The Habit of Art

I like to think this is what K and I both have, but in an active, positive sense, not in the passive, resigned sense that W.H. Auden expresses in Alan Bennett's excellent new play at the National Theatre... which we saw on Thursday night - at the cinema!

The National Theatre have been running a new initiative with their last few productions, called NT Live, whereby live performances are beamed into cinemas around the country and around the world. We were slightly wary of the idea - the magic of the theatre surely comes largely from being there, with all the electricity generated by the living interaction of the actors with each other and with the audience - but we really wanted to see the play, and were having problems finding any available Travelex £10 tickets (somehow these all just evaporate the moment they are released for sale - I am sure there is a way of playing the system, but I haven't figured out what it is yet) and didn't fancy bankrupting ourselves for a seat in the gods...

So partly out of defeat and partly out of curiosity for this newfangled technology we booked tickets to see The Habit of Art down the road at the Ritzy. And it was absolutely brilliant!! There was no less a buzz as we all waited through the countdown for the performance to begin, and rather than the fixed view of the stage which I imagined would be what we saw, we had an absolutely privileged view of the action from a variety of camera angles. It was often very close in to the actors, so you didn't quite get the sense of set which you do when you're at the theatre itself, though the cameras did give wide shots of the stage at the beginning and during the interval. The strangest thing was the interval, when the cameras turned on the audience, and there were we, another audience, watching them, but they couldn't see us... Slightly bizarre.

But the play itself was fantastic!! So so funny and poignant at the same time. I hadn't realised it was a play within a play - perhaps I had read this, but forgot - but effectively the play is a cast of actors rehearsing a new play about Auden and Benjamin Britten, and an imagined encounter between them soon before their deaths, after decades of estrangement. I loved the sense of theatre - so to speak - and how theatre works which was encapsulated within the 'rehearsal' bits, where the play moves out from the intimate focus on Auden, to comment self-referentially on the play itself, on the National itself, on the whole process of making art, how it's the work that counts and what lives on... Really really excellent. Another classic from Bennett, who really is a master of his game.

There were students in the cinema (some annoying ones, who left after about 10 minutes), including a girl sitting behind K taking notes. I loved how this initiative made the theatre so accessible. As a schoolgirl and student I used to get cheap standing tickets at the National, and just lap up the performances - Tom Stoppard's Arcadia, with Felicity Kendal, really sticks in my memory for being a moment when I awakened to how wonderful the theatre was - and this idea of beaming plays into cinemas makes that available to people who can't afford the National's prices, or who live a long long way from where these landmark productions are happening... The list of international venues which broadcast The Habit of Art last Thursday was long in all senses of the word!

London Assurance is the next one, another play we have been having difficulty getting affordable tickets for. Can't wait!

Happy Easter!

Nick sent this to us as an Easter greeting a couple of years ago - it always makes K giggle like a little boy!

Thank goodness for the Easter bank holiday weekend - four days of enforced time off work! It has been a festival of cooking and eating and an orgy of relaxing...

We kicked off the proceedings by hosting a dinner for eight here on Thursday evening, in honour of one of K's colleagues whose contract has come to an end. We started cooking for that on Wednesday night, to fit all the preparations around work, but somehow I still managed to get chained to the kitchen for two hours on the night making salads... The first recipes we have tried from our new cookbook purchase, Ottolenghi, but how yummy and worth the wait! One with broad beans and radishes, another with fennel and feta and sumac, and lots of lemon juice and olive oil in both. A lovely evening, but one which reminded us that it is difficult to entertain eight comfortably in our flat!

On Good Friday, K went into work - it was the first day that the Tudor wine fountain he has been involved with recreating was going to be up and running and serving wine, and he wanted to be around to make sure all went smoothly. I went in to meet him for lunch, then to be introduced in person to the wine fountain - which is just amazing, but more on that anon! I gained the distinction of being the first person ever to pay for a glass of wine from the fountain! I also went round some of the parts of the palace they had made changes to since the last time I had been - and went round the Georgian apartments, which for some reason I had never visited before but really loved, in large part because they were the Hampton Court home of Caroline of Ansbach, wife of George II, who is one of the characters in the second Neal Stephenson book, The Confusion, which I have just finished reading and which in all honesty has made me far more interested in the 18th century than I have ever been! On the train there, I was reading about the celebrations of her 18th birthday, and here I had jumped forward - or back - in time to the apartments she lived in at the end of her life!

