I know, I know...

We got back from our Trip Of A Lifetime 3 weeks ago and I haven't blogged about it, or anything else for that matter, yet. Life, which is to say, work, and not exactly our 9-5 work but more the things we do on top of that - the Festschrift volume I am (supposedly co-)editing, unexpectedly having to check the proofs of an article submitted aeons ago, a symposium paper demanding I know a bit more than I actually did about Mediterranean trade (though I did get to meet the amazing Claudia Roden!), a lecture to write for the upcoming launch of the Spanish translation of my book at the Seville Book Fair next weekend - has all rather got in the way. I think I am going to have to blog about The Trip bit by bit - bite-sized chunks with pictures and anecdotes of each the places we went to. I still haven't had the chance to properly sort through my photos - I took 4000!! (I even killed a camera) K took 6000, so there's a bit of a job to do. But we survived, and the trip was fantastic, exhausting, eye-opening, frustrating... but more on all of that to come.

Photo © KR

Since getting back we have also been playing hard, finding ways to make the most of summertime London. The May Day bank holiday weekend saw the grand opening of the restored Brixton Windmill - yes, there is a windmill in Brixton! Built in 1816, it was surrounded by open fields - the Friends of Windmill Gardens (the local community force that has been behind the restoration) were selling an amazing postcard, showing Brixton Hill in the 19th century, when it was a Constable-esque rural idyll! But as the city gradually extended further south and the area became more built up, there was less wind to feed the windmill, and it fell into disuse and then disrepair in the 20th century. It's taken this local group 15 years to get the money together to restore the windmill, but now it's going to be open at regular weekends and is even going to grind flour supplied by local people growing wheat on allotments and in gardens! Brilliant!

Photo © KR

It was a lovely sunny bank holiday as well and loads of families were out enjoying themselves and some of the entertainment that was laid on - our friend Lisa took some lovely colourful people-watching photos which you can see here.

That same week we also went to see Gilbert and Sullivan's Iolanthe at Wilton's Music Hall, this wonderful gem of a Victorian Music Hall that survives in the middle of an urban wasteland in the City of London - not only was it a fantastic production (all male, and the campest thing I have ever seen!), but it made total sense of the space, the kind of performance you would originally have gone to Wilton's to see. Fantastic. Next day we had an OJADS visit to Kensal Green Cemetery - one of our colleagues, Glenn, is a Friend of Kensal Green and arranged for their chief guide and knowledgeable historian to take us on a guided tour, picking out particularly famous Victorians, but above all of course we were there to make a pilgrimage to the grave of Owen Jones.


Kensal Green is where anyone who was anyone wanted to be buried, and there are some very grand tomb monuments, but it is also just an amazingly atmospheric place. We started off in the Crypt, which you can only visit on the occasional guided tours, but which Victorian Londoners used to come and visit as one of the city's attractions. It is now rather macabre, with mouldering lead-lined coffins and ceramic flower displays, and incredibly cold. Chilling, in fact.

Henry, our guide around the historic tombs of Kensal Green, in front of the grave of the Brunel family of engineers

Then yesterday we had a fantastic day exploring south London. We signed up for one of the architectural walking tours that Open City - as the Open House team are now calling themselves - have started running. This one was focused on 'South London Regeneration', all about the huge building projects that have been going up around Southwark in recent years, making it one of the most exciting areas in London in terms of contemporary architecture as well as bringing new life and vibrancy into a formerly industrial area that had been largely neglected as London developed in all other directions. This also means that a lot of industrial buildings and 18th-century residential areas survive more here than in other parts of London, which were aggrandised into the Squares which characterise parts of the north.

Photo © KR

The most controversial/well-known of the new projects is The Shard at London Bridge, which will be the tallest skyscraper in western Europe when it is finished! It completely dominates the London skyline these days - for a long time it was just a gigantic concrete column, but as soon as they started cladding it with the glass structure that makes it look like an angled, broken shard of glass, you can see and recognise it from everywhere. It is even starting to hide the Gherkin which for the last 8 years has been an iconic profile on the London skyline. I don't think I had been so close to the Shard before - it really is too big to believe.

Our guide was a great character, a rather eccentric Irishman (?), he was an architect himself and had worked for many of the companies that had created these great building projects. He also had a fantastic habit of getting down on the ground and drawing architectural plans or diagrams in chalk on the pavement - loved that idea!

Photo © KR

We went with our wonderful Sicilian friend Rosa, who lives in Bermondsey, so after the official walking tour had ended - at the soon-to-be-destroyed monumental, brutalist Heygate in Elephant & Castle (there's a really interesting article on this failed social housing experiment here) - she took us on a walking tour of her own, starting with a fabulous late lunch at The Garrison on Bermondsey Street, then around the riverside and the wonderful old wharf buildings, which are now gorgeous apartment blocks. The bridges between buildings along Butler's Wharf are now people's gardens, but once were there for barrows carrying tea, spices and other goods which had just been off-loaded at the docks.

