Christmas feasting!

We did goose - and thanks to the combination of Mr Dale (aka 'the Hampton Court Butcher')'s magnificent bird, Raymond Blanc's excellent recipe (serendipitously spotted by my mother) and K's sterling efforts with a sharp knife, it was absolutely delicious - moist, goose fat did not pour smoking from the oven, and there were lots of leftovers, despite the horror stories which several people had told me when I said we were going to try cooking goose for the first time... My sister did think the roasted crown looked a bit like the head of one of the aliens in Alien, which was disturbingly true, but it didn't mar the flavour!

Preparations on Christmas Eve, just before heading out to Midnight Mass up the road at Christ Church, Streatham - the James Wild designed church with an Owen Jones interior which is just up the road!

As you can see here next to the fruit bowl, the new iPad really came into its own for online recipe consultation - I call it 'iPad cooking'! Did I mention that I treated myself to one of these from the Apple store in Houston?? It has been brilliant anyway, generally for reading PDFs when travelling to and fro on the tube (I am examining an enormous Spanish thesis - which, thank god, I actually finished reading today - and this has made getting through it in a timely fashion much more manageable)

Sitting down to a delicious starter of home-made blinis and Hebridean Smokehouse peat-smoked salmon, with thanks to my sister...

The goose - served up on the wonderful 19th-century platter which I inherited from my grandmother, which only ever comes out on special occasions, and when the food deserves showing off!

And there were a lot of trimmings! Home-made bread sauce (yum) and cranberry & apple relish, and all the vegetables came from our Local Greens veg bag, which I have blogged about before and will again - it has been prompting us to experiment with new recipes and invigorate our cooking which is always good!

Happy Christmas diners! We needed a walk in Brockwell Park after all that...

...but we returned ready to eat our dessert - a rather delicious (if I say so myself) mocha chocolate roulade! I was very happy with how very loggy it looked, being a Yule Log an' all. I totally mucked up the icing for this - twice - and so that the cream and Green & Blacks dark chocolate I had melted together didn't go to waste, I made truffles!


Quite pleased with how these have turned out! (though amazingly we haven't tried them yet)

My sister stayed over and on Boxing Day we went for a long walk along the Thames, from Vauxhall to Bermondsey.

A bit different from this time last year when we had to strap on our crampons to trudge through the Edinburgh snow! It has been really mild and rather un-wintry, and the South Bank was full of tourists, as usual! I couldn't resist taking a photo every time I saw the growing Shard...

This is from pretty much right underneath it, at London Bridge station. It is just so other-worldly in its hugeness. When it is finished it will be the tallest building in Europe!!

So, it's been a lovely week of cooking and eating and spending time with family and seeing friends - last night we had dinner with Wanda and Az at Bill Granger's new London restaurant, Granger & Co, which was amazing. I won't be forgetting the gorgeous pavlova with quince and strawberries for a while...

Not bad for a first Christmas in our new flat. And we still have a week off work! We're finally organising a housewarming, an 'open house' on New Year's Day, which we're now planning the menu for (we're going to bake a whole salmon from the Brixton Market fishmonger) and which might finally prompt us to put some pictures up on the walls... Catching up on sleep is also an important part of the plan.

Hope you all had a very Merry Christmas and all best wishes for 2012!

Christmas is coming!

I hadn't realised quite how long it has been since my last posting, but this is symptomatic of how busy November was, for both of us. I gave a conference paper (in Berlin), a gallery talk and 5 lectures (4 of them on the same day! a study day to the Birkbeck Alumni art history society - I was the study day!) all in the space of a two week period! The day I was giving my conference paper in Berlin, K was giving a lecture to the Hereford Historical Association! So, when the lecture was done, at least he got to spend a relaxing weekend at home with his parents...

Since we finished with all that craziness we have been trying to catch up with ourselves and start winding down a bit. By the end of December, I still have to read and write a report on a Spanish PhD thesis, write an article and a book introduction, but I am choosing not to worry overly about all those things - I am feeling completely lethargic at the weekends, and all I am capable of doing is wandering around shopping in Brixton Market, trying more of the food joints we haven't gone to yet. Mama Lan was a recent high point - the new Chinese dumpling place. We sat at the counter eating our lunch, watching the chefs making and cooking more of the dumplings we were eating - can't get much more freshly prepared than that!

There are quite a lot of pre-Christmas markets on at the weekends at the moment, which is quickly getting us into the Christmas spirit - last Saturday we went to visit our friend Lisa who was doing her first ever stall at the Workshop Sale in East Dulwich. We cycled over there, and picked up a few nice things for Christmas presents. Yesterday we wandered round the Crafty Fox Pop Up makers' market (I have discovered this is the phrase of the moment for craft fairs) and Brixton Makers' Market, which is a now monthly happening on Station Road, though I have to say the first one - which I stumbled upon quite by chance, back in October - was the best so far.

Today we bought a Christmas tree! (see above) And once K had struggled with getting it to stand up straight without falling over, we decorated it! I am sitting looking at it as I write - it feels very cosy in our living room now. We even put up a few pictures properly. We are doing Christmas here in the new flat this year - my parents and sister are coming to us, and we're planning the menu: so far the only fixtures are goose, and a mocha chocolate roulade. We both have two weeks off work, to catch up on sleep and exhibitions and write those articles and prepare for what is going to be another busy year - at least for me the next 6 months are going to carry on being pretty crazy - but also to spend some time in the flat and properly figure out where pictures and furniture should go, and replace those things we've been living with temporarily, and just be home-bodies for a while in our own home... Only two weeks to go!