Home long before K to prepare some of the food for our Easter Sunday lunch party - braised broad beans in tomatoes and herbs, the first time I had cooked beans from dried, and I think the only advantage of this was that they held together better during the long cooking process because in the end I am not sure the dish was all that tasty! I also made lemony biscuits and blackberry ice cream for dessert, using the blackberries we picked on my birthday last year, which have been taking up space in the freezer since then - along with a blackberry and apple pie filling, and quite a few raspberries as I rediscovered to my interest...

On Saturday we journeyed out to Little Chalfont - via the urban wasteland of Watford, due to multiple engineering works on the railways - for the interment of K's grandfather Robert's ashes, in the churchyard in Chenies where he now rests with Betty, his wife of over 60 years. We had a nice family lunch in the pub nearby, then back to the flat for the last time, to choose any books and CDs we wanted to keep, and help K's parents and uncle load furniture onto the hire van, to clean out cupboards and sort what remains into boxes. The sale should be completed by the end of April - fingers crossed - but the flat should be empty by the end of this week. It suddenly struck K as we were leaving that he would never go back there.

Home to marinade the lamb for Easter Sunday lunch and mix up another batch of blackberry ice cream.

On Sunday morning we had to prepare the rest of the food for Sunday lunch but also receive K's father and uncle and the hire van full of furniture K was inheriting from his grandparents, which he had loaded up the day before. This included two bookcases - one of which was made by his great grandfather who was a cabinet maker - and to make room for these, K had to take everything off the two (smaller) bookcases we already had ... so at one point our sitting room was just a pile of books, and 6 lunch guests due in less than half an hour...! But amazingly everything got delivered, fitted into place and books shoved back into them at random, and by the time the doorbell rang for the first guest, it was as if nothing had ever been out of place!

They're rather beautiful pieces of furniture but they give the flat a strong feeling of living in the past that I haven't quite got used to yet. They're the kind of cabinet that might have furnished this flat when it was originally built in the 1930s.




And so to lunch. We followed a Greek-inspired menu by chef Maria Elia, from the food magazine we subscribe to, Olive. Over the years it has come to seem very repetitive and there is far too much Gordon Ramsay in it for my liking, but in every issue there are always 2 or 3, sometimes more, new recipes which we try, and which keep us experimenting with food, and for want of a good substitute, we keep buying it.

This lunch menu started with halloumi and a nice salad made with fennel, celery, olives and parsley; and in addition to the braised broad beans, was accompanied by lemon-roasted potatoes with capers, and wilted spinach with pine nuts and a dressing made with sultanas, herbs and red wine vinegar. But of course the star of the feast was the paper-wrapped leg of lamb that we had marinated overnight with garlic and plentiful herbs and spices and more lemon juice - quite a number of lemons lost their lives to put our lunch on the table! This was the result:

served up on a lovely mid-19th century platter which I inherited from my grandmother, and enjoyed by all - but especially by K and I for whom this was the first meat to pass our lips in 6 weeks!! It was gorgeous!!

A long lingering Sunday lunch with Lindsay & Russell and Wanda & Az, that went on until about quarter to 8, which is how we like our Sunday lunches, and all the better for not having to go to work today...

And so to Easter Monday. We finally got a lie-in this morning - K shocked me into wakefulness by looking at the clock and saying it was 1.15!! Which fortunately it wasn't - the pillow was obscuring the first 1! A lazy breakfast - I am now reading the 3rd of the Neal Stephenson books, The System of the World, which K is jealous about because he hasn't read this one yet! - and then we took ourselves off to the Ritzy for some mindless entertainment in the form of Clash of the Titans, which was great! I love the original film and of course this was nothing like that, but there's nothing like a bit of Greek mythology to get you going!

