Snapshots

I have a fair bit to catch up on from the last month, but I thought I would write it around snapshots of what I have been doing and seeing in that time.

Owls in the British Library

Well, as I had been warned, the British Library was absolutely packed over the summer, and unless you got there by 10 or very soon after, you could pretty much kiss goodbye to the idea of getting a desk or finding an empty locker down in the cloakroom... People resorted to interesting lengths to reserve desks for themselves - I spotted this one in Rare Books as I was popping out for a coffee break: a little cloth owl, and a bashed-up old notebook. Later on in the day I remembered to look and see whose desk it was, and it was occupied by a very respectable-looking middle-aged Japanese lady - she was working away surrounded by piles of bona fide-looking rare books, with the toy owl still in the same position...

We got into a very cosy habit working with Juliette - my arrival time in the library was slightly erratic and she would always save me a desk. We moved around a little bit - she got a bit bored of looking at the mustachioed Italian who alternated his beige or grey cardigans on a weekly basis...

It was an immensely productive month - as Glaire commented in an email, I was obviously ready to do this. I sent off my book proposal and sample material, and got about halfway through revising the thesis. Some of it is not very polished, and I created work for myself in some ways by deciding to add a new chapter - by turning my object appendix into an object-focused chapter - but I feel very satisfied with how much I got done. Plus I felt extremely relaxed by the end of it, and not at all keen on going back to work - especially with the 'age of austerity' looming and no-one quite knowing what is going to be in store for museums and heritage institutions in the upcoming Comprehensive Spending Review...

With Nick at Blickling

We got away for the Bank Holiday weekend (typical late August weather, as you can see from the photo!!) and went to visit Nick in Norfolk. We had a rather crazy weekend staying with him at his mother and stepfather's, along with their 3 young grand-daughters (all under 5), the parents of their daughter-in-law, Nick's brother and his wife, and four labradors!! It was actually great fun, though we slipped away during the day, to take in the gorgeous Norfolk countryside and exercise our National Trust membership cards a little - not being drivers, we don't get to do that very much! K had a bunch of places that he wanted to visit for various research reasons, and it was great just spending time with Nick and catching up. We also got to be the first dinner guests at Suzie & Drake's wonderful thatched cottage, which they had only moved into 2 weeks before!


The South Bank had a Morris dancing festival - inspired by the sarcastic remarks apparently made by Sebastian Coe at the opening ceremonies of the Olympics in Beijing: in reaction to the acrobatic Chinese dancing, he quipped that in London in 2012 we could instead look forward to the performance of 5000 Morris dancers. South Bank took him at his word, and pop artist David Owen created some memorable Morris dancing related images - one of them was (ha ha) Morissey, waving a bunch of wildflowers; another was the famous head from the bookcover of A Clockwork Orange, wearing a flower-festooned hat... But I liked this Star Wars Stormtrooper the best!

We actually didn't see any of the Morris dancing, but we did go to hear The Imagined Village playing at Queen Elizabeth Hall, which was excellent! The night before going back to work too, so I certainly was not sitting around at home moping over my 'back to school' feeling...


People have been emailing me to tell me they have spotted my book for sale in far-flung places! So far, the furthest-flung is the American University of Cairo bookshop - in Cairo! But this photo was taken by Lisa, "in an academic bookshop in a narrow street in Venice, about two weeks ago"... You can just spot it there in the middle on the top shelf!

Have you seen my book for sale anywhere exotic? I'd love to know!


I had one day back in the office last Monday, then went off again on a 3-day courier trip to Munich - installing a few pieces in an exhibition that is soon to open at the Haus der Kunst, commemorating 100 years since a major Islamic Art exhibition held in Munich in 1910. This one has a combination of 'historic' objects - which had been shown at the 1910 exhibition - together with contemporary works, which seems to be a current trend in exhibition curating in Germany these days. The exhibition in Berlin which I couriered in January took a similar approach. It was early days in the installation - I was the first courier - but I was impressed by the quality of the pieces. The Haus der Kunst is a rather ugly Fascist building - it was built in 1937, and seems ironically to be one of few buildings in Munich that actually survived the Allied bombings in 1945 - though they seem to have turned it into quite a thriving cultural and exhibition centre.

Munich was lovely - I had never been before - and it was really nice to catch up with Marion (hello! I know she reads this!). The Glockenspiel in the picture above is one of Munich's major tourist attractions - it is installed in the impressive belltower of the neo-Gothic Rathaus, though it dates from the early 20th century. It commemorates two events from Munich's history. Everyone gathers in the main square for 11 o'clock when it starts to play, and there is a great cry of approval when the Bavarian jouster knocks his Austrian opponent off his perch - lots of fun!

But what a busy week! I was giving a lecture yesterday - in a study afternoon on Seville - so as soon as I got back from Munich, I had to think about that. No wonder I feel like a zombie today!


And last, but by no means least, our calendar image for the month - K's grandfather, Robert, who died this time last year. This lovely photo of him was taken during the war, when he must have been in his 30s. He didn't change a bit all his life!