Meet Juan, the camel-herd, and José, the potter - our mini-belen figures, bought in the Plaza Mayor Christmas market in Madrid, where there is always an enormous and highly complex belen, or Nativity Scene (though this does not really convey the true glamour of the Spanish version!), which the Christmas shoppers queue up to process past and enjoy! Of course the caganer is the most notorious of the Belen figures (Google it!) but there are all sorts of fun minor characters which make up the Bethlehem cityscape! We chose these two for a secular 'Nativity Scene' - though having put them out for the first time in a while, it is looking a bit bare. It's obviously about time to go back to Madrid to get a few more!!

Local Greens

For a long time we've wanted to get one of those veg boxes that gets delivered to you once a week, full of seasonal veg locally sourced from a nearby farm. The problem with the service provided by Abel & Cole and such companies, is that when you live in a block of flats in London, there is just nowhere for them to leave the box during the day, even if you trust your neighbours. A few years back, Tescos introduced one which we got a few times - but though it was convenient (delivered in the evenings alongside your weekly shopping), it was disappointing as most of the veg seemed to be flown or shipped in from somewhere far away, so was hardly supporting local farmers. We stopped that pretty quickly - and we can't have been the only ones, as I think they quietly adandoned it...

So imagine our delight when on a recent wander through Herne Hill we discovered a new local initiative called Local Greens, run by a small group of local ladies, supplying weekly bags of seasonal veg sourced from small and organic farms as close as possible to this part of London. Instead of delivering it to you at home, the bags are left at several local collection points and you go along on a Thursday evening after work to pick it up. And when we saw they were about to institute the Brockwell Lido Café as one of the collection points, which is at most a 10 minute walk from us through Brockwell Park, we signed up!

We're still getting into the swing of figuring out what to do with unusual vegetables (ideas for celeriac anyone?), mostly because this has been an unusually busy month for us - with me in Houston, back for a few days before going to Granada (see below), then back for a few days before K went off to Paris for a conference... But today I have been trying to catch up a bit. The clocks went back this morning so it has been the usual slightly odd, jetlaggy kind of day when it feels later than it is, so what better than to spend the afternoon cooking. I have made some stock out of a couple of chicken carcases that we had kept in the freezer, and have roasted the beetroot that came with the veg bag, and tomorrow night we will have borscht for supper. Since my cold-addled brain (I came down with a really nasty one this week and even took time off work, which I hardly ever do) mistook a freezer tub of egg whites for something else, and therefore defrosted it, I have made meringues too!!

Yes, I spent last weekend in Granada, attending the opening of the exhibition 'Owen Jones y la Alhambra', which I co-curated. The exhibition design looks fantastic, and it was just wonderful to think of Owen Jones and his work 'coming back' to the place that so inspired him in the 1830s... A really happy weekend.

Houses of Horrors

I knew Halloween was a big deal in the States, but I hadn't realised quite how big until this visit to Houston. On Sunday it poured with torrential rain, all day - in fact those words do not really capture the amount of rain that fell on Sunday, the first rain they have had in Texas for months, stuck as they are in the grips of a terrible drought.


My plan to visit the MFAH collections at Bayou Bend and walk through the gardens along the riverbank to the Rienzi, another satellite house-collection of the MFAH, was somewhat scuppered by the fact that whole riverside area was likely to have turned into a swamp, let alone that I would get drenched the moment I stepped out of the hotel's porte-cochère (they love these here). Just as I was pondering what to do with my day, Francesca - the curator here - phoned me up and we made a plan to drive up to the Rienzi in her car.

This is a 1950s house in the neo-neo-Palladian style, filled to the brim with a collection of European decorative arts from the 17th and 18th centuries, put together by the Mastersons and given to the MFAH on their deaths. They had a rather fun display in the dining room showing the table laid for an English noble banquet from the 1760s, with all the dishes based on recipes in Elizabeth Raffald's The Experienced English Housekeeper (1769) - I feel I need to obtain a copy of this. The bad weather had kept other visitors away so we had a personal guided tour of the house from one docent, then a personal explanation and discussion of the dining room with another docent - great fun actually.

Since the rain had calmed by the time we had finished, Francesca drove us around the River Oaks neighbourhood where the Rienzi is located, and we gawped at the ridiculously ginormous mansions built by Houstonians with more money than taste. Some of them were in a kind of American colonial style which at least felt like it had some local roots, but many others were attempting to be French châteaux or Renaissance villas of various kinds... But the best thing of all was their extravagant Halloween decorations!

I think this one is particularly creative...


This one lights up at night and even has ghostly sound effects!

Quite amazing. The amount of money they must spend on these decorations! Other places we saw had dozens of pumpkins of various sizes, some of them huge, 'landscaped' around people's gardens - just left to rot...

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Food waste is a major issue here. I mean it is bad in England, but the portions that they serve you in restaurants here are simply gigantic, and too much for a person to consume in one sitting! If you put your knife and fork down for a pause, a waiter will appear and ask if you are "still working?" - like it is a struggle you are forcing yourself through to eat everything on your plate. I guess it is a form of conspicuous consumption (literally) - but for a state as wealthy as Texas, Houston is not a cheap place to eat out. Or perhaps it's just this area.

