So, against all expectations, the rewritten book chapters got sent off to the editor at about 7pm on Friday 29th May. When I had a meeting with him a few days later to talk about scheduling the next few stages, he didn't have anything prepared because no-one had ever actually sent him a manuscript on time before!! We agreed I could have until 18th June to submit the end-matter - footnotes, bibliography, captions, all the other little bits and pieces (map locations, acknowledgements...) - as well as the 'signed-off' text, in the sense that my boss has read it and agrees it's ready to go. Herein lies the rub. My boss is not the world's most efficient person at scheduling his time, and he is also always immensely busy. I also returned to the Department (bidding a regretful farewell to that hot, stuffy but calm office in Research) at a particularly busy time - just as my colleagues were at panic-stations, wrestling with the logistics of shipping artworks from various international destinations which are going to be shown in the Jameel Prize, which opens in under a month. So instead of having time and space to think about footnotes, I got thrown into the deep end of liaising with art shippers, which involved conversations about artists I had never heard of and artworks I knew nothing about! Well, we need to be adaptable in this job, and it was nice to be back around people, in a thriving environment (one of the reasons I love working where I work) but this has meant for the last two weeks I have been ending crazy days in the office with trying to get as much work on the book done in the evenings and weekends as it is humanly possible to do when you are already running on empty.
And then eventually I managed to have a conversation with my boss about whether or not he had looked at my chapters, and he of course said he did not have time to do that before the day it was all supposed to go off to the copy-editor. Sigh. I let the editor know and haven't heard from him since - I don't think I'm in his good books any more. Annoying too, because I am actually taking a day off on 19th June, and flying to Berlin for the weekend to spend time with my friend Glaire, who lives in North Carolina, but will be over there for university meetings - so I am taking the chance to see her, and the idea was we'd also have fun celebrating my getting the book all done and dusted.
While it means that potentially I now have time to calm down a little on my work on the end-matter, I still want to get all this done by Thursday. I want it to be ready to go as soon as I get the go-ahead. I also want to have the satisfaction of knowing that I have fulfilled my sides of the bargain. But I just could not face working today. On top of all the book work, I had to give a paper yesterday! At a study day we held on Owen Jones, to accompany the display my colleague has curated, to commemorate his bicentenary, and to draw long overdue attention to this extremely versatile and influential design theorist, in the run-up to the international touring exhibition I will be co-curating later this year. I was talking on 'The Alhambra in the 19th century', drawing largely on material from Chapter 4 - but I still had to draw it together into half-hour paper length, put my Powerpoint together, then go and give the darn thing!
Still, it seemed to go down well. Luckily, I was second, so I could get it out of the way early on, then relax and enjoy the rest of the day - the other papers were all really high quality, and very interesting, though not directly relevant to my research, which made it more relaxing! We went out for drinks and dinner afterwards, and then more drinks - ending up with just the 'hardcore' at an appropriately Victorian pub, The Bunch of Grapes, on Knightsbridge, listening to anecdotes about the museum and past curators from one of our company who was a retired curator with an endless supply of such amusing tales, of times when fellow curators were known to their colleagues as 'Dirty Dingle', for example!! We all wished we'd been curators fifty years ago!
So, despite the good intentions of spending this sunny Sunday working on image captions for Chapter 4, I just can't be arsed. I think a day off at the weekend is not too much to ask! We got up late, I caught up with a few emails, started to put my mind to thoughts about Berlin next weekend, and then K and I went out for a leisurely lunch at Negril on Brixton Hill, a great little place that does fantastic Caribbean home-made food.
Any visit there is perforce leisurely, especially on a sunny day like today when their front yard gets really busy, and it can take absolutely aaaaages for your food to arrive. But if you go there in full knowledge that you will not eat soon, it's very relaxing! We got a table outside, read the newspaper, drank mango juice, and waited for jerk chicken, rice and peas, and homemade coleslaw - yum! Going there feels a little bit like going on holiday - their yard is surrounded by trees and plants (this picture is an old one), and if you don't look up too far, you can't see the double-deckers and terraced houses of Brixton Hill. It feels like the cool kind of place you normally find on holiday in trendy European cities. Well, that just goes to show that London is one!
K is doing a bit of research for the conference paper he has to give next month, and in a while we thought we'd go and have some tea outside in our communal garden. I might read my book - I'm now onto the second Stieg Larsson book, The Girl who Played with Fire. I was going to wait until it came out in paperback, since I only read in bed at the moment and I'm usually so tired in the evenings these days that a big sharp-edged hardback book can be a dangerous undertaking! But my colleague who lent me the Camilla Läckberg had borrowed it from a friend and lent it to me before giving it back! I do like that I now exchange Scandinavian crime fiction with one of the Senior Curators of Textiles...!
But before I go, I have been remiss at posting this month's calendar picture:
Lonja de la Seda, Valencia, Spain © MROThis is actually one of my photos! This was taken a year and a month ago in Valencia. These rather beautiful medieval angels supporting the coat-of-arms of the city of Valencia are on the corner of the Gothic building called La Lonja, the 15th-century silk exchange, which is one of the city's oldest and most beautiful buildings. A very impressive, cavernous interior space as well, an appropriately grand monument to one of Valencia's most important industries. Ahhh, makes me want to go back to Spain... (It doesn't take much!)
Well, there are many, many other things to say - but a cup of tea and a Viennese whirl in the sunshine is beckoning. I hope it won't be so long next time.
