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.

Brixton brunch

The American mid-term elections have made me realise that it is already two years since I had my mini-sabbatical at the Metropolitan Museum - six weeks in New York just as the weather was changing to autumn and the trees were turning gold in Central Park. How fantastic that was. Though I don't think, in the euphoria surrounding Obama's election, we could ever have predicted how badly things would go for him, and how disappointing his premiership would become. Still, he's not God.

Today we had brunch with friends and this brought back really strongly memories of another autumnal brunch two years ago in New York, with Rebecca who came down from Illinois to visit for a few days. So fantastic to see her after so long, but terrible that we haven't really been in touch since then. I remember vividly that it was the day of the New York Marathon. We went along to a brunch place on the Upper West Side which had been highly recommended as a New York institution - Sarabeth's, that was it. You can't reserve for Sunday brunch so you have to go there and queue and put your name down for a table, and you can't have a table for 4 if there are only 3 of you queuing. So we were supposed to be meeting Lindsay - who was also on sabbatical in New York at the time - but she was late, because she'd been watching the marathon, so we had to put ourselves down for a table for 3. While we waited for the table to be ready we went across the street to have an emergency coffee in an unfriendly little place where a TV was showing Paula Ridley winning the Marathon just a few blocks away...

I can't remember what we ate at Sarabeth's but it was packed with New Yorkers having brunch and had a great atmosphere. Afterwards we wandered over to Central Park and through the dregs of marathon-runners sporting medals and those space-age cloaks they give you for warmth. We found a fleamarket and started to look around, and discovered that it was a really good one, with great craft stalls, and picked up quite a few things. I got a coaster made from an old map of New York, which showed the exact street that my New York apartment was on - East 87th Street, the building was actually called The Gotham!! - and K picked up some cufflinks made from old typewriter keys. He still wears these, and the coaster is on our study bookshelves, where we put our teapot.

All these memories came back today when we went along to the Ritzy to meet Ruby and Jesse and baby Ivy, and Teresa and Dan - all local Brixton friends and neighbours - for brunch. How lovely! After a scrumptious breakfast (eggs benedict - my current favourite!) K and I decided to wander through Brixton, since we needed to buy some olive oil. It seems in recent weeks some of the market stalls have started opening on a Sunday, so there is still a bit of buzz even though Brixton is generally very subdued on a Sunday. We wandered into part of the covered market we hadn't been into for years - Brixton Village - and discovered not only that quite a number of places were open, but also that it has been completely transformed!! It is now full of lovely little eating places, which all look packed with atmosphere and nice design, and I am sure all do variously delicious food. I would have been happy sitting down to brunch at any one of them. It felt like a mixture between being in a Parisian passage, or somewhere in East London which is a bit more comfortable with being self-consciously trendy than Brixton is yet. Actually it felt like being in New York!

Perhaps it was the fact that it was a Sunday, meaning that all the more usual Brixton market stalls were closed up for the week, but it made me feel slightly sad for the passing of the Brixton Market identity, which is not about trendy foody joints but about the kind of food that real people need to buy day to day. What's wonderful about the Brixton Market foodstalls is that they cater to the ethnically diverse Brixton population, so plantain and salted fish heads and ginormous sacks of rice are as ubiquitous as basic fruit and veg. I felt as if that identity was being a bit streamlined, to make way for the trendy coffee and deli places. But, if that's what needs to happen for Brixton Market to survive at all, then so be it. And thankfully not one of these new places was a chain, all were highly individual in their look and the type of food they were serving. I guess I'll just need to go back on a Saturday and hopefully be reassured by how the two aspects of this new Brixton Market identity are working symbiotically together.

Catching up with the year...

I haven't blogged about our calendar images for months - the last posting seems to have been in June. I thought it was time to catch up with the year - since I think, I hope, I am finally starting to emerge from the myre of intense busy-ness of, erm, most of this year. But I saw a friend from Cairo the other day, and while we were catching up over a very fine lunch at Carluccio's, sitting outside in the blazing sunshine of last week's mini-Indian summer, I was musing on how I was hoping I was about to move into a less busy period, and she said - "You said that last year". Hmmm. Something not going right there. Anyway.

