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.

Three nights in the Sublime Porte

as the Venetians used to call Istanbul...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trois jours en Paris

Phew. February. Glad that's (nearly) over. We've all been working like crazy people preparing to install the Ceramics Study Galleries (26,000 objects in visible storage!!), which finally actually begins on Monday. I didn't think I'd be saying this but I might be just about ready. I'm the first to install - weird to think that one of the Middle Eastern pots I put in on Monday will be the first object in those new dense displays, where the intention is they will remain for several decades. So the most important thing to ponder over this weekend is which object it should be...

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The highlight of the last few weeks, however, was our long weekend in Paris last weekend - for our (14th!!) anniversary. We booked Eurostar tickets months ago when there was a half price offer, and both took Friday off work, got a breakfast-time train, and sailed off through the French countryside... Trains really are the only way to travel - especially if they are fast and efficient like the few European high speed lines I've travelled on. Our train left on the dot. Alas, we ran into a security alert on the way back, which meant a horrendous queue to check in, and the train leaving an hour later than scheduled - but it could have been worse: I have just seen that the passengers who left on the train before ours (also delayed) had to endure the additional nightmare of their train breaking down in the tunnel outside Ashford and then sitting in the dark for two hours until another train turned up to rescue them! Apparently our train bypassed theirs! I had no idea - poor people...

Paris is just so beautiful. There really is just no place like it. It was an extra special treat for K who - unbelievably - had not been there for about 10 years. Not since we used to go and visit my aunt and uncle and cousins, who were living and working there for a few years, at Christmas times. Happy memories of their wonderful, typically Parisienne house in Le Vesinet; the night it snowed and fell so heavily that it woke K up... I have had the fortune to go to Paris a few times since then, on courier trips or research visits, so as always it was a treat to go, but it was extra to see it through K's excitement.

We stayed near the Palais Royal and just walked everywhere. That's what you have to do in Paris - it's an important part of soaking up the atmosphere and the architecture. Flaneant, indeed - though sadly we couldn't put our hands on that wonderful book by Edmund White (The Flâneur: A Stroll through the Paradoxes of Paris) which is obviously one of the books currently lodged in K's parents' attic...

I had stayed in this area before, near the Galérie Véro-Dodat (built 1826), and had noticed a lovely looking restaurant which only seemed to be open at lunchtimes, when I was working, so we headed straight there after dumping our bag at the hotel, and jumped straight into a wonderful French food experience. Not only that but completely unexpectedly the ceiling was covered in anaglyptic (embossed) wallpaper in the Alhambra style, which must have been up there since the late 19th century! I was very chuffed at such a fortuitous find.

Anaglyptic wallpaper was popular in the late 19th century, especially among those who wanted to create rich interiors decorated in the revivalist styles that were en vogue at that time - the decoration of the Alhambra being one of the most widespread of these international historicist styles.

The Galérie Véro-Dodat (named for the two men who built it, in 1826). It's one of the few surviving commercial passages in Paris - one of the best preserved too, I think, since it seems to have all the original shop fronts and many of their signs. The tables you can see about halfway down are outside the restaurant where we had lunch.

From there we wandered around the Marais, meandering along to the Place des Vosges, taking in the various gorgeous 16th-century hôtels and modern boutiques along the way. Dinner in the atmospheric Coude à Coude on Rue St Honoré where they squeeze you in "elbow to elbow". For the rest of the weekend, we went medieval - though K was a little surprised (I think) to discover he is no longer a 'proper' medievalist: nearly 4 hours in the Musée de Cluny, and he was disappointed that there wasn't more 16th-century stuff! He still managed to take about 10,000 photographs though.

One of the amazing windows at Sainte Chappelle. It is a relatively small space and was absolutely packed with tour parties, which completely removed any sense of awe or tranquility at being in the space. Every now and again some laconic guard would ssssssshhh!!!! everyone, until the chatter inevitably started up again. It was a little bit like being in the Sistine Chapel - not an experience I enjoyed very much the last time I went.