Photo © KR

Bermondsey is also known for its antiques trade and we ended up at the massive antiques warehouse under the railway arches near Tower Bridge. This was partly an exploratory mission, as we're still figuring out what we're doing in the new flat (see below), but we also knew we wanted some new kitchen chairs - and hurrah! we found some! Four very nice antique (1930s?) dark, hard wood chairs with very nice detailing (a sort of medieval pan-Mediterranean design on the backrest) for a not outrageous sum. A chair-laden taxi ride back to Brixton to get them home. They fit our dining room table excellently well and we're very chuffed with them.

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Since getting back we have also been trying to dedicate ourselves to settling in and sorting out the flat - as K so rightly put it, we need to be as organised and efficient about this as we were about moving out of the old flat. Trouble is, we're realising we haven't really left ourselves time for this! But gradually over the last weeks we have been meeting the immediate neighbours - upstairs, next door, and most importantly downstairs, since these guys were playing their music rather too loudly late at night and we needed to have a sit down with them to work it out. Fortunately it was all very reasonable - we had been afraid it might turn into a massive issue, and it was the only thing that was making us feel less than comfortable and at home in our new place - and since then we haven't heard a peep out of them after hours.

K has put up some shelves in the study (let us not dwell on the fact that he ended up cutting them each 10 cm too short, so we are not quite maximising the space in the way we had intended!), and I have planted a window box and some herb seeds - very excitingly the rocket seeds are already sprouting crazily, and there is also some activity from the thyme, though the others are all still keeping themselves to themselves in their little soil beds. We have even conquered our bourgeois guilt - as Juliette once so appositely put it - and hired a cleaner, Ingrid. Actually I was the one who had the problem with it, but I have finally come to the realisation that I just do not have time in my life for housework, and someone else could use the money. It doesn't seem like a lot, though I wonder if we get make £10 an hour ourselves...

Suzie came over to see the flat on Friday night, but rather unfortunately managed to fall down our stairs on her way out and broke her little finger. K spent the early hours of Saturday morning with her in A&E. Hopefully nothing else like that happens to our visitors for a very long time.

And just to round off the wonderful London time we've been having recently, we're just in from seeing 'Attack the Block', a brilliant film about youths on a council estate in Brixton becoming heroes as they fight off an alien invasion. Very funny and well acted and totally unpatronising, with lots of little social commentary digs - about stop and search policies, gang violence, etc - without laying it on too thick. I have to see it again. Slightly unsettling, perhaps, to step out of the Ritzy and find yourself in the midst of the area you just saw being invaded by terrifying aliens on-screen.

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And so back to Spain. It's K's birthday next weekend so we're taking advantage of this talk I'm giving at the Seville Book Fair - and the fact that the funders of my book are paying for my flight and hotel - to go to Spain for the Bank Holiday weekend together. He hasn't been to Spain for about 3 years, and hasn't been to Seville since we went there together about 13 years ago, when I first visited Spain with a view to spending a research year there. He comes back on Bank Holiday Monday, and I go to Granada for meetings of our Alhambra project and other such things. It was chaos last time so I'm a little nervous about it, but looking forward to just chilling this weekend in a beautiful city. So, expect updates on Central Asia some time in June. Until then...

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.

Open City

This has been a good week for making the most of living in London.

It started with going to see/hear Raja Shehadeh at the Royal Festival Hall. K had managed to double-book himself, so I went along with Alison, and we had a great evening. He read from his new book, A Rift in Time, which grew out of family research he did into the life of his great-uncle, a political exile from the Ottoman government of Palestine, which is interwoven with his own contemporary story of struggle against the Israeli occupation. Then there was a Q&A led by the director of Profile Books, his publisher, then opened to the floor.

Perhaps unsurprisingly the questions were less about his new book than about his views on the current peace talks (pessimistic) and about the potential for challenging human rights abuses through legal means - something he has spent his whole working life doing, which he seems to feel others are now doing just as successfully, if that's really the word. His recent writings - especially Palestinian Walks - have been about trying to reclaim the land, and his approach to the crisis in Israel/Palestine is long-term and root-and-branch: that basically the settlements not only need to stop being built, but need to be torn up, borders got rid of, and the whole region turned back into something approaching the broader territory encompassed by the Ottoman occupation, shared and lived in equally by all races and religions. He doesn't seem to think that is far-fetched, but I can't see it happening for a very long time.

As Alison said, it was just so refreshing to hear someone so articulate talk in an impassioned but entirely fair and reasonable way about the situation in the Middle East, without giving in to emotion or point-scoring. He signed copies of his book - I got one for Paz and asked him to sign it for her in Arabic. That will be a nice Christmas present, and also a nice exchange for the book she just gave me, the fifth and last in Tariq Ali's Islam Quintet, personally signed by him when she went to hear him talk at the Edinburgh Festival last month.

Then there was a screening of a short film that a father-and-son team have made inspired by Shehadeh's Palestinian Walks - part interview with him, part 'dramatisation' of one of the most memorable scenes of that book, the encounter with a settler during a walk along a stream through the hills around Ramallah where he lives, and their discussion of whose land it is and which of them has the right to walk there. Very poignant.

But what made it so 'London' - if it isn't already great enough that we have access to this kind of event - was the fact that Michael Palin was in the audience, and Stephen Fry was 'performing' in the main hall just underneath us, and when we went down in the musical lift (the RFH choir sings scales at you, upwards or downwards depending on which way the lift is going! A sound installation by artist Martin Creed) there he was signing copies of his new autobiography, with a huge queue snaking round the main foyer of the Festival Hall. Alison and I casually walked past and stared at him for a bit, before heading our separate ways!

