Two pots

In honour of our new Ceramics Study Galleries - the break-neck project I have been working on full-time for the last 9 months, which had their gala opening last night, and which open to the public tomorrow - I wanted to blog about two pots I have acquired recently.


This vase was designed by Keith Murray for Wedgwood in the 1930s. Murray was trained as an architect and brought an architectural eye to his ceramic designs. My colleague, the curator of modern and contemporary ceramics, tells me that he thinks Murray was one of the best Modernist designers for pottery, and I love its simple yet very structural elegance. This design was glazed in this 'Moonstone' white, in an olive green, and a metallic grey, and other versions of it were made with more and thinner ribs, and in different functional forms including a gorgeous pair of bookends which I would love to have! You can find more info here on the Museum's example of this vase - with a rather better photograph.

This is the only thing I chose to keep from among K's grandparents' possessions. He made a long list, including the two bookcases which arrived in time for lunch on Easter Sunday, probably made in the 1930s as well, so the vase looks right at home on top of them, in the corner of a 1930s flat. I was invited to keep whatever I liked, but the only thing that had always rather caught my eye was this vase - tucked away on top of the kitchen cabinets and wonderfully unfussy in the context of Betty and Robert's rather more decorative taste... Apparently when they had valuers in to assess their collection, it was the only thing that they said was really worth anything. But it was already spoken for.


And facing it, a rather different object. This is a late 19th-century storage jar which I bought in Tunisia recently. Again it is very close to one we have in the collection, which was acquired in 1894, which therefore helps me to date this one.

I was in Mahdia, and finally had a bit of free time to wander around in the souk of that small and special town. Two of us went to buy a present for the lady who had done most of the organising of the Summer School (which I will write about soon!) and we had been directed by some colleagues to a street that was slightly off the beaten tourist track, where there were looms and textile shops. We bought her a lovely silk scarf (and one each for ourselves, ahem) then before we knew it had been lured into a neighbouring shop. It was all shiny touristy kitsch in which I had no interest at all, and we disengaged ourselves pretty quickly, but the kindly gentleman proprietor was not going to give up that easily and asked if he could show us one last thing in the shop opposite. As we stepped in, I could see there were some genuine antiques in here and said to myself "Aaah, this is the real stuff" - which he heard so of course we started talking about the fact that I worked in a museum in London which had some Tunisian ceramics in its collection, and which I had been looking at recently for the Study Galleries.

I had sort of promised K that I wouldn't buy any pots on this trip (since I have rather a habit of doing so and we are running out of space in our small flat...) but I couldn't resist when I saw the collection of 19th-century wares he had underneath a table loaded with jewellery - forgive the Orientalist simile, but was a true Aladdin's cave! My only consideration was size and which one I could feasibly fit into my suitcase! I had run out of dinars so paid him in sterling - £40 which I thought was a complete bargain!!

The shopowner - Mr Ben Rhouma - said he acquired the pots from people who had them in their homes, inherited from forebears, and knew that the occasional tourist liked to buy them, so sold them to him for a bit of ready money. He does nothing at all to them, so it was a bit cobwebby and still is a bit dusty, but since learning how to clean pots for our Ceramics Project I will be applying my cotton swab any time now. There is a broken section at the rim, but the piece was inside, and one of my conservator colleagues has loaned me some paraloid and instructions for how to reattach it in a conservation-approved manner.

Two pots, completely different aesthetics, but I love them both, and the memories they conjure.

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And thank goodness the project has finally come to a triumphant close! The galleries look amazing - "overwhelming" and "awe-inspiring" were some of the phrases that people mentioned to me last night. They are visible storage galleries with massed groupings of objects organised geographically and chronologically, but the sheer quantity and scale is so impressive, it takes your breath away. But now it is time for a holiday. On Friday morning at the crack of dawn we leave for North Uist to visit my sister, chill out for a week, visit seal colonies, eat smoked salmon, and read the 3 for 2 book selection I acquired in Waterstone's in Hereford last weekend (having finally come to the end of the 3000-and-some-pages of the Baroque Cycle - magnificent, but it has taken me 6 months!!). So I'll check in again in a couple of weeks. Over and out.

