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!