A New Year's Walk

Since we seem to have spent much of the Christmas holidays inside, much of the time cooking and then eating (and our New Year's Day housewarming do was a great success and lots of fun), we decided to dedicate the extra New Year bank holiday, on 2 January, to going for a long walk. I wanted to get on a train and go out of London and walk in the country, preferably taking in something of antiquarian interest along the way. And, courtesy of the excellent National Trails website, we found the perfect walk - along the bit of the South Downs Way which skirts the Cuckmere Valley. The downloadable PDF told us which trains and buses we needed to take to the start of our walk and even provided an extract of the right bit of Ordnance Survey map, which we popped onto the iPad and took walking with us! Very handy for zooming in to check which path you need to take at crossroads etc...


We had the most idyllic weather - gorgeous cloudless blue skies and lovely sunny weather, though it as very cold once the sun set. We took a train to Lewes - from handy Victoria - then another train to Seaford, from where we took a local bus to Exceat, then set off across the valley - which was somewhat squelchily muddy thanks to the rain on New Year's Day. There was a white horse cut into the chalky hillside (= antiquarian interest) and our walk took us to the brilliantly-named Litlington where we paused for lunch in the lovely Plough & Harrow pub, before setting off up slightly higher and more wooded ground for the second half of the walk. At the end of which the footpath opened up on to the most amazing vista over the estuary, where the river meets the sea, with its winding channels and waterlogged tributaries glinting in the sunlight. We sat and looked at the view for a goodly while.


We made our way back to Lewes where we stopped off to visit the ruins of the Priory (= more antiquarian interest), which was dissolved by Henry VIII and meticulously dismantled by his engineers - and therefore of interest to K's book research. We had a walk around Lewes, which neither of us had ever been to before and which is really beautiful with a rather fine castle, though surprisingly lacking in good, quaint places to find a cup of tea and a piece of cake - or certainly on 2 Jan! After a refreshment pause, at disappointing Caffè Nero, we got the train back to London - and we were home in time to cook dinner and sit down in front of the new series of Sherlock!

A wonderfully idyllic day and hopefully an auspicious start to 2012!

Christmas feasting!

We did goose - and thanks to the combination of Mr Dale (aka 'the Hampton Court Butcher')'s magnificent bird, Raymond Blanc's excellent recipe (serendipitously spotted by my mother) and K's sterling efforts with a sharp knife, it was absolutely delicious - moist, goose fat did not pour smoking from the oven, and there were lots of leftovers, despite the horror stories which several people had told me when I said we were going to try cooking goose for the first time... My sister did think the roasted crown looked a bit like the head of one of the aliens in Alien, which was disturbingly true, but it didn't mar the flavour!

Preparations on Christmas Eve, just before heading out to Midnight Mass up the road at Christ Church, Streatham - the James Wild designed church with an Owen Jones interior which is just up the road!

As you can see here next to the fruit bowl, the new iPad really came into its own for online recipe consultation - I call it 'iPad cooking'! Did I mention that I treated myself to one of these from the Apple store in Houston?? It has been brilliant anyway, generally for reading PDFs when travelling to and fro on the tube (I am examining an enormous Spanish thesis - which, thank god, I actually finished reading today - and this has made getting through it in a timely fashion much more manageable)

Sitting down to a delicious starter of home-made blinis and Hebridean Smokehouse peat-smoked salmon, with thanks to my sister...

The goose - served up on the wonderful 19th-century platter which I inherited from my grandmother, which only ever comes out on special occasions, and when the food deserves showing off!

And there were a lot of trimmings! Home-made bread sauce (yum) and cranberry & apple relish, and all the vegetables came from our Local Greens veg bag, which I have blogged about before and will again - it has been prompting us to experiment with new recipes and invigorate our cooking which is always good!

Happy Christmas diners! We needed a walk in Brockwell Park after all that...

...but we returned ready to eat our dessert - a rather delicious (if I say so myself) mocha chocolate roulade! I was very happy with how very loggy it looked, being a Yule Log an' all. I totally mucked up the icing for this - twice - and so that the cream and Green & Blacks dark chocolate I had melted together didn't go to waste, I made truffles!


Quite pleased with how these have turned out! (though amazingly we haven't tried them yet)

My sister stayed over and on Boxing Day we went for a long walk along the Thames, from Vauxhall to Bermondsey.

A bit different from this time last year when we had to strap on our crampons to trudge through the Edinburgh snow! It has been really mild and rather un-wintry, and the South Bank was full of tourists, as usual! I couldn't resist taking a photo every time I saw the growing Shard...