We did the main churches of medieval Paris - Sainte Chappelle, with its truly stunning stained glass windows, though the apse was behind some rather unattractive hoardings while they do a big restoration project on the glass and lead fittings; Notre Dame, where they were conducting a mass confirmation service for all the parishes in Paris (it seemed), so it was crowded and full of buzz and activity; St Germain des Pres, which has rather suffered from over heavy restoration and repainting in the 19th century; and Saint Denis, the royal pantheon - where K was happy to discover more 16th-century tomb sculpture than is reasonable in a church. But it was the site and excuse for another fine culinary experience - at the extremely elegant Mets du Roy, facing on to the square in front of the basilica. Expensive but amazing beef fillet.

I have always thought that going away for a long weekend like that in the middle of a busy work period would be exhausting - but, on the contrary, it was invigorating and relaxing, because there was so much to see and think about, that I spent very little time at all thinking or worrying about work. So more city breaks - that's the resolution. Especially to cities we can get to on the train. We're thinking Bruges next.

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In Paris we also took a holiday from K's enforced giving up of meat for Lent - only partly because France is, I think, officially the worst place in the world to be a vegetarian. Since getting back, though, he has been strictly enforcing this new regime. Even fish is off the menu. Practically, from a shopping and cooking point of view, it is easiest if we do this together - but I told him I couldn't guarantee that I wouldn't eat meat at lunch times. But so far I haven't and I am not missing it. Though I did join some colleagues for dinner at China City after the SOAS Islamic art research seminar yesterday evening, and I could not resist the prawns...

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I have not posted the calendar image for this month, since it is one you have seen before - something that might become a common occurrence, since the pictures we have selected for the calendar are some of the iconic images of last year, many of which I have already shared here. This month the image is the Natural History Museum in the heavy snow of last February - something which seemed magically rare when I wrote about it at the time, but which has been repeated this year, almost ad infinitum. When it first snowed, early on in the New Year, people were off work and schools were closed and fun and toboganning was had in the streets... But after weeks of the big chill, even the school kids didn't seem to care much for snowball fights any more.

It has been absolutely freezing, though in London in the last couple of days it has started to get milder. Cycling through Battersea Park on the way to work yesterday morning, I was suddenly assaulted by an amazing scent, and then I noticed a huge carpet of crocuses, all about to burst into bloom. How wonderful if spring was actually on the way!

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I finished reading the 900-page-long book - Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver, the first trilogy-in-one of his Baroque Cycle. It's a fictionalised and partly fantastical historical novel about Europe during the 17th century, woven around Natural Philosophy and the Royal Society (appropriate in its 350th year), the rise and fall of kings, money, commerce, pirates, Puritans, brilliantly and amusingly written... I had nothing better to read so I carried straight on to the next volume, The Confusion - 800 pages this time. There is another one after that too. These may be the only books I read all year! But I'm completely sucked in. Highly recommended reading.

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...

Roses, a Palace, Pancakes, a Cathedral

I’ve got quite a bit of catching up to do. Don’t worry, I won’t give you a blow by blow account of the last two weeks, which have been somewhat manic, while I try to ‘clear the decks’ (i.e. most of my workload for the next three months) to free up my time to start writing my book … on Monday!!! No, just the highlights – and the highest (?) of these was that a week ago today we celebrated our 13th anniversary! K sent me flowers at work – beautiful, proper, long-stemmed red roses, 13 of them of course, that were just perfectly in bloom, and they smelt gorgeous too! It’s so rare to find roses that actually have a scent! The lady at reception called me during my lunch break, and I couldn’t understand what she was telling me, it was so unexpected – I thought a visitor had turned up for me out of the blue! But no… I felt rather embarrassed but also extremely chuffed as I walked through the Museum to my office – of course I bumped into someone almost immediately, who I don’t really know but who of course stopped and asked me if it was my birthday. Once in the office I had to show them off to the ladies, and word apparently got around because later in the afternoon, people were coming in from other offices to look at them!! This is how perfect they were:


