First experiments with gardening

One of the great features of the new flat is the garden which over the years our new neighbours have filled with beds and pots and climbing plants. I decided I wanted to experiment with growing things, especially edible things, mainly as a way of developing a hobby which gets me away from my computer at the weekends. As an idea, this will probably be more successful when I have finished working on the Festschrift volume I am currently mostly editing. So, as a result, the seedlings I bought at a 'Growing in Brixton' fair a few weeks back all died, while sitting out on the kitchen windowsill waiting for me to have time to think about planting them out. Terrible waste.

But I planted some herb seeds in a couple of window boxes a couple of months back and got some seedlings from some of them - especially the rocket. So this weekend, when I should have been Festschrifting but, hell, I'd been conferencing the last 3 weekends, I finally got around to planting out the rocket seedlings. I inherited some big tubs from an event at work, which don't have holes in the bottom for drainage, but one of my colleagues drew my attention to the phenomenon of sub-irrigation planting, which has been used successfully by urban gardeners across the world to produce flourishing crops and gardens in balconies, rooftops and other city spaces. Read all about it at the fascinating Inside Urban Green blog.

I had been saving plastic food trays and bottles for the last few weeks to use in constructing my sub-irrigation system, which seemed complicated but in practice was really easy to do.


I planted out all the rocket seedlings - there were many more of them than I realised - and have been looking forward to lots of delicious salads!


I have been diligently watering them, but today one of them has flowered, which I think means it is running to seed... Apparently this is easily done with rocket, especially if they have been overcrowded, which I guess they were when they were sprouting in my window box. Hey ho. It's all an experiment at the moment - people just keep saying I have to try things and see what works. Growing up in London, I have never had a garden to play with before. Anyway I will probably be posting here about gardening again, and I'll let you know what becomes of the rocket!

----------------------------------------------------------

RANT ALERT: I needed some first class stamps, and was out and about on High Street Ken during my lunch hour today (I popped down to Leighton House to see their George Aitchison exhibition before it closes on Sunday), so I went into a corner shop (I love how we call these convenience places 'corner shops' even when they're nowhere near a corner) and asked for a packet of 12. He charged me £6.60, which seemed a lot to me but I just thought to myself, I am obviously out of touch with the price of a first class stamp. Then I figured out that this meant that each stamp cost 55p, which seemed extortionate. Since a few years back, British stamps no longer have the price printed on them - just '1st', as follows:

This seemed at the time like a ploy to keep putting the prices up without anyone noticing, and so it turns out. I have learned today that the price of a first class stamp is 46p - which is a 20p increase since the last time I was aware of the price!!! In any case, I thought I had been charged too much so went into the Post Office branch on the other side of the road - the enormous lunch time queue had put me off buying my stamps there before. Trying in vain to find any visible information on the price of stamps, I seized upon a passing post office worker, and asked her the price of a first class stamp. When she told me 46p and I started to tell her that I had just been charged 55p a stamp over the road, she said - 'Did you buy them in a shop? They're allowed to charge what they like'. I was and am outraged! How can the price of a first class stamp, guaranteed by Her Majesty's Royal Mail, cost whatever arbitrary sum a shopkeeper fancies???

----------------------------------------------------------

We spent an idyllic day in Ely yesterday, seeing Marcus and Eva and their two beautiful and well-behaved littluns, over from Canada for the summer but about to return. The first warm sunny day in a while, so lots of sitting out in the garden while the children played. We went for a walk around the Cathedral - which is astonishing, perhaps all the more so for the way it rises up out of the flat fens around, but it is still just ginormous. And amazing that the week before we had been in York Minster, the other biggest medieval cathedral in the land.

So just in the last week we have gone some way towards ticking a few more cathedrals off K's list. For a while now we have been Doing Cathedrals on bank holidays, but he only revealed to me recently (perhaps because he had retroactively rationalised it this way) that our goal is actually to visit all the medieval/nice cathedrals in the country! Chichester next, on the August bank holiday weekend.

Three in a row

It's conference season, and over the last three weeks I have been at three of them, back to back. It's been rewarding, but exhausting!

© Julia Gonnella

This is me alongside one of the masterpieces of early Islamic architecture - the Malwiyya, or spiral minaret, at the great Iraqi palatine city of Samarra. I'm in the process of chairing one of the sessions at Conference 1, '100 years of excavations at Samarra', held at the Museum für Islamische Kunst in Berlin, somewhere I always enjoy going. That was a great and important event and hopefully we have incentivised enough people to finally get a project on the Samarra small finds off the ground, which a colleague and I have had in the works for a long while but never had the time to do anything with.

Back from two days in Berlin, I slept at home then the following afternoon travelled to Southampton for the biennial meeting of the Society for the Medieval Mediterranean, at which I had organised a double panel - on material culture and exchange across the Mediterranean, focusing on Sicily/Southern Italy and North Africa in particular. The beginnings of my campaign to bring North Africa properly into the discourse of Islamic art. Had an evening to wander around Southampton a bit and look at the medieval walls and some of the old buildings that survive there, though it was very heavily bombed in the Second World War - but the refuse collectors were on strike which meant that rubbish bags were just piled up in the street and there was loose litter everywhere, and I am afraid it looked like a total dump. I felt embarrassed to be with international visitors who might have taken a very adverse impression of English cities away with them...

Back at work for 3 days, then off to the next conference, on medieval Spain, where I was giving a paper - the first in fact, which meant I could relax for the rest of the conference. This one was in York, where I had only been once before and very briefly, but gosh it's so beautiful!! The antithesis - the remedy even - to Southampton, with the best preserved medieval town centre in all the land. K came up too, to explore the buildings of York while I was in the conference room, and had a brilliant time. I joined him at York Minster in time for evensong on the Saturday - always the best way of experiencing a medieval cathedral I think - then we had time to walk around the town together a bit on Sunday before a late lunch with Bruce, and the train back to London.

I am finally settling back again into whatever passes for 'normality' around here, but I think it's catching up with me as I feel exhausted this evening!

----------------------------------------------------------

There was a short but totally idyllic interlude between Southampton and York. We went back to The Ring of Bells...


A few years ago - 2006 in fact, how time flies - Glaire and I spent a few days here (after a totally unsatisfactory conference on medieval Iberia in Exeter) working on the closing stages of the volume of essays which we edited together. This totally quiet and beautiful inn, in an idyllic village of thatched cottages on the southeastern corner of Dartmoor, provided the perfect setting for getting to grips with the final tasks of whipping all the essays into shape. Glaire also had the joyless task of having to translate one of the articles from Spanish. Anyway, since she came over to participate in my Southampton panel, we decided to go back - without having any work to do - since our few days at The Ring of Bells have been an oasis of calm and tranquillity in both our memories ever since.

K decided to join us this time, to experience it for himself. And I am very pleased to say that it was just as wonderful the second time around (though there was a wedding in the next village over on the Saturday so it was quite a lot busier than last time). We took an OS map with us this time, and went for long walks - on the Friday we walked for 8 hours, over to Lustleigh for a pub lunch, and back again the long way round - and sat long talking over dinner in the evenings.

The landscape there is so amazingly beautiful, almost magical. The recent rain meant that the vegetation was almost unbelievably luscious and green!


That part of Dartmoor has a heavily wooded fringe, but then you climb up through bracken onto the high moor and have amazing views for miles around. The weather wasn't that great but, hey, this is England in the summer - as one of the Americans I met at the York conference said, "There is no such thing as bad weather - only inappropriate kit". I thought that was totally apt!

There are some photos of the triumphant Return to The Ring of Bells on my Flickr photostream. Enjoy!