This is from pretty much right underneath it, at London Bridge station. It is just so other-worldly in its hugeness. When it is finished it will be the tallest building in Europe!!

So, it's been a lovely week of cooking and eating and spending time with family and seeing friends - last night we had dinner with Wanda and Az at Bill Granger's new London restaurant, Granger & Co, which was amazing. I won't be forgetting the gorgeous pavlova with quince and strawberries for a while...

Not bad for a first Christmas in our new flat. And we still have a week off work! We're finally organising a housewarming, an 'open house' on New Year's Day, which we're now planning the menu for (we're going to bake a whole salmon from the Brixton Market fishmonger) and which might finally prompt us to put some pictures up on the walls... Catching up on sleep is also an important part of the plan.

Hope you all had a very Merry Christmas and all best wishes for 2012!

Christmas is coming!

I hadn't realised quite how long it has been since my last posting, but this is symptomatic of how busy November was, for both of us. I gave a conference paper (in Berlin), a gallery talk and 5 lectures (4 of them on the same day! a study day to the Birkbeck Alumni art history society - I was the study day!) all in the space of a two week period! The day I was giving my conference paper in Berlin, K was giving a lecture to the Hereford Historical Association! So, when the lecture was done, at least he got to spend a relaxing weekend at home with his parents...

Since we finished with all that craziness we have been trying to catch up with ourselves and start winding down a bit. By the end of December, I still have to read and write a report on a Spanish PhD thesis, write an article and a book introduction, but I am choosing not to worry overly about all those things - I am feeling completely lethargic at the weekends, and all I am capable of doing is wandering around shopping in Brixton Market, trying more of the food joints we haven't gone to yet. Mama Lan was a recent high point - the new Chinese dumpling place. We sat at the counter eating our lunch, watching the chefs making and cooking more of the dumplings we were eating - can't get much more freshly prepared than that!

There are quite a lot of pre-Christmas markets on at the weekends at the moment, which is quickly getting us into the Christmas spirit - last Saturday we went to visit our friend Lisa who was doing her first ever stall at the Workshop Sale in East Dulwich. We cycled over there, and picked up a few nice things for Christmas presents. Yesterday we wandered round the Crafty Fox Pop Up makers' market (I have discovered this is the phrase of the moment for craft fairs) and Brixton Makers' Market, which is a now monthly happening on Station Road, though I have to say the first one - which I stumbled upon quite by chance, back in October - was the best so far.

Today we bought a Christmas tree! (see above) And once K had struggled with getting it to stand up straight without falling over, we decorated it! I am sitting looking at it as I write - it feels very cosy in our living room now. We even put up a few pictures properly. We are doing Christmas here in the new flat this year - my parents and sister are coming to us, and we're planning the menu: so far the only fixtures are goose, and a mocha chocolate roulade. We both have two weeks off work, to catch up on sleep and exhibitions and write those articles and prepare for what is going to be another busy year - at least for me the next 6 months are going to carry on being pretty crazy - but also to spend some time in the flat and properly figure out where pictures and furniture should go, and replace those things we've been living with temporarily, and just be home-bodies for a while in our own home... Only two weeks to go!

Meet Juan, the camel-herd, and José, the potter - our mini-belen figures, bought in the Plaza Mayor Christmas market in Madrid, where there is always an enormous and highly complex belen, or Nativity Scene (though this does not really convey the true glamour of the Spanish version!), which the Christmas shoppers queue up to process past and enjoy! Of course the caganer is the most notorious of the Belen figures (Google it!) but there are all sorts of fun minor characters which make up the Bethlehem cityscape! We chose these two for a secular 'Nativity Scene' - though having put them out for the first time in a while, it is looking a bit bare. It's obviously about time to go back to Madrid to get a few more!!

Local Greens

For a long time we've wanted to get one of those veg boxes that gets delivered to you once a week, full of seasonal veg locally sourced from a nearby farm. The problem with the service provided by Abel & Cole and such companies, is that when you live in a block of flats in London, there is just nowhere for them to leave the box during the day, even if you trust your neighbours. A few years back, Tescos introduced one which we got a few times - but though it was convenient (delivered in the evenings alongside your weekly shopping), it was disappointing as most of the veg seemed to be flown or shipped in from somewhere far away, so was hardly supporting local farmers. We stopped that pretty quickly - and we can't have been the only ones, as I think they quietly adandoned it...