It was shown in 3D, as everything seems to be these days - the Ritzy had obviously run out of 3s for the board out front where they still put up all the film titles of what's on that week in the traditional way, which I love, and so they were advertising Clash of the Titans in 4D! What would that be?? You are actually in the movie I suppose! But I like the idea of it because it always reminds me of Victorian stereoscope images - the 3D glasses you have to put on are literally the modern equivalent of the stereoscope glasses you used to have to use. Though the technology for creating these images in film-form has obviously greatly advanced, somehow this little bit of lo-fi kit is such a pleasing link to the past...

K is now sorting books, CDs and DVDs, trying to fit everything onto the new bookcases, which have smaller and narrower shelves, and integrating the not-very-restrained pile of books and CDs we brought from his grandfather's. If we end up moving to this new flat, chances are that none of this is going to fit...

Bafta Sundays

For the last three Sunday mornings, we have gone to the cinema. Our marvellous local arthouse cinema, The Ritzy, has been showing all the films nominated for the BAFTA award for best 'Film Not in the English Language', and we have been making the most of our membership to catch up on the films we didn't see the first time around. It has also been a really lovely way to relax, which we're trying to get better about doing at the weekend. The Ritzy now has this clever system where you print at home a barcode which contains your booking confirmation, so no more queueing to pick up tickets - you just need to get there in time to buy a coffee from the bar, have your barcode zapped and away you go. Marvellous.

This morning's film was Coco Avant Chanel, which was beautifully made and enjoyable - and my goodness Audrey Tautou looks so much like Chanel! - but I still found it a bit disappointing. Of course the film's title is very clear about the fact that it is not about how she built up her haute couture empire, yet at the same time it tried to be a little bit about that, and I found that was actually what I wanted to know more about - not about her relationships with the men who helped her get to a position of being able to set up her business, since at the very least it seemed - from the film - that she didn't want to depend on men. So I found that rather unresolved and unsatisfying.

Last Sunday we sojourned in the colourful fantasy world of Pedro Almodóvar, watching Abrazos Rotos (Broken Embraces) - as K put it, basically the same film he always makes, about lost or unrequited love and obsessions, but my god he's good at it! So that was the usual delight - and so brightly coloured and patterned that your eyes feel like they have something wrong with them when you come out of the cinema, especially since it was daylight! But it very much made me want to jump on the first plane to Madrid...

And the week before, it was Das Weisse Band (The White Ribbon), the Michael Haneke film which was strangely exactly like The Castle, which we went to see at the BFI a few months ago - his film of an unfinished literary fragment of Proust, which just stops abruptly at the place Proust's fragment stops, so in your mind the characters are forever locked in their Proustian world of cyclical absurdities... The White Ribbon is probably the film that I rated the most out of these three, though it was sinister and disturbing, more so for the way it begins with a tranquil picture of a German village before the First World War and through accidents, murders and heightened suspicion among an enclosed community gradually rolls back all the ways in which adults abuse children... Haneke has apparently called it a film about the root cause of all terrorist acts.

The Ritzy's favourite for the Bafta was Let The Right One In, the beautiful Swedish vampire film which we also loved, but in the end the winner was Un Prophète, deservedly so I think as that really was in another league from the other nominations. It missed out on an Oscar - unsurprisingly I suppose, as those nominations seem to be more about securing television ratings for the awards ceremony than rewarding good film making... (though I am glad Avatar didn't win Best Picture). The foreign language award went to an Argentinian film I have never heard of (El Secreto de Sus Ojos) - but I hope it's released in the UK soon.

The whole idea of a foreign language category is so ridiculous anyway. These are just excellent films - better usually than most of the English-language films - and shouldn't be judged according to a different standard. Or rather, why should the English-language films be favoured, when often they seem to be scraping the barrel to get a list together, especially now they've made it longer.

It's like 'world music'. We like to put into boxes and ghettoes anything we don't (sometimes literally) understand.

Anyway - I've been enjoying Sunday morning cinema. Not sure what I'll do without it next weekend...

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We also went to see Banksy's film this week, Exit Through the Gift Shop. K and Cornelius both loved it - K was in stitches most of the time - but I have to admit, I was utterly bemused for most of it... It purported to be a documentary about a documentarist making a film about street art, but it was and it wasn't that. Like Banksy's own street art - or his recent 'interventions' at Bristol Museum (which I really wish I had had the chance to see) - it looks like one thing from a distance, and then you realise it is something else entirely. Thing is, I am still not sure I've worked it out...