I had to guard them carefully on the tube on the way to the restaurant where we were meeting – a seemingly endless almost-circuit of the Circle Line. It was a bit busy, but when I eventually got a seat and sat down, the bouquet was nearly as tall as me!! When the lady next to me got up a few stops later, she tripped on it and they fell over – when I picked them up, she said, “Oh what beautiful roses!” and a nearby gentleman said, “They were!” It was funny, but also one of those slightly uncomfortable moments where you make brief contact with your fellow passengers – everyone laughs, then immediately go back to being complete strangers…

We ate at the Bleeding Heart Tavern, where there has been a pub since 1746, which is now one of a group of French restaurants, all at slightly different levels of formality, housed in the tiny Bleeding Heart Yard, near to Farringdon station, in the ancient heart of the City of London. It had been recommended to us by friends aeons ago, and we only just got round to going. It was a lovely meal and really reasonably priced – and to top it all off, they brought us a chocolate cake with ‘Happy Anniversary’ written on the plate around it, on the house! It was the roses that did it… I think we're going to keep going back, trying a different eating establishment each time (working our way up to the grand restaurant)

A post-prandial drink (as my father used to say…) in the nearby Mitre, another historic 18th-century pub, and a late night walk along High Holborn to pick up the bus home… A lovely celebration!

(The roses are still going strong after a week – sitting here on my desk, behind my computer, looking increasingly dark and velvety as they mature. I sniff them when I need a moment of pause.)

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We continued the festivities on Sunday by going to Windsor for the day. Again, somewhere we had always intended to visit, but had never been. Amazingly (for us), we left promptly and were in Windsor by 10.30, and wandering around the palace by 11. The Queen was in residence, as the flag was flying from the top of the keep.


It was wonderfully quiet, partly because it was early and cold (that promised sunshine never materialised, but shone on Saturday instead, when we were in the library!), and also because we were visiting at the end of the Half Term week, so I guess the children were suitably exhausted and the parents preparing to go back to work. South Kensington was utterly packed last week, as it always is at Half Term, but it seemed busier than usual – museums are free, and in this economic climate they’re going to be an attractive option for families looking for entertainment on a budget. But apart from quite a lot of tourists, there were not many other people at Windsor, which made it more relaxing. A contrast, as well, from when we visited Buckingham Palace last summer – not out of choice, I might add, it was K’s mother’s birthday treat … though, in the end, it was quite interesting, but utterly besieged by what can only be described (and this is not intended in a disparaging way) as working class people. I thought it was utterly tasteless (I note I am using “utterly” a lot in this post) – the Queen deigns to throw open her doors to her poorest subjects for a few months in the summer, and charges them thirty pounds each for the privilege. Talk about redistribution of wealth.

Anyway Windsor was sort of similar to Buckingham Palace, in that everything is actually very modern, ‘medievalised’ in the late 19th century. I suppose it’s not surprising, as it’s a lived-in palace, so you can’t expect it to be historic as such, but it is somehow a little disappointing to discover, nevertheless – perhaps because we are fortunate enough to live our daily lives surrounded by history. The ‘Drawings Gallery’ was mostly filled with photographs of and paraphernalia associated with Prince Charles – not really sure why, unless it was supposed to inspire us all with pride at the life and works of our future monarch… Actually, pretty much the best thing about visiting the palace was seeing Queen Mary’s Dolls’ House, an absolutely fantastic, fully-furnished model of an aristocratic London house, in miniature (it’s on a scale of 12:1). Made in 1924, the house was designed by Lutyens, and the garden by Gertrude Jekyll! We decided that the best job in the world would be ‘Curator of the Queen’s Dolls’ House’!

After exhausting ourselves traipsing around the State Apartments, we went off in search of lunch, which we found in the marvellous ‘Crooked House of Windsor’


located on officially the shortest street in Britain!


