Hello and goodbye, November!

The minaret/bell tower of the Great Mosque of Cordoba, by night

It’s a whole month since my last posting. Two days after that, I went to Spain for a week. I try to go at least once a year – to keep the language skills ticking over, and also to catch up with the recent research that those prolific Spaniards publish, and which can be so hard to find or find out about over here; sometimes you can’t even track them down outside the particular region of Spain where the book or periodical was published. This time I was mainly in Córdoba – so wonderful to spend a whole week there – with a lightning visit to Granada tacked on the end, to see the current exhibition at the Alhambra on Washington Irving, the American writer who first popularised the monument and its charms for the Anglophone world, through the publication of his Tales from the Alhambra in 1832. This year marks the 150th anniversary of his death.

The primary reason for the visit was to attend the conference, “‘And diverse are their hues’: Color [it was an American-organised affair] in Islamic art and culture”. This was organised by the Qatar-based campus of the Virginia Commonwealth University, and as such was an extremely lavish affair, with receptions, three-course dinners and lunches laid on free of charge for the attendees – of which I think there were about 400!! It was completely dry, not just as a result of the Qatar Foundation’s sponsorship, but apparently also because American universities will not pay to provide alcohol at their events, especially if students are present. The Spaniards were utterly bemused by this, and the only table with a bottle of wine on it at the dinner after the opening reception was that of the Mayor of Córdoba and dignitaries of Córdoba University. Many conference attendees were seen slipping away to the bar before (and during!) dinner…

I did not have much luck with flights on this trip. Since it is not possible to fly direct from London to either Córdoba or Granada (except, it seems, on very specific and unhelpful days for Granada), I had to fly to Madrid and make carefully calibrated onward travel arrangements. These did not allow for much leeway if there were delays. Which there were, both ways. I had booked a train (the marvellous AVE) from Madrid to Córdoba, but the flight from London was delayed by two hours, because the passenger manifest did not match up with the number of people physically on the plane. There were two extra people, and the flight crew kept checking and rechecking everyone’s boarding passes, and occasionally calling out particular names and asking those passengers to make themselves known. Both the names of the extra people on the plane were called out various times, but they did not identify themselves. Eventually one of them was found during one of the passport/boarding card checks, and they asked him if he knew the other person whose name they had been calling out. He denied it. After another round of checks, this other person was found to be sitting next to him. They had checked in, but somehow got onto the plane without having their boarding cards checked. Finally, the plane started to taxi to the runway, then it stopped for a while, and then it turned back to the stand! Some transport officials got on and took these guys off the flight. The captain explained it all afterwards, and said he was uneasy about the situation and did not want to take off with them on board – in case it was deliberately dodgy and not just a case of stupidity, I suppose. I spent most of the flight worrying that I wouldn’t make it to Atocha station in time to catch my train, and in the end we landed half an hour before the train was due to leave – it normally takes 45 minutes to get there on the Metro! I ran out of the airport and straight to the front of the taxi queue, and the wonderful taxi driver zipped through the Madrid roads (it was a Monday lunchtime so not too busy, fortunately) so that I arrived in Atocha just as they were boarding my train!

So against all the odds, I made it to Córdoba – in time to attend the conference’s opening ceremony – and I had a fantastically productive week. I felt so intellectually engaged! I took with me a bunch of photocopied articles, an article I have in progress, a chapter and an article of Glaire’s which she had asked me to read and comment on… and I got through them all, in fact I didn’t want to read anything else! I took the new Carlos Ruiz Zafón book with me (The Angel’s Game) and I didn’t start reading it until a couple of nights before I was due to leave. Another reason for the trip was to see the newly-opened museum and visitor centre at Madinat al-Zahra – which is absolutely state-of-the-art and fantastic, such a treat to have all that material on display properly for the first time! – and also to start to ease my brain back into the subject of my PhD thesis, already more than seven years old, since I want to think about finally publishing it next year. One of the best things about the trip was meeting the archaeologist of the Great Mosque of Córdoba, whose articles I had read but whom I had never met, and going around and even underneath the mosque with him!


