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.

We're in - and I'm off again!

Imagine this. You move house at the weekend. You don't take any time off work the next week but instead try to write an 8500 word essay for an exhibition catalogue which should be finished at the end of the week - you don't succeed. You take your mind off how tired you are by going to see The Eagle on Friday night (excellent). You spend Saturday thinking about and writing the talk you have to give the next day at your book launch! You relax on Saturday night by having your sister to stay in the new flat. You attend book launch - it seems to go well though it would have been nice if more people had been there. But it was Mothers' Day and the sun was shining. After lots of hobnobbing at said book launch you go out for Mothers' Day lunch with your mother. You eventually go home but can't collapse because early the next morning you are going to Amsterdam for 3 days to take part in a conference about 'Presenting "Islamic" Art in the Contemporary Context'. You are on a panel, something you have never done before, asked to present for 10 minutes on 'What makes Islamic art Islamic?' and to respond to three key questions the conference organisers have posed, which you don't understand. You will fly back from Amsterdam early Thursday morning and go straight into work, because you then have 3 working days to finish the aforementioned catalogue essay and deal with everything else that needs to be done before going away until the end of the month, to Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Iran... Who would manage to arrange such a crazy work schedule? Me, that's who.

We're in Day 2 of Amsterdam at this point. I have participated in the panel today - which seemed to go ok actually - and tomorrow unexpectedly have the morning off, before participating in a Think Tank in the afternoon about a planned exhibition of Islamic art. We're being well looked after, and staying in the once-grand musaktastic Hotel Krasnapolsky - I am blogging from the lobby, the first time I have managed to get online (we don't have an internet connection yet in the new flat) and not had to worry about change-of-address admin, trying to move over our contents insurance, etc etc.


The new flat is great, though we went through a stage the middle of last week of being very disorientated and slightly traumatised by the whole uprooting/touching down in a new place (though at the same time not new because only 250 m from the old place) where we don't know anyone. Probably because we were so tired and hadn't taken any time off work to 'settle in'. As you can see from the photos, we're living in a state of semi-chaos, semi-civilisation - we unpacked the kitchen, the bedroom and about half the living room, so it is livable in and it is starting to feel like home. But we're putting everthing else on hold until we get back from Central Asia.

My half hour's free internet connection is about to run out, and there's the conference dinner to rush to in a moment, so I will sign out for now. We should get online at home on Thursday so I will aim to blog again before our travel adventures! Just wanted to check in as I know some of you are wondering how the move went... I leave you with some flamingoes in Amsterdam zoo.

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.

Spanish conversation

Life - which is to say, work - has rather got in the way of blogging over the last couple of months. Since getting back to work after my long summer break, it seems busier than ever, with more to be done by fewer people, and an air of uncertainty underlying everything, with cuts cuts cuts the only thing being discussed - in the media and in people's daily lives. "Keep calm and carry on" seems a useful motto, as always. That resolution - of getting my work/life balance under better control - has not so far materialised.

I had a nice trip to Granada last week, to attend the meeting of a collaborative research project with the Alhambra which we're now engaged in. The weather was gorgeous - 23°C on Sunday! - but cold in the mornings and evenings, or if you stepped into the shade. It was an intense course in Spanish conversation, which did me a lot of good. I had that experience which I have always admired in friends for whom English is not their first language - like when Silvia and Rosa came here for dinner at the start of October, two Italians researching aspects of Italian-Islamic artistic encounter whom I wanted to introduce to each other. Of course we all spoke English, but when I stepped out of the room, and came back in a few minutes later, they were still speaking English to each other. Or when, in Berlin in January, I went out for dinner with some German colleagues from the Islamic museum, who were all still conversing in English when I got back from a trip to the loo. In this case, I was in Granada with a Spanish colleague from work, and a French colleague from the Louvre whom I know well, and with both of them I normally speak English - but because the lingua franca of our project meetings was Spanish, we continued to speak Spanish at the end of the day when out for dinner, and when I bumped into the French colleague, Sophie, on Sunday morning, having a coffee in a bar on the Plaza Nueva, we conversed in Spanish, because it felt odd to switch to English. How funny.

An interesting trip, as well, for understanding something about the internal politics of Spanish academia - sad, though, that in a city as small as Granada, with so many important groups of people who are experts in their own ways in local Islamic cultural history, that they should all be competing with each other, rather than working together to form a powerhouse of academic study in this area. They share information with us, as outsiders, but not with each other. It was good, though, to understand for the first time that I am not the only one who feels the tyranny of a certain couple, who seem to want to control what anyone anywhere says about Nasrid art history, by pillorying anyone who dares to express a theory different from one of theirs. Good, also, to understand that there are people within Granada who do not believe that their work is gospel any more. It gives me renewed hope for the new generation of upcoming Spanish scholars in the Islamic field, as well as a sense of reassurance that if one of this couple slates my book in a review - which I feel is fairly likely, especially since the Spanish translation is about to be launched - that not many people will pay them much attention.

