Sans Souci

Sans Souci, Potsdam, Berlin © MRO

I can't believe it's almost exactly a year ago that I took this picture - after finishing and submitting all the work on my book, I treated myself to a long weekend in Berlin to coincide with Glaire being there from North Carolina on a work trip. I stayed with Nadania in her lovely apartment in Prenzlauer Berg. While G met with colleagues at the Frei Universität during the day, I entertained myself - as is very easy to do in Berlin - and one day I took myself off to Potsdam, where I had never had time to go before. Since I was mentally still in book-mode, I was also interested to see the famous examples of Orientalist architecture, especially the Pump House which was built to draw water for the complex system which supplied the many gardens of the royal pleasure palace. The Pump House is built like a Mamluk mosque on the outside, and decorated on the inside like a miniature version of the Great Mosque of Cordoba. Fascinating - though the guided tour was in German only, so I didn't learn as much as I could have!

By the time I walked up to Sans Souci - Frederick the Great of Prussia's own (much smaller) version of Versailles - it was a really hot and sunny day, and the park was absolutely full of sightseers. I skirted round the palace for a while, visiting all the interesting little garden pavilions, then found I was too late to visit the palace itself - tickets were sold out for the day. I was happy wandering around the outside and taking photos of the rather over-the-top Baroque decoration - I thought K would like these chaps. And now this is our calendar image for June - hopefully it will also bring us respite from our cares...

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Foremost among these is that, try as we might, we cannot get a mortgage on the flat we want to buy. It all got very complicated, and K spent weeks solidly on the phone to our mortgage advisor and the reps of different mortgage companies and finally the surveyor who came to assess the flat, all to no avail... The building is unmortgageable in the current financial climate. It turns out that the thickness of the walls is half what it should be for a mortgage lender to consider it suitable for resale. This makes it prone to condensation and damp - which certainly is a problem in these flats - though I still don't quite understand why that should mean lenders won't touch it. Apparently this kind of 'higher risk' flat used to be covered by the sub-prime mortgage market, which just doesn't exist any more, being as how it was the root cause of the global recession an' all. All the smaller sub-prime lenders have been bought up in the last year by bigger companies who are getting rid of all possible risk from their lending policies.

So this is the current climate that we have stumbled right into... Looking on the bright side, at least the problem does not lie with us. And our mortgage advisor is trying to reassure us that we have had a lucky escape - if we had managed to buy the flat, there is every chance that we couldn't sell it again. Which is in fact now the situation that all our flat-owning neighbours are going to find themselves in - it really doesn't bear thinking about. Apparently there are a number of 1930s-built properties like this in London, where the only way people can sell their flats is to cash buyers - and I wonder how many of those there are around in the current market?

So - everything was going smoothly and we had completely thought ourselves into the purchase and the move - and then this bombshell, just as I got back from Tunisia (about which more another day). The prospect of moving - and especially somewhere so nice and modernised as the flat we were going to be buying - makes you notice all the things you endure about where you actually live but which you can't do much about: the damp and mould in the bedroom; the mildewy shower curtain in the bathroom; a new floorboard starting to creak in the kitchen; the dodgy valves in the boiler that means the radiators come on when you run the hot water... And I really was looking forward to having a dishwasher...

The thing is, as soon as I was faced with the prospect of not being able to stay here - or rather not being able to put down roots here, as there is no urgent necessity to leave this flat - it made me realise quite how much this has come to be my home. Capital 'h' Home, in that deep emotional attachment kind of way. We've been here 6 and a half years now, so it's not surprising. It's not only the fact that as a maisonette it's like a little house, but it has all the advantages of being in a block of flats in terms of security, a shared garden for whose upkeep we have absolutely no responsibility but which we love to look down on and sit in, and above all the sense of community and the friendship of our neighbours. We're starting to realise that what we have here is very very rare, and now that we are casting an eye around at other things, we are quickly realising that for the same price we cannot get the same amount of space, nothing as nice architecturally or in terms of the arrangement of the rooms, and certainly nowhere with a ready-built community of friends on your doorstep.