We literally climbed down a rickety ladder through a hole in the floor near the cathedral, while tourists peered down on us through the grate – after we had parted, I was sitting on a bench furiously writing up the notes from our conversation, when a group of Spanish tourists came over to me and asked me what was down there! This was the site of an archaeological excavation they had done several years ago, at the junction between the original eastern façade of the old mosque, and the extension which was constructed all along it by al-Mansur, regent of the Umayyad caliphs at the turn of the 10th/11th centuries, and subject of my doctoral research. This excavation goes all the way down to the 8th-century street! This originally ran alongside the length of the eastern façade (as the street today runs along the side of the mosque), but had to be filled in up to a height of about 4 m, in order to level the land before laying the foundations for al-Mansur’s enormous mosque extension. It was just fantastic to see, and what a privilege. All the finds from this excavation have been surveyed and drawn, but inexplicably, the archaeologist told me that there is no local interest to publish it, and while it is all currently held in the Cathedral archive, it cannot be consulted there, because it is not published!! When we parted, he asked me if I thought there was any chance of having this important material published in England – so at some point I might try to follow up on this…

On the way back from Spain – having got efficiently and uneventfully to Granada on the bus – I had a flight from Granada to Madrid, with a gap of two hours to get to my onward flight to London, but though I was at the airport in plenty of time, my flight was, of course, late. There was no explanation for this, nor any actual acknowledgement that it was in fact late, so no apology either. The flight landed 40 minutes late, but then it took another 40 minutes for the baggage to come out on the carousel – again, there was no explanation or apology, and the staff at the Iberia desk very unhelpfully just told us to wait. By the time I saw my suitcase, I was very anxious about catching my onward flight, since I had to change terminals – from the swanky new Richard Rogers terminals, to the old terminal building (which I knew so well from the year I lived in Madrid), which now operates as Terminal 1. I tried to run for a taxi again, but was told that I could not take a taxi between terminals and had no choice but to get the shuttle bus. Of course I had just missed one, had to wait 10 minutes for the next one to arrive, and then of course it went to every other terminal before Terminal 1. By the time I had run the length of the concourse to the EasyJet check-in desks, they had closed the flight, and would not make an exception for me. This has to be the first time I have ever known an EasyJet flight to take off on time.

Ridiculously, two flights left simultaneously for Gatwick and Luton, and unbelievably these were the last flights to London from any of the Barajas terminals. I had no choice but to change my ticket to a flight the next morning, but the EasyJet office could do nothing until the flight had actually taken off, so I just had to wait, doing nothing in the airport, watching my flight leave. It was extremely frustrating. Airport information were able to find me a relatively cheap place to stay near the airport, since the first flight the next morning was due to take off at 7.30, and I didn’t want to miss it! Unfortunately, the hotel did not serve food, and though they ordered me a pizza, it never arrived! Feeling very annoyed and sorry for myself, I had a fitful night’s sleep, but caught my flight uneventfully the next morning, and went straight into work. The trip was extremely rewarding and productive, but I have decided that travelling by plane is too stressful and I am happy not to have to do it for a while!

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The week I went to Córdoba, my sister went to visit her friend Will in North Uist, to get away from it all for her birthday, having just left her extremely frustrating and stressful job. By the time I got back from Spain, she had decided to move there! This was not an out-of-the-blue decision – it’s something she had been meaning to do for a while, and in fact she had a job interview in Glasgow on the way to Uist… But while she was up there, she heard of a flat available and decided to just go for it. I basically got back from Spain in time for her leaving party! I’m really proud of and happy for her, but I miss her loads too.

Holidays in North Uist next year, if she’s still there, which hopefully she will be!! I have been listening a lot to the CDs we bought on Harris in the summer – Julie Fowlis and Kathleen MacInnes – which really transport me back to the gorgeous landscape and intense feeling of wellbeing and relaxation we experienced on holiday up there. Which, now that I have to commute on the tube again, is no bad thing.

She wants the space to write, and to make ends meet through freelance editing work, which is busy finishing her training in. For her birthday present, I had reconditioned my old iBook for her, so she had a laptop. It’s about 8 years old, so doesn’t have a lot of memory, and won’t even mount the external hard drive I bought for her for back ups, so it’s practically useless, but hopefully it will tide her over until she can afford something more up-to-date. The space bar on the old keyboard had got stuck – it had lost its bounce basically – and I did not know where to get this fixed. I took it into an Apple retailer and repair shop on High Street Kensington, who told me I would have to have the whole keyboard replaced, which I was not prepared to do; and then a friend told me about a little hole-in-the-wall place by Goodge Street station, who fixed it without fuss, and also upgraded the operating system. Long live boffins and computer geeks, that’s what I say!