There is not much other news, or what there is, is too boring to go into. I am giving a lecture tomorrow evening - the first in a while - so my time and thoughts over the last few days have been focused on that. It is on my book, a sort of promotional event which I had to organise for myself, since my publishers aren't doing anything. Compared to the publishers of the Spanish edition who have just invited me to participate in a launch event in Spain in the New Year! Anyway. I've been collecting book sightings - it's been spotted in the bookshops at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and the American University in Cairo. It was in the Alhambra bookshops, and will hopefully be more prominently placed when the Spanish translation is out. (And a nice little plug for that came out recently in Granada Hoy, though with quite a few mistakes!)

But the best book-related anecdote so far is that a work colleague took a copy to present as a gift to the Sultan of Sharjah on a recent business trip, only to be told, "I've already got that! My daughter gave it to me!" So the Sultan of Sharjah has a copy of my book! The best book-related comment I've had is from the great professor of Islamic art, Robert Hillenbrand - chatting to him after his recent Islamic Art Circle lecture, someone asked us what was the book we were talking about, and Robert said - "Islamic Arts from Spain. You'd think, all the old chestnuts... But there is not a chestnut in sight!" I took that as high praise indeed.

The clocks went back this morning so now I have that strange feeling of my body-clock being out of kilter with what the clock on the wall says. Now begins the winter.

Three nights in the Sublime Porte

as the Venetians used to call Istanbul...

View over the Bosphorus towards the Yeni Cami (New Mosque)

I had the great fortune to be invited to join the RCA History of Design MA course trip to Istanbul earlier this week - they had booked to go in April, but due to the Icelandic volcano had to reschedule for now, which meant that some of the students could no longer come on the trip, though it was all paid for, so they had some extra places. I wasn't going to pass up the chance for a free trip to Istanbul, even if I did have to take annual leave!

The only time I have been before was, I think, 18 or so years ago, in a former life, when I was a Classicist - Richard and I went to do the British School at Athens Summer School, which was fantastic though I only vaguely remember it, and afterwards we took a bus to Istanbul, via a short stopover in Thessaloniki. Richard promptly got food poisoning (some dodgy prawns in a restaurant overlooking the Bosphorus) and I spent most of the 3 days we were there wandering around on my own, but not wanting to go too far afield since I was young and this was my first experience of the 'exotic' Middle East. Thinking about that on this trip, in light of all the other places I have travelled to since, which actually are in the Middle East, this former self seemed terribly naive. Nevertheless I had vivid memories of having visited Topkapi, and the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Arts - it may even have been this trip that solidified my interest in Islamic Art, who knows.

So it was a great opportunity to go back, albeit for another fleeting visit, as an Islamic art historian who actually knew a little bit about what she was looking at. Though I tried to impress on my colleagues, the course tutors, that Ottoman architecture was not my area, and I was there as just as much of a student as they. That didn't stop them from asking me questions about every conceivable aspect of Islamic culture and civilisation, some of which I could answer, most of which I couldn't.

But it was wonderful to go back and see again the major monuments - Aya Sofya, the Blue Mosque, Topkapi - and to visit places I had not seen before, like the jewel-like Rustem Pasha Mosque, a small monument perched above shops and completely lined with colourful Iznik tilework. I had a long list of places I would have liked to visit as well if I had had more time, and I tried to go to some of them, but a lot of places on the cultural map of Istanbul were closed for restoration projects. Istanbul is the European Capital of Culture this year, which means an injection of EU funds for restoration projects that are clearly direly needed - but a shame these projects were not finished in time for the launch of the Capital of Culture. We all agreed we needed to go back - but need to give enough time for all these restorations to finish.

One lucky thing - they have just taken down the scaffolding in Aya Sofya, which for the last 17 years has been supporting the miraculous central dome, while they carried out restoration and conservation of the paintings. Thing is, last time I went was before the scaffolding even went up, so I am fortunate enough never have had to visit Aya Sofya in its scaffolded phase!

What was awful, though, was the vast crowds of tourists, all in enormous tour groups which get bussed in from wherever they're staying and then bussed out again, without putting any money into the local economy. It's cruise season apparently so you can have upto 3000 people from a single cruise ship suddenly turning up in the queue for Aya Sofya or Topkapi. It really did make the experience of trying to squeeze your way around these awe-inspiring monuments tiresome in the extreme. Not only that, but it can't be good for the preservation of the buildings. At the Alhambra they have a cap on the number of tickets that they sell every day, and if you're unlucky enough to get there after they've sold out for the day, you don't get in. But there seems to be no such regulation at the major Istanbul monuments, so they have streams of thousands passing through every day. In the small spaces of the Harem in Topkapi, people were clambering over marble fireplaces and fountains just to get round the other tourists blocking their way. Horrible.