We kind of feel that this is our moment to buy - since we have the momentum, and there is only so long the stamp duty holiday will last, since even though at the time the Tories claimed Labour had stolen their policy, it doesn't look like they're going to hold to it now they're in government... But I don't want to rush into anything, and I certainly have not let go of the simple, original plan of staying right where we are. Plan B is to keep a lazy eye on the market, and think about it in a more focused way when we get back from holiday in late June...

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And talking of the new coalition government... When I left for Tunisia, no-one knew what was going to happen - just that the Liberal Democrats had failed to pull the votes that everyone had predicted. Labour did surprisingly well - my Green votes in the local council election counted for nought as all 3 Labour councillors were re-elected, and Chuka Umunna got his parliamentary seat (I decided straight away that I could live with the latter - less happy about the former). K texted me while I was on a bus in Tunisia to tell me that Gordon Brown was resigning!! Which was exciting news, but then what?? Too complicated to convey in text messages... I got back to a Liberal Conservative government, a genuine coalition by all accounts, with Lib Dem MPs in cabinet positions, which no-one expected. It means that my speculative Lib Dem vote was not wasted, but more importantly, it seems like it might actually be a good government for the time we're in. It's a change anyway, and a new start. It's already been sorely tested, with the unfortunate scandal over poor David Laws (my personal theory is that right wing Tories are targeting the Lib Dem officers of the coalition) but we're definitely prepared to give it the benefit of the doubt...

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'?

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…!

Back in the Big Wide World - for now!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Radio Silence

Well, howdy! It's been a while. Sorry for the radio silence - I have been wrangling with Chapter 3, and have been avoiding email, and pretty much anything that is not in some way influenced by the art of Islamic Spain. Apart from Henry VIII - though he was influenced, but this is not the time or place for that discussion. All the big Henry VIII launches have been happening in the last few weeks - the opening on Wednesday evening at the British Library, of their exhibition Man and Monarch, was on the actual 500th anniversary of Henry officially assuming the throne - marked by K and his fellow Tudor historians all wryly commiserating each other on the death of Henry VII... I'll have to defer talking about that exhibition until I've been back to look at it properly.

The previous week was the party to launch all K's work at Hampton Court - details here. It all looks fantastic - they have re-presented the Tudor palaces, including hanging the 'Haunted Gallery' (a long corridor which is used as a paintings gallery, hung with fabulous portraits from the Royal Collection) with rich fabrics, as it would have been in the Tudor period, and bringing together in Henry's council chamber (never before open to the public!) a small exhibition of contemporary portraits of Henry's wives (the first time that's ever been done!) and daughters, together with an object of significance from their lives - and much much more ... The conceit is that the palace is 'dressed' for the wedding of Henry and Katherine Parr ("survived"), which was held at Hampton Court in 1543, and you are the courtiers in attendance: there are staged events throughout the day, when you can meet help the bride and groom prepare for the wedding, or be the first to congratulate them after the ceremony... They have hired three actors to rotate playing Henry every day for a year, and I must say it really brings everything to life, when you're just wandering around the palace and then everything stops to make way for the King ... You get caught up in the scenario and really believe it's him!


I could go on and on - but you'll just have to go along and see for yourself! It is certainly enough to fill a fun day out, which has been one of the main purposes. Hampton Court is just that little bit too far away (though it is really easy to get to - when the trains are running!) for people to automatically think of going there, but amazingly, they had 16,000 visitors over the Easter bank holiday weekend!! We were some of them - K had to go in anyway, so we arranged to go with friends on Easter Sunday. The range of projects that K was involved in for this was so wide that I really had not that much idea what he was working on, as it was too much to talk about after he'd been hard at it at work all day, so that was the first time I really got the chance to find out, and to see it all in action, and people enjoying themselves. Visitors are encouraged to dress for court, by putting on these fine velvet(een) robes - here's K and our friend Az pretending to be Holbein's Ambassadors!


