Hogmanay

We climbed up Craiglockhart Hill, near where my sister lives in Morningside, to see the midnight fireworks light up the Edinburgh city horizon on New Year's Eve. This is a local tradition - we were a bit early so not really sure if we were in the right place, but soon noticed a cluster of seasoned old timers with a coolbox (transport the champers in it and sit on it afterwards - very sensible!) so decided they knew what was what so we'd lurk near them, and soon we were surrounded by very jolly groups of people wishing each other a happy new year. Much better than being one of the estimated 80,000 people to crush themselves into the Hogmanay Street Party on Princes Street, thank you very much...

It also seems to be quite a tradition to light sky lanterns and since it was a really clear, crisp night - beautiful - we could see these floating up into the sky from all over Edinburgh. The fireworks display was spectacular but could have gone on for longer! It lit up the outline of Edinburgh Castle, and for ages afterwards the smoke floated over the Salisbury Crags and Arthur's Seat, silhouetting them against the night (my camera battery died at that point, alas).


On New Year's Day, we climbed up Arthur's Seat - along with most of Edinburgh by the look of it! There was practically a queue to reach the trig point!


We made a little picnic of sausage sandwiches and a thermos of tea and ate them with icy fingers sitting on the side of the hill looking out over the city towards the Firth of Forth - until we were just too cold and had to start walking again to warm up!


Mission accomplished on - what was it? Drives in the Scottish countryside and visits to castles: we saw some fine ruined craggy Scottish castles at Craigmillar and Roslin (which was the site of another freezing picnic, but amazing setting, looking down over the glen... check out those icicles!)



as well of course as the wonderful 15th-century Roslin Chapel, every stone surface of which is exuberantly carved, with symbols and scenes that have given overactive imaginations a run for their money for the last 500 odd years, leading it to be claimed as one of the likely resting places of the Holy Grail. The tiny building is massively over-visited, which I fear has more to do with Dan Brown and The Da Vinci Code than with an appreciation of medieval architecture - but perhaps that's unfair.

We went round Holyroodhouse free of charge, thanks to K calling in a favour. The Scottish Parliament building is an amazingly thoughtful piece of architectural design - I would just like to know how well it works as a building. We took a long walk to what must be the archetypal "quaint pub" - the Sheep Heid Inn in Duddingston, though we didn't play skittles... And as to big fat books, I read Barbara Kingsolver's latest, The Lacuna, which was excellent. Oh and extra bonus excitement - K bought himself a fine tweed suit.

And as far as we were concerned, it was a White Christmas, even if the official definition is a single flake of snow actually falling on Christmas Day. I can't find anything to say whether the bookies have actually declared 2010 a White Christmas or not, but there was snow everywhere in Edinburgh on Christmas Day... It was fab.

Happy Christmas

Photo © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2010

I have been inspired by the current V&A exhibition on Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes to use this wonderful stage backcloth from the Wedding Scene in The Firebird - designed by Natalia Goncharova in 1926 - as my Christmas image this year. Though it deserves to be seen much bigger than this (click on the image above for a bigger version), preferably in the flesh - I saw it today and even though I was prepared for it to be big, it was astonishing. At over 10 metres wide, it's the largest object in the V&A's entire collection. But beautiful, and somehow wintry and Russian and therefore appropriate for Christmas.

We're heading for Edinburgh on Christmas Eve, to spend Christmas and New Year with my sister, who moved there a few months ago. She is finally - and very happily! - living in the city she loves (she went to university there), has a job in the sector she has been training for and trying to break into - editing/publishing - and using her Arabic degree. And I am just happy to have the excuse to spend time in Edinburgh, having only been back there a couple of times since she left university.

We haven't made many plans to do much once we get there - over the last few days we have been focusing our thoughts on actually getting ourselves there, since last week the Arctic weather conditions which we've been suffering from in the UK this month returned. Many Christmas travellers have had their flights or trains cancelled, and the roads have been a nightmare. It seems to be improving now - touch wood - and one of my colleagues successfully made it to Edinburgh on the same train route we're taking tomorrow evening...

We'll be cooking our traditional braised duck recipe for Christmas lunch, then after that the only other thing we have planned is a visit to the new Scottish Parliament building later in the week. In between we'll probably go for drives in the Scottish countryside and visit castles and quaint pubs and watch M R James stories on DVD and read big fat books. Can't wait.

So all that remains is for me to wish you all a very Merry Christmas and all best wishes for an excellent New Year - may 2011 bring peace and happiness to you all!

East Window

Yesterday we went with my parents to the Family Carol Concert at St Martin-in-the-Fields. K and I used to go to concerts there quite often but we haven't been for ages - perhaps because the repertoire began to seem a bit repetitive. We certainly haven't been since the church unveiled its new refurbishment in April 2008 - already 18 months ago, and particularly remiss of us since my mother worked on that fundraising campaign. So, while I very much enjoyed the concert - sung by the London Concert Choir, with some really unusual, quite folkish songs sung by them, and the hit parade of traditional carols accompanied lustily by us - I spent quite a lot of time transfixed by the new East Window.

