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!!

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.

As I was going to St Ives...

I met a man with seven wives
Each wife had seven sacks
Each sack had seven cats
Each cat had seven kits
Kits, cats, sacks, wives
How many were going to St Ives?

The traditional answer to this riddle is 1 ("I") though it turns out there are a surprising number of philosophical and mathematical interpretations of this old nursery rhyme - which you can read here.


In any case, on this occasion, there were two of us. K and I spent a week's retreat in a lovely 18th-century stone cottage in St Ives, which we have rented a couple of times before, as a Christmas hideaway. This time we went over New Year. We couldn't remember exactly when we had been before (our collective short term memory is terrible), but there we were in the comments book, Christmases 2005 and 2006. We had to cut the second trip short, since K's grandmother, Betty, died. I suppose we have always harboured a sense of unfulfillment, so it was wonderful to be coming back.

As usual, my full set of photos are over on Flickr - you should see my slideshow in the window below, otherwise click here.

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It's the perfect cottage for two, and was an excellent find - though I did spend the equivalent of several days online until I found it!


St Ives is also the perfect destination - we can get there by train, which is essential since neither of us can drive (and we've discovered it helps if you treat the loooong train journey as part of the holiday!); it's beautiful and picturesque, full of traditional granite houses, whitewashed with slate rooves covered with lichen, giving the town its distinctive range of colours; it's by the sea - and for some reason I am always drawn to the sea, I could sit and stare at it for hours ... as well as being surrounded by amazing landscape; and it's got Culture, all of the above having attracted a colony of artists to settle there since the late 19th century, but made most famous by the likes of Barbara Hepworth and Bernard Leach, as well as the 'primitive' (such a disparaging adjective) local fisherman and artist, Alfred Wallis, whose work I love. In fact, 'our' cottage is right opposite Barbara Hepworth's former studio - now a small museum and sculpture garden, which is a wonderful and inspiring place to visit, even though freezing cold in the winter! I love her sculptures, which can also be seen in various spots around the town.


This strong artistic legacy - which I always intend to learn more about and never get round to - led to the foundation of an outpost of the Tate there in 1993, in this retro-Modernist building, in homage to the importance of abstract modernists such as Hepworth and her husband Ben Nicholson to the history of the town.

Every time I visit, I am disappointed that there is no permanent corner of the gallery given over to the history of art in St Ives. Their temporary exhibitions always feature the work of local artists but, alas, you cannot learn anything about the history or artistic trends sponsored by this local community by visiting the gallery whose very existence is due to their fame and their legacy. I seem to write this on the evaluation form each time I go and it obviously has no influence! No Alfred Wallis on display anywhere this time around - and I have to say we did not think much of the current exhibition. One of the problems with having such a strong architectural space, which responds to and encompasses views of the sea and the landscape within two of the major gallery spaces, is that the artwork on display within has to be really strong to compete with what is around and outside. I am always far more interested in gazing out of this picture window than I am in gazing at the works behind me.


A highlight of this trip was our first visit to the Bernard Leach Pottery, which reopened in March 2008 after a major refurbishment. The old pottery workshop has been really sympathetically restored so it very much has the feel of a functioning pottery, from which the potters have just stepped out for the moment, and you can watch a fascinating film made in the 1950s, showing Leach and his studio in action, with a recent voiceover from one of the potters who worked there at the time. Leach was the founding father of British studio pottery and was deeply influenced by his time in Japan, and the new areas of the building reflect that by having a very Zen style to them - low wooden buildings with walkways between, housing a modern pottery which continues the Leach tradition of teaching through working. We bought two very beautiful black, salt-glazed mugs as a memento - I am drinking my morning coffee out of one right now! - but I could have totally bankrupted myself in the shop...

Another highlight was unexpectedly seeing a pod of dolphins playing in the sea off Porthmeor Beach. After visiting the Leach Pottery, we wandered back down to the sea, to sit and eat our packed lunch of Cornish pasties. Suddenly several specks appeared in the water, which we gradually realised were fins. There were at least 10 of them, quite close to the beach, and after weaving their way deeper out to sea, some of them started leaping and playing in the waves. Porthmeor Beach is popular with surfers because of the size of its waves, and the dolphins seemed to be joining in! In fact one of them made its way quite close to one of the surfers who was out that day - crazy dude - but then backed off again when it seemed to realise it was just a human being. It was amazing! They played like that for about 20 minutes. I unsuccessfully attempted to take some photographs - K much more sensibly filmed them:

When I looked up from this spectacle, the whole length of the beach and the edges of the surrounding cliffs were lined with people all watching - it was great, how this unexpected event of nature really wowed everyone and drew them all together.