Not that K can relax now it's all open - he's been involved in a whirl of media coverage, including his spot on Today a few weeks back, and the Time Team special on Tudor palaces on Easter Monday! There's also a documentary going around on the History channel, but no-one we know has Sky, so we have to wait for the DVD to watch that!! And this week he has had to give two study day papers, so ended up working through the night on Monday to get the first one written...

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As a result, we're desperately planning to 'get away from it all' and have a holiday this year, so we're planning a retreat to the Outer Hebrides (literally) for mid-July - the earliest 'window' in both our schedules... But we did make sure to take Easter Monday off, and had an absolutely wonderful day out at Bexhill. I wanted to go to the seaside and see some nice architecture, so we decided on Bexhill because of the De La Warr Pavilion, built in 1935, the UK's first public building to be constructed in the Modernist style.


You just can't take a bad photo of it. There was also something truly amazing about the contrasting colours - of the sea and the sky and the pavilion, and the lawn out front which seemed impossibly green. This picture doesn't do it justice.

We got up reasonably early (considering how tired we were!) and managed to get a 9.30 train, and somehow I'd been organised enough to prepare a thermos of coffee and some hot cross buns for breakfast on the train. We read our books and dozed for the two-hour journey (already sounding good, eh?) Beautiful weather had been forecast for the Easter weekend, which had so far failed to materialise, but the clouds burned off and the sun came out as we sat on a perfectly-located bench overlooking the sea, with an easy view backwards to the pavilion, eating what I am reliably informed were the best fish-and-chips on the South Coast (from Louis's Fish Bar on Sea Road - go there)


We literally spent every last penny we had on this feast and it was worth every one of them!!

Quite a number of boats came out as well - it turned into a gorgeously beautiful day.


The thing was, we had absolutely no mental energy left, so it was the perfect day out, because it was all just so beautiful to look at and soak up, and we pretty much just wandered and sat and gazed all day, without having anything at all to say.

This picture sums up my mental state that day!

We sat on the shingle and K found it endlessly rewarding to throw stones at the sea. He took this picture while lying on the beach!


The added bonus was that while I had known pretty much what to expect from the Pavilion, I was totally unprepared for the gorgeous Victorian Orientalist sea-front cottages - we're seriously considering moving there!


Here are some gratuitous gorgeous views of Bexhill and the Pavilion (it's an exhibition venue, but we had absolutely no difficulty in avoiding looking at any of the art - tea on the terrace was much more the order of the day).

View from the terrace

Up the stairwell © KR

Down the stairwell © KR
I love the colours - though they seem to be slightly flattened here

A meditative view out to sea...

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So it turns out I have an inflamed ulnar. This is compressing the nerves which run down the left side of my body and giving me numbness and tingling sensations in my arm and leg - and making it not so easy to type for long stretches. At least it is that and not some other more worrying cause of numbness and tingling down one side ... it induced some anxiety for several days until I decided to be grown-up and go and see the doctor yesterday. I have to take ibuprofen for two weeks to help the swelling go down and hopefully the symptoms will subside. It is probably caused by how I tuck my arm under my head while sleeping, aggravated by the intensive typing I'm doing while I write my book, and by cycling - apparently this condition is quite common in cyclists, and is also known as "handlebar palsy"!!! What is it with me and oddly-named nervous inflammations?? I had plantar fasciitis in my heel last year!!

I am also under doctor's orders to relax this weekend! Which fortunately coincides with that slight fallow period between finishing one chapter and beginning the planning process of the next - which will also be the last!! (apart from the Introduction) Chapter 4 is about the 19th-century rediscovery of Spain's Islamic past and the revival of 'Moorish' (if you must, though I don't like to) styles in art and architecture... So I plan to do some gentle reading about that today, to get me in the mood - and then my sister is coming over tonight (hurrah!) and we're going to see In the Loop at the Ritzy - the first film we've been to see since Frost/Nixon (oh dear!) ... And tomorrow we're going to plan our holiday, over brunch. Doctor's orders.