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Then this weekend it is Open House - when hundreds of the city's amazing buildings throw open their doors and let you poke around inside. We were a little more organised than usual this year - at least we managed to book ourselves onto a tour of the London Library, which is somewhere we've always been curious about (not being able to afford the £400-odd fee to become members and find out from the inside!).

They have just finished a renovation and expansion project, and members of the architects firm were there to talk to us about that, which was interesting, but actually I wanted to know more about the Library! Basically it was founded as a gentlemen's club for the intellectually lofty, from what I could make out. We couldn't go into the reading rooms which was a shame, though we peered voyeuristically into them from the corridor. There were hardly any "members" around - the librarian who was taking us round thought perhaps they were all out enjoying Open House. More likely they stayed away from all of us! The stacks were fantastic though - with cast iron grilles allowing you to look all the way up or all the way down through the floors (not good if you have vertigo!) and with book-shelf height carefully worked out to avoid the need for ladders. They have a very individual cataloguing system which is entirely alphabetical within its thematic sections - in the "Science & Misc." part of the stacks (excellent!) 'Fishing' was followed by 'Flagellation' which was followed by 'Flags'!

After a restorative coffee, we walked from St James's along to our next port of call, the 'Roman baths' underneath King's College on the Strand. No-one seems to know when these were built, though possibly they're Tudor. From the horrible busy-ness of the Strand, we passed into the deserted square mile of the City of London - it is always so strangely empty at the weekends, when the business people that populate it during the week seem to stay away. We wondered as well if everyone was off looking at the Pope, as London did seem strangely empty yesterday. We were heading for the Guildhall where we spent a few hours - K got excited by the 15th-century Great Hall and crypts, I got excited by the fact there is a Roman amphitheatre underneath it!! Which was only discovered in 1988!!


We also visited the 1:500 scale model of the City of London on display in the 'City Marketing Suite' behind the Guildhall, which shows you what the skyline of central London is going to look like once all the current and projected skyscraper projects are completed - intended-to-be-iconic buildings which already have names ('The Shard', 'The Pinnacle') which are going to completely dominate The Gherkin and ruin the view. But quite fascinating to see it visualised in this way. There was a good interactive and a rather charismatic architect there answering people's questions.

We dipped in and out of quite a lot of Wren churches, which you seem to fall over on every corner in that part of the city, K making use of his recent purchase, the Pevsner for London's City churches. It was revealing of quite how much rebuilding was done immediately after the Second World War, since this part of the city was pretty much destroyed by bombing in the Blitz. We checked historic photos of where we were walking on the Museum of London's iPhone app, Street Museum. They don't have many photos on there yet, but it's a really interesting way of looking at and thinking about where you happen to be standing. We were going to go to the Bank of England, but this was the queue when we got there:


It reminded one of the queues you see on the news sometimes when there are reports in, say, Argentina of the country's economy being on the brink of collapse. K wondered whether they all thought they were going to be given money when they got inside. Perhaps they all knew something we didn't. Still, it's amazing that this many people turn out to look at buildings on Open House!

We got the bus home to Brixton, and because we weren't quite ready to go home, we went to visit Lambeth Town Hall, which was also Open, and got a personal tour by Lib Dem councillor and former mayor, Daphne Marchant, which was an idiosyncratic experience. Though we had come to that meeting of the Planning Committee last year - at which our Residents' Association successfully challenged the Lambeth College development next door - it was interesting to see the Council Chamber and hear a bit more about what goes on behind the scenes.

After that we went to experience the beer garden of our local pub.

Spring forward, fall back

The clocks went forward this morning, so it is officially - erm - British summertime, though the idea of summer still seems an incredibly long way off at this point. Lets be content to call it spring shall we? Though the weather can't seem to make up its mind about that either. Anyway, point is, it only feels like a few weeks ago that the clocks went back! This year is just zapping by in a blur of Ceramics Galleries work, without me really having the time to pay attention.

A springy picture to bring a smile to your face - daffodils are probably my favourite flowers, seen blooming brightly and happily away here in our lovely Sargadelos vase...

The last few weeks we have been piling stress on to the madness by moving judderingly yet unerringly forward with the business of getting a mortgage and buying a flat. Yikes. This is something that we have been talking about and nudging our way towards for a couple of years now - ever since K's parents kindly offered to give us the money we needed for a deposit, which was the only conceivable way we would ever be able to afford to do this - but our finances were in such a state that we needed to spend quite a long time sorting them out. It was hearing the phrase "to be brutally honest..." coming out of the mouth of the mortgage advisor some friends had put us in contact with.

Anyway, the long and short of it is, thanks to K's inheritance from his grandfather, we have just this week paid off the huge loan that we took out to pay off all our debts in one fell swoop - which actually means that for the first time in about 10 years, we are debt free. I know I should be whooping for joy about this, but I guess it hasn't really sunk in properly yet, probably because it is just a stepping stone on the way to being in more debt than either of us have possibly imagined... The sudden incentive to get things sorted out is because we have seen a flat in our block that some neighbours are selling and have decided to just go for it. We're going to try to buy it from them privately, so once we get the mortgage application in - hopefully in the next couple of weeks - we'll be at the delicate negotiating stage. So it might not work out, but we're going to try to do whatever we can to ensure it will!! Exciting - but also frankly terrifying.