Chapel of St. Mary Magdalene, Ludlow Castle © KR

July: this is the gorgeous round Norman chapel in the centre of Ludlow Castle, which really is one of the most beautiful sets of castle ruins in all of England. We visited last summer on a day trip from Hereford when we went down for a few days to celebrate K's mother's 60th birthday and retirement. I sat inside here for quite some time admiring the architecture while waiting for K to take about a million photos of it and the rest of Ludlow Castle. We had a lovely wander around the town as well, which is really picturesque, with a lot of surviving timber-framed buildings, and now well-known as a foodie destination. It was on this trip that I conceived the idea of giving my parents a weekend at The Feathers to celebrate their 40th wedding anniversary this year, since this is where they spent their honeymoon. This is what we did, and they had a really lovely weekend, indulging in quite a lot of memory lane. At the end of August, we had a great party for them - there are photos here.

Roman Theatre, Bosra, Syria © MRO

August: Last November/December I spent five weeks in Syria, based in Damascus, looking after an exhibition of world ceramics from my museum's collections. This is one the big trips I took last autumn which was one of the reasons for setting up this blog, to keep family and friends updated, but there was just no time for that - too much to see and do! While working on the exhibition, I had Fridays off - the Muslim holy day, when the exhibition was closed - and I tried to make the most of my time by taking a few out-of-town trips. Living was cheap, so from my per diem I could afford to hire a car and a driver and travel in relative luxury - this meant that I didn't have to rely on the vagaries of bus timetables, and could definitely go there and back in one day without having to worry and exhaust myself.

One of these day trips was to Bosra, in the far south of Syria, a small town built on and around the ruins of an ancient settlement - first for the Nabataeans, and while most of the standing ruins and monuments are Roman, there are also fascinating medieval buildings integrated into the older Roman structures. They are built from this amazing black basalt, so have a very different feel from your usual Roman antiquities, but it glows a gorgeous warm colour in the late afternoon sun. I was particularly taken by the Roman theatre, which is one of the best preserved in the entire world - unfortunately the Roman remains in the Middle East are rather neglected by Classical archaeologists, but they would do well to spend some time studying them. Because one of my research interests is spolia and reuse, I found this theatre fascinating, since it was reused as a citadel by the Mamluks (who ruled in Egypt and Syria between 1250 and 1517), who carefully enclosed the theatre within fortifications, turning it into a smaller version of a Crusader castle like Krak des Chevaliers, with a perfectly preserved Roman theatre at its heart. This is a photo taken standing on the stage looking up through the ruins of the three-storey scaenae frons, which was originally fronted with white marble and highly decorative details, such as these capitals.

Boating lake, Central Park, New York © KR

September: Wow, there is something so calming and idyllic about this photo of the boating lake in Central Park, with the Manhattan skyline poking up behind the trees and reflected in the water. It is exactly a year ago that I left for my 6 week sojourn in the States - taking part in a curatorial exchange with the Metropolitan Museum. This time last year I was in California, having adventures on the Greyhound, which I really will blog about properly sometime soon! K came out for my last two weeks, and Becca came down to visit us from Illinois - it was fantastic to see her after so long. This photo was taken on a walk around Central Park with her - so it reminds me of friends, and the beauty of New York in the autumn, of how much I love New York, and also of the first time I went there with K, when we were taking another walk around this boating lake - along the tree-line on the far side of this photo - and completely by chance stumbled on a lakeside amateur production of Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor. We sat down on the grass and watched, and it was absolutely fantastic. We were reminded of it last year when we went to see the same play at the Globe with K's family - it was brilliant there as well, but there was something about the impromptu, informal nature of the New York production that has always stuck with us. Afterwards we wandered off towards the Bandstand, and accidentally caught a flamenco performance, just as the sun was going down. That was a good walk in the park!

Colonnaded street, Apamea, Syria © MRO

October: This rather misty photograph - which probably looks better if you look at it a bit bigger - was taken at Apamea, a two kilometre long Roman colonnaded street in the middle of nowhere in northwest Syria. At Eid, the exhibition was closed for two days, so I was able to take an overnight trip - again, travelling by hired car and driver - to Krak des Chevaliers, staying overnight in Hama, and coming back south via Apamea, and Ma'loula - a small town just outside Damascus which is famous for its early Christian monasteries, now important pilgrimage sites. The weather in the north was grey and misty and rainy - apparently everywhere else in Syria that weekend there were beautiful sunny blue skies! - so that I did not get much sense of the amazingly fertile landscape in that part of the country, and walking around Krak des Chevaliers was a little bit like having been transported to deepest France or something...

