

Actually it was never in doubt. I first started supporting Spanish fútbol when I was living in Madrid for a year, researching for my PhD, and Real Madrid won the Champions League - can you believe that is 10 years ago now, in 2000?? (Can you also believe there is actually a Wiki page on that particular match!) They returned to Madrid covered in glory, and there were processions and celebrations in the street - I just got caught up in the joy of it all.

So I can well imagine the logjams that wild partying in the streets of Madrid has apparently caused as Spaniards celebrate their victory! A picture on El País shows Gran Vía absolutely crammed with people in red and gold shirts! The outbreak of support for the national team - "La Roja" - across Spain has apparently also done much to heal separatist rifts: an interesting article on the Guardian about that here.

Great pictures on El País tonight of the team returning home and being received by the royal family at the palace - everyone just looks so happy and relaxed! Can you imagine our queen and prince consort looking so happy when faced with a squad of footballers?? There was a great moment, just after Iniesta scored his historic goal last night, when the TV camera caught la Reina Sofia whooping for joy with her arms in the air! I had hoped to find it on YouTube, but it doesn't seem to be up there - perhaps it is not an unusual occurrence! But if it had been England winning the World Cup (er, please excuse a moment of fantasy) can you imagine old Lilibet even twitching a smile?!

¡Enhorabuena España!

My book is in the shops!

and the Ceramics Study Galleries are open - the two major projects I have given all my time to over the last several years are successfully complete, and I am becoming increasingly aware of an unfamiliar feeling of aimlessness in my extra-curricular time. It's not that I don't have research or writing projects I could be doing, I just don't want to be doing them - or rather, I feel that I have earnt some time off from them, just that I don't really know what it is that normal people do with their free time. I suppose part of the problem is that K has two article deadlines to meet, so he is writing writing writing, so I can't make any plans for us to go off and do things together at the weekend. And I quite enjoy luxuriating in the pure fact of having nothing to do.

But I have read enough of the LRB and my current book, The Rings of Saturn (which I have to say I am not enjoying nearly as much as I ought to be - especially since it is one of K's most beloved books), and have caught up with the Guardian profile of Simon Mawer and review of his recently-Booker-nominated The Glass Room - the book I read on holiday, which was such a wonderfully evocative portrait of a Modernist building that when I eventually brought myself to look at photographs of the Tugendhat House in Brno, Czech Republic, upon which it based, I felt I had already seen it... I have caught up with a good few long-overdue emails, and we have even started to arrange to see people again!

I feel like I am re-emerging from a long period of hibernation, but am out of practice where basic social pastimes are concerned - perhaps because our habit over the last years has been to do our research in all the spare hours we can carve out from the day. I made a conscious decision early on in my working life to maintain an active academic strand alongside my job - of course those things should cross over more than they do - but I feel I have now got to the stage, especially now that I have been promoted, where I do not have anything to prove any more, and I am grateful for that. But it is difficult to suddenly learn to relax when you've never really been sure of how to do it! I have done quite a lot of cooking - hours in the kitchen last night producing Ottolenghi's turkey and sweetcorn meatballs, and as always with meatballs I am not sure that the end result really justified the hours of faff; I have even done all the washing up (things must be bad!).

This lull is also actually only a brief window before embarking on the next book project - in August, I am using up 5 weeks of my accumulated leave (having not really taken any holidays over the last few years) to start focusing on how to turn my thesis into a book. I haven't looked at it for 8 years, and don't really want to think about it at all before 2 August - when I plan to pitch my metaphorical tent in the British Library for the duration (people who don't realise I am not going on a month's holiday say, "I hope you're going somewhere nice"!) - so I am trying to get my ducks in a row (scans from Spanish colleagues of articles that have come out in the last 8 years, a sense from EUP - where I plan to propose it - of what I should have achieved by the end of August) without really engaging my brain, since I want to come to it absolutely fresh when I finally sit down and re-read it. I am hoping that the intervening years and publishing projects will make it immediately obvious to me what it needs, but I also don't want to do too much rewriting, mainly restructuring and reducing. But who knows what will possess me.

In the meantime, we're having a glorious summer and I really should be outside. Thank goodness we have the Lambeth Country Show next weekend!