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At the same time, I have been nominated for a promotion at work. Which I was very chuffed about - until the full reality of the bureaucratic process that this entails struck me. I have to go through something ominous-sounding called the Curatorial Review Board, which means putting together copies of all my publications (actually rather a lot - mostly done in my own time!) for consideration by the Board - this I have to do by Wednesday; a "portfolio", which I have a bit more time to think about (end April); and then an interview in front of a panel of 4, including an external assessor (end May). I know colleagues who have been through this process, and it is not much fun apparently. You pretty much have to sell yourself, which I am not much good at. Plus there isn't space in my brain to think about all this at the moment. But I am hoping a bit of relief comes in April from the full-on workload - most of my ceramics displays will have been installed by then - and I can start to gear myself up for it. I bloody well deserve a promotion after all!!

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A nice thing that's happened - I got a place on that Summer School in Tunisia that I applied for, so I will be going there for 10 days in mid-May. I knew that part of it was giving presentations, but I understood that these were on topics that you already knew something about or were in the process of researching. As it turns out, I have been selected to present on the "minor arts" - a phrase I absolutely hate, since it implies the primacy of painting as the most important art form - plus I don't really know what it means. Basically, it looks like I have to talk knowledgeably about the objects on display in museums I have never been to. We are supposed to do preparation for this - they have sent me some references to articles - but this is time and work I have not anticipated doing! The others on the course all seem to be academics in research institutions, who may have time on their hands to read articles - but some of us have crazy busy working lives! Still, I am very much looking forward to the trip - I think it's going to be amazing! I have to start making travel plans soon...

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Another nice thing that's happened - my sister has finally found herself a permanent job in North Uist!! This is not an easy thing to achieve, because the jobs are few and far between to being with, and mostly seasonal. But she has persevered, and just this week landed a job at the Hebridean Smokehouse - hurrah! She worked there over their crazy pre-Christmas period and said it was a bit of a nightmare, and it's busy at the moment because of the pre-Easter orders, but hopefully things will settle down soon. She was really worried that if she didn't find something soon, she wouldn't be able to stay up there. So this gives her some stability and a regular income, and because it is just mornings it means she can get on with her own editing and writing in the afternoons. Phew.

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And finally...

When we walk out of the front door of our block of flats on to Brixton Hill, we can see straight down into central London and have a clear view of the Gherkin, one of the most iconic buildings on the London skyline. A few months back, we noticed a new skyscraper had reared itself above the Brixton skyline... Officially known as the Strata Tower, this has already become known as "the Razor", because after "the Gherkin" all landmark buildings in London have to have a nickname. It's a new tower-block in Elephant and Castle, and sounds like an amazing building - with three huge wind turbines at its peak that give it its distinctive appearance, and will generate energy to power the building. You can read all about it here.

"The Razor" under construction, courtesy of zupermaus

Problem is, every time we see it, we can't help but think of the Tower of Mordor, and that a huge eye is going to appear above those wind turbines, and blink...

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'?

One that didn't win the Turner Prize...

I haven't been along to Tate Britain yet to see the Turner Prize show, but reading about Richard Wright's piece - a gold leaf abstract fresco on the gallery wall, which will get painted over at the end of the show - certainly makes me want to. There is something wonderful about the fact that the fundamental reason the judges all gave for selecting it as the winner was that it is beautiful.

One of the artists that didn't win last night was Roger Hiorns, creator of a rather amazing installation in a derelict council flat in Elephant and Castle, which we popped down to see a couple of Sundays back, in the pouring rain. This piece is called Seizure, and you can read more about it here. I have also posted my photographs of it on our Flickr site - it's worth a look (apologies, the picture link to my photostream doesn't seem to be working at the moment...).

The flat was turned into a watertight tank and 75,000 litres of super-saturated copper sulphate solution was pumped into it through holes in the ceiling. This was then left to cool and crystallise over the next two and a half weeks, and then they broke into it and pumped out the remaining solution. When you first visited, back in 2008, you were given wellies and rubber gloves since the crystals were still wet. When we went round the other week, we were told not to lick our fingers after touching the crystals, since it was poisonous! A little boy going round with his father earnestly said, "Daddy, will you remind me if I forget?", to which his father replied, "But if you forget, it will be too late!" Oh dear...

Every surface - originally the floor as well, even the old bath - is encrusted with large jagged crystals in this ethereally or supernaturally deep blue colour. It's quite stunning when you're cocooned in there. And perhaps because I had been there so recently, at one point I had an overriding sensation of being in the Alhambra... That sensation of every surface covered in glittering ornament, that you just can't take in in one go - you have to sit and be and absorb it gradually, in an almost spiritual way... Originally the plaster decoration of the Alhambra's walls would have been coloured in deep primaries - gold, red ... and blue.

And like Richard Wright's work, this amazing idea will be destroyed. The council block it's housed in is scheduled for demolition at some point in the New Year. In fact, it should have already gone by now, but the credit crunch stalled the developers. Lack of money combined with artistic creativity? Isn't that always the way?!