St Martin's is one of London's gorgeous Baroque churches, built in 1726 by the architect James Gibbs. It has a wonderful open and light interior, heightened by the recent restoration of its plasterwork decoration, and its clear glass windows. Its original windows were blown out by a bomb in the Second World War, and as part of the refurbishment the church has commissioned a really significant work of contemporary art. Artists were invited to create a work that "embodied light" and worked in harmony with the historic interior, that would "challenge preconceptions and stimulate debate", as well as encouraging reflection and contemplation. So no small task. But the winning design - by husband and wife artist and architect collaborators, Pip Horne and Shirazeh Houshiary - has really achieved this.

The stainless steel framework ripples outwards from an opaque ellipse that seems to pulse at the centre of the window. I have to say that the resemblance of the window's structure to the crucifixion is the last thing I noticed, perhaps because I am not fully alert to Christian symbolism; but of the surprisingly little information about it I've been able to find online, this seems to be the first thing that people comment on - apparently, following an uncharacteristically tepid remark by Jonathan Glancey in the Guardian about how it resembles a cross reflected in water. But the eye is drawn to the ellipse at the centre, whose oval form recalls one of the key forms of the Georgian architecture around it. All the panes in the window are lightly etched, evoking a motif from Houshiary's paintings apparently, and these etched flecks grow more concentrated the closer they come to the central oculus, so you realise there is a sort of aura around it, which represents the crown of thorns. Of course that means the heart of the window stands for Christ but there is something profoundly moving - intellectually and spiritually - about it being entirely non-figurative, non-representational. An icon for our postmodern world. And because we were there on a wintry late afternoon, we could watch the amazing transformation of the window as the sky grew dark outside...

(with apologies for the not very good iPhone images - plus, as you can see, there was a rather tall chap sitting in the row in front of me!)

As the sun goes down, the ellipse at the centre of the window glows - embodying light, as the commission invited, and a kind of mystical evocation of Christ as the light of the church, the star guiding mankind to Jerusalem at the time of his birth, all those meanings, as well as just a pan-religious symbolism of light for God. We couldn't figure out how this physically happens - is there something in the glass itself that glows, or is it subtly lit from somewhere? If the latter, then the source of this light is entirely invisible, which just adds to the mystery and the effect.

It was a highly controversial design apparently, though I can't find out online exactly why this was. Much of the commentary seems rather patronisingly to focus on the fact that Houshiary is 1) a woman (another Guardian article calls the window "gynaecological"!!) and 2) Iranian in origin: it is therefore exotic, imbued with the inspiration she draws in her art from the 13th-century Sufi mystic, Rumi, non-figurative because her art draws on Iranian artistic traditions - bla bla bla. She might be Iranian but does that mean she is Muslim? My mother couldn't remember but thought she might be Zoroastrian. Anyway, Houshiary trained and has lived and practised in England since 1974. Would she like to be labelled "exotic"?

This is a discussion that is quite current these days, with the growing debate over what "contemporary Islamic art" is, if it even exists. Most contemporary artists surely prefer to see themselves precisely as contemporary artists, practising in a globalised world without borders between artistic disciplines, rather than as "a contemporary artist from Iran" or wherever. Do such pigeon holes make Westerners feel more comfortable?

I was rather shocked to read the comment - posted by 'Highby' in response to the gynaecological Guardian article - that Houshiary "had simply applied the Iranian style. Means, no pictures of humans. Just graphical elements - lines. Arabesques. Geometrical forms". To start with, there seems to me nothing "simple" about this window. And goodness only knows what Highby thinks an arabesque is. But it also smacked of the attitude I often come across in discussions of the Islamic style in art made for Christians or Jews in medieval Spain - what has come to be called Mudéjar. For a long time, the attitude among art historians was (perhaps still is) that if an art work was in an Islamic style, it had to have been made by an Islamic artist or craftsman; there was absolutely no way that a medieval Christian or Jewish craftsman would find the Islamic style appealing and be influenced by it. This always struck me as illogical because why would a wealthy Christian patron spend money on building a church or a palace or commissioning a carpet or a geometric ceiling in an Islamic style if that isn't what they wanted in their material surroundings?

And precisely the same could be said of the St Martin's authorities who chose this window design, which is so profound and beautiful and seems to engage both mind and soul, and work on so many levels.