But I think my overriding impression of this trip is that Istanbul is Europe. Compared to the other parts of the Middle East I have travelled to in the last 18 years, everything about Istanbul feels European - especially of course the Istiklal Caddesi, the main shopping drag leading up to Taksim Square, which is where the Europeans used to have their embassies in the 19th and 20th centuries (some still do), and built historicist buildings in the styles then popular in more western parts of Europe, but also used innovative styles like Art Nouveau - we stumbled upon the delapidated Botter House, which was rather a treasure, though no-one is looking after it. Marta felt like she had been transported back to southern Italy. I still got chatted up in the Spice Souk ("You want a boyfriend for 3 days?" Ugh) but - I tried to tell myself - there are lecherous men in abundance in Europe, it is not a Middle East-specific nuisance.

So - up with Turkey joining the EU, I say!

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18 years since I went to Istanbul last. Yikes. These are the kinds of things that make you start to feel old. It is 10 years ago since I got back from my doctoral research year in Madrid! I timed my return to Oxford in order to attend Bev & James's wedding - so that means it's their 10th anniversary on Thursday! (Congrats guys!!) K and I moved into our mostly unfurnished bedsit on St Clement's the day before I think, and I quite clearly remember: a) having to take a bath with no hot water, and b) K burning toast - as we rushed to get ready for their wedding...

Not only that - generation-defining icons like Twin Peaks is 20 years old (such clear memories of obsessively swapping notes with Ali the morning after, during double Geography lessons at school), and Back to the Future is 25 years old!! They're about to show an anniversary screening at the Ritzy! I wonder how it will have aged...

More prosaicly, last week I had my 8th anniversary in my job. I only remembered as I was walking out at the end of the day!

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So we've got Ed as new leader of the Labour party. Good. It seems only now that he's been elected - despite the small margin - that commentators are noticing what was clear to all: that he is suitably untainted by association with either Blair or Brown, unlike the other frontrunners. We all want a change. Still, there has been some witty commentary on the two Miliband brothers running against each other - 'Milidum and Milidee' being the best I think (courtesy of Jim Crace in the Guardian), though 'Milibandwagon' always amuses too.

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.

Back in the Big Wide World - for now!

Well, I have re-emerged from the world I have been immersed in for the last two weeks, of the international influence of Islamic Spanish art in the 19th century, while I have been writing Chapter 4 - but as of 9.30 last night, I sent that off to my readers, and took the rest of the weekend off! That's the last chapter of the book - so, nearly there. Just the small matter of the rewrites to incorporate comments and corrections from my readers, finding some time to write the introduction, and whipping my image needs into shape - not all of which I am going to be able to do in the next two weeks, which is how much more research leave I have. I will try and do what I can to keep focused when I get back to the 'day job' in early June, but I know it will be difficult, so I'm feeling a little bit of pressure there.

I'm starting to chafe at the confinement slightly too - whole days at the desk when you don't go outside or (since my office in the Research Dept has no window) even see the sky. When I was writing Chapter 3 I closeted myself in the flat and didn't go out for about three days. This is all bringing back memories of writing up the PhD. I have also been remembering the difficulty of finding music to write to - you need something that makes the background fade away (especially in the Research Dept, where there is quite a lot of background) but is not itself distracting. I can't write to Bach for example - the music is so complicated that it engages your brain too much. Trouble is, you find something that works and then over-listen to it - I haven't been able to listen to Satie's Gymnopédies since I finished my thesis. This time round I have been listening to a lot of Max Richter, which is great but is now also starting to drive me slightly crazy. It's time to put this book to bed and get on with the rest of my life!!

This is a random picture to show the kind thing I have been writing about - this one of the pavilions built for the International Exposición Iberoaméricana in Seville in 1929, in a 'neo-Mudéjar' style, i.e. reviving a form of medieval Iberian architecture which adapted Islamic styles to Christian functions. The style was revived during the eclecticism of the late 19th century, when nations were looking for an architectural style to encapsulate their national identity, and which could represent their culture and aspirations at International Expos. At that time, Islamic styles became Spanish. The pavilion still stands, in Seville's Parque de María Luisa - along with various other structures built for that Expo.

Still. Today was a carefully-planned lazy Sunday, beginning with a cooked breakfast at the Vera Cruz on Brixton Hill, with Lindsay, followed by a short cycle ride over to the Clapham Farmers' Market, where we haven't been for aaages. It's not the biggest market you've ever seen, and I think stallholders were put off by the gusty, chilly, rainy weather we've been having over the last week - so there were only about ten stalls today, but all the same, it was nice to wander and think about buying things you would never otherwise buy. I got some rhubarb! I have no idea what to do with rhubarb but I plan to find out! We also bought some game pies (one venison and one rabbit), K picked up some homemade cider, and somehow the guy on the bakery stall managed to persuade us to buy his last two slices of pear and chocolate cake for a £1 each - he drove a hard bargain!