If you want to pop along and see it before 3 January, details are on the Artangel site.

I still can't believe it...

... but my lovely, seven-month young, Ride2Work scheme bike was stolen last weekend. Again. Or rather, that is the second bike that I have had stolen. I never cycle it anywhere other than between work and home, but ironically last Sunday evening, we took a ten minute ride down to Abbeville Road, to stock up on fine cheeses at Macfarlane's, which we had not done for months, and then met up for a drink with a colleague of K's who has just moved to the flat above the hairdresser's next door... We were a maximum of two hours, and when we got back to the hoop where we had locked up both our bikes, there was K's, and just an empty space where mine should have been. The lock was still there - they must have taken the saddle off to get it out...

You never quite believe it - you think for a moment you must actually have locked it up somewhere else, and I had a futile wander up and down the road just in case it happened to be leaning around somewhere else, but of course it was not. Some bastards saw an opportunity and went for it. Thing is, because I am paying it off in instalments, I will be paying for another six months for a bike I don't own any more!! Am waiting to hear from HR at work about what I should do now - was it perhaps covered by some Museum insurance, because technically (I guess) I do not own it until I have finished paying for it? Can I have another Ride2Work scheme bike on the go while I am still paying off the last one?

Sooooo annoying, as the weather has been beautiful this week - mild and autumnal - and I keep wistfully looking out of the window and wondering how lovely it would be to cycle home in... Also I have been feeling under a lot of pressure with work - again, as I suppose is becoming usual now, as we lose staff and don't have the money to replace them, so everyone is doing an insane amount of work... so it would have been great to have the cycle home to de-stress. Instead I have to battle with the tube - and the Victoria Line has been positively boiling with the unseasonally warm temperatures this week. I was at Green Park station during rush hour last week - coming back from attending the Oriental Ceramic Society council meeting, followed by a very fine tea with George in the Royal Academy café - and there must also have been some problem with defective trains, or defective tracks, or god knows what, because three tube trains came and went and there was no way that all the people on the platform, which was constantly filling up, could cram themselves into the already-full carriages. In the end, I changed platforms and went north to Warren Street, changed platforms again and went back south. It was the only way to get home!! (without losing too many of my marbles)

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I have started a new research project - for an encyclopaedia article I have to write by the end of January, on Almoravid religious spaces in Fes and Marrakesh. It's nice to start something new, and also to get back to research areas I want to expand into, rather than endlessly going over old ground, which is what it feels like with my Islamic Arts from Spain book, now that the third set of proofs is about to come in... I have been reading photocopied articles while I travel to and fro on the tube, most of which are in French, since it was mainly French scholars of the early 20th century who have worked on the architectural history of North Africa - and not much done since, due to an unfortunate hangover of European imperialist perspectives that the cultural achievements of Africa are not worthy of serious scholarly attention... Happily, that is changing now. And it's good for my French too.

But in between trying to get my research done on the tube, I have been enjoying having a free subscription to the London Review of Books. A colleague 'gave' me this subscription by putting my name forward - she got something out of it too, a book token or some such. But I am completely hooked and will certainly pay to renew the subscription when the time comes - very clever marketing on the part of the LRB. It is very satisfyingly left wing, and snobbishly makes me feel very intellectual, surrounded - as one usually is on the tube - by readers of the Metro. When I first moved back to London and started commuting to work (my own "year in Catford", as satirised - that very year! - by The Chap magazine, which is very sadly not available on their online archive...) I was taken aback by getting on the train in the morning and being met by a wall of everyone reading the very same newspaper. Talk about brainwashing. Since then we have had to endure the ridiculous street competition of the free evening rags - the London Lite, and the London Paper, which has already mercifully folded, excuse the pun. Hopefully the London Lite will go soon, now that the Evening Standard is back, and being given away for free!! (oh the politics of freebie London newspapers!)

BUT in the LRB, I have become completely addicted to the classifieds, or rather I should say the personals. This is a typical offering:

Small but perfectly formed ex-hack turned jurisprudential insurrectionist seeks proper gent/unicorn with wit, charm and optimistic approach to Bakhtinian dialogics. (F, 29)

A few months ago, there was one in Latin! I would have loved to see the responses - I hope they were in Latin too!

I also love the fact that I read about things I would not have read about otherwise ... but I suppose that is in the nature of magazine subscriptions.

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The clocks have gone back now, so it's dark when I leave work. My body clock is so adjusted to 'working till it gets dark', that I now think about leaving work a bit earlier, which is a good thing, but then I don't actually do it, which isn't. They went back last Sunday, which meant I spent the whole day experiencing that feeling of it being later than it was, because it was, and then the whole week feeling I was late for things. Why is it we do this again??

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Thought for the day: If you Twitter, are you a Twat?

A London cabbie's philosophy

There are major roadworks going on at both ends of my journey at the moment. I have lost track of what they are doing in Brixton - it started out with refurbishing the Victorian water mains, but whatever they are doing now, seems to have been going on for years. In South Kensington, they have just pedestrianised the area around the tube station, and rerouted all the traffic, which makes not only for major roadworks, but also utter confusion. The traffic is a complete nightmare around there at the moment, especially in the evenings.