So imagine our delight when on a recent wander through Herne Hill we discovered a new local initiative called Local Greens, run by a small group of local ladies, supplying weekly bags of seasonal veg sourced from small and organic farms as close as possible to this part of London. Instead of delivering it to you at home, the bags are left at several local collection points and you go along on a Thursday evening after work to pick it up. And when we saw they were about to institute the Brockwell Lido Café as one of the collection points, which is at most a 10 minute walk from us through Brockwell Park, we signed up!

We're still getting into the swing of figuring out what to do with unusual vegetables (ideas for celeriac anyone?), mostly because this has been an unusually busy month for us - with me in Houston, back for a few days before going to Granada (see below), then back for a few days before K went off to Paris for a conference... But today I have been trying to catch up a bit. The clocks went back this morning so it has been the usual slightly odd, jetlaggy kind of day when it feels later than it is, so what better than to spend the afternoon cooking. I have made some stock out of a couple of chicken carcases that we had kept in the freezer, and have roasted the beetroot that came with the veg bag, and tomorrow night we will have borscht for supper. Since my cold-addled brain (I came down with a really nasty one this week and even took time off work, which I hardly ever do) mistook a freezer tub of egg whites for something else, and therefore defrosted it, I have made meringues too!!

Yes, I spent last weekend in Granada, attending the opening of the exhibition 'Owen Jones y la Alhambra', which I co-curated. The exhibition design looks fantastic, and it was just wonderful to think of Owen Jones and his work 'coming back' to the place that so inspired him in the 1830s... A really happy weekend.

Houses of Horrors

I knew Halloween was a big deal in the States, but I hadn't realised quite how big until this visit to Houston. On Sunday it poured with torrential rain, all day - in fact those words do not really capture the amount of rain that fell on Sunday, the first rain they have had in Texas for months, stuck as they are in the grips of a terrible drought.


My plan to visit the MFAH collections at Bayou Bend and walk through the gardens along the riverbank to the Rienzi, another satellite house-collection of the MFAH, was somewhat scuppered by the fact that whole riverside area was likely to have turned into a swamp, let alone that I would get drenched the moment I stepped out of the hotel's porte-cochère (they love these here). Just as I was pondering what to do with my day, Francesca - the curator here - phoned me up and we made a plan to drive up to the Rienzi in her car.

This is a 1950s house in the neo-neo-Palladian style, filled to the brim with a collection of European decorative arts from the 17th and 18th centuries, put together by the Mastersons and given to the MFAH on their deaths. They had a rather fun display in the dining room showing the table laid for an English noble banquet from the 1760s, with all the dishes based on recipes in Elizabeth Raffald's The Experienced English Housekeeper (1769) - I feel I need to obtain a copy of this. The bad weather had kept other visitors away so we had a personal guided tour of the house from one docent, then a personal explanation and discussion of the dining room with another docent - great fun actually.

Since the rain had calmed by the time we had finished, Francesca drove us around the River Oaks neighbourhood where the Rienzi is located, and we gawped at the ridiculously ginormous mansions built by Houstonians with more money than taste. Some of them were in a kind of American colonial style which at least felt like it had some local roots, but many others were attempting to be French châteaux or Renaissance villas of various kinds... But the best thing of all was their extravagant Halloween decorations!

I think this one is particularly creative...


This one lights up at night and even has ghostly sound effects!

Quite amazing. The amount of money they must spend on these decorations! Other places we saw had dozens of pumpkins of various sizes, some of them huge, 'landscaped' around people's gardens - just left to rot...

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Food waste is a major issue here. I mean it is bad in England, but the portions that they serve you in restaurants here are simply gigantic, and too much for a person to consume in one sitting! If you put your knife and fork down for a pause, a waiter will appear and ask if you are "still working?" - like it is a struggle you are forcing yourself through to eat everything on your plate. I guess it is a form of conspicuous consumption (literally) - but for a state as wealthy as Texas, Houston is not a cheap place to eat out. Or perhaps it's just this area.

I haven't ventured particularly far afield. I did not make it to the Space Center, unsurprisingly. The farthest I have walked is up to the Menil Collection - about half an hour from the hotel - and I am getting to know Montrose Boulevard pretty well, where most of the 'nearby' restaurants are located. What is frustrating is that there are no shops. I can't pop out to buy a bottle of water (and I am not paying $6 for a hotel bottle!) or a coffee or snack. The nearest shop is the drive-thru CVS pharmacy a 15-minute walk away.

