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!