Coming home this evening, I was as usual stuck in a line of traffic, behind cars pointing at stupid angles across lanes, having changed their mind at the last minute, waiting for the lights to change in order to inch forward. I managed to make it round the corner, where there was an utter logjam - a green light off in the distance, but absolutely no movement, and a car blocking the way of a black cab. The taxi driver had been standing out on the road shouting at the driver of the car blocking him, but got back in his car as I pulled up. But since there was absolutely no way round or through I just had to wait there with my bike. The cabbie could not resist including me in his (justified) frustation.

"You know what the problem is, don't you? Transport for London. They've just got too much money."

This is a frequent complaint, and one whose validity I am never quite sure about - leftover budgets needing to be spent before the round-up of the financiaI year, so let's blow it all on needless roadworks... (though actually when it's finished South Kensington will be much more pleasant)

And I am not sure I believe what a cabbie says about TfL - a company that exists to manage the city's public transport, and thereby to deny cab drivers an income. And I also wonder - if they have too much money, then why on earth are they talking about hiking the prices on the tube, again?

Autumnal musings...

Well, K completed his half-marathon in an amazing (I think!) 2 hours and 7 minutes!! I have uploaded some photos of the day to our Flickr photostream, but here are a couple of before and after shots, and a close-up of his well-earned eco-friendly medal, that he proudly sported for the rest of the day!

It was gorgeously autumnal - the temperature was cold, but just right for running (I am reliably informed). While he did the hard work of running, I wandered around the 'Food and Fitness festival', getting some breakfast (the marathon started at 9.30!) and picking up as many freebies for K as I could - Lucozade recovery drinks, and energy bars. I was amused that the members of the Welsh Guards band seemed to be making the most of this as well!


After reaching my tolerance level of browsing through marquees, I went to sit by the Serpentine and drink my thermos of coffee and read my book (Wolf Hall, by Hilary Mantel - a well-deserved winner of the Booker Prize recently! I'm loving it!) until it was time to wander down towards the finishing line to see if I could see K coming in... Eventually I did, though of course I was not quite ready in time with the camera, so only got a picture of his back disappearing into the distance... Because of the crush of people at the finish line - there were 10,000 runners taking part!! - we had agreed to meet at the Albert Memorial, where we sat for a while watching the stream of runners flowing past... I had to wonder to myself what on earth makes people put themselves through this! But trying to raise money for a worthy cause goes a long way to helping you towards the finish line...

Speaking of which, K has not quite reached his sponsorship target, so if you're reading this, please go to his JustGiving page and help him raise money for International Action for Iraqi Refugees - there are 4.5 million orphans in Iraq and about 1 million young widows, and even if each of us gave a small amount, together we can help them to survive and build themselves a future and a better life.

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We have just got back from a lovely weekend in Oxford, visiting wonderful friends Bob and Bev for dinner on Saturday night (after a full day spent in the British Library, so we felt very virtuous), and a lovely Sunday lunch in Woodstock today with Annie and Honey, whom I don't think we've seen since their wedding, nearly 3 years ago... shocking. It was great to catch up, and it felt so lovely to be 'out in the country' - and as always cosily nostalgic to be back in Oxford, wandering around old haunts, seeing what has closed down and what is new, and letting those old memories flood in - things you have not thought about for years....

It is well and truly autumn now. The trees are at that point where they have not yet shed all their leaves and they are turning all the colours of the autumn spectrum. It has been really beautiful cycling through the parks. Very cold though, with crisp autumn mornings, which turn into those lovely days where the sky is blue and sunny but there is a chill in the air. People are starting to burn logs on their fires, or make bonfires of fallen leaves, and there is a wonderful woodsmoke smell in the air, which I always associate with autumn. It is still that period before the clocks go back, when it is just dark all the time - when you travel to and from work in the dark - but at the moment it is lovely in the mornings, and gets gradually darker as I cycle home... Lights come on in houses, and as you glide past you can see glimpses of people's cosy interior worlds...

I had not been cycling regularly for a while and had found myself feeling really quite stressed out - one of the reasons for not cycling was the need to get to work promptly, then working really long stressed out days and just wanting to get home quickly and flop. I was feeling like I was not at all on top of my work and that it was all just too much. Plus, it coincided with a period when I had run out of Evening Primrose Oil - which is supposed to keep your hormonal levels nice and balanced, though I don't know whether any of that alternative medicine stuff is really true... But I decided that the exercise from cycling would help me cope with feeling stressed. Also, my plantar fasciitis had come back after - I don't know, maybe it's just over a year since I had it - and cycling seemed to help it last time. And indeed having cycled almost every day for the last two weeks (and got some new Evening Primrose...) I feel much much better and far less angsty about everything now - though I still have a sore heel. The first two days I decided to get back on the bike it rained - it has been very dry this year - but I was determined, and even though I was soaked by the time I got to work, I also found it fresh and invigorating!