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I also got back from Spain in time to attend the next meeting of Lambeth Council’s Planning Committee – you will recall that in September, our Residents’ Association successfully argued for a delay to the Lambeth College redevelopment, on the site next to our block of flats, pending a site visit by all the necessary parties involved in making this decision. Astonishingly, this had never been done, and no-one involved in pushing this decision through the Planning Committee had seemed all that fussed about the opinions or the quality of life of the residents of Brixton Hill Court. The site visit was announced at very short notice, as was the Planning Committee meeting – one might be forgiven, I think, for wondering whether they were trying to push it through without more fuss from our Residents’ Association… However, they found out, and in time to pull some new statements together, and we all trooped down again to Lambeth Town Hall, the night after I got back from Spain.

Again, we’d been warned that the Planning Committee was minded to approve the application, and that our stand was more symbolic than anything. But amazingly, the wonderful Tory councillor who had argued for our cause before did so vociferously again – he has attended the site visit, and said this had made him even more amazed that such a big building could be contemplated on the neighbouring site, since it would really cut off our light and views and privacy. The mood in the room was going against approving the application, though at one point it seemed as if the unpleasant Chair might overrule the other councillors and push it through. It came to a vote, and a voice from one of the members of the public at the other side of the room was heard to say – “Sling it aaaaaaat!” (This guy turned out to be something of a nutter – as we were all leaving afterwards, he pulled K to one side and advised him to buy a recording device, since the councillors were all corrupt and could not be trusted to represent the discussions accurately in their minutes…) In the end, and much to our amazement, the application was basically rejected – or the Lambeth College officials present were informed that the building in its current configuration would not be approved, and they had to drastically rethink it before resubmitting their site redevelopment plan.

I think the phrase is a Pyrrhic victory, though that might be overstating it. Basically, we were of course delighted with this outcome – and with the continued success of our great reps from the Residents’ Association (K being one of them, you’ll remember) – but we also want Lambeth College to have the chance to redevelop its site. The Chancellor commented to Angela as we were gathering in front of the Town Hall afterwards – “You’ll be going home happier than we are”. We went to the pub to celebrate, but we await the next phase in this saga with some trepidation. Let’s hope it’s not worse.

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I have just read Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, and it was absolutely fantastic. A Tudor historian friend-of-a-friend is apparently disgusted by how inaccurate it is, but I couldn’t care less. Everyone knows the story (it’s about the rise of Thomas Cromwell, during the era that sees the fall of Cardinal Wolsey, the divorce from Katherine of Aragon, the rise of Anne Boleyn and Thomas Cranmer, the break with Rome, the fall of Thomas More), and the point of this book is not to retell it in the format of ‘just another historical novel’. It is so beautifully written, and it made me realise that what the historical fiction genre is lacking is this kind of lyrical writing. Hilary Mantel might be the only person doing this. It’s a literary novel that just happens to be set in the past. But its historical setting is very impressionistic – you don’t read this book to find out how Thomas Cromwell rose to be the most important man in the State after Henry VIII. You read it for its fantastic use of language and the conception of Cromwell’s interior world.

This sentence is deservedly being used a lot in all the blurb about the book:

“Lock Cromwell in a deep dungeon in the morning”, says Thomas More, “and when you come back that night he’ll be sitting on a plush cushion eating larks’ tongues, and all the gaolers will owe him...”

I am also very happy to say that Wolf Hall has finally dispelled the bitter taste left in my mouth by the Shardlake novels of C J Sansom. I read the third of these while on holiday in Harris, and really wish I hadn’t. They’re badly written, overlong, and just plain boring. I have given him three out of four tries, but now I definitively give up on them. I cannot see why they are so highly regarded.

As the Economist review (Oct 10th-16th) put it, Ms Mantel eschews “cod Tudor dialogue … going for direct modern English. Her best novel yet”.

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Waterwheels and the Mosque of Nur al-Din, Hama, Syria © MRO

Exactly a year ago I was in Syria, looking after our Masterpieces of World Ceramics exhibition (amazing to see the same objects now permanently fixed in the timeline of world ceramics in our fantastic new Ceramics Galleries). During the two days off I had from Eid al-Adha – the three or four day holiday that occurs at the end of the pilgrimage to Mecca (the Hajj), which all my Syrian acquaintances likened to the Christmas break in the West – I hired a driver, and went on a wonderfully memorable trip to Krak des Chevaliers, the stunning Crusader castle in the fertile north of Syria. I wrote a bit about this trip in this posting. I stayed overnight in Hama, a small town on the Orontes river that is well-known for its waterwheels. We arrived there just as it was getting dark, and stayed in a lovely atmospheric hotel just outside the main part of the city, whose name I now cannot recall – though there was a very cute ginger kitten who climbed up my arm, I seem to remember!