I haven't ventured particularly far afield. I did not make it to the Space Center, unsurprisingly. The farthest I have walked is up to the Menil Collection - about half an hour from the hotel - and I am getting to know Montrose Boulevard pretty well, where most of the 'nearby' restaurants are located. What is frustrating is that there are no shops. I can't pop out to buy a bottle of water (and I am not paying $6 for a hotel bottle!) or a coffee or snack. The nearest shop is the drive-thru CVS pharmacy a 15-minute walk away.

Walking is the other thing that's weird - though not quite as bad as our experience in Fort Worth (my previous Texas experience) when walking from Downtown, where we were staying, to the Kimbell Museum where we were installing, which was probably another half hour walk, drivers would pull over and ask us if we were all right! There is certainly no disputing the friendliness or hospitality of Texans. But walking to and from dinner the last few nights, I am pretty much the only person I see on foot. The only other pedestrians are people walking their dogs or out for a run in the cooler evening temperatures.

And it is a bit cooler after Sunday's rainstorm. A little less humid as well. Apparently in the summer they can have 100 degree F and 100% humidity - it must be unbearable. In the high humidity of the first few days I was here, papers I left on my desk were damp when I picked them up.

It is slightly weird to be surrounded by so much Spanish. And that the Latino Spanish here is slightly different from the Castilian I am used to - shifts like elevador rather than ascensor for lift. But the entire service industry is Hispanic - every waitor or anyone you see doing any kind of manual labour, housekeeping in the hotel. The Texas economy would surely collapse without the Latino community, yet anti-immigration nutters want to keep them out.

The other thing I always find weird when I come to the US is the enormous size and great abundance of the churches. I think there is one on each corner, opposite the (metaphorical) Starbucks.

The hotel shuttle service, complete with horned buffalo skull. This service will take you anywhere within a 5 mile radius for free and come and pick you up when you're done. It seems to keep the engine running all day to keep the interior chilled and air conditioned for these Texans who seem to be allergic to warmth...

And last but by no means least, the bonkers Hotel Zaza where I am staying. Check out the website - it really does look like that! It is right next to the museum so it is certainly convenient, but this is a self-conscious rockstar hotel. It also claims to be one of Houston's premier night spots and though I am on the 7th floor, the bar is right below my window and there are speakers out on the pavement, which actually means the disco never stops. I am not exactly sleeping well and this might be why! That or the ridiculous number of pillows on my claw-footed luxury bed - one of two in my room!

Well, it has certainly been an experience. The installation is rather stop-start so I have been catching up with quite a lot of work that I brought with me, which is good. But tomorrow promises to be a busy day - when I need to install more than half of the pieces I am responsible for - and then I am travelling back to Blighty overnight on Thursday, so over and out from Houston.

Howdy from Houston

The fourth largest city in the United States, in terms of population and sprawl, though it doesn't really feel like it from this little pocket of the Museum District, where I am staying for 10 days installing our loans to the Gifts of the Sultan exhibition - which promises to be a visually rich and glamorous show. I arrived in the States on the day that Steve Jobs died and Sarah Palin announced she wasn't running for the White House - both momentous events in their own ways.

It is three years pretty much to the day since I last visited the States, arriving in New York for my six-week fellowship at the Met - what an amazing treat that was - and it is really nice to be here. Houston is perhaps not my number 1 holiday destination, but it is actually surprisingly civilised! There is lots of cultural stuff going on here, including some interesting museums. Also the Rothko Chapel is here, which I have been wanting to visit pretty much all my life, and finally got to yesterday evening after finishing my installation work for the day.

Photo courtesy of the art daily blog

It's a deeply meditative space, and the particular deep purple colour of some of the canvases really draws you in and you start to see mysterious shapes and whole worlds in the brush strokes. I sat in there for half an hour while other visitors came and went in a few minutes. (For more posts on my obsession with Rothko, see here.)

The Rothko Chapel is a small satellite building of the Menil Collection, the private collection especially of modern and contemporary American art formed by the Texan couple John and Dominique de Menil and now housed in a Renzo Piano building and visitable free of charge.


I had a walk around one of the wings, intending to go back up there over the weekend to see the rest of it and visit the other satellites, which include another chapel housing Byzantine frescoes from a church in Cyprus. I was the only person in the galleries for much of the time, apart from the security staff, which was a bit disconcerting, given the quality of the collection.

Unexpected treat: one room of the galleries house alternate canvases for the Rothko Chapel. Different, and I don't know why these weren't used. Up close and in a comparatively small gallery space, the canvases are truly monumental. This is what I was inspired to write in my notebook:

"These have a deep burgundy red and large black squares at the centre. Impenetrable black. You stare up at them - they're giving nothing away. In fact they seem to be staring back at you. They're Giants. Like Gods. But implacable, not benevolent. Is this the revelation that drove Rothko to suicide?"

I find I can't get away from thinking about his death when I look at his paintings - especially topical since the Rothko Chapel was dedicated a year after he died.

The de Menils also bought up houses in the neighbourhood surrounding their museum building which are all painted the same shade of 'Menil grey' and it has a really nice feel - traditional clapboard houses, quite small, but cosy-looking. A nicer area to walk around than the gigantic villas in some of the other residential parts of Houston!

I think K will probably want to live here...