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On past visits, because we have been there over Christmas, everything has been closed so there was very little pressure to do anything... More was open this time, but for the first few days we still managed to resist doing very much at all. Relaxing was what we were there for after all. We had ordered our groceries via a Tesco delivery and were both rather surprised when this actually arrived without any fuss on Monday morning - on past trips, we've got to the cottage, unpacked our suitcases, then lugged them by bus to the out-of-town supermarket to stock up. No such hassle this time! After which we promptly nested. I don't think we did all that much for the first couple of days apart from snuggle up in front of the wonderful log fires that K built and read our books.


Yes it really was that cosy!

We just took a little light reading with us...


We were there for New Year's Eve which is a big deal in St Ives. We had heard rumours about it but didn't really know what to expect. We went out at the start of the evening for a pre-prandial drink at The Sloop Inn - a wonderfully atmospheric pub on the harbour-front which they say dates back to 1312, and which you have no problem imagining smugglers and pirates frequenting... as indeed they were this evening, since as we sat there a steady stream of people in fancy dress, some of it extremely elaborate, came and went at the bar...


Basically everyone in town dresses up in fancy dress, and the small town is inundated by people from around Cornwall and beyond, also dressed up in fancy dress... Apart from the many smugglers and pirates, we saw quite a few Roman centurions, some Darleks, quartets of people dressed up as all the characters from the Wizard of Oz, and a veritable menagerie of people dressed up as animals... Thus attired, an enormous street party ensues! We popped back out again just before midnight and joined the throngs congregated around the harbour, where the tide was far out, and at midnight people started letting off fireworks on the beach. The whole thing had a great happy buzz about it, and was a really fun way to see the New Year in! (though we did so in our normal clothing!)



St Ives has also got some really top-class cafes and restaurants: we tried some new ones this time, spurred on by the recommendations in June's issue of Olive, the foodie magazine we subscribe to. Some of these places did not even exist the last time we were there! Cornish cream tea in the Porthminster Beach Cafe was particularly fine - I think it's the clotted cream that does it! Though the amazing views of the sea help as well...


The Digey Cafe was fantastic as well - a really cosy little deli-cafe selling locally-sourced produce, and judging by the lunch we had, excellent cooking too. Amazing steak-filled crumbly Cornish pasties from the new St Ives Bakery provided the perfect packed lunch for our long coastal walk to Lelant, while The Dolphin on Fore Street provided really gorgeous juicy fish and chips which were the perfect accompaniment to the special episode of Dr Who on New Year's Day!!

One thing we did not manage to do - though we're determined to do it next time - was the lantern-lit ghost walk around the town, led by the magnificently-named storyteller, Shanty Baba. However, late one evening we were sitting in front of the fire, reading, when we heard them stop outside the cottage and overheard Shanty tell about the man who used to live there, one James Wallis, the last of the local "ghost layers" - exorcists, or 'ghostbusters'. We couldn't quite hear everything he said, but it was amazing to think he was talking about 'our' cottage! This James Wallis was also a maths teacher, and all the local smugglers used to send their lads along to him, to sit in that front room where we were sitting reading by the fire, to learn some basic tricks of the trade! This explained why the cottage has a home-made sundial attached to the front wall with 'J. Wallis, 1780' rather naively inscribed on it. A brilliant little bit of history to add to our appreciation of the cottage and our surroundings!

I think St Ives would be a complete hell-hole in the summer, when those wide open beaches are mobbed by endless crowds of sunbathers... We have vowed never to go in the summer, but it makes the perfect winter retreat! I have come home with a desire to reread the Daphne du Maurier tales of smugglers and remote inns on Cornish moors and feisty heroines, which I so enjoyed as a teenager! And fortunately, we both still have another week's leave, a bit more time to prepare ourselves to go back to work and the onslaught of 2010... though feeling recharged after our Cornish hideaway.

Happy Christmas to all and to all a Good Night!

We always say that Christmas as we celebrate it these days is a Victorian invention... well here it is! The first ever Christmas card - designed by J.C.Horsley RA in 1843, commissioned, published and posted by Sir Henry Cole (1808-1882), Victorian extraordinaire...

Though the days are not completely gone when we design our own Christmas cards, I am afraid that they require time and a degree of organisation that we have not had in great measure in recent years...