My driver dropped me off in the town centre and then went off to stay with friends or family for the night, and I had a really atmospheric wander along the banks of the Orontes. I took this photo of the waterwheels and the 12th-century mosque of Nur al-Din from the bridge which crosses from one side of the river to the next, before diving into the network of medieval streets that meander around the back of the mosque. In my mind, I will always see Hama at night. It will be a surprise if I ever go back during the daytime!

This is our calendar picture for this month. We have been very organised this year, and have just ordered and even received our new calendar for 2010, so we can actually start writing in the nice things we have booked over the next few months – such as a long weekend in Paris for our 14th anniversary in February! So these happy reminiscences of high points of the last year will continue into 2010… Which is scarily imminent – I can’t wait for our two-week break at Christmas and New Year (we are heading for our cottage in St Ives again this year, and I just cannot wait) but there is still so much to do in the next month… Eeek!

Catching up with the year...

I haven't blogged about our calendar images for months - the last posting seems to have been in June. I thought it was time to catch up with the year - since I think, I hope, I am finally starting to emerge from the myre of intense busy-ness of, erm, most of this year. But I saw a friend from Cairo the other day, and while we were catching up over a very fine lunch at Carluccio's, sitting outside in the blazing sunshine of last week's mini-Indian summer, I was musing on how I was hoping I was about to move into a less busy period, and she said - "You said that last year". Hmmm. Something not going right there. Anyway.

Chapel of St. Mary Magdalene, Ludlow Castle © KR

July: this is the gorgeous round Norman chapel in the centre of Ludlow Castle, which really is one of the most beautiful sets of castle ruins in all of England. We visited last summer on a day trip from Hereford when we went down for a few days to celebrate K's mother's 60th birthday and retirement. I sat inside here for quite some time admiring the architecture while waiting for K to take about a million photos of it and the rest of Ludlow Castle. We had a lovely wander around the town as well, which is really picturesque, with a lot of surviving timber-framed buildings, and now well-known as a foodie destination. It was on this trip that I conceived the idea of giving my parents a weekend at The Feathers to celebrate their 40th wedding anniversary this year, since this is where they spent their honeymoon. This is what we did, and they had a really lovely weekend, indulging in quite a lot of memory lane. At the end of August, we had a great party for them - there are photos here.

Roman Theatre, Bosra, Syria © MRO

August: Last November/December I spent five weeks in Syria, based in Damascus, looking after an exhibition of world ceramics from my museum's collections. This is one the big trips I took last autumn which was one of the reasons for setting up this blog, to keep family and friends updated, but there was just no time for that - too much to see and do! While working on the exhibition, I had Fridays off - the Muslim holy day, when the exhibition was closed - and I tried to make the most of my time by taking a few out-of-town trips. Living was cheap, so from my per diem I could afford to hire a car and a driver and travel in relative luxury - this meant that I didn't have to rely on the vagaries of bus timetables, and could definitely go there and back in one day without having to worry and exhaust myself.

One of these day trips was to Bosra, in the far south of Syria, a small town built on and around the ruins of an ancient settlement - first for the Nabataeans, and while most of the standing ruins and monuments are Roman, there are also fascinating medieval buildings integrated into the older Roman structures. They are built from this amazing black basalt, so have a very different feel from your usual Roman antiquities, but it glows a gorgeous warm colour in the late afternoon sun. I was particularly taken by the Roman theatre, which is one of the best preserved in the entire world - unfortunately the Roman remains in the Middle East are rather neglected by Classical archaeologists, but they would do well to spend some time studying them. Because one of my research interests is spolia and reuse, I found this theatre fascinating, since it was reused as a citadel by the Mamluks (who ruled in Egypt and Syria between 1250 and 1517), who carefully enclosed the theatre within fortifications, turning it into a smaller version of a Crusader castle like Krak des Chevaliers, with a perfectly preserved Roman theatre at its heart. This is a photo taken standing on the stage looking up through the ruins of the three-storey scaenae frons, which was originally fronted with white marble and highly decorative details, such as these capitals.