Walking is the other thing that's weird - though not quite as bad as our experience in Fort Worth (my previous Texas experience) when walking from Downtown, where we were staying, to the Kimbell Museum where we were installing, which was probably another half hour walk, drivers would pull over and ask us if we were all right! There is certainly no disputing the friendliness or hospitality of Texans. But walking to and from dinner the last few nights, I am pretty much the only person I see on foot. The only other pedestrians are people walking their dogs or out for a run in the cooler evening temperatures.

And it is a bit cooler after Sunday's rainstorm. A little less humid as well. Apparently in the summer they can have 100 degree F and 100% humidity - it must be unbearable. In the high humidity of the first few days I was here, papers I left on my desk were damp when I picked them up.

It is slightly weird to be surrounded by so much Spanish. And that the Latino Spanish here is slightly different from the Castilian I am used to - shifts like elevador rather than ascensor for lift. But the entire service industry is Hispanic - every waitor or anyone you see doing any kind of manual labour, housekeeping in the hotel. The Texas economy would surely collapse without the Latino community, yet anti-immigration nutters want to keep them out.

The other thing I always find weird when I come to the US is the enormous size and great abundance of the churches. I think there is one on each corner, opposite the (metaphorical) Starbucks.

The hotel shuttle service, complete with horned buffalo skull. This service will take you anywhere within a 5 mile radius for free and come and pick you up when you're done. It seems to keep the engine running all day to keep the interior chilled and air conditioned for these Texans who seem to be allergic to warmth...

And last but by no means least, the bonkers Hotel Zaza where I am staying. Check out the website - it really does look like that! It is right next to the museum so it is certainly convenient, but this is a self-conscious rockstar hotel. It also claims to be one of Houston's premier night spots and though I am on the 7th floor, the bar is right below my window and there are speakers out on the pavement, which actually means the disco never stops. I am not exactly sleeping well and this might be why! That or the ridiculous number of pillows on my claw-footed luxury bed - one of two in my room!

Well, it has certainly been an experience. The installation is rather stop-start so I have been catching up with quite a lot of work that I brought with me, which is good. But tomorrow promises to be a busy day - when I need to install more than half of the pieces I am responsible for - and then I am travelling back to Blighty overnight on Thursday, so over and out from Houston.

Howdy from Houston

The fourth largest city in the United States, in terms of population and sprawl, though it doesn't really feel like it from this little pocket of the Museum District, where I am staying for 10 days installing our loans to the Gifts of the Sultan exhibition - which promises to be a visually rich and glamorous show. I arrived in the States on the day that Steve Jobs died and Sarah Palin announced she wasn't running for the White House - both momentous events in their own ways.

It is three years pretty much to the day since I last visited the States, arriving in New York for my six-week fellowship at the Met - what an amazing treat that was - and it is really nice to be here. Houston is perhaps not my number 1 holiday destination, but it is actually surprisingly civilised! There is lots of cultural stuff going on here, including some interesting museums. Also the Rothko Chapel is here, which I have been wanting to visit pretty much all my life, and finally got to yesterday evening after finishing my installation work for the day.

Photo courtesy of the art daily blog

It's a deeply meditative space, and the particular deep purple colour of some of the canvases really draws you in and you start to see mysterious shapes and whole worlds in the brush strokes. I sat in there for half an hour while other visitors came and went in a few minutes. (For more posts on my obsession with Rothko, see here.)

The Rothko Chapel is a small satellite building of the Menil Collection, the private collection especially of modern and contemporary American art formed by the Texan couple John and Dominique de Menil and now housed in a Renzo Piano building and visitable free of charge.


I had a walk around one of the wings, intending to go back up there over the weekend to see the rest of it and visit the other satellites, which include another chapel housing Byzantine frescoes from a church in Cyprus. I was the only person in the galleries for much of the time, apart from the security staff, which was a bit disconcerting, given the quality of the collection.

Unexpected treat: one room of the galleries house alternate canvases for the Rothko Chapel. Different, and I don't know why these weren't used. Up close and in a comparatively small gallery space, the canvases are truly monumental. This is what I was inspired to write in my notebook:

"These have a deep burgundy red and large black squares at the centre. Impenetrable black. You stare up at them - they're giving nothing away. In fact they seem to be staring back at you. They're Giants. Like Gods. But implacable, not benevolent. Is this the revelation that drove Rothko to suicide?"

I find I can't get away from thinking about his death when I look at his paintings - especially topical since the Rothko Chapel was dedicated a year after he died.