I walked from here to meet some of my fellow couriers at the 'English pub', The Black Labrador, which has a red telephone box out front and a mannequin dressed up as a Beefeater inside! After that we went to Nelore Churrascaria, a Brazilian steakhouse, for dinner - which was an expensive but rather amazing experience! The waiters wander around with massive skewers of differently prepared meats and if you turn the card on your table over to green - for go! - they keep coming by (it's all you can eat) and slicing off bits from their skewer which you grab with little tongs. It was delicious but filling, though some people were really letting their plates pile up!

This was the prime sirloin - house specialty apparently!

Well I had better get on with the day, or I will miss the hotel breakfast! I haven't really figured out what I am doing today - K is insistent that I visit the Space Center, but it is 25 miles outside of Houston and there just seems no feasible way of getting there by public transport! I will think about it over a cup of coffee... More anon.

The Challenges of Home Ownership, Part 2: The Plumbing

And in case you missed the first part - the hilarious and heart-warming story of the pigeon which got stuck up our chimney - you can catch up here.

Monday was our 6-month anniversary in the new flat - I think it's safe to say that we feel pretty well at home here now (though it took longer than I thought it would), but one thing that has been the bane of our lives - and I can't believe we actually managed to put up with it for 6 months - has been the barely-functioning shower. The bathroom is small - when the flats were built, around 1902 - the bathroom, well toilet I should say, was in an outhouse out back. Anyway this means there is not much room and the vendors took out the bath and installed a shower cubicle - ie there is no other means of washing, apart from a flannel in the washbasin and water all over the floor. The bathroom was one of the last rooms the vendors did up before selling on the flat, and it is barely a year old - when I first saw the flat, it looked far too glamorous for us, with stone and tile and mirrors everywhere and a shower like you might expect to find in a 5-star hotel.

They warned us about the fact that when you turn it on, you have to run it for a goodly while before enough water started to flow to actually shower in. To start with this meant running it for about 10 minutes, but gradually it got worse, meaning we often needed to leave it running for half an hour before enough water was flowing to wash in. I hated the waste of water. And even once it did start flowing, it kept cutting to a heavy flow of cold water, which meant you had to leap out of the way and squeeze into the corner of the cubicle, until it started flowing warm again. For a while this was preceded by a noise in the pipes - an increase in pressure or something I suppose - which forewarned you that the cold was coming, a bit like the noise the Fireswamp makes in The Princess Bride before it incinerates you.

Basically after a few months of this, the hot water stopped flowing all together and turned into a dribble, which alternated with a heavy flow of cold water. For a moment when the hot dribble turned into cold flow or vice versa there would be a flow of hot water, for about a millisecond, which is when you could rinse shampoo or conditioner from your hair - though I am not sure it ever really got properly wet!

And that is how we have been washing ourselves for the last few months, often ending up leaving late for work as it has taken so long to have a shower in the morning. And this is not for want of trying to get it fixed. The most frustrating thing about it all has been the difficulty of getting a plumber to come and look at it, to diagnose the problem, and of course we had no clue - the frustration of learning what you don't know about when you own a place... I made contact, one way or another, with about 5 different plumbers, got 5 different opinions on what the problem was, made arrangements to come and look at it which were never honoured. I learnt that the good plumbers don't need to call you back, because they have no shortage of work. The recommendation from our old neighbour Sue of Martin the Polish Plumber eventually paid off - but having called, texted and emailed, when I finally succeeded in speaking to him, he was about to head to Poland for the summer!

In the end, he was here until 10pm last night, and touch wood, it now seems to be working. You turn the shower on and - miracle of miracles! - water comes out and it's hot and it keeps coming out and it stays hot! The problem was differential pressures for the hot water (coming from the mains) and the cold water (coming from a tank in the roof), and he tried a series of things until one of them worked. Counter-intuitively a pressure-reducing valve for the hot, to try to level out the pressure - and then simplest of all solutions, installing a brand-new shower and tap which were suited for low water pressure. It seems the vendors had installed high pressure taps.

Sorry to go on about this, but it has been a real nightmare, and stupidly difficult to get sorted out! But hopefully normal life can now resume, and we can turn our thoughts to all the other things we want to do in the flat that we haven't been thinking about with the part of our brains consumed by shower frustration - like putting up some pictures!

A Week at the Edinburgh Festival

Just back from a week in Edinburgh, visiting my sister, celebrating my birthday, and Doing the Festival! This is what we did, each with a mini-review in case you're thinking of going to any of them yourself:

Monday:
Walked along the Water of Leith to Dean Village (beautiful) to the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art to see the exhibitions of new work by Hiroshi Sugimoto and a retrospective of drawings and sculptures by Tony Cragg. Thumbs up for Sugimoto (who I like anyway) especially for Lightning Fields, which manages to capture forms from bursts of energy which seem to be alive, like weird sea creatures from the bottom of the ocean... Photogenic Drawing (blow up prints of Fox Talbot images from the 1840s) seemed more of an academic experiment. Take-it-or-leave-it thumbs for Tony Cragg - I like those weird sculptures that look like lots of faces in profile but after a while it is all the same.

Midnight till 2 am: 'Political Animal' at The Stand, politically satirical stand-up hosted by Andy Zaltzman. His bits in between the guests were the best and funniest thing about it so if you're not sure and don't want to stay out late then I'd go for his 'Armchair Revolutionary' show instead! But it fulfilled all my expectations of the Fringe! Late night comedy stand up in basement bars... So worth it for the experience alone.

