Photographing buildings is a crime

When I was in Damascus this time last year, I took this photograph of the Hijaz railway station, the terminus constructed in 1913 by a European architect, in a style which revived the medieval architecture of Egypt and Syria as built by the Mamluks, rulers of that territory between 1250 and 1517. This was a time when many European architects were working in the Middle East and reintroducing these old, national styles, when actually the Middle Eastern rulers were quite keen on being European, thank you very much. Anyway that is not the point.

It's not a great photo - the sun was in the wrong place, and there was too much traffic in between - but it was more of an aide mémoire than anything else. But as I was taking this photograph, a Syrian policeman sidled (sp?) up to me, and encouraged me to desist from doing so. I had read that photographing institutional and government buildings in Syria was frowned upon by the authorities, so I stopped. And moved on, round the corner, where - rather naively, in retrospect - I carried on taking a few more.

Discussing this over lunch in the staff canteen the other day (I took an actual lunch break for once, which I rather enjoyed - I should do it more often!) a colleague told of a friend of hers who got arrested in Tehran for taking some photographs of an attractive building, without realising it was the headquarters of some Iranian ministry or other.

I am sorry to say it, but you kind of expect this treatment in Damascus or Tehran, being the capital cities of countries ruled by totalitarian dictators. You do not expect it of London, for god's sake - but that is what seems to be happening. Reports in recent weeks tell of police stopping and searching people taking photographs of iconic London monuments like St Paul's or the Gherkin. This is all apparently due to an over-zealous interpretation of Section 44 of the Terrorism Act. A Guardian reporter just tested this - you can read about it here - and within minutes was set upon by security guards, uniformed and non-uniformed police, and special branch had been informed.

What the hell? How do some snaps of a church and an office skyscraper effect national security? Are we turning into a totalitarian regime? I thought this was the 'liberal West'?

Damascus - and Waddesdon

A quick note to share these beautiful photographs, taken by my colleague, who co-ordinated the ceramics exhibition I worked on and lived with in Damascus for five weeks at the end of last year - she has captured some really serene and beautiful moments in the life of that great and ancient city, as well as some of the other places in Syria which she managed to get away to visit during her rather stress-packed extended stay there. Check them out.

And while I am on the subject of photos - this now being March (where does the time go??), it is time to share with you our calendar image for this month.

Waddesdon Manor, Buckinghamshire © KR

This rather grand façade is the back of Waddesdon Manor, the extremely over-the-top home of the Rothschild family, built between 1874 and 1889 to house both them and their important art collection, and which we visited at Easter last year. Among the objects in this collection are an ivory casket painted with designs in the Islamic style, made in 12th-century Sicily, and a fine lustre flower pot from 15th-century Valencia. I had suggested a trip with the sneaky hope that I might get to see either of these objects, but sadly the gallery displaying highlights of the collection was closed, or we did not find it - though by that point I didn't care too much, since it was supposed to be a day off from work! The house and its furnishings were that weird kind of construction that seems to have been so popular among the late 19th-century super rich - I encountered many more examples among the 'Robber Barons' of New York, when I was in that august city last autumn, and was searching for traces of the fever for the 'Moorish' style that was so popular among international wealthy elites. The Waddesdon collection is largely French and 18th-century - not at all to our taste - encased within a glamorous house that also purports to be from that period, but is late 19th-century. It's a little bit weird, but exceedingly opulent, and we decided just to give ourselves up to the aesthetic experience, which was refreshingly unrelated to anything we know or really care about!

Getting there by public transport was a challenge - we had quite a long walk from and to the station, and were not very impressed with all the other visitors who swept past us up the long drive in their 4x4s, and not a single person stopped to offer us a lift...! The walk was pleasant, though on the way back a snow blizzard started up, which we were not at all prepared for - but it was beautiful, and the thing I remember with most fondness about the day.