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Perhaps next year we'll go to the candlelit evening carol concert - the 'family concert', of course, attracts families, mainly parents and grandparents with very young children, who don't much fancy sitting still and quietly through an hour's worth of concert and don't know any of the carols (apart from 'Away in a Manger') so can't join in. There was a particularly grizzly child in the row behind us, and a general low hum of children's restlessness all around us. Still it was fun and put us in the Christmas spirit. In fact with the recent Big Chill and the fact that we have booked our train tickets to Edinburgh to visit my sister for Christmas and New Year, we've been feeling cosy and wintry for a few weeks now.

This was my sister's little car at the beginning of the week:

Almost as much snow as there is car!

The snow has pretty much all thawed now. It happened quickly yesterday. Walking to meet K at the pub on Friday evening, I was slipping and sliding over compressed snow all along St Matthew's Road, but the next morning we woke up to the sound of dripping outside the bedroom window - the sun had come back and it was a little bit rainy. Not before time - I fell down the escalators at Brixton station the other day. I had my walking boots on but it was so slippy on the escalators that there was nothing to grip onto and I couldn't get up again. I floundered for a moment until someone helped me up - I never saw who, just a voice behind me that said, 'Up you get'. My thanks to that good Samaritan.

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I'm making stock and, while I write this, wonderful smells keep wafting up from downstairs. I'm using the carcass of the lemony roast chicken we made a few weekends ago (I froze it in the meantime!) when Gareth was supposed to come round for a long overdue dinner and catch-up, but poor him, his grandmother died and he spent the weekend looking after his grandfather and helping with funeral arrangements... I like making stock: it seems like a good wintry make-do-and-mend thing to do, and a good way to use up old bunches of herbs and random bits of celery and other veggies languishing in the bottom of the fridge. We're planning to use some of this new batch of stock in the rabbit stew we'll be making in a couple of weekends' time - Cornelius and Giles are coming to share it with us. Maybe Gareth will be able to make it over too.

Snow blanket

Photo taken by Nasa's Terra satellite on 2 December 2010, captured by the University of Dundee satellite receiving station, courtesy of the BBC

We seem to be finishing the year as we started it - covered in snow. But will it be a white Christmas??

Brixton brunch

The American mid-term elections have made me realise that it is already two years since I had my mini-sabbatical at the Metropolitan Museum - six weeks in New York just as the weather was changing to autumn and the trees were turning gold in Central Park. How fantastic that was. Though I don't think, in the euphoria surrounding Obama's election, we could ever have predicted how badly things would go for him, and how disappointing his premiership would become. Still, he's not God.

Today we had brunch with friends and this brought back really strongly memories of another autumnal brunch two years ago in New York, with Rebecca who came down from Illinois to visit for a few days. So fantastic to see her after so long, but terrible that we haven't really been in touch since then. I remember vividly that it was the day of the New York Marathon. We went along to a brunch place on the Upper West Side which had been highly recommended as a New York institution - Sarabeth's, that was it. You can't reserve for Sunday brunch so you have to go there and queue and put your name down for a table, and you can't have a table for 4 if there are only 3 of you queuing. So we were supposed to be meeting Lindsay - who was also on sabbatical in New York at the time - but she was late, because she'd been watching the marathon, so we had to put ourselves down for a table for 3. While we waited for the table to be ready we went across the street to have an emergency coffee in an unfriendly little place where a TV was showing Paula Ridley winning the Marathon just a few blocks away...

I can't remember what we ate at Sarabeth's but it was packed with New Yorkers having brunch and had a great atmosphere. Afterwards we wandered over to Central Park and through the dregs of marathon-runners sporting medals and those space-age cloaks they give you for warmth. We found a fleamarket and started to look around, and discovered that it was a really good one, with great craft stalls, and picked up quite a few things. I got a coaster made from an old map of New York, which showed the exact street that my New York apartment was on - East 87th Street, the building was actually called The Gotham!! - and K picked up some cufflinks made from old typewriter keys. He still wears these, and the coaster is on our study bookshelves, where we put our teapot.

All these memories came back today when we went along to the Ritzy to meet Ruby and Jesse and baby Ivy, and Teresa and Dan - all local Brixton friends and neighbours - for brunch. How lovely! After a scrumptious breakfast (eggs benedict - my current favourite!) K and I decided to wander through Brixton, since we needed to buy some olive oil. It seems in recent weeks some of the market stalls have started opening on a Sunday, so there is still a bit of buzz even though Brixton is generally very subdued on a Sunday. We wandered into part of the covered market we hadn't been into for years - Brixton Village - and discovered not only that quite a number of places were open, but also that it has been completely transformed!! It is now full of lovely little eating places, which all look packed with atmosphere and nice design, and I am sure all do variously delicious food. I would have been happy sitting down to brunch at any one of them. It felt like a mixture between being in a Parisian passage, or somewhere in East London which is a bit more comfortable with being self-consciously trendy than Brixton is yet. Actually it felt like being in New York!