I don't care all that much about the fact that the food is organically-grown, I just like the fact that it is grown as it should be, and when, and that it's not flown in from cash crops in Zimbabwe. I'd love it if we could get a veggie box, and you just get what you get, cos it's in season that week, and you have to work out what to do with it - but where we live, there is nowhere for the delivery guy to leave it. Tescos was doing it for a while, in partnership (apparently) with local farmers in Kent, which seemed like the ideal solution as they could deliver it with your other groceries - but I got annoyed with it, because most of the stuff in the box was freighted in from distant lands, and that was not my idea of supporting local farmers. I guess other people objected to this too because they stopped it. 'Grow your own' is a big thing now, especially on community gardens - with people turning common garden areas in council estates into kitchen gardens, and the government proclaiming 2012 new allotments in London in time for the Olympics (it's not just Michelle Obama and her organic garden, though that is obviously fantastic!) - and that's something I have wondered about us trying to do with some of the unused common garden areas in our block of flats, though I have never had a garden in my life and wouldn't know what to do with it, let alone have the time....

But in terms of 'green lifestyle' for now we're contenting ourselves with composting - thanks to our neighbour Lisa, who actually went out and bought a compost bin, which nestles under a tree round the back, out of everyone's way, and which about five flats share now, including us. I got fed up with how much organic waste we were throwing away every week - and it's amazing what a difference it makes. It is so satisfying putting the peelings and the offcuts in our little compost bin then once a week taking it down to the big bin! I am sure some nice juicy compost has developed by now - Lisa has had the bin for about a year - but we have to work out how to get to it and what we're going to do with it! Hence the momentary thought about community gardening, when we were in the pub one night... Hmmm.... What I get annoyed about now (!) is how much plastic packaging there is - on almost everything you buy! There is so rarely an option not to buy something covered in plastic - I hate it! Our rubbish bin is just full of plastic bags and wrappers now. There was some horrible statistic I heard once - on a Jon Stewart interview I think - that plastic will outlive the human race, or some such. That's the monster we've created! The truth of this was visible everywhere in Syria last autumn, especially out in the countryside - plastic bags everywhere, just awful.

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I've accidentally finished The Gormenghast Trilogy. I didn't have another Swedish crime book lined up after I finished The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and Bookthrift didn't have anything in that jumped out at me, so I reverted to Titus Alone, and after a few pages a night here and there, I discovered I was most of the way through, so I just went for it! It was very different from the previous two books - written much later, and completed after Mervyn Peake's death from his notes, but there is also such a contrast between the world of Gormenghast, which seems so remote from the real world in time as well as in space, and the sort of Brave New Modernist World which Titus encounters during his adventures in the last book. It all becomes a little bit weirdly hallucinogenic as well. But the writing is so beautiful - I've had a bookmark in this passage almost since the start of the book:

Suddenly and unexpectedly the last of the cedars floated away behind him as though from a laying-on of hands, and the wide sky looked down, and there before him was the first of the structures.

He had heard of them but had not expected anything quite so far removed from the buildings he had known, let alone the architecture of Gormenghast.

The first to catch his eye was a pale-green edifice, very elegant, but so simple in design that Titus's gaze could find no resting place upon its slippery surface...

Titus sat down by the side of the road and frowned. He had been born and bred to the assumption that buildings were ancient by nature, and were and always had been in the process of crumbling away. The white dust lolling between the gaping bricks; the worm in the wood. The weed dislodging the stone; corrosion and mildew; the crumbing patina; the fading shades; the beauty of decay.

I love that! The idea that buildings "were and always had been in the process of crumbling away", of not being able to find a resting place for your eye on the plain surface of a Modernist design - I can just imagine what it must have felt like living through the development of those new architectural fashions, how stark that contrast must have been between the heavily-decorated Victorian constructions of the previous century, and the move towards new, sleek, undecorated designs and their machine-made materials... It must have been exactly like how Titus experiences the unnamed world he is travelling through in that passage. (A by-the-by - we went to the Le Corbusier exhibition last Sunday - another disappointingly put-together exhibition with fabulous material)

Now I am reading The Suspicions of Mr Whicher (Bookthrift came through this time, and I set aside my snobbish reaction to the 'Richard and Judy book club' sticker on its cover) which I'm really enjoying - I hadn't realised it is an account of a true-life country house murder mystery, investigated by one of the earliest ever detectives, which was sensationalist at the time and inspired a wave of Victorian crime novels, not least Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone - well, we like those kinds of books, so it's got to be a winner. Really pared down language, which is refreshing too, somehow - after Gormenghast, and my own florid literary creations!

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Quick plug before I go. On Thursday night I joined my family to celebrate a friend's book launch - The Iraqi Cookbook, by our great family friend Lamees Ibrahim. Lamees is an Iraqi who has lived most of her adult life in England. The recent war in Iraq really hurt her, and she's been really driven to do something to raise understanding about the Iraqi people and their culture - she's been instrumental in setting up the new International Action for Iraqi Refugees. She's also an amazing cook, and the book started out as a way to pass on recipes to her children. She started throwing in memories and anecdotes about her childhood, and researching the history of Iraq and its cuisine, and the book was born. In her little speech on Thursday, she talked about why Iraqi cuisine is so different from that of its Middle Eastern neighbours - even from one end of the country to the other (all the fresh fish that is cooked and eaten in the port cities of the south are not known in the north, for example), partly because of all the empires and rulers that have passed through Mesopotamia during the course of millenia and left their mark on the food. She paused and said, "I don't think the current regime is going to have the same influence!"

