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.