Boating lake, Central Park, New York © KR

September: Wow, there is something so calming and idyllic about this photo of the boating lake in Central Park, with the Manhattan skyline poking up behind the trees and reflected in the water. It is exactly a year ago that I left for my 6 week sojourn in the States - taking part in a curatorial exchange with the Metropolitan Museum. This time last year I was in California, having adventures on the Greyhound, which I really will blog about properly sometime soon! K came out for my last two weeks, and Becca came down to visit us from Illinois - it was fantastic to see her after so long. This photo was taken on a walk around Central Park with her - so it reminds me of friends, and the beauty of New York in the autumn, of how much I love New York, and also of the first time I went there with K, when we were taking another walk around this boating lake - along the tree-line on the far side of this photo - and completely by chance stumbled on a lakeside amateur production of Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor. We sat down on the grass and watched, and it was absolutely fantastic. We were reminded of it last year when we went to see the same play at the Globe with K's family - it was brilliant there as well, but there was something about the impromptu, informal nature of the New York production that has always stuck with us. Afterwards we wandered off towards the Bandstand, and accidentally caught a flamenco performance, just as the sun was going down. That was a good walk in the park!

Colonnaded street, Apamea, Syria © MRO

October: This rather misty photograph - which probably looks better if you look at it a bit bigger - was taken at Apamea, a two kilometre long Roman colonnaded street in the middle of nowhere in northwest Syria. At Eid, the exhibition was closed for two days, so I was able to take an overnight trip - again, travelling by hired car and driver - to Krak des Chevaliers, staying overnight in Hama, and coming back south via Apamea, and Ma'loula - a small town just outside Damascus which is famous for its early Christian monasteries, now important pilgrimage sites. The weather in the north was grey and misty and rainy - apparently everywhere else in Syria that weekend there were beautiful sunny blue skies! - so that I did not get much sense of the amazingly fertile landscape in that part of the country, and walking around Krak des Chevaliers was a little bit like having been transported to deepest France or something...

However, early the next day, walking along the endless colonnaded street at Apamea, I was the only person there apart from, I think, three other tourists who quickly disappeared into the mist, and some rather annoying guys on motorbikes trying to flog me 'authentic' Roman coins and finds - I ignored them. But it was just so beautiful and atmospheric, as the standing columns of this once busy market street emerged out of the mist - parts of it were so well-preserved that you could still make out the forms of the shops. These small cubicles are exactly how the shops in Middle Eastern souqs still are today, set back in the same way from the bustling walkways - visiting some of these places where traditional ways of life are still so strong really does give you a better sense of how people must have lived in the past.

So this is the photograph we will be looking at every day for the next month. Happy memories...

At the moment we haven't written a single thing onto the calendar for what we're doing this month. For a brief moment, I thought - perhaps we're not doing anything at all, all month - what bliss! A quick flick through the pages of my diary put paid to that notion. Better start filling in the calendar...

Fixing the Family Graves

Last weekend we travelled down to Swansea for a weekend away with my parents and sister. This was timed to celebrate my father’s birthday on 2nd March, and meant we were there for St David’s Day (he is called David because he was born the day after the Welsh National Day), and though I must have been there then as a child, I don’t remember, and it was quite an experience to get caught up in such outpourings of Welshness! That particular weekend it was made all the more exuberant because of the fact that Wales had been playing France on the Friday night in the Rugby Six Nations tournament – as soon as we crossed the Severn Bridge into Wales, the roads were eerily quiet and empty, and it felt like we were driving through the small hours, rather than 9 o’clock in the evening. Unfortunately Wales lost, and this gave rise to an awful lot of hanging and slow shaking of heads over the course of the weekend – and to shared moments between strangers that must have sounded rather enigmatic to anyone listening in who was not aware of the defeat in this game which is more of a religion than a sport in Wales.