Saturdays in the British Library

This has been our habit for a goodly while now, but since the start of the year, it has become a regular routine. There is something very relaxing about spending a quiet day in the library - when you're academics like us, and what you love doing is your research, yet have such hectic, crazy jobs that largely involve meeting other people's deadlines so that research gets pushed to the sidelines, ie your own time. It gives us the chance to spend a companionable day together, and we get on with work we need or want to do.


The British Library is an amazing building - the largest public building erected in the UK during the 20th century, apparently. K calls it 'the ziggurat of learning', and there is something awe-inspiring about approaching the building across that wide open plaza - which sits atop six storeys of book stacks - with the neo-Gothic spires of St Pancras station encrusting its horizon. It's so well-designed to frame the view of that historic building, and be sympathetic to its environment yet architecturally assertive at the same time.

We've taken to using the Manuscripts Reading Room. This is because K regularly looks at actual manuscripts, though I can make no such claim. Humanities I is the biggest reading room, which tends to get packed out with undergraduates. Serious readers use Rare Books & Music instead. Scholars ascend the conspicuously located staircase to the ivory tower that is Manuscripts, which is always pleasantly empty, dotted with academics engaged in the serious business of primary research. I call up printed books, which the librarians at the issuing counter are so uninterested in that they rarely even ask me which desk number I am sitting at when I go to collect them. That is after they have looked down their noses at me for only consulting printed works produced during the 20th or 21st centuries.

It's always pleasantly sociable too. The library is often packed on a Saturday - we're not the only saddoes that spend their weekends engaged in intellectual pursuits. Most of the other readers are regulars, and creatures of habit, who usually sit at the same desks or put their coats and bags away in the same lockers. We certainly do. And we're often bumping into people we know. We see Patricia there on such a regular basis that we often have lunch together.

And then at the end of a productive day, you file out feeling virtuous, and because it's only 5 o'clock, there's still a whole evening of relaxing ahead of you.

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After the library yesterday, we headed for Chinatown for an early dinner, and then to the theatre - the Donmar Warehouse for the last-night performance of Red, the new play by John Logan about Mark Rothko during the years he was working on the Seagram commission. You can read my post about last year's exhibition at Tate Modern, which reunited those paintings, here. The play was absolutely fantastic - I had forgotten it was the last night, but clearly knew that when I booked the tickets, and in retrospect it made sense of the almost violently passionate performances that the only two characters presented last night. Though perhaps that's how it's been every night. Alfred Molina kissed his hand to the stage when they went out after their second curtain call.

The Donmar is a fantastically intimate almost in-the-round space, which seats only 250 people and puts on amazing shows. We went to see Life is a Dream there with Gareth last year, which was also a revelation. The set for Red was Rothko's studio in the Bowery, and the designers had recreated the feeling of being in a real artist's studio, with every surface encrusted with dried (red) paint. The centrepiece was a gigantic 'easel' from which hung a series of really good replica Rothkos - I would love to know how they got that genuine oil painting feel. Each 'scene' was punctuated by a different painting - Rothko and his studio assistant (played by Alfred Molina and Eddie Redmayne, both excellent) would lower the canvas on its pulley system and carry it over to the back wall of the theatre where there was a stack of 'in progress' canvases, and bring out another one. As the play went on, and Rothko's mood became darker and more despairing - as he realised the ultimate irony, tragedy even, of hanging his paintings on the walls of a fashionable New York restaurant - more and more black took over the surface of those pulsating (the word used in the play) red canvases...

The play itself was a battle of words and wits between Rothko - as the synecdoche of the past-it generation of Abstract Expressionists - and his young assistant - a painter himself, of the Pop Art generation. It was about art and philosophy, seeing and thinking, but also about ageing and the human urge to hang on to a past that seems to be slipping away. They had sold out of all the scripts, but the next time we're at the National Theatre I plan to buy a copy in the bookshop and read it again, since the writing seemed to capture that intangible ability to talk about art, as well as the spiritual quality of those Seagram paintings.