(A brief aside on the British "draw-down" from Basra - there's an article here about my cousin, Dickie Head, who won the Military Cross for leading the force which went in to recover the bodies of the British soldiers killed in that helicopter crash in 2006 - proud of him)

Anyway, I'm looking forward to browsing the book and learning to cook some Iraqi dishes. I wonder what they might do with rhubarb...?

P.S. You can also check Lamees and some of her recipes out on the Guardian 'word of mouth' section, here.

April Fool

Lordy, this has been a busy March! Somehow I find it slightly inconceivable that I have actually managed to draft the first two chapters of my book – though Chapter 2 is still a little rough, and a little long (though 3000 words less too-long than it was this morning), and I have given a work-in-progress seminar on it all, yesterday. Phew. I feel exhausted! And sadly there’s no let-up – Chapter 3 needs to be drafted! I am aiming to have something down on paper for all four chapters by the end of April. A chapter every two weeks. Am I mad?

So, time to post the calendar image for the month.

Descent from the Cross, Catalonia 12th-13th century, MNAC, Barcelona © KR

This is one of groups of monumental wooden sculpture from medieval Cataluña, among the fantastic collections of Spanish Romanesque art in the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya in Barcelona – taken last May, when K joined me for two weeks in Spain, after I had taken my group of Museum Patrons on their guided tour of ‘Islamic Spain’, and was staying on for the rest of the month to do research, museum and site visits for my book. We always try and fit in a visit to Barcelona, to visit Sarah and Julius, and their children Leila and Isaac – this was our last visit to their lovely (tiny!) old apartment just steps from the sea at Barceloneta. They were just in the process of sorting out a mortgage when we were there (they beat us to it!!) and have since moved to a larger place, just a few streets down, which is even easier to stay in than the last one, by all accounts – must go and find out some time soon!

We’d been to MNAC before, but K didn’t seem to remember (it was a fair few years previously, and I had been back on my own a number of times since then), and he just went crazy for the Romanesque. I phoned him at one point from Gothic Spain (and got stern looks from the wardens) and he was still halfway through the Romanesque period! That stuff is just absolutely fantastic though – we both really love it. There is something so – human – about its artistic naivety. The architecture is pretty fab too. Anyway we chose this photo for the calendar this month, because of its Easter-related theme, of the death of Christ.

And, in case you’re wondering, K has been doing very well at the not-drinking-alcohol-for-Lent. He has been taking Sundays off – this has obviously helped. I think last year he spoke to actual Christians about it, and apparently Sundays are not counted in the number of days for which Lent lasts – they’re a religious feast day, ergo you don’t have to give up what you gave up. He has been known occasionally to rather over-compensate – when Nick was here a few weekends back (so wonderful to see him! Was it really three years since the last time…?), K awoke on Monday morning with something of a headache. A whiskey too far, I fear.

And one last by the way – Stieg Larsson is excellent. Still a little way to go, but it has definitely been the thing to switch the brain off from The Book last thing at night. Highly recommended.

Another thing that has kept me sane the last couple of weeks - watching back issues of Brothers and Sisters. Gaaaad, I love that programme! I am not sure exactly why it is so good - on the surface the characters seem quite stereotyped and the idea of it doesn't sound that interesting: a big ensemble cast (12 main characters!), a loving but explosively expressive family and their escapades through daily life, all revolving around the personality and the absence of the husband/father, who (brilliantly) died right at the beginning of the first episode. But the writing and the acting is just fantastic! Welsh actor Matthew Rhys is so watchable as as Kevin Walker.

Another last 'by the way'. K has just informed me that he might be interviewed on the Today programme on Saturday morning, talking about Henry VIII! Be sure to listen!!

The Wonderful World of Byzantium

Last Sunday, I finally went to the Byzantium exhibition, the next ‘culture’ that the Royal Academy has decided to colonise. Wow. It is only on for a few more weeks (typical of me to leave it almost to the end), and I think everyone in London is trying to make sure they see it before it closes. It was packed! I got there as lunchtime was just starting, so during the two hours I was there, I experienced a comparative lull while everyone else went off to ingest some energy to get them through it. I walked straight through to the end of the show, and worked my way backwards – in my experience Royal Academy exhibitions are usually so huge that you are just too tired to take in the last few rooms, so I wanted to see what was there, and then focus on what I was really interested in – though unfortunately this meant that by the time I had got back to the beginning, lunchtime was over, and the first two galleries were jammed again. I felt so sorry for the several people I saw trying to go round in wheelchairs – one guy was particularly vocal about his frustration at not being able to see anything. I don’t think the height of the cases or position of the labels was very DDA compliant, so I really don’t know what he was able to see.

