On the road again

'I hear those voices that will not be drowned'
Maggi Hambling's 'Scallop' on Aldeburgh Beach, Suffolk

Where has January gone?! One of my New Year's resolutions to myself was to post here little and often, but then I quickly got inundated by the year, so 'often' went out of the window - probably 'little' won't last either... I've got a moment now - I've just finished writing a letter of application for a Summer School in Tunisia in May, which will focus on the art and archaeology of the late Classical and early Islamic periods, and which I am very keen on attending, so I have written rather a gushing letter; and dinner won't be ready for a while longer - K is cooking, and somehow he never manages to get the timing quite right! Smells gorgeous though (leek, spinach and goat's cheese pie - we're in training for Lent, during which he has declared that we will be giving up meat).

I went to Berlin for a short trip at the start of last week, to collect and accompany back some objects we had loaned to a rather strange exhibition at the Martin Gropius Bau. Berlin was covered in snow and fog (which caused more delays to my flights, although it is possible I have a jinx, after the travel fiascos of my recent Córdoba trip) - there were even ice floes in the Spree! It was beautifully atmospheric - especially the part I was staying and working in, which was right at the edge of the Wall, in the former East, so now a 'no man's land' of brand new skyscraper developments, but also where they have preserved a 200m stretch of the Wall. The opening of the Berlin Wall was one of the defining events of my teenage years, and I always feel strongly moved when I go to Berlin and see all the graffiti about freiheit. It feels like you have stepped back into the Cold War, but its so shockingly recent - within my own living memory.



I visited the Neues Museum, which reopened in October after 60 years of dereliction, since the Second World War. It's undergone a sympathetic restoration by the architect David Chipperfield, which preserves the state of decay of wall paintings and architectural interiors, which were clearly originally magnificent but now fragmentary - there is even a small room called the 'Fragmentarium' where they display pieces of the architectural decoration whose original locations they were not able to identify. The collection has some masterpieces - Nefertiti's bust of course, which gets an entire room to herself! - but it is worth going to see for the building alone.

I took the colour proofs of my book with me to do the final check and read-through - it was the only available time I had to do it, but also made worthwhile use of all the tedious time hanging around in airports. I think it's finally looking good - everyone seems to think it looks beautiful - and reading it all through again, I have satisfied myself that the text is not too crap, but I'm just so fed up with it now. My editor too, I think! We just have the index and picture credits left to check, and I think it will get sent off to production at the end of the week!!

In amongst the craziness that is the second phase of our Ceramics Galleries project (and I install my first case tomorrow!), I am spending the weekends working full time on the article - on religious architecture in 12th-century Morocco - which I have to send off at the end of the month - so, erm, this weekend. I wrote solidly through last weekend, and have too many words, but still more to write, and then all the refining to do. I had hoped to get some of it done during the evenings this week, but I spent most of last evening in Evans Cycles on Clapham High Street, sorting out my new new Ride2Work scheme bike...

But it means I am finally back on the road again. Let's hope that third time is lucky, and I manage to avoid this one being stolen! Alas it means that I will be doing much less reading - no more London Review of Books on the tube, and back to the two-pages-a-night-before-falling-asleep-with-the-book-on-my-head norm, which - considering I am now reading a book that is nearly 1000 pages long (Quicksilver, by Neal Stephenson) - might mean I read only one book all year.

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But before January was all over, I wanted to post our calendar image for this month. It's the picture at the top of this post, the magisterial Scallop by the artist Maggi Hambling, a stainless steel sculpture on Aldeburgh Beach in Suffolk, a commemoration and celebration of Benjamin Britten who lived in Aldeburgh - in the Red House, of which our friend Caroline is the curator - and founded the famous Aldeburgh music festival. The artist calls it her 'conversation with the sea' - you can read a short essay about it here. It has inexplicably been a controversial addition to the coastline - the conservative residents of Aldeburgh objected to it and it had to be moved further along the beach, so it was not so much in their sight line! - but we thought it was moving and beautiful, especially with the poetic inscription excised from the steel ("I hear those voices that will not be drowned") which evokes not only voices and people lost at sea, but the music of Britten's compositions that lives on and will never be lost.