It was tough getting out of London. As soon as I got to Brixton tube station, they were closing it because of signal failure at Stockwell – something that happens all too frequently while they work on the seemingly-endless “improvement works” (notice how these have been rebranded recently, so we can’t complain about disruption). I missed one bus, then piled onto another that came along soon after, and instead of going straight through to Victoria as I had initially planned, I made the split-second decision to get off at Stockwell and connect to the Victoria Line from there – I am sure this is what the signs up at Brixton had advised… As I was crossing the road, something felt not quite right, and I suddenly realised I had left our suitcase on the bus! With K’s wide angle lens in it and my father’s birthday present!! (my sister and I had his grandfather’s gold pocket watch refurbished – not exactly something you want to lose…) I ran like a fool back to the bus which had just pulled away from the stop but I banged on the door and yelled at the driver – “My suitcase! I’ve left my suitcase!” Fortunately, he opened the doors (they’re usually real sticklers about only opening doors at stops) and drove onto the next stop where I got off, having safely retrieved the suitcase. Phew. But then it turned out the Victoria line was suspended from Stockwell as well, and I can’t even remember now what I worked out I needed to do to get to my parents’, but of course by the time I did eventually get there (probably only about 20 minutes late in the end, having lingered in Wendell Park taking photos of crocuses wide open to soak up the sun) they weren’t quite ready to leave anyway. A quick stop at B&Q to pick up some provisions (we were also on a mission to clean and fix up the family graves) and then off to collect K at Richmond, which led us into horribly heavy traffic and took about another hour from there to get onto the motorway. But then we were off and, as always, heading out of London felt so refreshingly like sloughing off an old, tired skin…

We arrived late at our B&B – the very oddly-named Christmas Pie, but extremely cosy and welcoming, more like staying as a guest in someone’s house than somewhere you pay for. Excellent breakfasts too, and huge! Which was just as well as we had heavy work to do!

There are several family graves at Oystermouth Cemetery, in the wonderfully-named Mumbles, where my father grew up, once more of a sleepy fishing and holiday village than an outpost of Swansea, but this is where we spent most of our time (apologies to my father for saying this, but Swansea City proper does not have all that much to recommend it – though he’ll be the first to admit that the Council ruined it during reconstruction efforts after the extensive damage it suffered during the Second World War). Mumbles is lovely, on the other hand. Since no-one in the family really lives in or near Swansea any more (though that’s not strictly true) the family plots have got a bit run-down and overgrown, and on one of them, two of the corner stones had come loose, and my father wanted to fix them up before them went missing.

It was nice to see that the snowdrops had come out on our grandparents’ grave (significance of this mentioned in an earlier posting)


and that the new lettering had now been added to the headstone, so that my grandmother was finally there in her own right.


We set about picking out the fallen leaves and twigs and just generally tidying and cleaning and sprucing everything up.


Later on we went and spent a small fortune on daffodils to arrange on the top of the graves.

The real construction work was done on an older tomb higher up on the slopes of the cemetery, where two marble corner blocks had come loose, and K and my father mixed up some cement to stick them back on.


My father had once done a brick-laying course, and it turns out he can mix some good cement.


The Rev. Samuel Owen would be pleased to have his grave back in one piece, I am sure.


Oystermouth is a really lovely, atmospheric Victorian cemetery (it opened in 1883), which sweeps up the side of a steep hillside, and is surrounded by woodland. It has this wonderful avenue of large old cypress trees right down the middle of it.


Somewhat amusingly (at least, it’s amusing that such awards exist), it was shortlisted for the Cemetery of the Year Award in 2007. Quite a number of the old graves have been left to fall into ruin,


- the onus really is on the families to keep them up, and my father is just keen that, while we’re hale and able, we do what we can with ours. It really is a special thing to have a physical place where you can go and think about and remember your relatives – many of the people buried in these graves died before my time, or I only remember them very hazily from my childhood, but now my grandfather and grandmother are there, and though they’re in our thoughts and memories all the time, it really makes a difference to have a physical place to be with them. It reminded me of being in Syria during the Eid holidays in early December last year – after attending the Eid prayers at the local mosque, it is traditional for families to go and visit the family graves and to hang on them a wreath of an aromatic plant, a bit like rosemary for remembrance. I had two days off from the exhibition during Eid, and had arranged an overnight out-of-town trip to Krak des Chevaliers, Hama and Apamea (all of which was absolutely fantastic), but the driver I hired asked if we could meet an hour later than arranged (not by me!), to give him time to visit the graves. Then, as we were driving through northern Syria, all the cemeteries we passed were garlanded with these fresh green wreaths. It felt really special. I can’t really imagine what it would be like if your relatives’ ashes had just been scattered somewhere and you didn’t have an actual place to be with them. My grandmother was cremated (one of the most meaningful cremations I’ve ever been to) but I am glad her ashes were put in a casket and buried with my grandfather.