However, early the next day, walking along the endless colonnaded street at Apamea, I was the only person there apart from, I think, three other tourists who quickly disappeared into the mist, and some rather annoying guys on motorbikes trying to flog me 'authentic' Roman coins and finds - I ignored them. But it was just so beautiful and atmospheric, as the standing columns of this once busy market street emerged out of the mist - parts of it were so well-preserved that you could still make out the forms of the shops. These small cubicles are exactly how the shops in Middle Eastern souqs still are today, set back in the same way from the bustling walkways - visiting some of these places where traditional ways of life are still so strong really does give you a better sense of how people must have lived in the past.

So this is the photograph we will be looking at every day for the next month. Happy memories...

At the moment we haven't written a single thing onto the calendar for what we're doing this month. For a brief moment, I thought - perhaps we're not doing anything at all, all month - what bliss! A quick flick through the pages of my diary put paid to that notion. Better start filling in the calendar...

Damascus - and Waddesdon

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

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

Waddesdon Manor, Buckinghamshire © KR

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

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

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

Two Cities in One Day

Today we went to the Rothko exhibition at Tate Modern. It was a beautiful winter day, cold with a clear blue sky. We took the 59 bus to Waterloo Bridge and walked along the South Bank, which was busy with other Londoners enjoying the rare afternoon sunshine. Riverside London looked absolutely beautiful and we stopped and admired St Paul’s before passing into the cavernous interior of the Turbine Hall. We paused briefly at the current Unilever Series installation, which neither of us thought was up to much, though perhaps you only ‘get it’ if you spend more time there. It all seemed rather unimaginative, a collation of pastiches, which perhaps was what it was all about, in a postmodern kind of way.

The main perk of working in a museum – or, at least, the one I work in – is that I can get into most exhibitions for free, so there really is no excuse for not going to see everything that comes on in London – though there is usually quite a lot going on in London, which is one of the things that is so brilliant about living here, but trying to see everything would be practically a full-time job. Anyway, I love Rothko. One of the things I used to enjoy most about being a teenager in London (and I am one of those rare Londoners who was actually born and raised here) was sitting in the Rothko room when it used to be in the Tate at Millbank, before that was Tate Britain, or there were any other Tates, and it was just ‘The Tate’. This was probably my favourite art gallery when I was younger – everything under one grand and rather beautiful roof, and catering to all the different artistic phases you pass through during adolescence. I had my pre-Raphaelite phase (and am still rather partial to The Brotherhood, I must admit), my Turner phase, but there was always something other-worldly about the enormous Rothko canvases in what I remember as a dimly-lit and rather hallowed space in the old Tate. I have visited them in their new home at Tate Modern, but when I think about those paintings, the image that comes to mind is the old gallery at Millbank.

Anyway hallowed and memorable is not the nature of the space they currently occupy during this exhibition of his late series, which has the Seagram murals at its heart, but perhaps that is the fundamental problem with the transience of temporary exhibitions. The last show we had seen in those rooms was the Juan Múñoz retrospective (his is the Turbine Hall installation I most regret not having seen) and I could still imagine his works occupying those spaces – his works which are so representational and focused on the (his) human form, in almost diametric opposition to Rothko’s paintings, so there was a rather strange layering of the two artists in my mind. In any case, I think the way to experience Rothko’s art is probably to sit calmly and for several hours in the chapel in Houston for which he was commissioned to produce fourteen paintings of his Black Form series. That’s the kind of meditative environment you need to really look at these magnificent paintings, which suggest so many layers of meaning and profundity, opening like windows onto unknowable mysteries, endlessly resisting our natural urge towards interpretation. The hustle and bustle of the Tate on a busy Sunday afternoon was not it (though, of course, great for visitor figures etc etc).

I couldn’t help wondering what Rothko himself would have thought of the exhibition. He withdrew his commission from the Seagram building when he decided that a private restaurant on Park Avenue was “an unsuitable environment in which to experience his paintings”. He worked closely with the Director of the Tate Gallery in the 1960s to agree how some of the murals might be hung in that space, and one interesting piece in the show is the maquette from the Tate Archive showing the agreed arrangement of the hang. This is the gallery I used to love to visit, now lost in the mists of time. Reading the exhibition booklet it became clear that Rothko had very clear ideas about how his paintings should be hung (low), and lit (dimly), in spaces with warm-coloured walls – all features which had been completely ignored in the exhibition design, which had the standardised white walls and overly harsh lighting of modern art galleries, and which had the effect of flattening the tones and gloss of the paintings and made it impossible for you to really see into them in the way I remember being able to. The catalogue reprints his very specific instructions about how some of his murals should be hung for an exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1961 – I assume they were followed then. It seemed to me that if Tate Modern had a reason for disregarding how Rothko wished his own paintings to be experienced (apart from cost), they needed to make a case for it.