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It was the second amazing thing we'd seen in as many nights. On Friday night we saw Un Prophète - the new Jacques Audiard film - at the Ritzy. It's been haunting both of us ever since. It's gritty and hard to watch sometimes, but slow-moving and meditative too, and newcomer Tahar Rahim, who is in almost every frame, is just fantastic.

I've been trying to relax in the evenings this week. I sent off the article on Almoravid religious architecture on Sunday night and have been feeling pretty exhausted as a result of not really having had a break the last two weekends straight. And since things are heating up with the Ceramics Galleries installation phase, I need to be on the ball. I've been waking myself up thinking about it quite a bit lately - usually about 2.30 in the morning, I wake up with music playing in my head, and work thoughts crowding in, and the only way to drown them out is to play myself back to sleep with something on the iPod. I've also gone and got a stinking cold, which hit me out of nowhere mid-week, so I have been feeling a bit under par. I still managed to get all my ceramics labels written and sent off on time though!

Another busy week...

Capilla de los Condestables, Burgos Cathedral © KR

You might recognise this picture - it was the image we used for our Christmas greeting last year. We liked it so much, we used it for the December picture on our calendar. It's a photo K took of one of the beautiful openwork domes in the Cathedral at Burgos, where we visited last May - an example of the Islamic influence on the art of Christian Spain through the prominent eight-pointed star. I think you can just about see that the central detail is a figure group showing the holy family gathered round the infant Christ in the manger -

framed within a fiery halo that looks more like a wreath than sculpted stone. This dome is in the Capilla de los Condestables, founded at the end of the 15th century, and full of amazing sculpture.

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The weeks are just zipping past at the moment. On the one hand this means that the Christmas break is just around the corner, on the other it is scary how much work I need to finish before then. Sigh. This week I have worked very long days and been out every night. At the start of the week, we had two opening events for the Medieval and Renaissance Galleries, which look absolutely stunningly beautiful and amazing - what a triumph. On Wednesday I attended the Khalili Memorial Lecture at SOAS, annually part of the Islamic Art Circle lecture series, and on Thursday it was a pre-Christmas gathering of the Islamic Art discussion group I am part of - we had not managed to meet up for months (normally we try to meet once a month), and while the meeting's 'assignment' was ostensibly my report on the conference in Córdoba, we pretty much decided to keep it as a friendly gathering and gossip at an (overpriced) Lebanese restaurant in Soho. Friday, thank goodness, was an evening off - though I had a good long chat with my sister. Looks like she might have part-time work at the Hebridean smokehouse, so I'm anticipating a neverending supply of gorgeous hot-smoked salmon!!

Then last night we met up with Cornelius after our usual Saturday in the library (we have been working in the National Art Library the last few weeks, a gorgeous Victorian library and one I love working in, even though it's a bit like going to work on a Saturday...) to see A Serious Man at the Ritzy, followed by the pub. I enjoyed the film, and thought it was an excellent piece of film-making by the Coen brothers, but I still don't know what really happened... The final visual metaphor of dark clouds on the horizon indicating, I guess, that real life does not have happy-ever-after resolutions... But I am a bit fed up of seeing films that just abruptly end - the week before, we went to see The Castle at the NFT, an adaptation by Michael Haneke of a fragmentary short story by Kafka. After about two and a half hours, this abruptly cut to a black screen and the voiceover, "This is where Kafka's fragment ends". And that was that. In that case, it somehow worked. In my mind, the wonderful Ulrich Mühe - der landvermesser - is endlessly lost in the surreality of that frozen world, endlessly trying to obtain an entré to the castle...

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K got his new glasses on Monday. The bridge of his old pair snapped while we were in Oxford in October, visiting Bob and Bev for the weekend, and since then he has been carrying around a bottle of superglue and his even older pair of prescription sunglasses, for when they unexpectedly snap again. This happened as he was cycling home one day, but fortunately the tight hat that he wears to keep his ears and head warm also served to keep the glasses in position on his nose! So eventually he organised himself an eye test, discovered that his sight had drastically worsened (probably to do with the eye strain during writing up his PhD - this happened to me too, when I developed migraines for the first time), but now finally has a new pair of large round tortoiseshell specs that I think make him look rather like Alan Bennett. I'm still getting used to them, but they're an improvement on the pair he threatened to get, which made him look like David Hockney. Which one of those two distinguished artistes would I rather live with...? A good question!