Having fulfilled our family duty, we went off for a big lunch of fish and chips, which surprisingly took a long time to find for seaside town, though we eventually ended up at Covelli’s, not far from where we started out. I can still feel the crispness of the batter on my haddock! It was wonderful! My mother and sister went off for a cup of tea (and secret birthday-card shopping) in Treasure – a shop which really cannot be missed during a visit to Mumbles (this was the shop window in honour of the rugby/St David’s Day - there was going to be a prize-giving the next day for the best dressed window, but we left before finding out who won...)


while K, my father and I went and clambered around Oystermouth Castle,


a rather impressive castle, dating from the 12th to 14th centuries, though sadly you can’t go inside since it is in too ruinous a state – my father says he has never known it open while he was growing up here, and doesn’t think his mother had ever been inside either. Some good views of the bay though from up here.


Swansea harbour has a very impressive tidal drop of about a mile.


We were so tired by the end of the day that we were almost falling asleep over our rather tasty dinner at Papa Sancho’s, home of the intriguing stonegrill cooking phenomenon, as well as being founded by, guess what, a former Welsh rugby star. Must have been all that sea air.

On St David’s day, the sun was shining, and we were back in Mumbles for a walk along the beach – though the tide was in when we started, so we didn’t actually get onto the beach until the very end. Le tout Mumbles was out doing the same thing, and it was all very jolly, with everyone sporting their daffodils (normally I get a load of funny looks if I go about with my daffodil in London), and the occasional leek.


We laughed at the interesting names on some of the boats

(this one's called 'Kangaroo Poo')

and saw the lifeboat coming back in from what must have been an exercise – it was really interesting to see how it gets hauled back in up the launching ramp, on what must be enormous chains.



My father can remember the boom going off in the bay to alert the lifeboatmen on duty that they needed to get their arses down to the boathouse. He said everyone else just stopped when they heard it.

We made our way to the end of Mumbles pier, built in 1898.


My father used to play here as a child, and apparently my great-grandmother and other relatives of her generation came here for entertainment. Nowadays there is a rather Disney-fied Welsh dragon slide


and some of those silly pictures with cut-out heads for your family to pose in for the cameras!


But it does have some rather fine Victorian ironwork.


We got down on the shingle and looked for nice stones – my mother found an enormous one to use as a doorstop, which no-one else offered to carry!


A last look at the Lighthouse (which dates from 1794)


and we wandered back along the bay to Mumbles, where the farmers’ market and “dragon festival” in honour of St David’s Day had really kicked off!

(and I always thought the Welsh were a short race...)

After some rather fine lamb burgers,


and some purchases of fine local produce, not to mention some free Welsh-cakes, we headed off to Joe’s ice cream parlour, home of legendary Swansea ice cream since the 1920s. My father remembers the owner, Joe Cascarini, always doing his accounts in the corner of the shop. This is a Swansea legend apparently – as is the ice cream, and I must say it was possibly the smoothest, creamiest vanilla ice cream I’ve ever tasted. I had a rather fine strawberry sundae.


We gave my father his birthday present,


which he seemed very chuffed with, and I was glad again for not having lost it on the Number 2 bus!! (Since then, my mother has bought him a chain to go with it from Ebay)

We stopped off briefly in Swansea city centre, for K to take photos of Swansea castle, another fine structure of which much less is standing than at Oystermouth – in fact, I had absolutely no idea there was another castle in Swansea! My folks went off to explore the Welsh Tartan shop (!) while I busied myself with taking photos of the fountain in the main square, where the water had been dyed red for rugby/St David’s Day. There were posters up everywhere warning people that “this dye could stain” (really?)! It was rather macabre actually, though compelling, and I couldn’t stop taking photos, just as most of the kids around couldn’t stop dipping their hands in, just to see if they came out red…


And then we set off back to London. It was good going until we got within spitting distance, and then the traffic almost came to a grinding halt – what you might expect, coming back into the Big Smoke at the end of the weekend, but much much worse than anyone had remembered it, and it took us an hour to get a couple of miles. The cause of the problem was revealed to be a major two-car collision at the junction with Chiswick. Rather horrible really – it looked as if it might have been fatal. So we didn’t get home quite as early as planned, but my parents managed to return the Streetcar we had hired, just in the nick of time. (That’s a great service by the way, and it has done us proud, not least on trips to Swansea – the first time being a car emergency in order to make it to my grandmother’s funeral on time. A bit of ring composition, here, perhaps?)