We went to see it at New Year last year, when we spent New Year's Eve and a few days afterwards staying with Caroline, in her idyllic rural Suffolk cottage, walking across fields to country pubs, lounging on her sofa reading while she valiantly supplied us with food and drink, showing us her place of work and talking us through all her exciting plans for the collection and exhibition projects, a lightning visit to Orford where I went with my grandparents as a child and vividly remember having lunch in a pub where there were stuffed muff dogs mounted in a glass case on the wall. I still remember my grandmother explaining how Victorian women used to carry these miniature dogs around in their muffs to keep their hands warm! We didn't find the pub again, but this time we went to Orford Castle, which had amazing views of the estuary and all the flat land around, and kept K happy. An idyllic start to the year - and memories recaptured by seeing this image every day on our home-made kitchen calendar. Best idea we've ever had!

In a jam...

My jam doesn't look like this!

Last night I thought I would experiment with making strawberry jam. Remember all that fruit we picked on my birthday last year? (if not, click here, and scroll down...) Well quite a lot of it ended up in tubs in the freezer, taking up room that we need for less permanent storage... I vowed to do interesting things with it all over the Christmas break, and of course ended up doing nothing of the sort. But the inkling was kindled (is that a mixed metaphor?) and all the empty jam jars we'd been saving were getting in the way, so I rashly decided to defrost a tub of strawberries.

Having never made jam before, I had previously done some consulting, principally of my parents, who swore that pectin was the thing you needed. Also that you need equal quantities of sugar and fruit. I decided to further consult some of the many recipe books we never seem to look at often enough, and ended up following not just one but two, slightly different, recipes for strawberry jam. Perhaps therein lay the mistake.

One of them (Apples for Jam by Tessa Kiros) did not advocate equal quantities of sugar and fruit, but it did suggest the juice of a lemon (important for the pectin you see) and seemed to have good advice on sterilising the jars and on the consistency I needed to aim for - so I mostly followed that recipe, except for levelling out the quantities.

I was boiling boiling boiling this sugar and strawberry concoction (while talking on the phone to my sister) and nothing very much seemed to be happening in terms of the consistency so I added the lemon juice. Then at about 20 minutes of boiling and stirring, the consistency and colour started to change, so I hung up, and tested a teaspoonful on a plate as advised. It seemed right so the time had time to spoon the jam into the jars...

This ended up taking so long (and after all that only managed to fill two jars!) that it was cooling fast by the time I was halfway through the second jar. It was around this time that I noticed the wooden spoon I had been stirring the jam with was stuck hard to the plate I had put it down on in an absent moment. Also that my test gloop had pretty much solidified... It seems that, in fact, I had made strawberry flavoured toffee.

I persisted with following Apples for Jam in its advice to let the jam-filled jars cool upside down, so they form a vacuum which preserves the jam for longer. Problem with this advice is, when I thought I might have toast and strawberry jam for breakfast this morning, I discovered the lids were welded shut.

I currently have them both standing in a bowl of boiling water to see if they will ever open again... If they do, though, I'm not confident that I'm not going to break a knife on this toffee-jam!

Still, it was an experiment. And fun at the time. And there's a bit more space in the freezer.

The Big Freeze

Some wry graffiti photographed while the snow falls on Brixton...

It's snowing in the UK. We're having the coldest weather snap for 30 years apparently, and records for gas consumption are due to be set tonight - predicted to be the coldest night of the winter - as everyone has the heating pumped up to keep warm. It is really cold outside. We're covered in snow in Brixton, which did not melt by even a flake today, despite the sun shining weakly.

It's only a few centimetres, but having the predictable effects - banks were closing early yesterday due to "heavy snow" (!), and our Tescos shop couldn't be delivered, so we went and shopped in Brixton Market - which we should do more often anyway. Wandering around Brixton yesterday afternoon, it was amazing how empty it was - only one or two of the market traders had been brave enough to spend the day in the freezing cold trying to sell fruit and veg to the few people foolish enough to be slipping and sloshing along Electric Avenue...

(We're still on leave this week, and trying to 'make the most of Brixton', which in practice means having lunch in a different local café every day, and finding a variety of tactics to avoid sitting down and actually writing the article I have to send in at the end of the month. Sigh. Still, one advantage of the adverse weather conditions - no queue at Franco Manca! Gorgeous sourdough pizza just what was needed to warm us from the inside out...)

Keep warm wherever you are!