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The other day, I was cycling along Hayter Road, having just set off for work, and one of these new bike-mounted traffic wardens was there writing someone a ticket and he called out to me as I went past, so I stopped and turned back to him expectantly - I didn't think I had done anything to inflate the ire of a traffic warden (or parking enforcement officer, or whatever we're supposed to call them these days...). He said, "Excuse me - what colour would you call this car?" I looked at it, and to me it seemed a kind of dark greyish silver, so I said, "Silver?", which seemed to be a word he had never heard before. He thanked me and I went on my way. But as I mused on this humorous encounter, I soon began to realise it was in fact a rather philosophical question he had asked me, because almost every car parked along that part of my journey was some or other shade of silver, and how would you differentiate between them?

I began to think that if I were Paul Auster or W.G.Sebald - which quite clearly I am not, and never could even begin to approach the brilliance of those literary geniuses who are my heroes - that this momentary encounter with the traffic warden could have been the inspiration for some brilliant piece of writing... Oh well, being me, this is what you get.

Just another day at the beach...

As usual, I have been struggling to find time to catch up with this blog. The longer I leave it, the more things that come along that I want to blog about, which makes for interminably long posts…! But today I am going to limit myself to blogging about the fun I have had celebrating my birthday, and a few rambled digressions…

It was my birthday on the 19th. I’m now 35. Feels like a landmark. As K encouragingly put it, I'm halfway to 70!

We both took the day off work, and brilliantly, it was an absolutely gorgeous summer day - a mini heatwave, according to the BBC - and by far the best day to be out and about. I highly recommend mid-week days off! It makes you feel like you've worked two two-day weeks! We started our fun-packed and busy day by getting the 9.36 train to Brighton where we ambled around taking in the trendy, buzzy seaside town – and, rather unexpectedly, a fine neo-Nasrid building which is now the Brighton Dome concert hall and city museum - until finding the perfect spot for the morning's third cup of coffee, in the Pavilion Gardens.

The tower block in the background rather spoiled the effect of the turrets!

This guy busking on the French horn while standing on stilts was rather fun!


The point was to go to the Brighton Pavilion, where neither of us had ever been, and which - though I knew it was one of the earliest examples of Orientalist architecture in Britain - we knew very little about. It turned out to be a royal palace built by the Prince of Wales, later George IV, son of Mad King George, when he set up home in the society town of Brighton to escape from the pressures of being heir apparent. It also turns out to have the best interior decorative scheme in the Chinoiserie style that was so popular in the late 18th century! No photos inside, so I can't show you, but it was absolutely awe-inspiring in parts! The banqueting room and ballroom were particularly luxurious and overwhelming, including an amazing chandelier above the dining table, which hung from the claws of an enormous dragon. The whole thing weighed a ton and some of the king’s guests were scared to sit underneath it! I could sympathise! But visiting the pavilion was a real and memorable treat, and just enough outside of both of our areas of work to be a mini-holiday.

If it weren't for the grass, would you believe you were in Brighton?!

We were not the only people who had the bright idea of a trip to the seaside on a lovely English summer day - and Brighton beach was a far cry from the quiet idyll of Harris, or the delightfully relaxing day we spent at Bexhill at Easter... Despite the online warnings against doing so, we decided to get fish and chips from one of the stalls on the beach, so we could sit and look at the sea view, which we did, and they were not great quality, but the principle of the thing needed to be observed...!


It was crazily crowded, because of the school holidays, which naively we had not taken into account - but we got some good paddling in (no Kent method was attempted, though it was tempting apparently...) before heading back up the hill to the station... Alas, it was all too brief - we'll definitely go back and have a more extended wander round the interesting-looking shops and cafés, especially in the old warren-like part of town known as The Lanes - but we had to be at the National Theatre for 5, since we'd booked to go on a Backstage Tour! We were a bit early so we walked from Embankment and wandered along the South Bank in the sunshine, and I just took random photos of some of the things I love most about that part of London, since I don't often just wander around my haunts with a camera...

The view – in the foreground is Waterloo Bridge, which we often go over on the 59 bus travelling to and from Brixton, and from the top deck you get the best view in London: St Paul’s, the Gherkin and the City in one direction, the Houses of Parliament and the London Eye in the other, and on both sides the curl of the Thames. Just fab.

I have always loved the fact that this one part of the South Bank is completely given over to graffiti and skateboarders – and the fact that all the youngsters who hang out looking oh-so-cool and rebellious have no sense of being completely institutionalised by an area where these otherwise rather anti-social activities are perfectly allowed, even encouraged!

Of course the best thing is the second hand book market under the vast curve of the arch of Waterloo Bridge – I love browsing here. On my birthday, we scraped together our last few pound coins to buy The Blind Rider by Juan Goytisolo, which apparently he has said will be his last novel. I really like his writing (Cinema Eden is just fantastic) and I wanted to buy a book there on my birthday as a memento of that lovely day…

What we were less pleased to discover is that the area in front of the BFI – which used to be the best place to go for a drink in that part of London, and had wonderful long wooden bench tables which you had to share with your fellow drinkers, in a truly socialist South Bank experience – has been poshed up and turned into a terraza for fine pre-film or -theatre dining. The grungey BFI bar of old is no longer. We were quite disappointed to see that.