Two pots

In honour of our new Ceramics Study Galleries - the break-neck project I have been working on full-time for the last 9 months, which had their gala opening last night, and which open to the public tomorrow - I wanted to blog about two pots I have acquired recently.


This vase was designed by Keith Murray for Wedgwood in the 1930s. Murray was trained as an architect and brought an architectural eye to his ceramic designs. My colleague, the curator of modern and contemporary ceramics, tells me that he thinks Murray was one of the best Modernist designers for pottery, and I love its simple yet very structural elegance. This design was glazed in this 'Moonstone' white, in an olive green, and a metallic grey, and other versions of it were made with more and thinner ribs, and in different functional forms including a gorgeous pair of bookends which I would love to have! You can find more info here on the Museum's example of this vase - with a rather better photograph.

This is the only thing I chose to keep from among K's grandparents' possessions. He made a long list, including the two bookcases which arrived in time for lunch on Easter Sunday, probably made in the 1930s as well, so the vase looks right at home on top of them, in the corner of a 1930s flat. I was invited to keep whatever I liked, but the only thing that had always rather caught my eye was this vase - tucked away on top of the kitchen cabinets and wonderfully unfussy in the context of Betty and Robert's rather more decorative taste... Apparently when they had valuers in to assess their collection, it was the only thing that they said was really worth anything. But it was already spoken for.


And facing it, a rather different object. This is a late 19th-century storage jar which I bought in Tunisia recently. Again it is very close to one we have in the collection, which was acquired in 1894, which therefore helps me to date this one.

I was in Mahdia, and finally had a bit of free time to wander around in the souk of that small and special town. Two of us went to buy a present for the lady who had done most of the organising of the Summer School (which I will write about soon!) and we had been directed by some colleagues to a street that was slightly off the beaten tourist track, where there were looms and textile shops. We bought her a lovely silk scarf (and one each for ourselves, ahem) then before we knew it had been lured into a neighbouring shop. It was all shiny touristy kitsch in which I had no interest at all, and we disengaged ourselves pretty quickly, but the kindly gentleman proprietor was not going to give up that easily and asked if he could show us one last thing in the shop opposite. As we stepped in, I could see there were some genuine antiques in here and said to myself "Aaah, this is the real stuff" - which he heard so of course we started talking about the fact that I worked in a museum in London which had some Tunisian ceramics in its collection, and which I had been looking at recently for the Study Galleries.

I had sort of promised K that I wouldn't buy any pots on this trip (since I have rather a habit of doing so and we are running out of space in our small flat...) but I couldn't resist when I saw the collection of 19th-century wares he had underneath a table loaded with jewellery - forgive the Orientalist simile, but was a true Aladdin's cave! My only consideration was size and which one I could feasibly fit into my suitcase! I had run out of dinars so paid him in sterling - £40 which I thought was a complete bargain!!

The shopowner - Mr Ben Rhouma - said he acquired the pots from people who had them in their homes, inherited from forebears, and knew that the occasional tourist liked to buy them, so sold them to him for a bit of ready money. He does nothing at all to them, so it was a bit cobwebby and still is a bit dusty, but since learning how to clean pots for our Ceramics Project I will be applying my cotton swab any time now. There is a broken section at the rim, but the piece was inside, and one of my conservator colleagues has loaned me some paraloid and instructions for how to reattach it in a conservation-approved manner.

Two pots, completely different aesthetics, but I love them both, and the memories they conjure.

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And thank goodness the project has finally come to a triumphant close! The galleries look amazing - "overwhelming" and "awe-inspiring" were some of the phrases that people mentioned to me last night. They are visible storage galleries with massed groupings of objects organised geographically and chronologically, but the sheer quantity and scale is so impressive, it takes your breath away. But now it is time for a holiday. On Friday morning at the crack of dawn we leave for North Uist to visit my sister, chill out for a week, visit seal colonies, eat smoked salmon, and read the 3 for 2 book selection I acquired in Waterstone's in Hereford last weekend (having finally come to the end of the 3000-and-some-pages of the Baroque Cycle - magnificent, but it has taken me 6 months!!). So I'll check in again in a couple of weeks. Over and out.