Photo taken by Nasa's Terra satellite on 7 January 2010, showing the snowy weather pattern over Great Britain
Photo: NASA/GSFC, MODIS Rapid Response, via the BBC

As I was going to St Ives...

I met a man with seven wives
Each wife had seven sacks
Each sack had seven cats
Each cat had seven kits
Kits, cats, sacks, wives
How many were going to St Ives?

The traditional answer to this riddle is 1 ("I") though it turns out there are a surprising number of philosophical and mathematical interpretations of this old nursery rhyme - which you can read here.


In any case, on this occasion, there were two of us. K and I spent a week's retreat in a lovely 18th-century stone cottage in St Ives, which we have rented a couple of times before, as a Christmas hideaway. This time we went over New Year. We couldn't remember exactly when we had been before (our collective short term memory is terrible), but there we were in the comments book, Christmases 2005 and 2006. We had to cut the second trip short, since K's grandmother, Betty, died. I suppose we have always harboured a sense of unfulfillment, so it was wonderful to be coming back.

As usual, my full set of photos are over on Flickr - you should see my slideshow in the window below, otherwise click here.

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It's the perfect cottage for two, and was an excellent find - though I did spend the equivalent of several days online until I found it!


St Ives is also the perfect destination - we can get there by train, which is essential since neither of us can drive (and we've discovered it helps if you treat the loooong train journey as part of the holiday!); it's beautiful and picturesque, full of traditional granite houses, whitewashed with slate rooves covered with lichen, giving the town its distinctive range of colours; it's by the sea - and for some reason I am always drawn to the sea, I could sit and stare at it for hours ... as well as being surrounded by amazing landscape; and it's got Culture, all of the above having attracted a colony of artists to settle there since the late 19th century, but made most famous by the likes of Barbara Hepworth and Bernard Leach, as well as the 'primitive' (such a disparaging adjective) local fisherman and artist, Alfred Wallis, whose work I love. In fact, 'our' cottage is right opposite Barbara Hepworth's former studio - now a small museum and sculpture garden, which is a wonderful and inspiring place to visit, even though freezing cold in the winter! I love her sculptures, which can also be seen in various spots around the town.


This strong artistic legacy - which I always intend to learn more about and never get round to - led to the foundation of an outpost of the Tate there in 1993, in this retro-Modernist building, in homage to the importance of abstract modernists such as Hepworth and her husband Ben Nicholson to the history of the town.

Every time I visit, I am disappointed that there is no permanent corner of the gallery given over to the history of art in St Ives. Their temporary exhibitions always feature the work of local artists but, alas, you cannot learn anything about the history or artistic trends sponsored by this local community by visiting the gallery whose very existence is due to their fame and their legacy. I seem to write this on the evaluation form each time I go and it obviously has no influence! No Alfred Wallis on display anywhere this time around - and I have to say we did not think much of the current exhibition. One of the problems with having such a strong architectural space, which responds to and encompasses views of the sea and the landscape within two of the major gallery spaces, is that the artwork on display within has to be really strong to compete with what is around and outside. I am always far more interested in gazing out of this picture window than I am in gazing at the works behind me.


A highlight of this trip was our first visit to the Bernard Leach Pottery, which reopened in March 2008 after a major refurbishment. The old pottery workshop has been really sympathetically restored so it very much has the feel of a functioning pottery, from which the potters have just stepped out for the moment, and you can watch a fascinating film made in the 1950s, showing Leach and his studio in action, with a recent voiceover from one of the potters who worked there at the time. Leach was the founding father of British studio pottery and was deeply influenced by his time in Japan, and the new areas of the building reflect that by having a very Zen style to them - low wooden buildings with walkways between, housing a modern pottery which continues the Leach tradition of teaching through working. We bought two very beautiful black, salt-glazed mugs as a memento - I am drinking my morning coffee out of one right now! - but I could have totally bankrupted myself in the shop...

Another highlight was unexpectedly seeing a pod of dolphins playing in the sea off Porthmeor Beach. After visiting the Leach Pottery, we wandered back down to the sea, to sit and eat our packed lunch of Cornish pasties. Suddenly several specks appeared in the water, which we gradually realised were fins. There were at least 10 of them, quite close to the beach, and after weaving their way deeper out to sea, some of them started leaping and playing in the waves. Porthmeor Beach is popular with surfers because of the size of its waves, and the dolphins seemed to be joining in! In fact one of them made its way quite close to one of the surfers who was out that day - crazy dude - but then backed off again when it seemed to realise it was just a human being. It was amazing! They played like that for about 20 minutes. I unsuccessfully attempted to take some photographs - K much more sensibly filmed them:

When I looked up from this spectacle, the whole length of the beach and the edges of the surrounding cliffs were lined with people all watching - it was great, how this unexpected event of nature really wowed everyone and drew them all together.