The Backstage Tour was fun and interesting, though perhaps would have been more so had we gone during the working day (ours started at 5.15), when more people would have been behind the scenes, in the art studio and prop stores, actually doing things. Also having been heavily involved in the backstage side of theatre when we were at university, I wanted to know more about where the stage manager sat, how they prepared for a show, gave their cues, how the lighting design worked etc etc… But we got to see the sets for the plays were weren’t going to see that night, including All’s Well That Ends Well, whose set looked great – a bit like A Nightmare Before Christmas in massive 3D…

It made me want to go and see it – though we have seen quite a lot of Shakespeare already this year: we had a trip to As You Like It at the Globe a month ago, with Jane for her birthday, which was brilliant fun as always at the Globe, and nice as well since it was a text I had studied for A-level and seen staged by friends as the Oriel College summer show. The second Shakespeare we have seen this year was The Merchant of Venice, an outdoor production in the Bishop’s Garden at Hereford, when we went down a few weeks ago for the 3 Choirs Festival – K’s father was local festival administrator this year (a bad case of ‘recycling deputy headmasters’, as he amusingly put it). We had a really lovely long weekend – in all these years of going to Hereford, where my grandparents also lived when they were alive, I had never been to 3 Choirs, but the night I arrived on the train (K went down for the whole week), we went off to the Cathedral for a performance of Bach’s violin sonatas by Rachel Podger. It was absolutely, stunningly beautiful. The acoustics of the unaccompanied violin in one of the most beautiful medieval cathedrals in England. And Rachel Podger was an absolute virtuoso – somehow she managed to make two layers of completely different sounds come out of her strings at the same time. Wonderful.

Anyway, The Merchant of Venice was good too – I don't think I had ever seen it performed. There was a nicely down-to-earth amateurish quality about the set but the acting was excellent (this company, The Festival Players, specialises in giving opportunities to up-and-coming young actors). It was an all-male production, which really makes you understand just how funny all the cross-dressing and mistaken identity of Shakespeare’s plays would have been in his own day.



But back to my birthday and the National Theatre. That night we went to see Phèdre, by Jean Racine, a 17th-century French playwright who drew heavily on the classical tragedies – in this case, the Seneca play Phaedra, which I had studied for finals (and, typically, could not remember all that much about…). This was in a translation by Ted Hughes, and I really loved the Hughesian poetry of it – especially since Racine’s original text was also self-consciously literary – but I think K is right in his assessment that it did not make for a very dramatic play. On top of that, we didn’t think the quality of the acting was very good – and this was the great Helen Mirren in the title role, and the leading man of the moment, Dominic Cooper. It was also directed by Nicholas Hytner, the National Theatre director, so it should have been brilliant – but it wasn’t, sadly. The two supporting actors carried the show and their acting abilities really shone – Margaret Tyzack as the nurse, who had a really wonderful voice, and John Shrapnel as Hippolyte’s companion, especially in the scene where he has to report his gruesome death. And the set was magnificent, in true National Theatre style – and somehow the changing light on the glowing horizon really managed to capture the quality of the light in Greece… So it wasn’t all bad!!

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Last Saturday, the birthday celebrations continued. We went fruit picking with my parents and my sister, at Parkside Farm just outside Enfield. It was a brilliant day out! We had a picnic lunch to start with, and all brought enough for several picnics, so we had far too much food…

My father is here seen wearing his Terry Pratchett hat. When he was wearing this at home in Shepherd’s Bush recently, some of the local Aussies passed by, and one of them asked him – ‘Are you a real wizard?’ !!

Then we hit the fields!! We picked up a load of empty punnets and a cart which we trundled around behind us as we picked ever more and more fruit and vegetables and eventually completely filled it! I had decided I wanted to try making jam so everyone really got carried away on my behalf, especially with the berries – there is also something completely addictive about picking fruit! It was just so wonderful to be outside in the sun all afternoon (we have actually had several weeks of an actual summer here in England!!) – and a brilliant family thing to do. My sister and I have really fond memories of doing this with our grandparents in Herefordshire, and on that day there were loads of kids getting carried away in the bushes, as it were. Occasionally a loud cry would ring out – ‘I’ve just found the biggest raspberry in the whole world!’

Does anyone know what a ‘Himbo’ is??


My mother and my sister both pretending to be raspberries!

The farm had developed this ‘table-top’ system for growing their strawberries which meant you could pick away without having to bend down and break your back! Very civilised!

Some, ahem, ‘low-hanging fruit’, which we quickly picked! These strawberries - warmed by the sun - were so sweet and tasty!

Stained hands after blackberry picking (and some judicious munching)!

Our cart weighed down by our pickings!

K defeated by hunter-gathering!

We have been living off plums, sweetcorn, spinach, marrow, french beans and raspberries all week – the blackberries I have pureed and frozen, in preparation for making ice cream, though some of them I have baked with apples in a pie we are going to eat with my sister tonight; the raspberries and strawberries have been sorted, hulled, weighed and frozen, while I work out how on earth one makes jam…!

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After what seemed like an interminably long car ride from Enfield to Brixton – with all the punnets of fruit very carefully packed in the tiny boot of my sister’s (bright orange) Daewoo Matiz, we finished the day with a Victoria sponge birthday cake at home! I had made the sponges in the morning before setting out to the farm, and we filled it with strawberry jam bought from our lovely friendly deli on Abbeville Road, Jersey cream bought from the farm, and strawberries we had picked with our own fair hands! YUM!

They brought the candles!

It didn’t last long…!