What I love about Brixton

You can be on your way home from a productive day in the British Library, you happen to notice something going on in St Matthews Gardens - a new community event called Brixton Come Together - you wander in and just happen to stumble upon a Manu Chao concert!!

As K said, that man is a "human smile"! Brixton went wild! Fantastic!! (And beats coming home and doing a bit more work before dinner...!)

GetAwayFromTheGames.com

For those of you who don't live in London and therefore have not had the delight over the last few months of constant reminders to carefully plan your travel during the Olympics - including by the Mayor himself, Boris Johnson, via recorded audio messages that surprise you on the underground - this is a witty inversion of the web address set up to help with this planning, GetAheadOfTheGames.com. We have followed this advice and carefully planned an Olympic Escape - in fact I am writing this on the train, as it speeds out of London, heading to the North West of England. Carlisle, to be specific, from where we will be starting our Great Walk of Hadrian's Wall.

We're starting our holiday by travelling in the height of luxury - First Class on the train (due to the vagaries of the British rail network sometimes it only costs a little bit more than Second Class!) and the first couple of nights in a quite-nice-looking hotel near the Cathedral. The level of luxury will decrease quite quickly - in a few nights we'll be youth hostelling in a place that provides no meals!

This afternoon's post-arrival plans are to see the Castle & Cathedral and have a nice dinner! Early tomorrow morning we will get a bus to the western-most point of the wall, and walk back along the Solway Firth. After that it's rucksacks hoisted and the proper walking begins. I'm a little nervous, as it's pretty much my first walking holiday since going to Iceland on an A-level Geography field trip about 20 years ago, and the rucksacks are pretty heavy... But excited too, to see Hadrian's Wall and all the Romano-British archaeology along there, as well as the amazing landscape. I'm especially looking forward to spending time outside and taking exercise, because it feels like I have been locked up inside chained to my desk for the whole of this year so far, and much of last year!

Our reward at the end of the walk - which we have planned to take about 9 days - is to spend a few days chilling out on the Northumbrian coast with some friends who have a cottage up there. I am also looking forward to getting some good use out of our English Heritage and National Trust memberships!!

I don't plan to spend any time looking at emails or really keeping in touch with the outside world, though I may be moved to blog as we have our adventures along the Wall. In case I don't, enjoy the Games!

From Brixton to Ballaró - and beyond...

I can't believe it is exactly 3 months since I last had time to write a post here. It has been a mad mad year for busy-ness, one which I do not want to repeat for a while. I have just emerged though, having on Thursday evening had the launch party for the Festschrift volume I was editing in all my available spare time over the last few years, which was a triumphant and lovely evening; before that, I was in Pisa and Florence at the end of last week, giving the last of the conference papers I had signed up for this year, all on totally different subjects of course, each requiring new research which I had to scrabble to do in amongst everything else (oh, and on top of the busy day job!). So having written 4 papers, 4 articles (one of which has even been published already!), edited one (huge) book and begun the work on guest-editing a journal issue already in the last 6 months, I am feeling pretty exhausted!! So here's to the new resolution to say 'no' to absolutely everything else that comes along, with varying degrees of success already.

So the relaxing starts here - we have some friends from afar coming to stay over the next few weeks and it will be wonderful to see them. We are also (belatedly) starting to plan our Olympic Escape - to walk Hadrian's Wall, from west to east. More on that another day. Though it doesn't actually stop - K is at this moment preparing for a job interview on Wednesday. Keep everything crossed!

But I have wanted for a while to share with you these photos I took in the Ballaró market in Palermo, when we had our week's holiday in Sicily in April, after the end of one of my conferences. It was totally fantastic - we saw and experienced so so much (the food!), though as one friend observed, it was a bit of a busman's holiday. But with our ever-growing love of Brixton Market, we very much appreciated the sights and smells of this Saturday morning food market in downtown Palermo, where the vegetables and fruit were huge and their colours intense! I loved how they were grouped by colour, so tomatoes and strawberries were side by side. It was also amazing to see the tuna guy butchering a whole carcase which had probably started out about the same size as him! (I don't have photos but I also ate some delicious big and juicy cherries bought in Florence's Mercato Centrale last Friday - I love markets as you can see!)