It managed to live up to all my usual gripes about Royal Academy exhibitions – terrible lighting, how can they get away with it? Objects are in darkness, or lit so that you can’t avoid throwing your shadow over them, or so over-lit that the surface of the object just reflects it back to you, and you can’t see any of the detail. Also, small objects with immensely delicate and detailed decoration, positioned so far back in the case that you can’t see a thing. I really must get into the habit of bringing a torch and a magnifier with me to RA exhibitions. They also seem to have developed a new habit of giving only (what we call in the trade) ‘tombstone’ information on the labels (which were in a new kind of reflective silver material which meant that there was no chance of seeing anything if you tried to read them at a sharp angle through the glass because of the long queue of people clustering round one object…), which gives you absolutely no understanding at all of the complex iconography of Byzantine art, where things were found or how they survived or even really why they were in the show at all. ‘Interpretation’ is never the RA’s strong suit, and they seem to have done away with it completely here. If you want to learn anything, you have to get the audio guide, which I am too much of a snob to do, since I hate the way it turns exhibition-goers into automata, looking only at what the machine tells you to. Or you buy the catalogue, which I had already decided to do before I even arrived. A nice traditional publication of the exhibition as it was, with the added bonus of essays by people who know what they’re talking about. And information about the objects – hurrah!

But what objects! It was amazing to see all the real celebrities of Byzantine ivory carving in one room – and such a treat to be able to see their backs! I have, however, seen more icons than I needed to, but I had no idea how large some of them were! Something I thought was really interesting was that the large collection of 6th-century icons in the Monastery of St Catherine on Mount Sinai, in Egypt, was actually saved from iconoclasm by having been absorbed into the Islamic Empire some hundred years before the decree of iconoclasm (730-845) – so now it has one of the best preserved sets of icons from the whole Byzantine world. Nowadays, The One Thing That Everyone Knows About Islamic Art is that there is no figural representation (which is true only in religious contexts, and even then it is not universally enforced), and it seems to be entirely forgotten that other religions, not least Christianity, had their aniconic phases too. I thought the way they covered to and fro of artistic influences with Islam was a bit tokenistic (and they certainly focused on the ‘to’, but there was most definitely ‘fro’ as well, as evidenced by some of the ivories, and the palmette scroll designs in the repoussé silver adornments on many of the icons), and much more could have been made of this important topic – but perhaps that’s actually a subject for a whole exhibition in itself.

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You will be pleased to hear that my book writing is progressing well – I am nearly at the end of the second week of my research leave, though I am not quite on the verge of achieving my target of having a complete finished draft of Chapter 1 by tomorrow. This is because I ended up spending most of the first week gradually moving my accumulated piles of papers and notes and useful books from home into my new office in the Research Department at work, then sorting and filing these. Well, “it’s an essential part of the process”, as I was pleased to hear one of my new colleagues say to me! (And my desk at home has not been so clear for years!)

I decided not to be too worried about trying to over-achieve in the first few days, and I was giving a lecture two days in – to the Friends of Dulwich Picture Gallery (close to home at least) – so I just let the creative juices start to flow in their own time. Towards the end, Nick, one of my Asian Department colleagues, told me something very important, which immediately turned into my mantra – “Don’t get it right, get it written” (with thanks to his cousin). Now, as you know I don’t have a problem with getting things written, as evidenced by the length of my blog postings – whether they actually say anything interesting is another matter (and one I won’t invite you to comment on!). So, I am very nearly there with a complete first draft of Chapter 1 (which covers the early medieval period in the art history of Islamic Spain, focusing mainly on the 10th to 13th centuries) – trouble is, it’s already twice as long as the chapter is supposed to be. Turns out there are quite a lot of interesting things to say about the rather neglected (in art historical terms) Berber dynasties, the Almoravids and Almohads. So, I’m going to be spending a fair bit of time doing some serious polishing and refining, which is going to take me at least into the middle of next week, by which point I will be behind my entirely unrealistic work schedule. Sigh.

Two things that were keeping me going last week:

1) Catching up on the last seven episodes of Season 4 of Battlestar Galactica (not the original!) – with sincere thanks to Az for his episode pirating skills. Only three more episodes to go – ever!

2) Scandinavian crime fiction, in the form of The Ice Princess, by Camilla Läckberg (with thanks to Lesley for the loan). As people who owned the Complete Works of Henning Mankell before anyone else in the UK had heard of him (and, by the way, weren’t the Kenneth Branagh TV adaptations good? Hope he does more!), and now that Scandinavian crime writing is The New Black, it was with mild disdain mingled with curiosity that I embarked on this new discovery – though helped along by Lesley’s recommendation. I enjoyed it – it certainly helped to take my mind off my own stresses, at the usual two pages a night before falling asleep… But I am not sure it lived up to the hyperbole of the back cover (“a masterclass in Scandinavian crime writing” – er, no), and I thought that most of the subsidiary characters were rather stereotyped. There’s an insightful write-up on it at this blog – I actually though the “obligatory big knicker homage to Bridget Jones” was pretty disappointing. The main protagonist is someone who makes her career writing literary biographies of important Swedish women – and her “favourite literary heroine” is Bridget Jones?? Come on!