Cast ne'er a clout...

... till may be out. So goes the old proverb, warning the optimistic against shedding too many clothes before - either the month of May, or before the hawthorn blossom appears, called 'may' because that is the month it traditionally blooms. And boy was it in bloom in Herefordshire last weekend!!


All those bushes with the glowing white blossoms. It was K's birthday on Friday and bank holiday on the Monday, so we took a long weekend and went to visit his parents. We took an early Thursday evening train after work, which also meant I could get away from it all after my promotion interview which was that morning (on which more below) - and as always when we go to Hereford, you get out in to countryside quite quickly, and as the train pulls further from London and gradually empties and the landscape through the window becomes more and more picturesque, you feel the weight gradually lifting from your shoulders...

And now that they are both retired, K's parents are making the most of exploring the Herefordshire countryside, which is something we have not done much with them at all - so on Friday evening we drove to a country pub for K's birthday dinner, taking in a gorgeous early evening walk along the ridge at Much Marcle (I also love the placenames in that part of the country...) with its panoramic views on both sides; and on Sunday we took a picnic and went to Wigmore, in the far north-west of the county, the region known as the Welsh Marches because it is right on the border with Wales and historically was a major defensive zone for the English. My marauding ancestors were on the far side of that border! In fact, not too far and not too marauding, and not too ancestral - my father grew up in Presteigne!

But this is where we were last Sunday -



- Wigmore Castle, a 12th-century ruined castle, managed by English Heritage. When they opened it to the public in the 1980s, the fact that they had preserved the castle's ruinous state was highly controversial - I guess people thought it should have been rebuilt so you could see and experience how the castle would originally have looked. But you can see and experience that in many other places, and over the centuries, this site had become a major ecological site for wildlife and wildflowers, so English Heritage were quite ahead of their time in treating this as a conservation area - they stabilised and strengthened the walls of course, and obviously did a lot of work, in very subtle ways. It was an extremely atmospheric and beautiful place. These were the views from our picnic spot - towards England...


towards Wales...


If you look at the large version of this picture, you can even see the spire of the church at the wonderfully-named Leintwardine.

Magnificent rolling hills. Sometimes you just can't beat the British countryside for beauty.

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And I got that promotion. I heard on Friday morning. I had been stressing about it and trying not to since the interview, which really takes it out of you, I can tell you. So I now feel enormously relieved, and proud and happy, and rather more relaxed than I have done in a while. Two colleagues from my department also went through, and we went out for impromptu celebratory cocktails on Friday evening - then K and I went out for a truly wonderful dinner at Upstairs - another one of Brixton's gastronomic delights. This gorgeous little place opened a few years ago, and we gradually heard about it via word-of-mouth because it doesn't advertise itself. You would never know it was there if you didn't know it was there - if you know what I mean! It's a converted flat above a cafe, with a bar on one floor, and the 'restaurant' at the top, all very tastefully-decorated and the food beautifully-presented and delicious. The dining area only seats about 25 people at the tables so it's an intimate place, and we started eating late so sat there gradually more illuminated by candlelight as the sun went down... Lovely. Even better for just having a 10-minute walk to get home.

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...

A Tudor wine fountain!

© Associated Press

K's wine fountain has been officially launched - and it's getting amazing press! This photo was in the BBC website's Day in Pictures selection on Thursday, and the Photo of the Day on the England page. There was even a small leader column on it in The Independent! And it's gone viral! It's on blogs (now including this one), Flickr, Twitter, wine websites, even websites about gold, which have been appreciating the use of 24 carat gold leaf on the cast bronze lion-headed wine spouts! Needless to say, K is chuffed with all the attention - after all the work he has put into conceiving and creating this amazing object. Well done babe!

My banner's bigger than yours....