I also get a bit frustrated by exhibition text which focuses on the object (usually the case with paintings exhibitions like this one) to total exclusion of all context, refusing to indulge the viewer with biography, or any information about the creative process – we’re there for The Art, you know, which needs to be understood on its own terms. Perhaps I am too used to working in a decorative arts museum, and in a field which always seeks to make connections across societies and technologies. I guess I have developed a prejudice against an attitude which privileges (Western) painting as High Art, without any concern for justifying this place of privilege. If you don’t get it, you’re just not enough of an aesthete.

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

It was dark when we left the Tate, but still beautifully clear, and the city lights were reflected in the fast-flowing waters of the Thames – when London is at its most beautiful, I think. We carried on walking along the South Bank, to Southwark Cathedral and past the deserted Borough Market, where we got another bus back to Brixton. At home, I settled down with my green tea and pastel de nata (Portuguese delicacies being one of the joys of living in Lambeth), to read “Here is New York”, the essay on the great city written by E. B. White in 1948. I had bought this little book in the Strand Bookshop during my trip to New York in the autumn, and it was one of the books in the box I shipped back, and only just picked up from the post office depot after getting back to work in early January. I guess it is a love letter to the city by someone who loved to live there, but not at all over-romanticised, a very warts-and-all view, which makes it yet more lovable. It brought back strong memories of my month there in the autumn – which have been rather fading in the onslaught of the more heavily-spiced Damascus memories – as well as drawing many parallels for me with London:

It carries on its lapel the unexpungeable odor of the long past, so that no matter where you sit in New York you feel the vibrations of great times and tall deeds, of queer people and events and undertakings…

New York is peculiarly constructed to absorb almost everything that comes along … without inflicting the event on its inhabitants; so that every event is, in a sense, optional, and the inhabitant is in the happy position of being able to choose his spectacle and so conserve his soul.

The collision and the intermingling of these millions of foreign-born people representing so many races and creeds make New York a permanent exhibit of the phenomenon of one world…

My edition of this essay was printed in 1999 with a foreword by the writer’s stepson. The end of the essay is absolutely remarkable in light of the events of 11 September 2001, which were not even envisioned in 1999, but in 1948, E. B. White wrote:

The subtlest change in New York is something people don’t speak much about but that is in everyone’s mind. The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible. A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the millions. The intimation of mortality is part of New York now…

It certainly is today. How amazing his foresight was from 1948, but I suppose there must always have been a sense of the city being perched so precariously upon the ocean. I always find amazing the view you get of Manhattan from the plane, that utterly flat raft of land with the impossibly tall towers rising from it, somehow not capsizing it.

White talks of the construction of the United Nations headquarters, which was then being built:

The city at last perfectly illustrates both the universal dilemma and the general solution, this riddle in steel and stone is at once the perfect target and the perfect demonstration of nonviolence, of racial brotherhood, this lofty target scraping the skies and meeting the destroying planes halfway, home of all people and all nations, capital of everything, housing the deliberations by which the planes are to be stayed and their errand forestalled.

Thank goodness the UN building was not the target, but if only the organisation was as effective as White optimistically believed – though perhaps their recent persistence has had some role in finally staying Israel’s hand in Gaza.

His final paragraph puts me in mind of a scene from my own recent history in New York – a small tree growing out of the top window of an abandoned low-rise building lost in amongst all the skyscrapers and multi-storey apartment buildings of Carnegie Hill, which I passed every day on my walk to the Met, and find now that I did not photograph.

A block or two west of the new City of Man … there is an old willow tree that presides over an interior garden. It is a battered tree, long suffering and much climbed, held together by strands of wire but beloved of those who know it. In a way it symbolises the city: life under difficulties, growth against odds, sap-rise in the midst of concrete, and the steady reaching for the sun. Whenever I look at it nowadays, and feel the cold shadow of the planes, I think: ‘This must be saved, this particular thing, this very tree’. If it were to go, all would go – this city, this mischievous and marvelous monument which not to look upon would be like death.

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

Capilla de los Condestables, Burgos Cathedral © KR

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Slow Blogging

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

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

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

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

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

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