So, with apologies for the mass and digital mailing, we would like to join Henry Cole in wishing you

A Merry Christmas
and a Happy New Year!

May 2010 bring you peace and happiness!

Getting Christmassy...

The front pages of all the newspapers were carrying this photo yesterday - Queen takes train to Sandringham shock! The palace insisted it was not a publicity stunt, and there was no follow-on car transporting all her belongings, à la David Cameron and his bike - though the Duke of Edbinburgh had "already travelled ahead" (obviously feeling that First Capital Connect was beneath his dignity...) Hmmm... More than any of this frugal Queen lark, what I want to know is how she managed to get a first class ticket for only £44.40!?

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I've been starting to feel a bit Christmassy in the last couple of days. Glühwein and lebkuchen in to the small hours at Sonja's last night can't have hurt. The book I am reading is also inducing a wintry mood - Barry Unsworth's Morality Play, about a group of medieval mystery players, travelling through the snowy wastes of the north of England in the week before Christmas (it's great by the way). A lot of people are already off work as of now (though K and I are both in until the bitter end on Christmas Eve...) so I've been wishing quite a lot of 'Happy Christmases' over the last few days - though it seemed too early. Too early too for the work Christmas party at the start of last week. But it has suddenly got really cold, and has been snowing on and off all this week. It hasn't settled in London, of course, though it has managed to screw up trains, planes and automobiles - those poor passengers on the Eurostar who got stranded when the trains just failed on entering the warmth of the Channel Tunnel after the freezing temperatures of northern France! Amazing that such things happen in the 21st century!

Last weekend, after a productive day in the library, we went with my parents to St Pancras Old Church - a lovely mainly Norman church, stranded in the wastes behind King's Cross - to hear a concert of Elizabethan Christmas music, performed by a group called Passamezzo, who are music academics as well as performers, and research and bring to life historic music. It was a really lovely evening, performed by candle light, and one of the pieces they played had been reconstructed from a marginal note that one of them had come across in a manuscript in the Bodleian library... Not exactly carol singing, but much more amusing and atmospheric. We do have some carols lined up for next week though, in St Peter ad Vincula in the Tower of London. Another amazing privilege of working in the places we do...

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There is something about this time of year - midwinter - that brings out a primeval human urge for the ghostly and supernatural. We love the spooky short stories by M. R. James (1862-1936), that he used to write and recite to a select gathering of students and colleagues in King's College Cambridge, and last Christmas we went to a fantastic little story-telling production of some of these stories performed by Robert Lloyd Parry at the Barons Court Theatre - a tiny place in the basement of a pub, that reminded me of the theatrical venues we used to attend as students. Alas, he is doing no London performances this year, but we think we have found a satisfactory alternative, which we're off to tomorrow night - a play called Darker Shores at the Hampstead Theatre. It's about strange goings-on and bumps in the night in a house by the sea (a very M. R. Jamesian subject) but since we're about to go off to a house by the sea (we have our cottage in St Ives booked again - I'm counting down the days...) I hope it doesn't freak me out too much!

We are blitzing the family gatherings at the end of this week - off to K's brother's on Christmas Day where his family is congregating, and then my parents are coming here on Boxing Day... then at 08.57 on the 27th, we're off! I can't wait! But we're - finally - not doing Christmas presents this year. It always strikes me as a colossal waste of time, money and effort, battling Christmas shopping crowds to spend money you don't have on presents that people don't want, and which just go to the charity shop in the New Year. I am all for buying goats for African villages, paying to train a school teacher in Indonesia, and other such gifts - which spend money where it really counts. Problem is, K hasn't yet told his family this is what we're doing!!

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My sister is getting on well in North Uist. She found some temporary work at the Hebridean Smokehouse, preparing the huge number of Christmas orders they have unexpectedly been inundated with. It's such a small and close-knit community that everyone knows everyone else, so you get these jobs by word of mouth. She texted me the other day: "How's this for an island postal service? Postie has a package for [her friend] Will, but can't be arsed to go all the way to his house, so comes to the Smokehouse as he knows his neighbour works there, who then passes it to me so that I can give it to Will when I see him tomorrow!" Brilliant!

Another busy week...

Capilla de los Condestables, Burgos Cathedral © KR

You might recognise this picture - it was the image we used for our Christmas greeting last year. We liked it so much, we used it for the December picture on our calendar. It's a photo K took of one of the beautiful openwork domes in the Cathedral at Burgos, where we visited last May - an example of the Islamic influence on the art of Christian Spain through the prominent eight-pointed star. I think you can just about see that the central detail is a figure group showing the holy family gathered round the infant Christ in the manger -

framed within a fiery halo that looks more like a wreath than sculpted stone. This dome is in the Capilla de los Condestables, founded at the end of the 15th century, and full of amazing sculpture.