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We're not impressed with a leaflet that Lambeth Labour party have put through the door today. It basically spins their involvement in our Residents' Association's fight against the planning proposal from Lambeth College, to imply that they have been leading the charge on the part of their poor embattled residents. Which is not true. Actually they have done nothing, other than lend a seemingly sympathetic ear (when our reps could actually get in to see them), then say in the last meeting that they supported the College's application. They are turning us and our cause into an election issue, because the Labour party are so clearly going to lose resoundingly at the next General Election, whenever that's called for. They've touted themselves round Brixton Hill Court today in a blatent attempt to get us all to vote for them. K has taken down the two posters they stuck up on the public notice boards.

Spring Cleaning!

Hard to believe, as housework is probably the Thing I Hate Above All Else, but gently over the course of the last week we've been having a clear-out and a clean-up - K has gone through all the clothes in his wardrobe and binned or charity shopped about half, and I actually hoovered the flat (well, Dysoned, to be strictly accurate) on Saturday morning. It is one of the few activities in life where you see immediate results - not that this makes me want to do it any more often, but it is rather satisfying when you do. I picked up a fridge magnet somewhere a few years ago, which says - "Dull women have immaculate houses". I immediately connected with this concept, and the magnet is still going strong, stuck to the boiler! Anyway the weather has certainly been springy, so it is obviously something in the air - but it still hasn't made me want to clean the oven...

We've been relaxing over this May Day bank holiday weekend - K has a week off work now, spending some of the time off in lieu that he has accrued on the Henry VIII project. I decided to relax too, though the last week's work has not been exactly rigorous, and I have not got very far at all with Chapter 4 - quite a lot of urgent last-minute sorting of papers and "I had just better read this one last article..." Anyway I have to pull my finger out and really get into it this week, since it is now MAY and I suddenly only have a month of research leave left, which is somewhat terrifying, considering how much there still is to do - and who knows how much reworking to accommodate my readers' comments...

Anyway, we're relaxing today. We have been very fortunate to be invited round to friends' houses every day this long weekend, so we have eaten some very fine meals, and had some very fine conversation, and a very nice time all round! Lunch on Saturday with Kirstin in Pilgrims' Cloisters, the always unexpectedly gorgeous oasis of Victorian residential architecture which is the only remotely old thing still standing in a sea of tower-block estates in Camberwell... Yesterday in Guildford, with Alison and Steve, meeting Nate for the first time (though I can't believe he is already 8 months' old!) and being introduced to the world of Rainbow Magic books which Ellie and her 4-year-old friends absolutely love! There are nearly 80 of these books, and there's a fairy for everything you could possibly conceive of in life - from Alice the Tennis Fairy, to Tasha the Tap Dance fairy (this was the first one I read to Ellie, so will always hold a special place in my heart!) I was amazed - something about these books utterly mesmerised little Ellie... Whoever came up with this idea is clearly raking it in!!

Today we had lunch with Cornelius in Kennington (I do like it when we can travel to and from friends' places just on the bus), followed by a film at the Ritzy. We often go and see films with Cornelius, and it's really nice as a way to see things you would not otherwise think to go to. We suggested State of Play, he suggested Let the Right One In - which I have to say I knew very little about but had gathered that it involved vampires and was, according to the poster, a "chilling fairytale", which was enough to put me off wanting to see it, and avoiding reading any reviews. Normally I only watch 'horror' movies (though it defies that categorisation) under extreme protest, though Salem's Lot, to which this film nods in at least one memorable scene, was once a favourite film, but most recently, the closest I have been to vampires is watching the last few series of Angel, the friendly vampire-with-a-soul who crusades against evil, which is all rather outlandish and amusing TV, in a Joss Whedon kind of way. But when Cornelius suggested this film, I looked up Peter Bradshaw's review, whose critical opinion I utterly trust, which made me think it could be interesting - not quite Rainbow Magic, but certainly another way of taking my mind off my work...! In the end, we flipped a coin (when was the last time I did that?!) and Let the Right One In was the winner.