What a Dickensian confluence of circumstances!

We wandered around some more and eventually found our way to the very lovely Horse and Groom pub, right opposite the back door to the castle, where we sat in the window with our drinks, until we noticed the queue forming for Evensong, soon after 5, which we then went and joined. This was half-ploy to get into St George’s Chapel, which is closed on Sundays unless you attend the services – but is also a lovely thing to do, and the kind of thing I never would have experienced unless I knew K. But the Chapel is definitely the element of Windsor that is most worth visiting – and the most authentic too, being a genuine 14th-century monument.

(This is one of K's wide-angle photos)

The main part of the nave was all in darkness, and we were guided into the choir, which was candlelit, as we were there at twilight, and extremely impressive, with its wonderful rib-vaulted ceiling, contemporary with that at Westminster Abbey, and the choirstalls bedecked with the arms and achievements of the Knights of the Order of the Garter, for which this is the chapel. Enamelled copper plates of every knight that has ever been a member of the Order, since its foundation in the 14th century, are attached to the backs of the upper stalls – I was sitting next to John Major’s stall, who is clearly one of the current 24 Knights of the Order. All this really makes it a unique place to sit for an hour and hear beautiful monastic chant, sung that evening by the Lay Clerks (I guess the choristers were still on Half Term too), and to look up and around and be filled with beauty, as the sun gradually faded outside the stained glass windows. The two clerics who read the lessons and prayers were certainly at the top of their profession – imagine being almost the private chaplain to the Queen – and they had perhaps the most sonorous voices I have ever heard. They did a good reading – particularly the first one, which was a reading about Elijah in the wilderness, from the Old Testament, and vividly dramatic. We weren’t allowed to linger long at the end of the service, but this will be a beautiful place to return to. But how wonderful to experience it that way for the first time!

Since the trains back to London only left once an hour, we had missed the 6 o’clock by the time we emerged from the Chapel, so it was back to the Horse and Groom for some puddings (a gorgeous melting chocolate pot for me, spotted dick and custard for K), and then a gentle amble down the hill to the station in time for the 7 o’clock train. A really lovely relaxing day off.

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Tuesday was pancake day – Shrove Tuesday – which would seem to be a peculiarly English thing, according to this pancake-focused blog on the Guardian website which I had some fun browsing that night!

Of course we made pancakes – too many, it turned out, which we finished off last night, which is against the law apparently. Doing a baked dish with stuffed pancakes always sounds like a quick thing to do, but this one wasn’t, although it was delicious when it was eventually ready, at about 10.30! Pancakes rolled around a stuffing of shredded spinach, pine nuts and red onion, stirred up with ricotta, bechamel and parmesan, seasoned with nutmeg, and smothered in tomato sauce and more bechamel. Delish.

K has given up alcohol for Lent (again), which meant he was really grouchy when he came home from work last night!

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Today I visited Salisbury Cathedral on our departmental away day. It was fantastic! All the more so because something clicked with me that should have clicked before. The first thing was the discovery that William Golding lived and taught in Salisbury, footsteps from the Cathedral…

… and the second was that Salisbury Cathedral not only has a spire on top of its central tower, but that this spire, which was added in the early 14th century, is the highest in England, at 123 m (404 ft) tall. According to the Cathedral’s website, it weighs 6,500 tons, and our guide pointed out to us how the tall Purbeck marble columns at the crossing have bent under its weight.


All this gave me a whole new perspective on reading Golding’s The Spire, a remarkable book which I read last year, an historical imagining (one can’t really call it a novel) of the feverish obsession which drives the dean of an unnamed cathedral to believe God has instructed him through visions to build an immense spire, but his obsession causes many casualties – physical and spiritual – along the way. I found it a difficult book to read, because you really find yourself caught up in the protagonist’s fevered mental state – but it’s an amazing work of literature, and one that is all the more meaningful to me now that I have realised that Golding was inspired (ha ha) by the very real monument at the end of his street.

Over and out.

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!