Tuesday:
'The Proceedings of that Night': Excellent. This will probably turn up on Radio 4 at some point. Short single-hander play about an actor recording a ghost story for radio, inexplicably all alone late at night in an isolated recording studio... As he reads it the ghost story starts to fight back. Truly spooky!

'Blood and Roses': also really good. A promenade play, where we turned up to a meeting point in St George's West church and were given headsets to listen as the play played out in our heads, while we followed an usher who led us round nearby streets and into spookily dressed staged spaces. A love story through different times and places, with some witches thrown in for good measure.

Wednesday:
'The Queen: Art and Image' at the Scottish National Gallery. Not that I'm a patriot but I thought this was a really interesting exhibition - about celebrity, the developing image of the Queen over the long period of her reign, how this image is manipulated according to political events or popular opinion, especially the need to make her increasing accessible to her subjects... Plus many of the world's greatest artists have photographed or painted the Queen and there were some iconic and beautiful images. In particular I was struck by 'Lightness of Being' by Chris Levine (do a Google Image search), the accidental portrait taken while the Queen rested her eyes between long exposures while he worked on the actual portrait. Both are in the show and are holographic, so the reproductions don't really capture how the images follow you around the room...

Explored the craft market in the graveyard of St Johns church. Bought a cheese knife with a handle made from bracingly scented juniper wood as a memento.

National Museum of Scotland - which has recently reopened its doors after a major refurbishment lasting more than a decade I think. They have done major work on restoring the Victorian building, and the natural history displays are spectacular - particularly as they have a contemporary feel yet are inspired by the original Victorian approach - and I spent quite a lot of time in there. However I found the rest of it - the, er, art - disappointing and I am sorry to say the Islamic displays were risible.

Thursday:
A discussion at the Book Festival about Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, marking the centenary of his birth this year. This was K's choice and it was nice to do something at the book festival - most of the interesting talks were happening the following week... I hadn't read any Czeslaw Milosz - had hardly even heard of him - but it was a really interesting session, with some of his poetry read out, in English translation as well as in the original Polish, and I certainly will investigate him now.

'The Conference of the Birds': this was Isla's choice, a student production (we had had lunch that day with the Islamic history tutor of some of them!) which used a lot of physical theatre to depict this allegory of the world's birds undergoing trials and tribulations while they search for their king, the Simurgh (for which, read God). But it was really well done, and really nice to see something quite experimental - took me back to my own days of student theatre.

Friday:
My birthday! I am officially in my late 30s now. We took a trip to the seaside - driving along the East Lothian coast to Gullane where we had a wonderful 2-hour walk along its sandy beaches and back along its dunes, before heading for North Berwick for lunch - a feast of lobster and chips from the wonderful and much-to-be-recommended Lobster Shack at the harbour... We saw the lobsters being delivered (still alive of course) so they were totally fresh and absolutely delicious!



Pudding was Signor Luca ice cream (made with all local ingredients) while sitting on the sea wall looking out to the sheer rockfaces of the Bass Rock with its colony of tens of thousands of seabirds... It was gorgeously sunny and warm so K and I got a bit burned while Isla just went a deeper brown as she always does!

Back to Edinburgh in time to see 'Cowboys and Aliens' at the cinema - there was some low-brow activity as well!

Saturday:
'Me, Myself and Miss Gibbs': a really original show put together by Francesca Millican-Slater, which tells the story of a postcard she picked up in a junk shop in Devon, sent on 15 July 1910 to a Miss L. Gibbs, instructing her to 'Be Careful Tomorrow'. Francesca became obsessed by the postcard and about trying to track down Miss Gibbs and why she should be careful tomorrow... It was a really interesting little detective story, beautifully presented (best use of an OHP I've ever seen I think), told from the perspective of her personal journey to find out what she did, how she felt about the 'historical stalking' she was doing, who she met along the way... Really excellent.

After this we wandered up to the Farmers' Market on Castle Terrace, catching it just before everyone packed up for the day, and had the most amazing Aberdeen Angus beefburgers! Followed, somewhat later, after some lazy wandering and provision-purchasing (can't leave Scotland without some hot-smoked salmon, though the preferred Hebridean Smokehouse variety - smoked in peat, yum! - was not in evidence), by a tray of macaroons at Valvona & Crolla's VinCaffè...


That evening, opening night of 'The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle' at King's Theatre. This was the only thing we did as part of the actual, original 'International Festival'. My sister and I both really loved Haruki Murakami's book, though K hadn't read it so I think he spent most of the performance wondering what on earth was going on. It was really well produced and staged, with lots of interesting projection and puppetry, and I enjoyed the mix of Japanese and English language... K said the next day that the memory of the performance seemed like a hallucination which was exactly the nature of the book, so an amazing achievement, really, to capture its surreal nature.

There was much more food, drink, meeting up with friends, chatting, walking, exploring my sister's new neighbourhood (she now has her own flat off Leith Walk)... It was exhilarating and exhausting! Back to work for a rest!

Five days later

This was Foot Locker in Brixton on Wednesday morning, totally torched in the riots on Sunday night. There were a couple of crime scene investigators still at work on it, but by the end of the day it was being boarded up. Many of the shopfronts on the high street have their windows boarded up now, so you are faced with a cityscape of plywood when you walk down into town, but otherwise everything seems totally back to normal.