So, here is a little photographic tour of Ballaró market, a feast for all the senses. And I will try to be a better correspondent from this point on...

Happy Easter!

I wish I could take the credit for these beauties! But K has discovered baking, and has taken to it rather successfully - a wonderful stem ginger cake, a dark chocolate and beetroot cake, some soda bread, and now a batch of hot cross buns in time for Easter! Delicious! Here they are in progress...


Sorry for the deeper than usual radio silence. This year, though barely 3 months old, has already been horribly busy. The recent travelling has a lot to do with it, as well as preparing for those trips. After Spain, I had a couple of days to turn myself around and go to New York - another place I spent time in 2008, when I was there for 6 weeks on a curatorial exchange at the Met, which was fabulous. I was back this time to take our loans to an exhibition on Byzantium & Islam, and to finally see the Met's recently opened not-Islamic galleries - wonderful, because of the magnificent collection of masterpieces they house, but also very elegantly conceived and designed so you don't feel overwhelmed by the fact it is actually 1000 objects and 15 galleries. I also had lots of fun catching up with people, including some friends unexpectedly in town.

Then after returning from that trip I had another couple of days to get ready for the Gulf - Doha, Sharjah and Dubai. I was a bit trepidatious about this trip, partly I think because I was tired already from being constantly on the road, but also because I didn't think I would enjoy the Gulf very much, having previously only been to Qatar for a few days back in, amazingly, 2004, when it seemed little more than a building site with no heart and soul. Perhaps because my expectations of this trip were so low, I actually had a really good time.

I was in Doha for 5 days as a visiting scholar at the Museum of Islamic Art - again, the first time I had seen the museum since it opened in 2008 (when I was in Damascus, my other big trip that year) and not only is the building absolutely stunning, it is full of gorgeous things, and much happier curators.


Much more has been built in Doha in the intervening years since I was there so there are other things to go and see - such as Mathaf, the lovely Arab Museum of Modern Art, which had a fantastic Cai Guo-Qiang exhibition on, the Chinese artist who does such amazing work with gunpowder and fireworks. I was also there at the same time they were opening the Gifts of the Sultan exhibition, so I coincided with lots of friends and colleagues, some I hadn't seen for years, others new and happy acquaintances. I even managed to get some good work done - starting to think about the upcoming conference paper on oliphants, on which see below....

View of the skyscrapers of the West Bay, from the Museum of Islamic Art, Doha

Next stop was Sharjah for the opening of my own exhibition - the Museum of Islamic Civilisation is the next venue for Owen Jones, and it looks really lovely there, not least because they have so much space!


It was an intense couple of days (not helped by the fact that stupidly I missed my flight from Doha - I won't linger on my own idiocy, but suffice to say it will be a long time before I become blasée again about departure times...). The high point was probably having to give the Sultan of Sharjah a guided tour of the exhibition, and then making the front page of Al-Khaleej the next day!

Then, to 'relax' at the end, I joined my colleagues at Art Dubai, really to see what it was like. Since I didn't have any responsibilities at this point or any meetings to organise, I could just wander round the art fair and the participating galleries in various parts of the city, and really get a feel for what the contemporary Middle Eastern art market is like. Mad, basically. But I loved the 'fringe' art festival in the historic Bastakiyya district - alongside the creek, where old Dubai grew up, is a quarter where houses from the early 20th century have been carefully preserved and during Art Dubai this old quarter gets taken over by artists and installations, with music and performances taking place in some of the larger courtyards. I was there early evening on a Friday, so it was weekend time and full of families relaxing, a really lovely vibe.

This courtyard had a sound installation which consisted of someone reading George Orwell's 1984 with qawwali music playing from some of the speakers. I sat down on one of the beanbags and listened for a good 15 minutes - it made me think the time had definitely come to re-read 1984.

The traditional architecture of the Gulf is actually rather beautiful - courtyard houses built, remarkably, of coral stone (well, it is certainly locally available), with a lot of influences from the other side of the Gulf, such as these lovely wind-towers, which are a traditional feature of many Iranian buildings as well.