The Incident of the Rhubarb Tarte Tatin

It was Friday the 13th, and I quipped to Andrew by email, "I hope I don't burn the dinner!" Hmmm. I had chosen a fancy dessert recipe from Olive to wow our dinner guests, and also to use up the last batch of rhubarb from K's parents' garden. First problem - I haven't cooked with rhubarb much before, and had never made a tarte tatin, and found upon reading the recipe closely that this was supposed to be done in blini pans or in a Yorkshire pudding tray with four indents, neither of which I had. So a single tarte tatin in a cake tin it was going to be. Then came the issue of making the caramel base. I discovered the hard way (er, literally) that when the recipe says butter and granulated sugar, one should not use caster sugar to make caramel.

After two attempts (the first with golden caster sugar, the second with normal refined caster sugar, just in case its goldenness had been the problem), K was dispatched to the local corner shop to procure granulated sugar, and hurrah! all proceeded satisfactorily with caramel production. I made a nice arrangement of the rhubarb bits on top of this, and I must say the tarte tatin did look beautiful when it was turned out. I don't have a photo unfortunately. Andrew was presented with the first slice and we all waited for the verdict - poor man, having been put on the spot, he did a valiant job of keeping a straight face. I tried a bite of mine - decidedly sour!! What happened to all that sugar in the caramel??? Plus the recipe suggestion of serving this with mascarpone was not a good choice.

With lashings of caster sugar, the dessert was eaten, but lesson learned - always test a new dessert recipe before serving it to one's dinner guests!! Alas, I feel this episode might go down in personal legend - "remember when you did that rhubarb tarte tatin for Alison and Andrew....?"

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The nice thing, however, was that we had a dinner party at all. It has been far too long since we had people over for supper, and this is one of the very nice outcomes of the time I have off work at the moment. Five whole weeks! I had so much annual leave to use up, having taken almost no holiday over the busy last few years, that I decided to take a big batch of time off in the middle of the summer - when it is usually quiet anyway - and spend it in the library, finally starting to focus on how to turn my PhD thesis into a book... I get two different reactions to this:

1) "Don't work too hard / Make sure you actually give yourself some time off!"
2) "Five weeks in the library! What bliss!"

I fall into the latter category myself. Two weeks in, and I am feeling immensely relaxed! I have said before that I don't really know how to relax like normal people - I actually really enjoy going to the library, and it is wonderful just to have the time to read things. I made a list of books and articles that have been published since I submitted my thesis in 2002 - not too long fortunately - and have been working my way through that, but also reading the odd other article, which I'm interested in but isn't directly relevant... Plus - I have space in my brain! And time to get round to things I have been meaning to do for months! Like write emails, send people photos or references I said I would send them, and just see people and be sociable!

The British Library is a pretty sociable place, as I have noted before, and I have been meeting friends for lunch and coffee and a post-library drink. Now Juliette has joined me in Rare Books, on her own PhD sabbatical, and we're getting into a habit of taking our packed lunches outside at 1, to sit in the sun for half an hour or so, and debrief... K will be off work too soon, so the 3 of us will be chilling out together...

And two weeks in, I have nearly a complete first draft of a book proposal! Reading the thesis again after 8 years was an interesting experience, and I was gratified to discover that it wasn't too awful, and that mostly I still agreed with myself... It's a bit dry and in some places overly defensive, but that's what makes a PhD different from a book, and that's what I have got to work out how to tackle. I've even had some positive feedback from the professor who supervised me for the beginning of the process, but didn't see it through because he went off to the States to be a hot-shot museum director - amazing to have some actual feedback as the viva was such a let-down... But water under the bridge an' all.

So - the next dinner party is planned for just over a week's time, and I'm already plotting the menu. I'm starting with the dessert first this time...!

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And finally...

Signpost, Chenies © KR

Our calendar picture for this month. A very English country road sign, but for K one which conjures up the places of his childhood. Chenies was where his grandparents lived, both now passed away. It was exactly this time last year that we were in Hereford for the 3 Choirs Festival, unknowingly spending our last days with his grandfather Robert... Perhaps a little sombre for the kitchen calendar, but it prompts some happy memories.

The constant composter

Wool drying, Lewis & Harris, Outer Hebrides © KR

This month's calendar picture - the only one in colour, just because of the beautiful contrast of colours it shows, which is so typically Scottish, or so typical of what we now associate with the Outer Hebrides. This was taken outside the home and workshop of Marion Campbell, the tweed weaver we went to visit on Harris last summer. There is something amazing - but I suppose not all that surprising - about the way the earthy colours of the wool echo the colours of the hills on the horizon.