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The weeks are just zipping past at the moment. On the one hand this means that the Christmas break is just around the corner, on the other it is scary how much work I need to finish before then. Sigh. This week I have worked very long days and been out every night. At the start of the week, we had two opening events for the Medieval and Renaissance Galleries, which look absolutely stunningly beautiful and amazing - what a triumph. On Wednesday I attended the Khalili Memorial Lecture at SOAS, annually part of the Islamic Art Circle lecture series, and on Thursday it was a pre-Christmas gathering of the Islamic Art discussion group I am part of - we had not managed to meet up for months (normally we try to meet once a month), and while the meeting's 'assignment' was ostensibly my report on the conference in Córdoba, we pretty much decided to keep it as a friendly gathering and gossip at an (overpriced) Lebanese restaurant in Soho. Friday, thank goodness, was an evening off - though I had a good long chat with my sister. Looks like she might have part-time work at the Hebridean smokehouse, so I'm anticipating a neverending supply of gorgeous hot-smoked salmon!!

Then last night we met up with Cornelius after our usual Saturday in the library (we have been working in the National Art Library the last few weeks, a gorgeous Victorian library and one I love working in, even though it's a bit like going to work on a Saturday...) to see A Serious Man at the Ritzy, followed by the pub. I enjoyed the film, and thought it was an excellent piece of film-making by the Coen brothers, but I still don't know what really happened... The final visual metaphor of dark clouds on the horizon indicating, I guess, that real life does not have happy-ever-after resolutions... But I am a bit fed up of seeing films that just abruptly end - the week before, we went to see The Castle at the NFT, an adaptation by Michael Haneke of a fragmentary short story by Kafka. After about two and a half hours, this abruptly cut to a black screen and the voiceover, "This is where Kafka's fragment ends". And that was that. In that case, it somehow worked. In my mind, the wonderful Ulrich Mühe - der landvermesser - is endlessly lost in the surreality of that frozen world, endlessly trying to obtain an entré to the castle...

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K got his new glasses on Monday. The bridge of his old pair snapped while we were in Oxford in October, visiting Bob and Bev for the weekend, and since then he has been carrying around a bottle of superglue and his even older pair of prescription sunglasses, for when they unexpectedly snap again. This happened as he was cycling home one day, but fortunately the tight hat that he wears to keep his ears and head warm also served to keep the glasses in position on his nose! So eventually he organised himself an eye test, discovered that his sight had drastically worsened (probably to do with the eye strain during writing up his PhD - this happened to me too, when I developed migraines for the first time), but now finally has a new pair of large round tortoiseshell specs that I think make him look rather like Alan Bennett. I'm still getting used to them, but they're an improvement on the pair he threatened to get, which made him look like David Hockney. Which one of those two distinguished artistes would I rather live with...? A good question!

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We're not impressed with a leaflet that Lambeth Labour party have put through the door today. It basically spins their involvement in our Residents' Association's fight against the planning proposal from Lambeth College, to imply that they have been leading the charge on the part of their poor embattled residents. Which is not true. Actually they have done nothing, other than lend a seemingly sympathetic ear (when our reps could actually get in to see them), then say in the last meeting that they supported the College's application. They are turning us and our cause into an election issue, because the Labour party are so clearly going to lose resoundingly at the next General Election, whenever that's called for. They've touted themselves round Brixton Hill Court today in a blatent attempt to get us all to vote for them. K has taken down the two posters they stuck up on the public notice boards.

We wish you a Merry Christmas and a Very Excellent New Year!!

Capilla de los Condestables, Burgos Cathedral © KR

On New Year’s Day 2008, we went for a walk in Crystal Palace, among the ruins of the venue of the Great Exhibition of 1851 – an easy bus ride from Brixton on the number 3 bus, which transports you to the rather ghostly traces of what must have been an amazing spectacle until it was destroyed by fire in 1936… K had to give a paper in Oxford on 4th January, and has resolved never to ruin the Christmas holidays like that again.

In February, we celebrated our twelfth anniversary, and K was viva’d in Oxford for his PhD, which he passed with minor corrections.