Spotted on the way to Brockwell Park earlier - a huuuge banner in support of Chris Nicholson, the local Lib Dem parliamentary candidate for our area. (We also spotted him - walking up Brixton Hill with a similarly over-scale rosette pinned on his jacket) This is the biggest banner I've seen, and I must say there are quite a lot of orange posters up around here - considerably more than there are for Labour. Their candidate is young - he's got a whole career in politics ahead of him, maybe he'll even be Prime Minister one day - so he can afford to lose this election. The Tories don't even get a look in around here, which is rather satisfying. Though for all the momentum that has built behind the Lib Dems after Nick Clegg's charismatic performances at the leadership debates, I fear that we will still see David Cameron in No.10.

Still, I have decided to vote Liberal Democrat for the first time in my life - basically as the only available option, and because our voting system is so utterly ludicrous, that a party with a third of the national vote doesn't win a third of the available parliamentary seats. The current hope is that the Lib Dems attain enough of the vote that we get a hung parliament, and they initiate voting reform, ie they introduce proportional representation. Of course it is not in the interests of either the two big parties to initiate a fairer voting system, because the current system advantages them disproportionately. But why are they then surprised that we're all disillusioned with party politics? It's because our votes don't carry the weight they should.

I'm obviously not the only one. Today The Guardian has unprecedentedly declared its support for the Liberal Democrats - see their excellent editorial here.

We also have local elections on the same day. There I will vote the traditional Green. Can't vote Labour any more.

The Habit of Art

I like to think this is what K and I both have, but in an active, positive sense, not in the passive, resigned sense that W.H. Auden expresses in Alan Bennett's excellent new play at the National Theatre... which we saw on Thursday night - at the cinema!

The National Theatre have been running a new initiative with their last few productions, called NT Live, whereby live performances are beamed into cinemas around the country and around the world. We were slightly wary of the idea - the magic of the theatre surely comes largely from being there, with all the electricity generated by the living interaction of the actors with each other and with the audience - but we really wanted to see the play, and were having problems finding any available Travelex £10 tickets (somehow these all just evaporate the moment they are released for sale - I am sure there is a way of playing the system, but I haven't figured out what it is yet) and didn't fancy bankrupting ourselves for a seat in the gods...

So partly out of defeat and partly out of curiosity for this newfangled technology we booked tickets to see The Habit of Art down the road at the Ritzy. And it was absolutely brilliant!! There was no less a buzz as we all waited through the countdown for the performance to begin, and rather than the fixed view of the stage which I imagined would be what we saw, we had an absolutely privileged view of the action from a variety of camera angles. It was often very close in to the actors, so you didn't quite get the sense of set which you do when you're at the theatre itself, though the cameras did give wide shots of the stage at the beginning and during the interval. The strangest thing was the interval, when the cameras turned on the audience, and there were we, another audience, watching them, but they couldn't see us... Slightly bizarre.

But the play itself was fantastic!! So so funny and poignant at the same time. I hadn't realised it was a play within a play - perhaps I had read this, but forgot - but effectively the play is a cast of actors rehearsing a new play about Auden and Benjamin Britten, and an imagined encounter between them soon before their deaths, after decades of estrangement. I loved the sense of theatre - so to speak - and how theatre works which was encapsulated within the 'rehearsal' bits, where the play moves out from the intimate focus on Auden, to comment self-referentially on the play itself, on the National itself, on the whole process of making art, how it's the work that counts and what lives on... Really really excellent. Another classic from Bennett, who really is a master of his game.

There were students in the cinema (some annoying ones, who left after about 10 minutes), including a girl sitting behind K taking notes. I loved how this initiative made the theatre so accessible. As a schoolgirl and student I used to get cheap standing tickets at the National, and just lap up the performances - Tom Stoppard's Arcadia, with Felicity Kendal, really sticks in my memory for being a moment when I awakened to how wonderful the theatre was - and this idea of beaming plays into cinemas makes that available to people who can't afford the National's prices, or who live a long long way from where these landmark productions are happening... The list of international venues which broadcast The Habit of Art last Thursday was long in all senses of the word!

London Assurance is the next one, another play we have been having difficulty getting affordable tickets for. Can't wait!