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!