The de Menils also bought up houses in the neighbourhood surrounding their museum building which are all painted the same shade of 'Menil grey' and it has a really nice feel - traditional clapboard houses, quite small, but cosy-looking. A nicer area to walk around than the gigantic villas in some of the other residential parts of Houston!

I think K will probably want to live here...

I walked from here to meet some of my fellow couriers at the 'English pub', The Black Labrador, which has a red telephone box out front and a mannequin dressed up as a Beefeater inside! After that we went to Nelore Churrascaria, a Brazilian steakhouse, for dinner - which was an expensive but rather amazing experience! The waiters wander around with massive skewers of differently prepared meats and if you turn the card on your table over to green - for go! - they keep coming by (it's all you can eat) and slicing off bits from their skewer which you grab with little tongs. It was delicious but filling, though some people were really letting their plates pile up!

This was the prime sirloin - house specialty apparently!

Well I had better get on with the day, or I will miss the hotel breakfast! I haven't really figured out what I am doing today - K is insistent that I visit the Space Center, but it is 25 miles outside of Houston and there just seems no feasible way of getting there by public transport! I will think about it over a cup of coffee... More anon.

The Challenges of Home Ownership, Part 2: The Plumbing

And in case you missed the first part - the hilarious and heart-warming story of the pigeon which got stuck up our chimney - you can catch up here.

Monday was our 6-month anniversary in the new flat - I think it's safe to say that we feel pretty well at home here now (though it took longer than I thought it would), but one thing that has been the bane of our lives - and I can't believe we actually managed to put up with it for 6 months - has been the barely-functioning shower. The bathroom is small - when the flats were built, around 1902 - the bathroom, well toilet I should say, was in an outhouse out back. Anyway this means there is not much room and the vendors took out the bath and installed a shower cubicle - ie there is no other means of washing, apart from a flannel in the washbasin and water all over the floor. The bathroom was one of the last rooms the vendors did up before selling on the flat, and it is barely a year old - when I first saw the flat, it looked far too glamorous for us, with stone and tile and mirrors everywhere and a shower like you might expect to find in a 5-star hotel.

They warned us about the fact that when you turn it on, you have to run it for a goodly while before enough water started to flow to actually shower in. To start with this meant running it for about 10 minutes, but gradually it got worse, meaning we often needed to leave it running for half an hour before enough water was flowing to wash in. I hated the waste of water. And even once it did start flowing, it kept cutting to a heavy flow of cold water, which meant you had to leap out of the way and squeeze into the corner of the cubicle, until it started flowing warm again. For a while this was preceded by a noise in the pipes - an increase in pressure or something I suppose - which forewarned you that the cold was coming, a bit like the noise the Fireswamp makes in The Princess Bride before it incinerates you.

Basically after a few months of this, the hot water stopped flowing all together and turned into a dribble, which alternated with a heavy flow of cold water. For a moment when the hot dribble turned into cold flow or vice versa there would be a flow of hot water, for about a millisecond, which is when you could rinse shampoo or conditioner from your hair - though I am not sure it ever really got properly wet!

And that is how we have been washing ourselves for the last few months, often ending up leaving late for work as it has taken so long to have a shower in the morning. And this is not for want of trying to get it fixed. The most frustrating thing about it all has been the difficulty of getting a plumber to come and look at it, to diagnose the problem, and of course we had no clue - the frustration of learning what you don't know about when you own a place... I made contact, one way or another, with about 5 different plumbers, got 5 different opinions on what the problem was, made arrangements to come and look at it which were never honoured. I learnt that the good plumbers don't need to call you back, because they have no shortage of work. The recommendation from our old neighbour Sue of Martin the Polish Plumber eventually paid off - but having called, texted and emailed, when I finally succeeded in speaking to him, he was about to head to Poland for the summer!

In the end, he was here until 10pm last night, and touch wood, it now seems to be working. You turn the shower on and - miracle of miracles! - water comes out and it's hot and it keeps coming out and it stays hot! The problem was differential pressures for the hot water (coming from the mains) and the cold water (coming from a tank in the roof), and he tried a series of things until one of them worked. Counter-intuitively a pressure-reducing valve for the hot, to try to level out the pressure - and then simplest of all solutions, installing a brand-new shower and tap which were suited for low water pressure. It seems the vendors had installed high pressure taps.

Sorry to go on about this, but it has been a real nightmare, and stupidly difficult to get sorted out! But hopefully normal life can now resume, and we can turn our thoughts to all the other things we want to do in the flat that we haven't been thinking about with the part of our brains consumed by shower frustration - like putting up some pictures!