Still, I would read more books by Camilla Läckberg (especially if I don’t have to buy them!). Since then I’ve been splashing about in that strange myre you sometimes find yourself in when you finish a book and don’t have anything immediately lined up. I temporarily returned to The Gormenghast Trilogy, since I still have the third book (Titus Alone) to go. But though I love it, it is just too heavy-going for me at the moment – plus now that Titus is out of Gormenghast, discovering the big wide Modernist world, with new weird characters verging on the science fiction, have turned it into a very different, less escapist, reading experience. I will return to it another time.

So, I stopped off at the wonderful Bookthrift on my way to the tube station this evening, and picked up Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo – more Scandinavian crime fiction (it might just see me all the way through my own book project!), but I have read a number of plaudits for this guy, who died tragically young just after submitting the manuscripts of three crime novels to his publishers. I’ve enjoyed the few pages I managed to sneak-read on the tube on the way home, so I’ll let you know.

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Last thought for the day, then I’ll leave you in peace: have you noticed how the ad campaigns from our youth are gradually returning? And especially the characters that used to populate these ads? First it was Fido Dido returning to the 7Up campaign – now the bunny from Cadbury’s caramel has returned! (Remember – said in seductively hushed tones, with a slight hint of a West Country burr – “caaaaadbury’s caaaaaaramel”... Indulge in some nostalgia here). I have to admit, I didn’t think that chocolate bar was even around any more – guess that’s the point. But it makes me wonder – has the advertising world run out of ideas? Or is it just that the advertising world is now staffed by guys of our generation, nostalgic for the ad campaigns of our youth? Well, I am just glad the Wispa came back.

Happy 200th Birthday Mr Jones!

Today we did something rather unusual. We went to church. While that in itself is pretty unusual (though the third time I have been to church in as many months!), that wasn't the half of it. Today was the 200th anniversary of the birth of Owen Jones (1809-1874), the Welsh architect and designer whose theories of design and polychromy were fundamentally inspired by his early experience of the Alhambra Palace in Granada, where he lived and studied for six months in 1834, and whose magnificent publications of its buildings during the 1840s were the first major work to employ the newly invented technology of chromolithography, in order to represent his theories of the use of primary colours in the original decorative scheme of the Islamic palaces. These books were also almost single-handedly responsible for the Victorian discovery of the Alhambra and of 'Moorish' design, and were perpetuated through all his later work, at the Crystal Palaces at Hyde Park (for the Great Exhibition of 1851) and at Sydenham, where he designed and erected an 'Alhambra Court' - a 3D version of the Alhambra palaces in microcosm, in the heart of south London, in the Grammar of Ornament, which became an immensely popular and widely-used design textbook, and in the foundation of what became the South Kensington Museum, now the Victoria and Albert Museum, where I have the great privilege to be a curator. Jones is very current in our thoughts these days, since the 19th-century revival of Islamic Spain and dissemination of its designs, primarily through his work, will form the fourth chapter of the book I will soon be writing, and my colleague Abraham Thomas has curated a display which will open at the V&A on 28th March (until late November), in time to celebrate his bicentenary. During the second half of this year, we will be working together on turning this display into a fully-fledged touring exhibition. More on that anon, no doubt.

So Abraham had the bright idea, because Owen Jones's birthday fell on a Sunday - today - to attend the service at Christ Church in Streatham, which was designed and built in the Byzantine style (though with Islamic inflections) by Jones's brother-in-law and protégé, James Wild, in 1841 - the V&A has several of Wild's original designs in the collection, for instance here. Jones conceived the interior design, of which all that survives is the painting in the apse ceiling, and the decoration of the capitals.


This church is basically at the end of our street - it's a 20-minute walk up Brixton Hill. I had tried to visit it before, during one of the two-week breaks I like to take from work in the summer, in order to explore London - but I had come at a time when the church was closed and there was no getting in. I had made a note of the vicar, Father Tricklebank's (what a fantastic name!), contact details, and Abraham got in touch and let him know that we were coming. There was quite a contingent of us: myself and K; Abraham and his girlfriend; Kathryn who did her PhD on Owen Jones and is our fount of all knowledge; Sonia who is working at the V&A on Indian textiles and has discovered interesting links to Owen Jones through the history of the Museum's collecting (which you can read more about in her recent article, here); and Charles, who was one of our curators of prints and drawings until his retirement a few years ago, and another expert in the 19th century.

Father Tricklebank put us on the order of service, and even mentioned us in his address - he had been doing a spot of reading, in preparation for our visit, and brought attention to the fact that Byzantine and Islamic styles had been employed in the design and decoration of the church, and that this regard for other faiths and cultures was reflected in the congregation of the church today, which is largely African and Afro-Caribbean. It was gratifying to see so many people in the congregation - as Charles commented, about as many as you might expect on a slack Sunday in 1846... There was also a baptism on the order of service, of a very sweet Nigerian baby who was being christened with the fantastic name of Chisom Pureheart Obiesie. It made you think of Arthurian legends, and the setting was right for that! This was the first baptism I had ever been to. It was very high church - I think they are Anglo-Catholics, and I must say I found it difficult to distinguish between this and the memorial service we attended for Ralph Pinder-Wilson last month at the high Catholic church of Our Lady of Victories. K went up to take Communion - I am never sure if he does this out of genuine residual faith, or if it is because of his academic interest in the working of churches. Probably a bit of both.