And I loved it! It's an achingly beautiful film - set in snowy urban Sweden, with a quiet but beautiful soundtrack, not much dialogue, and quite minimalist when it comes. I liked the fact that the subtitles were quite minimalist as well - there was a lot more Swedish on screen, in newspaper cuttings, and notes between the young protagonists, than was translated, and I thought that was a sympathetic way of respecting the lack of spoken word. I won't tell you the story - read the review, if you want to know, it won't give too much away. If you're worried like I was about the horror movie aspect, don't be - it is gruesome in parts, but won't wake you up with nightmares (I hope!!) But it's hauntingly memorable, and as other reviews have said, it's a "major addition to the vampire genre", and "infinitely superior to Twilight" - which I have not seen, and quite frankly don't wish to after this! Though my heart sank to read just now that a "wholly unnecessary" American remake is in pre-production... Why do they do this?? Is it that taxing to read subtitles? We'd gone to an afternoon showing, and it was odd to re-emerge into daylight - everything seemed slightly disturbed, not quite normal. Cornelius seemed quite shaken, so I think we'll be going to see State of Play next time!

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It being May, though, it must be time to share the picture from our home-made calendar! This does not cease to bring joy by the way - it was an excellent thing to do!

Iglesia de San Antonio, Aranjuez © KR

This is another photo from our trip to Spain last May - nearly a year ago, which is unbelievable... K joined me in Madrid halfway through my month's trip, and the next day I made him go to a palace, which was hardly a fun holiday activity for him, considering he works in one - and one that has the best preserved set of royal rooms in the Baroque style in Europe, apparently, so dragging him to Aranjuez, a day-trip outside the capital, which was the Spanish monarchy's summer palace, remodelled in the 18th century to be fashionably Baroque, was, in retrospect, a bit cruel. But he seemed to love it - he went into photography mode, and took a few thousand images that day I think! No pictures allowed inside the palace, though, which was annoying since my reason for wanting to go there was to see the 'Moorish' smoking room that had been added to the royal apartments by Isabel II in 1850, commissioned from Rafael Contreras, the man who was working for her as restorer at the Alhambra palace, and was built and decorated entirely in the Alhambra style. It was pretty fantastic and worth putting up with the Baroque enfilade of rooms, and the truly monstrous chinoiserie porcelain room. We also had some very fine strawberries and cream, which is the thing to do at Aranjuez apparently.

Anyway we had some time to kill before taking the train back to Madrid, and had a wander around the very small town, which was all remodelled at the same time as the palace. K got particularly carried away taking photos of this church and a barrack block next to it. I am used to having to wait for him to take his photos and catch me up, but usually there are nice things to look at, so it doesn't matter, but I had had my fill of Baroque for one day, and I think it was starting to rain. Anyway I had to phone him to see where he was! But now he has seen the Baroque exhibition, and like me, was frustrated about the lack of a definition of what the Baroque style actually is, according to K, this church is typical Baroque because it's bendy. So there you go.

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Today is the 30th anniversary of Margaret Thatcher coming to power as the first female prime minister. I'm not celebrating, and I always think it's slightly debatable how much of a woman she was, but it is still remarkable, when you look around at our international politicians and see how few of them are women. When we had the G20 summit in town a few weeks ago, there was all this coverage about the meal that Jamie Oliver was cooking for the presidential spouses, and which talented British women were going to be invited, and who was going to sit next to who... And I just thought, hey, does Angela Merkel's husband come to that dinner? Turns out he stayed behind in Berlin!! Why? Because it's too humiliating for him to be one man among all those women at the patronising spousal dinner?? One coup for women I am happy to celebrate in the news this week is the appointment of our first ever female Poet Laureate - not that I am sure this is an institution I entirely support, though it sounds like Carol Ann Duffy has a strong sense of the good that poetry can bring to peoples' lives and of the good she can do in this role. So good luck to her. And I also appreciate the way that the discussion this week has not been all about her sexuality - which it certainly would have been in Thatcher's day.

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.