At Easter, we visited Waddesdon in the snow, and joined the National Trust, which inspired us to visit London properties, such as William Morris’s Arts and Crafts home in Bexleyheath, The Red House, which we did the next day. It was still snowing on Easter Monday when we walked up to Alexandra Palace for a drink with Helen G.

M gave a ridiculous number of lectures this year, including a series of three in April, on Córdoba, Granada and Seville, to members of The Art Fund. She is resolving to learn how to say ‘no’ but already the line-up for 2009 suggests she has a lot of practising to do.

In May, M led a group of V&A Patrons on a tailor-made guided tour of ‘Islamic Spain’, visiting Granada, Córdoba and Seville over the course of a week, and then staying on in Spain for the rest of the month, travelling from south to very north researching for the book she will be writing in Spring 2009. K joined her for the last two weeks, and we celebrated his 32nd birthday in a lovely local place at the end of an alley in Zaragoza, which was about the only restaurant we could find open. Almost everything in the city was closed, in the calm before the storm of the international expo! We had arranged to meet Glaire in Toledo, but also met Jeremy quite by chance, and spent an excellent few days in their company. In Barcelona, it was wonderful as always to see Sarah, Julius, Leila and Isaac, and spent what later turned out to be our last few days in their old home.

In June, K graduated for his PhD in Durham Cathedral, attended by his parents and his (then) 94-year-old grandfather. He wore a very exuberant red and purple gown, which he did not want to give back at the end of the day. (There are some photos here)

In July, we were visited by Bev and James, our long-lost friends returned from Australia for a round of visits. It was brilliant to see them and spend so much time with them! K gave another conference paper, at Leeds International Medieval Congress, and M had the honour to attend her mother’s graduation ceremony (photos here), in Guildford Cathedral, which she suspected and later confirmed was the church that scared Damien in The Omen. We spent a lovely evening with Alison, Steve and Ellie, a few months before the arrival of Nathan.

In August, M took her customary two weeks off work to make the most of living in London, but the weather was terrible, so it was largely spent indoors. Though we did go with Isla to the Canary Wharf Jazz Festival, and picnicked in the rain – something the English will have to get used to doing more and more, I suspect. Gareth celebrated her birthday with us, at Gastro in Clapham. At the end of the month we went to Hereford for a few days to celebrate K’s mother’s 60th birthday and retirement party.

In September, we spent a very pleasant day with Cornelius, visiting buildings all over London which threw open their doors for Open House Weekend – the highlight was definitely the former Granada Cinema in Tooting, now a bingo hall, built in the 1930s in high Victorian Gothic style (see http://cinematreasures.org/theater/9424). We joined K’s family again to celebrate his grandfather’s 95th birthday. K ran a 10k charity run at Hampton Court in aid of Cancer Research, which he made in 58 minutes, and he’s now addicted to running!

M left for New York at the end of the month, to participate in a curatorial exchange at the Metropolitan Museum for a month, but was away in the States for six weeks altogether, with a week in California at the beginning (book research again – honest!), and most of a week in Philadelphia attending the Historians of Islamic Art Association conference. Again K joined her for the last two weeks, having given a paper at the Sixteenth-Century Society conference in St Louis. We were in the States for the Presidential Election which was hugely exciting, especially because of the excellent result. Election night with Albert at Cleopatra’s Needle, watching the early results on a TV whose sound we could not hear and whose subtitling software was spitting out gobbledegook, followed by a late supper at Karen’s in Spanish Harlem where the result was declared and you could hear the whooping in the streets from all over Manhattan! Walking back through the Upper East Side at 1 in the morning with groups of happy people periodically shouting out, ‘Yes we can!’

We were visited in New York by another long-lost friend, Rebecca (though sadly Adam couldn’t make it), and we celebrated the release of her debut EP! (details here).

M was back in London for four days before flying to Damascus to install an exhibition of World Ceramics, the first time the V&A has ever loaned an exhibition to the Middle East, which was hailed in the British press as the right kind of diplomacy (see the excellent Guardian comment by Simon Jenkins here). She then stayed on to supervise it for the first half of its run, and was in Syria for five weeks altogether, trying to make the most of her one day off a week to visit some of the amazing classical, early Christian, and Crusader sites, not to mention Islamic, for which Syria is justly famous. A fantastic experience.

She is very happy, though, to be back home just in time for Christmas, and to be spending the festive season with loved ones. We’re confident that 2009 will be a good year, with Obama at the helm, and we look forward to all the happy hours we’ll spend with friends and family over the coming months. A very Happy New Year to one and all!