More soon - when I have time to write - about our very pleasant family weekend away in Swansea. It's my father's birthday today! A good omen, I think, given that today is also the day I have moved into an office of my own to begin the work of writing my book, which can no longer be ignored - and the day my sister starts a new job! And a beautiful warm sunny day as well, so it almost felt like spring - a true new beginning?

Obamania!

Wasn't it amazing? Was that really only two million people filling the Mall?? I smile a big smile every time I hear the words "President Obama", and what a wonderful moment to hear him swear the oath of office as Barack Hussein Obama! On Lincoln's Bible!

We had intended to hold an inauguration party, but then it turned out that it fell on the same evening as the last of a series of four Islamic Art lectures at SOAS, all of which I very diligently went to. In fact, the lecturer - a prominent American curator at the British Museum - had to rush off at the end of the questions to change and attend an inauguration ball at the Embassy! I got home some time after 9, and we settled down to watch all two hours of the 'live' BBC coverage ... though I had cheated slightly by watching it online on my computer at work! I'm sorry, but some things are just more important - especially at 5 o'clock in the afternoon!



I did, however, sport the Obama pin I had found in a hotel in Philadelphia, when I was there in October for the Historians of Islamic Art Association symposium. I wore this pin religiously in the period running up to the Presidential Election, and strangely found that I felt it emanated a kind of protective aura... This was in the uncertain days when it was by no means clear whether he would win, whether there would be more of what my friend Glaire described as "Republican shenanigans". But wearing this pin felt like an amulet, somehow. I can't really explain it - but then I came across a passage in Obama's amazing memoir, Dreams from my Father, which I recently finished reading (by the way, can you believe that has its own Wikipedia entry?!). He's still in his 20s, and it's just after he has moved to Chicago to take up a job as a community organiser, in the days after Harold Washington has just been elected the city's first black mayor. Obama wanders into Smitty's barbershop for a haircut and overhears the regulars discussing "Harold":

That's how black people talked about Chicago's mayor, with a familiarity and affection normally reserved for a relative. His picture was everywhere: on the walls of shoe repair shops and beauty parlors; still glued to lampposts from the last campaign; even in the windows of the Korean dry cleaners and Arab grocery stores, displayed prominently, like some protective totem. From the barbershop wall, that portrait looked down on me now: the handsome, grizzled face, the bushy eyebrows and mustache, the twinkle in the eyes ...

Smitty said, "The night Harold won, let me tell you, people just ran in the streets... People weren't just proud of Harold. They were proud of themselves. I stayed inside, but my wife and I, we couldn't get to bed until three, we were so excited. When I woke up the next morning, it seemed like the most beautiful day of my life..."

Could he ever have imagined that he could almost be writing about his own political victory, twenty years later?? Reading this, the parallel between the intensity of feeling among Chicago's black community in the 1980s and the response to Obama's election seemed almost miraculously close, like some kind of sealing of fate.

One of the great souvenirs I found in the souk in Damascus was a t-shirt with 'Obama' written on it in Arabic!


I bought a couple of these - unfortunately, for some reason the printer or shopowner had cut out all the size labels, so I had to go back a couple of times to get the sizes I wanted, and after all that, K's didn't fit him! But it sits in his wardrobe - like a protective totem (we might frame it!). Apparently 'u-ba-ma' in Farsi means 'he is with us'. Well, I guess they don't see it like that in Tehran, since they're already burning his effigy. I proudly showed this purchase to one of the Syrian security guards at the exhibition I was there to manage, and though he seemed amused by it, he did not seem to share my enthusiasm. He must have wondered what kind of strange English woman is this... I can understand that in Gaza at the moment they are thinking, this is just another new president who will not risk his re-election chances to help us. But then, there has to be a market for these t-shirts if one of the shops in the souq was selling them - and he had a fair few, in a whole range of colours!