Perhaps it was the fact that it was a Sunday, meaning that all the more usual Brixton market stalls were closed up for the week, but it made me feel slightly sad for the passing of the Brixton Market identity, which is not about trendy foody joints but about the kind of food that real people need to buy day to day. What's wonderful about the Brixton Market foodstalls is that they cater to the ethnically diverse Brixton population, so plantain and salted fish heads and ginormous sacks of rice are as ubiquitous as basic fruit and veg. I felt as if that identity was being a bit streamlined, to make way for the trendy coffee and deli places. But, if that's what needs to happen for Brixton Market to survive at all, then so be it. And thankfully not one of these new places was a chain, all were highly individual in their look and the type of food they were serving. I guess I'll just need to go back on a Saturday and hopefully be reassured by how the two aspects of this new Brixton Market identity are working symbiotically together.

Spanish conversation

Life - which is to say, work - has rather got in the way of blogging over the last couple of months. Since getting back to work after my long summer break, it seems busier than ever, with more to be done by fewer people, and an air of uncertainty underlying everything, with cuts cuts cuts the only thing being discussed - in the media and in people's daily lives. "Keep calm and carry on" seems a useful motto, as always. That resolution - of getting my work/life balance under better control - has not so far materialised.

I had a nice trip to Granada last week, to attend the meeting of a collaborative research project with the Alhambra which we're now engaged in. The weather was gorgeous - 23°C on Sunday! - but cold in the mornings and evenings, or if you stepped into the shade. It was an intense course in Spanish conversation, which did me a lot of good. I had that experience which I have always admired in friends for whom English is not their first language - like when Silvia and Rosa came here for dinner at the start of October, two Italians researching aspects of Italian-Islamic artistic encounter whom I wanted to introduce to each other. Of course we all spoke English, but when I stepped out of the room, and came back in a few minutes later, they were still speaking English to each other. Or when, in Berlin in January, I went out for dinner with some German colleagues from the Islamic museum, who were all still conversing in English when I got back from a trip to the loo. In this case, I was in Granada with a Spanish colleague from work, and a French colleague from the Louvre whom I know well, and with both of them I normally speak English - but because the lingua franca of our project meetings was Spanish, we continued to speak Spanish at the end of the day when out for dinner, and when I bumped into the French colleague, Sophie, on Sunday morning, having a coffee in a bar on the Plaza Nueva, we conversed in Spanish, because it felt odd to switch to English. How funny.

An interesting trip, as well, for understanding something about the internal politics of Spanish academia - sad, though, that in a city as small as Granada, with so many important groups of people who are experts in their own ways in local Islamic cultural history, that they should all be competing with each other, rather than working together to form a powerhouse of academic study in this area. They share information with us, as outsiders, but not with each other. It was good, though, to understand for the first time that I am not the only one who feels the tyranny of a certain couple, who seem to want to control what anyone anywhere says about Nasrid art history, by pillorying anyone who dares to express a theory different from one of theirs. Good, also, to understand that there are people within Granada who do not believe that their work is gospel any more. It gives me renewed hope for the new generation of upcoming Spanish scholars in the Islamic field, as well as a sense of reassurance that if one of this couple slates my book in a review - which I feel is fairly likely, especially since the Spanish translation is about to be launched - that not many people will pay them much attention.

There is not much other news, or what there is, is too boring to go into. I am giving a lecture tomorrow evening - the first in a while - so my time and thoughts over the last few days have been focused on that. It is on my book, a sort of promotional event which I had to organise for myself, since my publishers aren't doing anything. Compared to the publishers of the Spanish edition who have just invited me to participate in a launch event in Spain in the New Year! Anyway. I've been collecting book sightings - it's been spotted in the bookshops at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and the American University in Cairo. It was in the Alhambra bookshops, and will hopefully be more prominently placed when the Spanish translation is out. (And a nice little plug for that came out recently in Granada Hoy, though with quite a few mistakes!)

But the best book-related anecdote so far is that a work colleague took a copy to present as a gift to the Sultan of Sharjah on a recent business trip, only to be told, "I've already got that! My daughter gave it to me!" So the Sultan of Sharjah has a copy of my book! The best book-related comment I've had is from the great professor of Islamic art, Robert Hillenbrand - chatting to him after his recent Islamic Art Circle lecture, someone asked us what was the book we were talking about, and Robert said - "Islamic Arts from Spain. You'd think, all the old chestnuts... But there is not a chestnut in sight!" I took that as high praise indeed.

The clocks went back this morning so now I have that strange feeling of my body-clock being out of kilter with what the clock on the wall says. Now begins the winter.

It's a crime

I haven't blogged for a goodly while - I'm sorry about that, and I will catch up with you soon. For the moment I wanted to share with you what I considered to be an amusing/appropriate shelving of a particular book on the third shelf down, captured in the WH Smiths at Heathrow airport last week... (Another delayed flight on the way to Spain, but more about that anon)