I haven't blogged about this year's Hebridean holiday - there are just not enough hours in a day to get down here all the things I would like to write about, all the thoughts that pass fleetingly through my brain... I have finally got round to loading up some images on Flickr, a selection of about 50 out of the 400 or so photographs I took, mainly of amazing landscapes, and K and my sister pulling silly faces... The home-movie, The Langass Witch Project, is worth a watch though! (We climbed Beinn Langass, and I was trying to figure out how to photograph the amazing views from the top, and had the brainwave that a panoramic movie would capture the scene much better than a series of stills - but my endeavour was rudely interrupted...)

This year we were on North Uist, where my sister has been living since November, which is the second-most northerly of a string of five islands linked by causeways - though the word 'islands' is in some ways a misnoma, since they are potted with so many lochs and bodies of water that it doesn't feel much like a landmass sometimes. As with Lewis and Harris last year, the landscape is almost achingly beautiful, with such contrasts from one view to the next - ragged mountains on the horizon in one direction, miles-long sandy beaches with transparent turquoise seas in another, undulating treeless peaty moorland all around you, suddenly interrupted by the bright colours and heavy scent of the machair, meadows which grow behind the sea and before the peat, which were covered with wildflowers and teeming with wildlife, full of species of flora and fauna I had never seen in my life before!


We spent most of the time outside - a wonderful change from being cooped up in libraries or offices or galleries. K bought a small book about the archaeology of the Uists, which had a helpful gazetteer in the back, and we used it as the starting point for long walks in different parts of the islands. The joke became that the archaeology consisted of piles of stones in different configurations, be it chambered cairn, or Iron Age wheelhouse (the oldest 'buildings' in Europe apparently!), or medieval chapel... In fact it didn't really matter, it was the walk there that counted. One feature we thought particularly beautiful was the dun, or artificial island built out in the middle of a loch, linked to the land by an ancient causeway. The dun usually had a structure built on it, a cairn or a burial mound or domestic structure. You'd see them all over as we were driving around.


This time round we stayed in a B&B, run by a rather eccentric Dutch artist - a wonderful place in a beautiful setting, but he had quite strict breakfast times, which sometimes involved having to talk to strangers (other people who were staying there) without having yet imbibed sufficient quantities of coffee to have properly woken up! So we didn't get as much sleep as I would have liked and I did very little reading (only got through one book), and it confirmed us in the view that self-catering is definitely the way to go - memories of that gorgeous little cottage on Harris last year... But the infrastructure for that kind of tourism doesn't exist on the Uists yet, somewhat surprisingly. I was only partly joking every time I saw a run-down blackhouse for sale, about buying it and doing it up and renting it out... (especially since our house-buying plans in London are rather on the backburner these days)

So many stories and happy memories - slightly embittered by the personal difficulties that my sister has been having, and her indecision about what to do with her life. It seems she might be moving to Edinburgh now, where she was at university - I won't mind! I love Edinburgh, and it will be great to have the excuse to visit it more, plus it will be easier to get to see her, since getting to the Hebrides is not all that easy (one of its charms, of course) and can be rather expensive. We might try the Inner Hebrides next year, especially since there is a possibility that my parents might be about to move there... (Hmmm, don't think I should be taking it personally that my immediate family are all moving away!)

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I've done a neighbourly turn this afternoon, which I am feeling rather self-satisfied about. I have donated a good load of the compost we have been making for over a year now to the friend of a friend, who lives two streets away and has an allotment. It's all very well composting our food waste, but the bin was getting full, and though it goes down as the waste rots, ultimately it seemed a bit pointless if we weren't going to do anything with it. I tried offering it to the Brockwell Park Community Greenhouses, who were very nice about it but understandably have to observe DEFRA health and safety guidelines about the compost they use being made on-site; then a colleague of K's said she was sure her friend Honor would be interested.

I commandeered an abandoned barrow (I quickly realised why it was abandoned - it has a flat tyre), and borrowed some trowels from Lisa, the lady who technically owns the compost bin, though about 4 or 5 flats have been composting in it for a good long while now - then started excavating. It's quite good stuff! Amazing to see what all our food waste turns into! Lots of worms, which is apparently a good sign! Honor happily carried away three heavy bags worth, and will be back in the autumn for more! She gave us a lovely looking lettuce and two amazing courgettes in exchange - and it just seems so good that it will actually be going to some use. And it's created lots of space for more good composting! So now I can carry on composting with a clear conscience, and it has impressed K, I think, who was always a bit dubious about our compost. So good turns all round!

Sans Souci

Sans Souci, Potsdam, Berlin © MRO

I can't believe it's almost exactly a year ago that I took this picture - after finishing and submitting all the work on my book, I treated myself to a long weekend in Berlin to coincide with Glaire being there from North Carolina on a work trip. I stayed with Nadania in her lovely apartment in Prenzlauer Berg. While G met with colleagues at the Frei Universität during the day, I entertained myself - as is very easy to do in Berlin - and one day I took myself off to Potsdam, where I had never had time to go before. Since I was mentally still in book-mode, I was also interested to see the famous examples of Orientalist architecture, especially the Pump House which was built to draw water for the complex system which supplied the many gardens of the royal pleasure palace. The Pump House is built like a Mamluk mosque on the outside, and decorated on the inside like a miniature version of the Great Mosque of Cordoba. Fascinating - though the guided tour was in German only, so I didn't learn as much as I could have!