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On past visits, because we have been there over Christmas, everything has been closed so there was very little pressure to do anything... More was open this time, but for the first few days we still managed to resist doing very much at all. Relaxing was what we were there for after all. We had ordered our groceries via a Tesco delivery and were both rather surprised when this actually arrived without any fuss on Monday morning - on past trips, we've got to the cottage, unpacked our suitcases, then lugged them by bus to the out-of-town supermarket to stock up. No such hassle this time! After which we promptly nested. I don't think we did all that much for the first couple of days apart from snuggle up in front of the wonderful log fires that K built and read our books.


Yes it really was that cosy!

We just took a little light reading with us...


We were there for New Year's Eve which is a big deal in St Ives. We had heard rumours about it but didn't really know what to expect. We went out at the start of the evening for a pre-prandial drink at The Sloop Inn - a wonderfully atmospheric pub on the harbour-front which they say dates back to 1312, and which you have no problem imagining smugglers and pirates frequenting... as indeed they were this evening, since as we sat there a steady stream of people in fancy dress, some of it extremely elaborate, came and went at the bar...


Basically everyone in town dresses up in fancy dress, and the small town is inundated by people from around Cornwall and beyond, also dressed up in fancy dress... Apart from the many smugglers and pirates, we saw quite a few Roman centurions, some Darleks, quartets of people dressed up as all the characters from the Wizard of Oz, and a veritable menagerie of people dressed up as animals... Thus attired, an enormous street party ensues! We popped back out again just before midnight and joined the throngs congregated around the harbour, where the tide was far out, and at midnight people started letting off fireworks on the beach. The whole thing had a great happy buzz about it, and was a really fun way to see the New Year in! (though we did so in our normal clothing!)



St Ives has also got some really top-class cafes and restaurants: we tried some new ones this time, spurred on by the recommendations in June's issue of Olive, the foodie magazine we subscribe to. Some of these places did not even exist the last time we were there! Cornish cream tea in the Porthminster Beach Cafe was particularly fine - I think it's the clotted cream that does it! Though the amazing views of the sea help as well...


The Digey Cafe was fantastic as well - a really cosy little deli-cafe selling locally-sourced produce, and judging by the lunch we had, excellent cooking too. Amazing steak-filled crumbly Cornish pasties from the new St Ives Bakery provided the perfect packed lunch for our long coastal walk to Lelant, while The Dolphin on Fore Street provided really gorgeous juicy fish and chips which were the perfect accompaniment to the special episode of Dr Who on New Year's Day!!

One thing we did not manage to do - though we're determined to do it next time - was the lantern-lit ghost walk around the town, led by the magnificently-named storyteller, Shanty Baba. However, late one evening we were sitting in front of the fire, reading, when we heard them stop outside the cottage and overheard Shanty tell about the man who used to live there, one James Wallis, the last of the local "ghost layers" - exorcists, or 'ghostbusters'. We couldn't quite hear everything he said, but it was amazing to think he was talking about 'our' cottage! This James Wallis was also a maths teacher, and all the local smugglers used to send their lads along to him, to sit in that front room where we were sitting reading by the fire, to learn some basic tricks of the trade! This explained why the cottage has a home-made sundial attached to the front wall with 'J. Wallis, 1780' rather naively inscribed on it. A brilliant little bit of history to add to our appreciation of the cottage and our surroundings!

I think St Ives would be a complete hell-hole in the summer, when those wide open beaches are mobbed by endless crowds of sunbathers... We have vowed never to go in the summer, but it makes the perfect winter retreat! I have come home with a desire to reread the Daphne du Maurier tales of smugglers and remote inns on Cornish moors and feisty heroines, which I so enjoyed as a teenager! And fortunately, we both still have another week's leave, a bit more time to prepare ourselves to go back to work and the onslaught of 2010... though feeling recharged after our Cornish hideaway.