Since getting back (and to some extent, while away) every 'spare' waking hour has been necessarily devoted to the Festschrift volume I am editing - we're at proof checking stage and everything needs to be turned around really fast, and with 30 essays it takes a while. And now I am preparing my next conference paper - I have decided to venture into the thorny territory that is oliphants, though to focus on function rather than style, so it has been quite pleasant to read 'dissertations' on horns of tenure written by late 18th century Antiquarians. And the best thing is that this conference finally gets me to Sicily, which I have been studying long distance since I started my MA in Islamic art... So in a week's time I will be in Palermo, and after the conference K will join me and we will have a week of actual holiday! It will also be good to spend some time together, after I have been away so much recently.

And nice just to have a bit of down time with the long Easter bank holiday weekend. We have just celebrated our first anniversary in our new flat - amazing how that time has flown by! On Easter Sunday last year, we were at Persepolis! It still feels like we have spent more time away from the flat than we have in it - we still haven't properly put up any pictures in our long 'picture gallery'-like hall. We seem to have new problems with the bathroom - a leak into downstairs' bathroom - which slightly makes it feel like this patching up the flat will be never-ending. I suppose that is the difference when you're a home-owner.

But we're feeling more at home too - this weekend, we're cat-sitting for one of our neighbours. I have also been trying to take a bit of time to tend to my window boxes - I have planted some pansies, and finally replanted our money plant (jade). This we inherited from Bev & James when they moved to Aus all those years ago! It has flourished (which I like to think was commensurate with our improved economic circumstances, getting a mortgage an' all that) but it really didn't like the move last year. That, or it couldn't cope with the global financial meltdown. But there seem to be green shoots, just in time for spring.

Return to Madrid

You'll be forgiven for thinking I had fallen off the face of the planet or something, not having posted anything since the New Year. 2012 has already been totally mad - and will continue to be until May at the earliest - and while I have often thought of blogging about something, there has always been a pressing deadline which has meant it was not to be.

Statue in honour of The Arts, erected by Queen Isabel II in the Plaza de Oriente

I am now in Spain - Madrid to be precise, having come from Granada on Thursday night where I was participating in a conference on Alhambrismo connected with the Owen Jones exhibition I co-curated, which closes at the Alhambra on 28 February and has received more or less 100,000 visitors! I am participating in another conference here in Madrid on Monday and Tuesday - this time on Islamic textiles - so preparing two conference papers and Powerpoints at the same time, on totally different subjects, neither of which I feel I am a specialist in, rather took it out of me before I came.

But I decided to take advantage of the few days in between the two conferences to revisit the city which was my home town for a year, back in 1999-2000, when I was based here for my research 'fieldwork' while working on my PhD. I have not come back to Madrid many times since then, and always too briefly alas, but I always feel quite emotional coming back, and it is always nice - and a little bit odd - knowing so well a city that you do not live in.

Today I just walked. I always used to do that when I was living here, to discover new neighbourhoods and soak up the feel of each place. I love urban walking. I am staying in the cheap and cheerful and appropriately named Hostal Dulcinea in Calle Cervantes (ha ha) in the 'Barrio de las Letras' (where all the streets are named after important Spanish writers), which is very close to where the department of the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas where I was based used to be (about 10 years ago it moved miles out of the centre of town). So this is the area I used to wander around. The weather is also totally amazing - cold when the sun is not shining, but in the 20s C during the day! It feels like spring though the Spanish are worried as there has been no rain for months.

After a brief desayuno I followed old paths to the Plaza de Oriente and the Palacio Real, which is always an impressive view, especially in the sun, then down to the Plaza de España and stopped for a couple of hours at the Museo Cerralbo, the stunning house-museum constructed and decorated in the late 19th/early 20th century by an important Spanish noble family - so very indicative of elite taste for collecting and display at that era. I hadn't been there before but it was brilliant, and very well presented.

The impressive grand staircase at the Museo Cerralbo

The ballroom, with paintings by Juderías Caballero from 1891-2 on themes of dance throughout history

After a quick stop at the nearby Temple of Debod - given to the Spanish state by the Egyptians in the 1960s (!) - I walked down to the lovely Ermita de San Antonio de la Florida, the little elegant 18th-century chapel decorated with a cycle of beautiful frescoes by Goya as well as the artist's resting place.