By the time I walked up to Sans Souci - Frederick the Great of Prussia's own (much smaller) version of Versailles - it was a really hot and sunny day, and the park was absolutely full of sightseers. I skirted round the palace for a while, visiting all the interesting little garden pavilions, then found I was too late to visit the palace itself - tickets were sold out for the day. I was happy wandering around the outside and taking photos of the rather over-the-top Baroque decoration - I thought K would like these chaps. And now this is our calendar image for June - hopefully it will also bring us respite from our cares...

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Foremost among these is that, try as we might, we cannot get a mortgage on the flat we want to buy. It all got very complicated, and K spent weeks solidly on the phone to our mortgage advisor and the reps of different mortgage companies and finally the surveyor who came to assess the flat, all to no avail... The building is unmortgageable in the current financial climate. It turns out that the thickness of the walls is half what it should be for a mortgage lender to consider it suitable for resale. This makes it prone to condensation and damp - which certainly is a problem in these flats - though I still don't quite understand why that should mean lenders won't touch it. Apparently this kind of 'higher risk' flat used to be covered by the sub-prime mortgage market, which just doesn't exist any more, being as how it was the root cause of the global recession an' all. All the smaller sub-prime lenders have been bought up in the last year by bigger companies who are getting rid of all possible risk from their lending policies.

So this is the current climate that we have stumbled right into... Looking on the bright side, at least the problem does not lie with us. And our mortgage advisor is trying to reassure us that we have had a lucky escape - if we had managed to buy the flat, there is every chance that we couldn't sell it again. Which is in fact now the situation that all our flat-owning neighbours are going to find themselves in - it really doesn't bear thinking about. Apparently there are a number of 1930s-built properties like this in London, where the only way people can sell their flats is to cash buyers - and I wonder how many of those there are around in the current market?

So - everything was going smoothly and we had completely thought ourselves into the purchase and the move - and then this bombshell, just as I got back from Tunisia (about which more another day). The prospect of moving - and especially somewhere so nice and modernised as the flat we were going to be buying - makes you notice all the things you endure about where you actually live but which you can't do much about: the damp and mould in the bedroom; the mildewy shower curtain in the bathroom; a new floorboard starting to creak in the kitchen; the dodgy valves in the boiler that means the radiators come on when you run the hot water... And I really was looking forward to having a dishwasher...

The thing is, as soon as I was faced with the prospect of not being able to stay here - or rather not being able to put down roots here, as there is no urgent necessity to leave this flat - it made me realise quite how much this has come to be my home. Capital 'h' Home, in that deep emotional attachment kind of way. We've been here 6 and a half years now, so it's not surprising. It's not only the fact that as a maisonette it's like a little house, but it has all the advantages of being in a block of flats in terms of security, a shared garden for whose upkeep we have absolutely no responsibility but which we love to look down on and sit in, and above all the sense of community and the friendship of our neighbours. We're starting to realise that what we have here is very very rare, and now that we are casting an eye around at other things, we are quickly realising that for the same price we cannot get the same amount of space, nothing as nice architecturally or in terms of the arrangement of the rooms, and certainly nowhere with a ready-built community of friends on your doorstep.

We kind of feel that this is our moment to buy - since we have the momentum, and there is only so long the stamp duty holiday will last, since even though at the time the Tories claimed Labour had stolen their policy, it doesn't look like they're going to hold to it now they're in government... But I don't want to rush into anything, and I certainly have not let go of the simple, original plan of staying right where we are. Plan B is to keep a lazy eye on the market, and think about it in a more focused way when we get back from holiday in late June...

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And talking of the new coalition government... When I left for Tunisia, no-one knew what was going to happen - just that the Liberal Democrats had failed to pull the votes that everyone had predicted. Labour did surprisingly well - my Green votes in the local council election counted for nought as all 3 Labour councillors were re-elected, and Chuka Umunna got his parliamentary seat (I decided straight away that I could live with the latter - less happy about the former). K texted me while I was on a bus in Tunisia to tell me that Gordon Brown was resigning!! Which was exciting news, but then what?? Too complicated to convey in text messages... I got back to a Liberal Conservative government, a genuine coalition by all accounts, with Lib Dem MPs in cabinet positions, which no-one expected. It means that my speculative Lib Dem vote was not wasted, but more importantly, it seems like it might actually be a good government for the time we're in. It's a change anyway, and a new start. It's already been sorely tested, with the unfortunate scandal over poor David Laws (my personal theory is that right wing Tories are targeting the Lib Dem officers of the coalition) but we're definitely prepared to give it the benefit of the doubt...