After the service, they welcomed us to look around and take pictures, and go up to the gallery, to get a closer look at the capitals and organ (which had Egyptian-style papyrus designs on its pipes). Several members of the congregation came up to ask us more about Owen Jones and the history of the church. The layout of the church reminded me of the synagogue we had visited during Open House weekend last September, the New West End Synagogue in Bayswater, also High Victorian and decorated internally in a neo-Byzantine style, but from the 1870s - indicating how influential, but also avant-garde, Wild's church at Streatham had been.

After milling and looking for half an hour or so, we went off to lunch at Brazas on Tulse Hill, which was really an excuse for K and I to try a relatively recently-opened local restaurant which several of our neighbours have raved to us about. It was excellent - very much a place to be returned to many times. This even led to talk of celebrating Owen Jones's birthday every year, or founding a gastronomic society in his honour!

After a somewhat lazy lunch, the others, very commitedly, set off to travel to Kensal Green Cemetery, one of London's great Victorian cemeteries, where Owen Jones and other Victorian worthies of his generation are buried. We wandered gently home, having taken absolutely no form of transport other than our feet all day. How wonderful!

This week in 1809 was a vintage week for births - Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln were both born on Wednesday! Some other names came up over lunch, but the only one I can remember now is Edgar Allen Poe. Sadly Owen Jones is not quite so renowned these days, and is not getting any of the press coverage that Darwin is getting (the BBC are doing a whole season on him!). We're doing our bit though, in our own little way. Happy Birthday Mr Jones!

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow!

As you might have heard, it is snowing in England! We have had more snowfall in the last two days than London has seen for about 20 years! I certainly don't remember seeing anything like this for a good long time - if ever! Normally you get a few damp flakes that just don't settle, or do and almost immediately turn into annoying sludge. Not this time! We've had more than 15 cm of snowfall in London, and it only stopped actually snowing around 4pm this afternoon. Public transport was in complete meltdown - there were no train services into London, all the buses were suspended, which was amazing, and every single line on the tube was suspended or suffering from severe delays. Except, for once, the Victoria line! K decided to work at home today since he was supposed to be going for a meeting at the Tower of London, but all routes he would normally take to get there were not operating. I had no such excuse, though I had to wait a long while for a District line train at Victoria, and South Kensington station was closed due to staff shortages, so I had to walk through the sludge from Gloucester Road - and my feet were utterly soaking and freezing cold by the time I got to work!

I was expecting some visiting researchers from the Louvre who were flying in from Paris this morning - and though Radio 4 was full of reports of airports and runways closed, I had to proceed as if all was ok, and see if they turned up. Of course they didn't - all flights from Paris to London were cancelled all day today - but one half of the team travelled over on the Eurostar, and arrived without incident - early in fact! So it was a good job I was there, so they could proceed as planned with the samples of glaze and body fabric they had come to remove from a late 14th-/early 15th-century storage jar made in Islamic Spain, which are going to be analysed by thermoluminescence as part of a research project the Louvre are conducting on an object in their own collection. The analysis results will hopefully indicate place and date of manufacture, as well as tell us about the ingredients used in making the glaze. The XRF was going to happen tomorrow and this equipment was due to come over on the plane - it has been an utter nightmare to organise, and colleagues and I have been working on setting this up for over a month. And then, a little bit of snow, and all is cancelled. Sigh. At least I have an unexpected free day tomorrow - if I can get into work again! As our trusted Mayor said on BBC London news this evening, "It's the right kind of snow, just the wrong kind of quantity"!!

So, here is a little photo-diary of my journey to work in the snow today:







It was at this point that the batteries finally died on my camera, and I simultaneously dropped my lens cap to be irrevocably lost inside a flurry of snow. So that brought an end to my photography fun for the day. K went for a walk in Brockwell Park - perhaps trudge would be more apt - and took this photo on his iPhone:


There is something rather sepia and Victorian about it. He said some people were building an igloo!!! Even the youths from the local gangs were out building snowmen!

There's a wonderfully apposite article here about "London's day of innocence" - how the great smoke reverted to a giant playground for a day, as credit crunch blues were forgotten!

Other cities - Winnipeg, say, Moscow or Bergen - cope with snow, subdue it and go to work through impeccably gritted roads. London isn't like that: it rarely copes with anything; these days, it masters nothing. Equipped with a loveably tragi-comic public transport system, our capital fails on a daily basis. The poor suckers who live here get - at best - inured to this hopelessness. Yesterday London was so hobbled by the snow that the situation was even worse than hopeless: usually six million Londoners get to work by bus; yesterday there were no buses; the tube was even more spectacularly unreliable than usual... Just for a day Londoners got hit by something special.

And good old Guardian, always on the lookout for the nation's wellbeing - they printed these endlessly useful and delightfully practical instructions on "How to make the perfect snowball"!