Everyone is sharing experiences - you overhear snatches of conversation in the market. We chatted with our upstairs neighbours, who were much more alert than us and started noticing via online forums that it was all kicking off in Brixton on Sunday night. One of them is a journalist and actually went out and had a wander around - he said that the mood was more like a carnival than anything particularly aggressive, but he was depressed about the fact that most of the kids doing the looting were young teens. The other neighbour said she had looked out of her front window at one point and seen kids running down our street laden with flat-screen TVs and other gear from Currys round the corner. She had heard, though, that these kids were subsequently mugged by older kids with guns - kind of worrying to have confirmed so baldly what you have always suspected about the neighbourhood but never really wanted to think about.

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On a lighter note... Because K was working at home today, we went and had lunch in Brixton Village, fulfilling our resolution to always have lunch in the market when we're around (more usually at the weekend).

View down 4th Avenue, with the quirky lampshade installation designed by local artist, Charlotte Squire, who has her studio in the market. Read more about the work here.

Last autumn I blogged about the total transformation of Brixton Village, but didn't know much about it at the time. I now know it's the amazingly successful result of a deliberate policy of regeneration, the brainchild of an agency called Spacemakers that hasn't been going for long but specialises in urban regeneration projects: you can read about their project for Brixton Village here. That part of the market was so rundown that parts of it were derelict, but they arranged with the council and the property managers to let out 20 market stalls rent-free for three months, and held an open evening to attract interest, which was massive. They allocated the stalls to independent small businesses run by local people or who would source their supplies, especially food, locally, and only agreed to projects which would not threaten the already-existing shops and stalls. And now it is totally buzzing!

We have been back many times since, and it seems like there are new places every time we go. We try to eat at a different place every time: we've tried Etta's Seafood, Cornercopia, though I must admit we have been three times to Kaosan, a really delicious little Thai place which was highly rated by the Observer's restaurant critic, Jay Rayner, also a local resident (we used to see him taking his kids to school when we lived on Brixton Hill). The first time we went it was empty - just us and a second table were occupied - but ever since his rave review, the place has been totally packed and you're lucky to get a table! (They do really gorgeous lemongrass tea)


Today we tried the Japanese place, Okan, which specialises in okonomiyaki, Japanese street food - which I had eaten in Japan and it tasted just as good and delicious here in Brixton. I love how all these restaurants have benches outside, and you can watch the market life going on around you. It's really nice to go on a Friday, when it is quieter anyway but feels like locals only, whereas on Saturdays now the market is full of people who come in from outside Brixton - we've even spotted some tourists! It's all great for the local economy (though I know some fear it heralds gentrification - though actually Brixton has always been pretty wealthy and gentrified, until the post-war years...) but it is also nice to feel you're a local there.

And supporting your local businesses and community seems like the right thing to do at the moment, after the trauma of the riots.

After the riots...

Pictures from a walk around Brixton after last night's rioting and looting...

Curry's on Effra Road - this is literally just around the corner from us. I took these pics with my phone so the quality isn't great but you might be able to make out that the glass front doors are both smashed in and there are piles of loot that I guess wasn't taken - and two of the shop managers standing around apparently totally lost about what to do. Next door is Halfords which didn't look too badly damaged, but the BBC journalist who reported on the looting live in the small hours of this morning said that bikes were being passed one by one out of the front door...

There were piles of stones and bits of broken up brick lying around on the pavement, presumably assembled for throwing at shop windows to break the glass. A low wall at the end of our street seemed to have been slightly dismantled, presumably to get at the bricks for ammunition.

Brixton was full of press. This reporter was being hassled by a drunk guy who the police had a stern word with...


The camera crew at the left were from Portuguese TV. I even saw a couple of Japanese journalists setting up their camera in the middle of Electric Avenue. This shows the view down Brixton Road, totally cordoned off with police tape, everyone standing around just looking though there wasn't much to look at apart from scenes of destruction.

The windows had been boarded up at KFC by the time I got there, around lunchtime. Though I couldn't get onto the high street to really see the extent of the damage, what seemed to be the case is that the banks were completely untouched, but places like KFC or MacDonalds or the gaming shop (you can just make out the smashed windows of the shop with the blue frontage)

or Foot Locker - all these places were targeted for smash and grab. It seems to have been gangs of youths out for whatever they could get. Someone made a half-hearted attempt to get into this jewellery shop

but the real targets seem to have been those places that stock goods that appeal to current youth culture - the mobile phone shops were particularly smashed up apparently. Though someone had also had a go at M&S for good measure.


This was one of the bus stops by the tube station (which was closed today) - totally smashed up.

The high street was closed and buses were diverted and there was pretty much total chaos on the traffic front - but I still managed to walk around the market, some of which was open, and do some shopping (I am on leave this week and needed some supplies as Rosa is coming round for dinner this evening). There was a weird feeling of business as usual, though subdued and with a sense of people not quite knowing what to do with themselves.

It was weird. Coming home from Helen's barbecue last night around 9 pm, we would never have guessed that riots would erupt within a matter of hours. It had been Brixton Splash, a street festival, during the day, which seems to have been fun and chilled and there were still quite a lot of people around, sitting in groups on the lawn in Windrush Square. There seemed to be a rather unnecessary number of police around, but they weren't doing anything - we laughed about how one of them was queuing for a burger from one of the street vendors. Ironically, later it turned out that there weren't enough police on hand.