Sundry frustrations

Mumbles Pier, March 2009 © KR

I haven't been posting the calendar pictures for a while, since they are all images I posted here at the time we took them - in February, the snow on Cromwell Road on my way to work; in March, the Crooked House in Windsor, where we had lunch on our anniversary day trip; in April, the gorgeous Modernist spiral stairwell at the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea... But this month we have this beautiful photograph that K took of the run-down benches and ironwork on Mumbles Pier, when we went to Swansea en famille for my father's birthday last year.

The pier dates from 1898 and was originally 835ft long. It functioned mainly as a landing jetty for steamer excursions from Swansea to other towns on the Welsh or southern English coast, and my father talked of how he remembered coming down to meet his grandmother alighting here, when he was a child. There's something so elegant and picturesque about the flaking paintwork in this photograph, and I love the two jumping dolphins with entwined tails...

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I have been feeling rather frustrated recently. Turns out this mortgage business is fraught with frustration! People often say that buying a house is the most stressful thing you will do in your life - well, K and I have done some pretty stressful things (up there at the top of both lists would be finishing PhDs...) so that has not been our experience, just an initial flurry of excitement and activity and then long anti-climactic waiting... The first mortgage company we applied to took two weeks to get back to us! And to cut long and boring stories short, it is turning out that it is not so easy to find a mortgage company willing to lend for the purchase of flats in buildings taller than 4 or 5 storeys, such as ours. There is also a lingering distrust of the fact that it was originally built under the auspices of the London County Council. Basically, the companies think we live in a council estate, and without doing any valuations for themselves are not exactly turning us down, but not giving us generous terms. I think K and our mortgage advisor have finally cracked it between them, but I can't feel excited about it, because there is now a sense of that's all very well, until the next problem arises... So watch this space.

I have finally signed up for an iPhone - which I am quite excited about except for i) I was extremely frustrated (note recurring theme) at waiting in the flat all day on Friday (the last of my Fridays off) for DHL to deliver it, only to be told when I rang to check on it at 3.30 in the afternoon that it had never left the depot. I cycled over to Nine Elms to pick it up, and what was more frustrating is that I had been working in that area - at our store by Battersea Power Station - on two separate days earlier in the week, so could have gone and collected it, if I'd known they wouldn't bother to deliver it!!

and ii) it's taking aeons to have my number moved over from Vodafone, who in the meantime have been calling me every day trying to persuade me to sign up for other deals with them. Hence further frustration.

And I was frustrated with the annoying length of my hair - until I went and had a haircut on Friday!! This is actually a significant moment for me, as I literally cannot remember the last time I had my hair cut professionally - not during my adult life I don't think. My sister cuts my hair, and I cut hers. We've done that ever since we were children - although then we weren't supposed to... I have basically straight hair and I never do anything interesting with it, just have a few inches chopped off the bottom, and I have always resented the extortionate rates charged by hairdressers to do this for you - £40 seems to be an average price in London. And frankly, until now, I have never been able to afford this. Throughout my student days, it was literally a choice between food, or a haircut.

So, my regular coiffeuse having moved to the Outer Hebrides, I pondered whether or not I could hold out until mid-June when we go and visit her (tickets booked, Icelandic volcanic eruption allowing!!), decided I couldn't really, and then noticed for the first time a little hair salon on Brixton Hill that I must have walked past a hundred times... I enquired within about the cost of a hair cut and was told £15. It turned out to be £19 for some reason, but I decided this was entirely reasonable. They even gave me a cup of tea and a piece of cake! Somewhat oddly, there was an elderly Irish lady hanging around - not a customer, not an employee, but obviously known to the staff - who then proceeded to have a row with the lady who had cut my hair! I was hanging around at the counter drinking my tea and waiting to pay and not really knowing where to look... Still, I'll probably go back at some point - I need a long-term alternative to having my hair cut once a year in the Hebrides!

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I turned in my portfolio (for my promotion) on Wednesday last - writing and assembling it was a pretty painful experience (this is how fantastic I am etc etc). But at least now I can forget about the process for a while - the interview is at the end of this month. And on Saturday - the god Vulcan permitting - I am off to Tunisia!!!! So there will be a bit of radio silence here for a while... But then you're used to that...

Trois jours en Paris

Phew. February. Glad that's (nearly) over. We've all been working like crazy people preparing to install the Ceramics Study Galleries (26,000 objects in visible storage!!), which finally actually begins on Monday. I didn't think I'd be saying this but I might be just about ready. I'm the first to install - weird to think that one of the Middle Eastern pots I put in on Monday will be the first object in those new dense displays, where the intention is they will remain for several decades. So the most important thing to ponder over this weekend is which object it should be...

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The highlight of the last few weeks, however, was our long weekend in Paris last weekend - for our (14th!!) anniversary. We booked Eurostar tickets months ago when there was a half price offer, and both took Friday off work, got a breakfast-time train, and sailed off through the French countryside... Trains really are the only way to travel - especially if they are fast and efficient like the few European high speed lines I've travelled on. Our train left on the dot. Alas, we ran into a security alert on the way back, which meant a horrendous queue to check in, and the train leaving an hour later than scheduled - but it could have been worse: I have just seen that the passengers who left on the train before ours (also delayed) had to endure the additional nightmare of their train breaking down in the tunnel outside Ashford and then sitting in the dark for two hours until another train turned up to rescue them! Apparently our train bypassed theirs! I had no idea - poor people...