I am hoping - that new emotion that America was waking up to this morning - that Obama abides by the principles he manifests, utterly honestly, in Dreams from my Father, where he genuinely believes that it is possible to make life better for a people who have suffered unjustly for too long, and tirelessly works towards trying to make this happen - I hope that he applies this generosity of spirit to the problems in the Middle East, unadulterated (or, at least, not much) by political compromises and vested interests. After all, as I read someone say in one of the newspapers in the last few days - "He's not Jesus". Cynics say he won't be able to do anything - his hands will be tied by Washington process - but I would just love to believe we can surf on this amazing wave of history for a bit longer, and see the United States of America as a genuine force for good in the world. I am trying not to think too hard about that gorgeous spring day in 1997 when it felt like we had woken up to a 'brave new world'. Then look what happened.

Arabic Scrabble

One of the Christmas presents I bought for my sister in the souk in Damascus was the Arabic version of Scrabble.


This is a total rip off of the official game (there are no copyright laws in Syria), and let's hope Hasbro don't get their hands on it, though I don't really know how they could take action against some shopowners in the souk who would completely ignore them anyway.

We had a go at playing it this weekend! And a very sterling effort we made too I think. With a little help from Dante (our ginger cat).


We both had a dictionary (we were playing real Arabic words!) and my sister (who has a degree in this language) had to give me rather more assistance than normal in a Scrabble game, while our father played on my laptop and posted snarky comments about us on his Facebook page ("it would help if they knew more Arabic", which is true of course...).


Eventually we gave up. It was late, and it was taking far too long to work out what we could do with our letters - and there were still so many unused tiles in the box! But the scores were 164 to 157 (I won't say which was which!), which I think is very decent.

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!

The Shoe Incident

I first heard about this from a taxi driver in Damascus. I didn't understand everything he said (my Arabic is not that good) but I gathered that it involved Bush, Iraq and a shoe, and that he was gleeful about it, so I figured it must be something good. The next time I had internet access I read up on the whole thing on the BBC website - the by-now-famous incident in which Iraqi journalist, Muntadhar al-Zaidi, threw his (Iraqi-made) shoes at thankfully-outgoing President George W. Bush, and is now, as the "Baghdad Clogger", hailed as a hero throughout the Middle East (and through large parts of the rest of the world too I suspect). I just want to encourage anyone reading this to visit the excellently therapeutic site, http://play.sockandawe.com, and have a go for yourself!

Slow Blogging

I opened this blog at the end of September, planning to use it as a way of keeping in touch with friends and family during my two big autumn trips, to post anecdotes and photographs of my experiences in California and New York (six weeks from late September to early November) and Damascus (five weeks from mid November to late December), which have kept me away from home for about the last three months. The kind of diary I have always liked to keep on big trips, from the two-week A-level Geography field trip to Iceland (written in a book), to the weekly emails I sent during my PhD research year in Madrid. A blog seemed to me the natural evolution of these earlier forms of communication. In the end, of course, I was far too busy doing the things I was in the States and Syria to do, and did not have the time to sit down and compose any bloggings.

This has caused me to be the brunt of some ridicule from my sister. It turns out, however, that I am not alone in wanting to take my time over crafting something that I think is worth being posted here - it seems that unwittingly I am part of an internet phenomenon, known as 'Slow Blogging'. There is a whole article about it in the Guardian, which I serendipitously found in one of the occasional issues I managed to buy in a little shop on Straight Street, and hungrily read cover-to-cover, meaning I now know more about current international news than I have done for years, despite the feeling of isolation from it all that I felt in Damascus.

Slow Blogging, according to Todd Sieling as reported in The New York Times, is "a rejection of immediacy ... an affirmation that not all things worth reading are written quickly", and represents "a willingness to remain silent amid the daily outrages and ecstasies that fill nothing more than single moments in time".

You can read the full piece here, but I would like to add my endorsement to the writer's final paragraph:

"Let's hear it for all those who take the time to think, study and reflect before they post; who do not feel the need to slap the first thing that comes out of their head straight onto the web. People who refuse to update five times a day, or even once a week. People who value quality over quantity."

That might be my own manifesto for this blog! I will, over the coming weeks, post anecdotes and photographs of my experiences in America and Syria, and other notes and thoughts, but don't expect this to happen too quickly!