We came home, watched a movie (The A-Team!) and went to bed - then got woken up at 2.30 in the morning by the noise from a police helicopter directly overhead. The noise was unbearable - reverberating with all the tall buildings of the council estates around us. It went on for about half an hour/40 minutes, maybe longer. I got up and looked out of the window - it literally was straight up from our flats, with a huge beam pointing in the direction of Currys, I now realise. I guess we realised that meant something was going on - but something usually is going on in Brixton.

I just fell back asleep and was none the wiser until K checked the headlines online as he settled down to work at home for the morning, and was greeted by 'Riots erupt in Brixton'.

I feel kind of depressed about the whole thing. It seems to have been organised and there is some talk online about groups of youths bussing in from outside Brixton. But what is it all about? What is the point of it? So far it seems to be utterly senseless, violence and looting for the sake of it. One of the buildings that has been completely gutted by fire in Tottenham was a rather handsome 1930s block, now destroyed - so sad. A lady standing next to me this afternoon as we surveyed the emptiness of Brixton Road said to me, 'It's so unfair - they're smashing up their own back yard, where their parents and grandparents have to work and shop'. It doesn't have the ideology of 30 years ago - but is that how all riots start? With a spark and then you rationalise it later? I just hope that's it, and we're not in for a repeat of what happened last time.

P.S. so touched by all the messages and calls we've had this evening asking us if we're ok - thanks for caring guys!

First experiments with gardening

One of the great features of the new flat is the garden which over the years our new neighbours have filled with beds and pots and climbing plants. I decided I wanted to experiment with growing things, especially edible things, mainly as a way of developing a hobby which gets me away from my computer at the weekends. As an idea, this will probably be more successful when I have finished working on the Festschrift volume I am currently mostly editing. So, as a result, the seedlings I bought at a 'Growing in Brixton' fair a few weeks back all died, while sitting out on the kitchen windowsill waiting for me to have time to think about planting them out. Terrible waste.

But I planted some herb seeds in a couple of window boxes a couple of months back and got some seedlings from some of them - especially the rocket. So this weekend, when I should have been Festschrifting but, hell, I'd been conferencing the last 3 weekends, I finally got around to planting out the rocket seedlings. I inherited some big tubs from an event at work, which don't have holes in the bottom for drainage, but one of my colleagues drew my attention to the phenomenon of sub-irrigation planting, which has been used successfully by urban gardeners across the world to produce flourishing crops and gardens in balconies, rooftops and other city spaces. Read all about it at the fascinating Inside Urban Green blog.

I had been saving plastic food trays and bottles for the last few weeks to use in constructing my sub-irrigation system, which seemed complicated but in practice was really easy to do.


I planted out all the rocket seedlings - there were many more of them than I realised - and have been looking forward to lots of delicious salads!


I have been diligently watering them, but today one of them has flowered, which I think means it is running to seed... Apparently this is easily done with rocket, especially if they have been overcrowded, which I guess they were when they were sprouting in my window box. Hey ho. It's all an experiment at the moment - people just keep saying I have to try things and see what works. Growing up in London, I have never had a garden to play with before. Anyway I will probably be posting here about gardening again, and I'll let you know what becomes of the rocket!

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RANT ALERT: I needed some first class stamps, and was out and about on High Street Ken during my lunch hour today (I popped down to Leighton House to see their George Aitchison exhibition before it closes on Sunday), so I went into a corner shop (I love how we call these convenience places 'corner shops' even when they're nowhere near a corner) and asked for a packet of 12. He charged me £6.60, which seemed a lot to me but I just thought to myself, I am obviously out of touch with the price of a first class stamp. Then I figured out that this meant that each stamp cost 55p, which seemed extortionate. Since a few years back, British stamps no longer have the price printed on them - just '1st', as follows:

This seemed at the time like a ploy to keep putting the prices up without anyone noticing, and so it turns out. I have learned today that the price of a first class stamp is 46p - which is a 20p increase since the last time I was aware of the price!!! In any case, I thought I had been charged too much so went into the Post Office branch on the other side of the road - the enormous lunch time queue had put me off buying my stamps there before. Trying in vain to find any visible information on the price of stamps, I seized upon a passing post office worker, and asked her the price of a first class stamp. When she told me 46p and I started to tell her that I had just been charged 55p a stamp over the road, she said - 'Did you buy them in a shop? They're allowed to charge what they like'. I was and am outraged! How can the price of a first class stamp, guaranteed by Her Majesty's Royal Mail, cost whatever arbitrary sum a shopkeeper fancies???

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We spent an idyllic day in Ely yesterday, seeing Marcus and Eva and their two beautiful and well-behaved littluns, over from Canada for the summer but about to return. The first warm sunny day in a while, so lots of sitting out in the garden while the children played. We went for a walk around the Cathedral - which is astonishing, perhaps all the more so for the way it rises up out of the flat fens around, but it is still just ginormous. And amazing that the week before we had been in York Minster, the other biggest medieval cathedral in the land.

So just in the last week we have gone some way towards ticking a few more cathedrals off K's list. For a while now we have been Doing Cathedrals on bank holidays, but he only revealed to me recently (perhaps because he had retroactively rationalised it this way) that our goal is actually to visit all the medieval/nice cathedrals in the country! Chichester next, on the August bank holiday weekend.