Paris is just so beautiful. There really is just no place like it. It was an extra special treat for K who - unbelievably - had not been there for about 10 years. Not since we used to go and visit my aunt and uncle and cousins, who were living and working there for a few years, at Christmas times. Happy memories of their wonderful, typically Parisienne house in Le Vesinet; the night it snowed and fell so heavily that it woke K up... I have had the fortune to go to Paris a few times since then, on courier trips or research visits, so as always it was a treat to go, but it was extra to see it through K's excitement.

We stayed near the Palais Royal and just walked everywhere. That's what you have to do in Paris - it's an important part of soaking up the atmosphere and the architecture. Flaneant, indeed - though sadly we couldn't put our hands on that wonderful book by Edmund White (The Flâneur: A Stroll through the Paradoxes of Paris) which is obviously one of the books currently lodged in K's parents' attic...

I had stayed in this area before, near the Galérie Véro-Dodat (built 1826), and had noticed a lovely looking restaurant which only seemed to be open at lunchtimes, when I was working, so we headed straight there after dumping our bag at the hotel, and jumped straight into a wonderful French food experience. Not only that but completely unexpectedly the ceiling was covered in anaglyptic (embossed) wallpaper in the Alhambra style, which must have been up there since the late 19th century! I was very chuffed at such a fortuitous find.

Anaglyptic wallpaper was popular in the late 19th century, especially among those who wanted to create rich interiors decorated in the revivalist styles that were en vogue at that time - the decoration of the Alhambra being one of the most widespread of these international historicist styles.

The Galérie Véro-Dodat (named for the two men who built it, in 1826). It's one of the few surviving commercial passages in Paris - one of the best preserved too, I think, since it seems to have all the original shop fronts and many of their signs. The tables you can see about halfway down are outside the restaurant where we had lunch.

From there we wandered around the Marais, meandering along to the Place des Vosges, taking in the various gorgeous 16th-century hôtels and modern boutiques along the way. Dinner in the atmospheric Coude à Coude on Rue St Honoré where they squeeze you in "elbow to elbow". For the rest of the weekend, we went medieval - though K was a little surprised (I think) to discover he is no longer a 'proper' medievalist: nearly 4 hours in the Musée de Cluny, and he was disappointed that there wasn't more 16th-century stuff! He still managed to take about 10,000 photographs though.

One of the amazing windows at Sainte Chappelle. It is a relatively small space and was absolutely packed with tour parties, which completely removed any sense of awe or tranquility at being in the space. Every now and again some laconic guard would ssssssshhh!!!! everyone, until the chatter inevitably started up again. It was a little bit like being in the Sistine Chapel - not an experience I enjoyed very much the last time I went.

We did the main churches of medieval Paris - Sainte Chappelle, with its truly stunning stained glass windows, though the apse was behind some rather unattractive hoardings while they do a big restoration project on the glass and lead fittings; Notre Dame, where they were conducting a mass confirmation service for all the parishes in Paris (it seemed), so it was crowded and full of buzz and activity; St Germain des Pres, which has rather suffered from over heavy restoration and repainting in the 19th century; and Saint Denis, the royal pantheon - where K was happy to discover more 16th-century tomb sculpture than is reasonable in a church. But it was the site and excuse for another fine culinary experience - at the extremely elegant Mets du Roy, facing on to the square in front of the basilica. Expensive but amazing beef fillet.

I have always thought that going away for a long weekend like that in the middle of a busy work period would be exhausting - but, on the contrary, it was invigorating and relaxing, because there was so much to see and think about, that I spent very little time at all thinking or worrying about work. So more city breaks - that's the resolution. Especially to cities we can get to on the train. We're thinking Bruges next.

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In Paris we also took a holiday from K's enforced giving up of meat for Lent - only partly because France is, I think, officially the worst place in the world to be a vegetarian. Since getting back, though, he has been strictly enforcing this new regime. Even fish is off the menu. Practically, from a shopping and cooking point of view, it is easiest if we do this together - but I told him I couldn't guarantee that I wouldn't eat meat at lunch times. But so far I haven't and I am not missing it. Though I did join some colleagues for dinner at China City after the SOAS Islamic art research seminar yesterday evening, and I could not resist the prawns...

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I have not posted the calendar image for this month, since it is one you have seen before - something that might become a common occurrence, since the pictures we have selected for the calendar are some of the iconic images of last year, many of which I have already shared here. This month the image is the Natural History Museum in the heavy snow of last February - something which seemed magically rare when I wrote about it at the time, but which has been repeated this year, almost ad infinitum. When it first snowed, early on in the New Year, people were off work and schools were closed and fun and toboganning was had in the streets... But after weeks of the big chill, even the school kids didn't seem to care much for snowball fights any more.