Next to it is famous Casa Mingo, an Asturian sidreria which specialises in amazing roast chicken! I was not the only one who had had the idea to have lunch there on a sunny Saturday and I had to queue for about half an hour for a table! I could have got a table quicker outside, in fact, but chose to stay inside for the full cacophonous experience of Casa Mingo when it's busy - fantastic!

The menu board at Casa Mingo framed by hundreds of bottles of sidra!

I couldn't finish my chicken and needed a walk afterwards so it was just as well I had planned to walk along the riverbanks of the Manzanares, which has very recently been totally landscaped with parks and playgrounds and interesting bridges and other activities, and again it was full of people out enjoying the weather. I don't think I ever came down to the river when I was living in Madrid - there was nothing here, certainly no walks to do. Now it is a real pleasure, which great vistas of the Madrid skyline on either side.


There are such regular bridges that I kept criss-crossing to get different views. The landscaping has also incorporated Madrid's two historic bridges into the parks - the Puente de Segovia built by Philip II, and the 18th-century Puente de Toledo, which is now totally pedestrianised.

The Puente de Segovia with Madrid Cathedral in the background (coincidentally, built on the site of the Great Mosque when Madrid was an Islamic town in the medieval period!)

I walked for about 3km (there are handy markers in the pavement), all the way along to the Puente de Toledo, then left the river and wound my way through the streets around Lavapiés and Atocha, to go and see the new extension at the Reina Sofia - I didn't go in but I can tell you that it was big and red and slightly unrealistic in that way that impressive modern structures sometimes are.

Then I headed to the Prado. I hadn't been there for years and considering I had already been walking all day, I wasn't sure how good an idea this was, but I wanted to see its not-so-new extension as well, revisit some paintings there, as well as go and see the 19th-century paintings that the extension has allowed them to display. I got there at 5.30 and was dismayed to discover an enormous queue - forming ready for the free entry that kicks off at 6pm. I got in ahead of the crowds with my ICOM card. The museum was already busy but a few minutes after 6 it was heaving! They had to close off the gallery where an early and accurate copy of the Gioconda by a student of Leonardo da Vinci has just gone on display after a major restoration project - I hadn't realised it is only up for a few weeks so that makes more sense of the total craziness of the crush of people that gathered round it, somewhat like the original in the Louvre, and then later on the gallery was totally closed off and you had to queue to get in to see it. Ironic, since at the Leonardo exhibition in London recently, no-one was at all interested in any of the works by Leonardo's students!

I left the Prado when it closed at 8, swept along in the crowd back to nearby Dulcinea to rest my feet for a little bit and check my email (Dulcinea has free wifi but the connection has been really weak the last few days and I haven't been able to get online recently - it is quite strong this evening so I decided to take advantage and have a blog!). I was thinking about going to eat at another old haunt - yesterday I went for cod fritters at Casa Labra just off Sol, and then for pimientos de padrón at Viña P in Plaza Santa Ana, both old favourites - but then I thought I would try something new: a little place I had passed last night on Calle Lope de Vega, that had a really nice look to it and reminded me of all the little places that have been opening up in Brixton.


This is La Mojigata and it was lovely - everything home made, all the bread and cakes home baked, all the ingredients responsibly sourced and ecológico, and what's more something different, fresh rather than the fried food that tapas often is. I had a sort of risotto made of whole rice with wild mushrooms, and a salad of red endives with strawberries and rocket - delicious!! And a really nice atmosphere - so this is a definite restaurant recommendation if you are coming to Madrid! But it is very small - it only seats 17 - so you made need to book to ensure you get a table!


So Madrid is the same but different - reassuringly familiar and happily still buzzing, despite 'la crisis' which is also on everyone's tongue. It always comes up in conversation, as does the fact that there are no jobs. There are more people sleeping in the streets or begging than there were before, many shops closed or closing down, people wandering around Puerta del Sol offering to buy gold. A lot of graffiti against the banks, and there was going to be a demonstration in Plaza Lavapiés this evening. But it's still great to be here and I plan to make the most of enjoying it for the next few days!

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!