Three in a row

It's conference season, and over the last three weeks I have been at three of them, back to back. It's been rewarding, but exhausting!

© Julia Gonnella

This is me alongside one of the masterpieces of early Islamic architecture - the Malwiyya, or spiral minaret, at the great Iraqi palatine city of Samarra. I'm in the process of chairing one of the sessions at Conference 1, '100 years of excavations at Samarra', held at the Museum für Islamische Kunst in Berlin, somewhere I always enjoy going. That was a great and important event and hopefully we have incentivised enough people to finally get a project on the Samarra small finds off the ground, which a colleague and I have had in the works for a long while but never had the time to do anything with.

Back from two days in Berlin, I slept at home then the following afternoon travelled to Southampton for the biennial meeting of the Society for the Medieval Mediterranean, at which I had organised a double panel - on material culture and exchange across the Mediterranean, focusing on Sicily/Southern Italy and North Africa in particular. The beginnings of my campaign to bring North Africa properly into the discourse of Islamic art. Had an evening to wander around Southampton a bit and look at the medieval walls and some of the old buildings that survive there, though it was very heavily bombed in the Second World War - but the refuse collectors were on strike which meant that rubbish bags were just piled up in the street and there was loose litter everywhere, and I am afraid it looked like a total dump. I felt embarrassed to be with international visitors who might have taken a very adverse impression of English cities away with them...

Back at work for 3 days, then off to the next conference, on medieval Spain, where I was giving a paper - the first in fact, which meant I could relax for the rest of the conference. This one was in York, where I had only been once before and very briefly, but gosh it's so beautiful!! The antithesis - the remedy even - to Southampton, with the best preserved medieval town centre in all the land. K came up too, to explore the buildings of York while I was in the conference room, and had a brilliant time. I joined him at York Minster in time for evensong on the Saturday - always the best way of experiencing a medieval cathedral I think - then we had time to walk around the town together a bit on Sunday before a late lunch with Bruce, and the train back to London.

I am finally settling back again into whatever passes for 'normality' around here, but I think it's catching up with me as I feel exhausted this evening!

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There was a short but totally idyllic interlude between Southampton and York. We went back to The Ring of Bells...


A few years ago - 2006 in fact, how time flies - Glaire and I spent a few days here (after a totally unsatisfactory conference on medieval Iberia in Exeter) working on the closing stages of the volume of essays which we edited together. This totally quiet and beautiful inn, in an idyllic village of thatched cottages on the southeastern corner of Dartmoor, provided the perfect setting for getting to grips with the final tasks of whipping all the essays into shape. Glaire also had the joyless task of having to translate one of the articles from Spanish. Anyway, since she came over to participate in my Southampton panel, we decided to go back - without having any work to do - since our few days at The Ring of Bells have been an oasis of calm and tranquillity in both our memories ever since.

K decided to join us this time, to experience it for himself. And I am very pleased to say that it was just as wonderful the second time around (though there was a wedding in the next village over on the Saturday so it was quite a lot busier than last time). We took an OS map with us this time, and went for long walks - on the Friday we walked for 8 hours, over to Lustleigh for a pub lunch, and back again the long way round - and sat long talking over dinner in the evenings.

The landscape there is so amazingly beautiful, almost magical. The recent rain meant that the vegetation was almost unbelievably luscious and green!


That part of Dartmoor has a heavily wooded fringe, but then you climb up through bracken onto the high moor and have amazing views for miles around. The weather wasn't that great but, hey, this is England in the summer - as one of the Americans I met at the York conference said, "There is no such thing as bad weather - only inappropriate kit". I thought that was totally apt!

There are some photos of the triumphant Return to The Ring of Bells on my Flickr photostream. Enjoy!

Book launch

I thought I would rather shamelessly share with you some photos of my book launch in Seville a few weekends back.


It was K's birthday weekend as well as a bank holiday on the Monday so we made a long weekend of it, and had a really lovely time. Just got sent these shots last week from colleagues at the Fundación Tres Culturas who organised the whole thing (they financed the Spanish translation of my book). It was part of one of those flat-pack book fairs that take over a whole plaza, that seem to be so common in Spain and which I have often wandered around and bought books from, so it was weird to be part of one myself.




They want to arrange some more in the autumn so I'll be an old hand at this soon.

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I am not keeping up with this blog these days - too much going on and I just feel tired a lot of the time (not helped by the horrible weather that seems to be gripping the UK this last month). One day soon I hope to finally sort our photos from the Central Asia trip (before I forget what they all are) and post them on Flickr, and post a few reports and stand-out anecdotes... We're seeing some of the friends we made on that trip this weekend so that will be an incentive, hopefully, to reminisce about it here.

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We finally watched Avatar on DVD. What a terrible film! I think we missed about 75% of the point by not watching it on a massive IMAX-sized screen in 3D. It's an effects film which doesn't transfer to the small screen. Can't believe it's one of the highest grossing films of all time, but thank goodness it didn't get the Oscar (though from what I remember about The Hurt Locker I am not sure that deserved it either - but hey it's politics). Not a patch on The Shadow Line - finally a British show good enough in terms of its writing and acting to stand up to the best of the American and European dramas we have been getting here recently. And with the lovely Chiwetel Ejiofor to boot! Catch it while it's still on iPlayer!