It has been absolutely freezing, though in London in the last couple of days it has started to get milder. Cycling through Battersea Park on the way to work yesterday morning, I was suddenly assaulted by an amazing scent, and then I noticed a huge carpet of crocuses, all about to burst into bloom. How wonderful if spring was actually on the way!

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I finished reading the 900-page-long book - Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver, the first trilogy-in-one of his Baroque Cycle. It's a fictionalised and partly fantastical historical novel about Europe during the 17th century, woven around Natural Philosophy and the Royal Society (appropriate in its 350th year), the rise and fall of kings, money, commerce, pirates, Puritans, brilliantly and amusingly written... I had nothing better to read so I carried straight on to the next volume, The Confusion - 800 pages this time. There is another one after that too. These may be the only books I read all year! But I'm completely sucked in. Highly recommended reading.

On the road again

'I hear those voices that will not be drowned'
Maggi Hambling's 'Scallop' on Aldeburgh Beach, Suffolk

Where has January gone?! One of my New Year's resolutions to myself was to post here little and often, but then I quickly got inundated by the year, so 'often' went out of the window - probably 'little' won't last either... I've got a moment now - I've just finished writing a letter of application for a Summer School in Tunisia in May, which will focus on the art and archaeology of the late Classical and early Islamic periods, and which I am very keen on attending, so I have written rather a gushing letter; and dinner won't be ready for a while longer - K is cooking, and somehow he never manages to get the timing quite right! Smells gorgeous though (leek, spinach and goat's cheese pie - we're in training for Lent, during which he has declared that we will be giving up meat).

I went to Berlin for a short trip at the start of last week, to collect and accompany back some objects we had loaned to a rather strange exhibition at the Martin Gropius Bau. Berlin was covered in snow and fog (which caused more delays to my flights, although it is possible I have a jinx, after the travel fiascos of my recent Córdoba trip) - there were even ice floes in the Spree! It was beautifully atmospheric - especially the part I was staying and working in, which was right at the edge of the Wall, in the former East, so now a 'no man's land' of brand new skyscraper developments, but also where they have preserved a 200m stretch of the Wall. The opening of the Berlin Wall was one of the defining events of my teenage years, and I always feel strongly moved when I go to Berlin and see all the graffiti about freiheit. It feels like you have stepped back into the Cold War, but its so shockingly recent - within my own living memory.



I visited the Neues Museum, which reopened in October after 60 years of dereliction, since the Second World War. It's undergone a sympathetic restoration by the architect David Chipperfield, which preserves the state of decay of wall paintings and architectural interiors, which were clearly originally magnificent but now fragmentary - there is even a small room called the 'Fragmentarium' where they display pieces of the architectural decoration whose original locations they were not able to identify. The collection has some masterpieces - Nefertiti's bust of course, which gets an entire room to herself! - but it is worth going to see for the building alone.

I took the colour proofs of my book with me to do the final check and read-through - it was the only available time I had to do it, but also made worthwhile use of all the tedious time hanging around in airports. I think it's finally looking good - everyone seems to think it looks beautiful - and reading it all through again, I have satisfied myself that the text is not too crap, but I'm just so fed up with it now. My editor too, I think! We just have the index and picture credits left to check, and I think it will get sent off to production at the end of the week!!

In amongst the craziness that is the second phase of our Ceramics Galleries project (and I install my first case tomorrow!), I am spending the weekends working full time on the article - on religious architecture in 12th-century Morocco - which I have to send off at the end of the month - so, erm, this weekend. I wrote solidly through last weekend, and have too many words, but still more to write, and then all the refining to do. I had hoped to get some of it done during the evenings this week, but I spent most of last evening in Evans Cycles on Clapham High Street, sorting out my new new Ride2Work scheme bike...

But it means I am finally back on the road again. Let's hope that third time is lucky, and I manage to avoid this one being stolen! Alas it means that I will be doing much less reading - no more London Review of Books on the tube, and back to the two-pages-a-night-before-falling-asleep-with-the-book-on-my-head norm, which - considering I am now reading a book that is nearly 1000 pages long (Quicksilver, by Neal Stephenson) - might mean I read only one book all year.

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But before January was all over, I wanted to post our calendar image for this month. It's the picture at the top of this post, the magisterial Scallop by the artist Maggi Hambling, a stainless steel sculpture on Aldeburgh Beach in Suffolk, a commemoration and celebration of Benjamin Britten who lived in Aldeburgh - in the Red House, of which our friend Caroline is the curator - and founded the famous Aldeburgh music festival. The artist calls it her 'conversation with the sea' - you can read a short essay about it here. It has inexplicably been a controversial addition to the coastline - the conservative residents of Aldeburgh objected to it and it had to be moved further along the beach, so it was not so much in their sight line! - but we thought it was moving and beautiful, especially with the poetic inscription excised from the steel ("I hear those voices that will not be drowned") which evokes not only voices and people lost at sea, but the music of Britten's compositions that lives on and will never be lost.

We went to see it at New Year last year, when we spent New Year's Eve and a few days afterwards staying with Caroline, in her idyllic rural Suffolk cottage, walking across fields to country pubs, lounging on her sofa reading while she valiantly supplied us with food and drink, showing us her place of work and talking us through all her exciting plans for the collection and exhibition projects, a lightning visit to Orford where I went with my grandparents as a child and vividly remember having lunch in a pub where there were stuffed muff dogs mounted in a glass case on the wall. I still remember my grandmother explaining how Victorian women used to carry these miniature dogs around in their muffs to keep their hands warm! We didn't find the pub again, but this time we went to Orford Castle, which had amazing views of the estuary and all the flat land around, and kept K happy. An idyllic start to the year - and memories recaptured by seeing this image every day on our home-made kitchen calendar. Best idea we've ever had!

Another busy week...

Capilla de los Condestables, Burgos Cathedral © KR

You might recognise this picture - it was the image we used for our Christmas greeting last year. We liked it so much, we used it for the December picture on our calendar. It's a photo K took of one of the beautiful openwork domes in the Cathedral at Burgos, where we visited last May - an example of the Islamic influence on the art of Christian Spain through the prominent eight-pointed star. I think you can just about see that the central detail is a figure group showing the holy family gathered round the infant Christ in the manger -

framed within a fiery halo that looks more like a wreath than sculpted stone. This dome is in the Capilla de los Condestables, founded at the end of the 15th century, and full of amazing sculpture.

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The weeks are just zipping past at the moment. On the one hand this means that the Christmas break is just around the corner, on the other it is scary how much work I need to finish before then. Sigh. This week I have worked very long days and been out every night. At the start of the week, we had two opening events for the Medieval and Renaissance Galleries, which look absolutely stunningly beautiful and amazing - what a triumph. On Wednesday I attended the Khalili Memorial Lecture at SOAS, annually part of the Islamic Art Circle lecture series, and on Thursday it was a pre-Christmas gathering of the Islamic Art discussion group I am part of - we had not managed to meet up for months (normally we try to meet once a month), and while the meeting's 'assignment' was ostensibly my report on the conference in Córdoba, we pretty much decided to keep it as a friendly gathering and gossip at an (overpriced) Lebanese restaurant in Soho. Friday, thank goodness, was an evening off - though I had a good long chat with my sister. Looks like she might have part-time work at the Hebridean smokehouse, so I'm anticipating a neverending supply of gorgeous hot-smoked salmon!!

Then last night we met up with Cornelius after our usual Saturday in the library (we have been working in the National Art Library the last few weeks, a gorgeous Victorian library and one I love working in, even though it's a bit like going to work on a Saturday...) to see A Serious Man at the Ritzy, followed by the pub. I enjoyed the film, and thought it was an excellent piece of film-making by the Coen brothers, but I still don't know what really happened... The final visual metaphor of dark clouds on the horizon indicating, I guess, that real life does not have happy-ever-after resolutions... But I am a bit fed up of seeing films that just abruptly end - the week before, we went to see The Castle at the NFT, an adaptation by Michael Haneke of a fragmentary short story by Kafka. After about two and a half hours, this abruptly cut to a black screen and the voiceover, "This is where Kafka's fragment ends". And that was that. In that case, it somehow worked. In my mind, the wonderful Ulrich Mühe - der landvermesser - is endlessly lost in the surreality of that frozen world, endlessly trying to obtain an entré to the castle...

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K got his new glasses on Monday. The bridge of his old pair snapped while we were in Oxford in October, visiting Bob and Bev for the weekend, and since then he has been carrying around a bottle of superglue and his even older pair of prescription sunglasses, for when they unexpectedly snap again. This happened as he was cycling home one day, but fortunately the tight hat that he wears to keep his ears and head warm also served to keep the glasses in position on his nose! So eventually he organised himself an eye test, discovered that his sight had drastically worsened (probably to do with the eye strain during writing up his PhD - this happened to me too, when I developed migraines for the first time), but now finally has a new pair of large round tortoiseshell specs that I think make him look rather like Alan Bennett. I'm still getting used to them, but they're an improvement on the pair he threatened to get, which made him look like David Hockney. Which one of those two distinguished artistes would I rather live with...? A good question!

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We're not impressed with a leaflet that Lambeth Labour party have put through the door today. It basically spins their involvement in our Residents' Association's fight against the planning proposal from Lambeth College, to imply that they have been leading the charge on the part of their poor embattled residents. Which is not true. Actually they have done nothing, other than lend a seemingly sympathetic ear (when our reps could actually get in to see them), then say in the last meeting that they supported the College's application. They are turning us and our cause into an election issue, because the Labour party are so clearly going to lose resoundingly at the next General Election, whenever that's called for. They've touted themselves round Brixton Hill Court today in a blatent attempt to get us all to vote for them. K has taken down the two posters they stuck up on the public notice boards.

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...