I know, I know...

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

Photo © KR

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

Photo © KR

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

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


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

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

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

Photo © KR

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

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

Photo © KR

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

Photo © KR

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

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

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

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

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

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

East Window

Yesterday we went with my parents to the Family Carol Concert at St Martin-in-the-Fields. K and I used to go to concerts there quite often but we haven't been for ages - perhaps because the repertoire began to seem a bit repetitive. We certainly haven't been since the church unveiled its new refurbishment in April 2008 - already 18 months ago, and particularly remiss of us since my mother worked on that fundraising campaign. So, while I very much enjoyed the concert - sung by the London Concert Choir, with some really unusual, quite folkish songs sung by them, and the hit parade of traditional carols accompanied lustily by us - I spent quite a lot of time transfixed by the new East Window.

St Martin's is one of London's gorgeous Baroque churches, built in 1726 by the architect James Gibbs. It has a wonderful open and light interior, heightened by the recent restoration of its plasterwork decoration, and its clear glass windows. Its original windows were blown out by a bomb in the Second World War, and as part of the refurbishment the church has commissioned a really significant work of contemporary art. Artists were invited to create a work that "embodied light" and worked in harmony with the historic interior, that would "challenge preconceptions and stimulate debate", as well as encouraging reflection and contemplation. So no small task. But the winning design - by husband and wife artist and architect collaborators, Pip Horne and Shirazeh Houshiary - has really achieved this.

The stainless steel framework ripples outwards from an opaque ellipse that seems to pulse at the centre of the window. I have to say that the resemblance of the window's structure to the crucifixion is the last thing I noticed, perhaps because I am not fully alert to Christian symbolism; but of the surprisingly little information about it I've been able to find online, this seems to be the first thing that people comment on - apparently, following an uncharacteristically tepid remark by Jonathan Glancey in the Guardian about how it resembles a cross reflected in water. But the eye is drawn to the ellipse at the centre, whose oval form recalls one of the key forms of the Georgian architecture around it. All the panes in the window are lightly etched, evoking a motif from Houshiary's paintings apparently, and these etched flecks grow more concentrated the closer they come to the central oculus, so you realise there is a sort of aura around it, which represents the crown of thorns. Of course that means the heart of the window stands for Christ but there is something profoundly moving - intellectually and spiritually - about it being entirely non-figurative, non-representational. An icon for our postmodern world. And because we were there on a wintry late afternoon, we could watch the amazing transformation of the window as the sky grew dark outside...

(with apologies for the not very good iPhone images - plus, as you can see, there was a rather tall chap sitting in the row in front of me!)

As the sun goes down, the ellipse at the centre of the window glows - embodying light, as the commission invited, and a kind of mystical evocation of Christ as the light of the church, the star guiding mankind to Jerusalem at the time of his birth, all those meanings, as well as just a pan-religious symbolism of light for God. We couldn't figure out how this physically happens - is there something in the glass itself that glows, or is it subtly lit from somewhere? If the latter, then the source of this light is entirely invisible, which just adds to the mystery and the effect.

It was a highly controversial design apparently, though I can't find out online exactly why this was. Much of the commentary seems rather patronisingly to focus on the fact that Houshiary is 1) a woman (another Guardian article calls the window "gynaecological"!!) and 2) Iranian in origin: it is therefore exotic, imbued with the inspiration she draws in her art from the 13th-century Sufi mystic, Rumi, non-figurative because her art draws on Iranian artistic traditions - bla bla bla. She might be Iranian but does that mean she is Muslim? My mother couldn't remember but thought she might be Zoroastrian. Anyway, Houshiary trained and has lived and practised in England since 1974. Would she like to be labelled "exotic"?

This is a discussion that is quite current these days, with the growing debate over what "contemporary Islamic art" is, if it even exists. Most contemporary artists surely prefer to see themselves precisely as contemporary artists, practising in a globalised world without borders between artistic disciplines, rather than as "a contemporary artist from Iran" or wherever. Do such pigeon holes make Westerners feel more comfortable?

I was rather shocked to read the comment - posted by 'Highby' in response to the gynaecological Guardian article - that Houshiary "had simply applied the Iranian style. Means, no pictures of humans. Just graphical elements - lines. Arabesques. Geometrical forms". To start with, there seems to me nothing "simple" about this window. And goodness only knows what Highby thinks an arabesque is. But it also smacked of the attitude I often come across in discussions of the Islamic style in art made for Christians or Jews in medieval Spain - what has come to be called Mudéjar. For a long time, the attitude among art historians was (perhaps still is) that if an art work was in an Islamic style, it had to have been made by an Islamic artist or craftsman; there was absolutely no way that a medieval Christian or Jewish craftsman would find the Islamic style appealing and be influenced by it. This always struck me as illogical because why would a wealthy Christian patron spend money on building a church or a palace or commissioning a carpet or a geometric ceiling in an Islamic style if that isn't what they wanted in their material surroundings?

And precisely the same could be said of the St Martin's authorities who chose this window design, which is so profound and beautiful and seems to engage both mind and soul, and work on so many levels.

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Perhaps next year we'll go to the candlelit evening carol concert - the 'family concert', of course, attracts families, mainly parents and grandparents with very young children, who don't much fancy sitting still and quietly through an hour's worth of concert and don't know any of the carols (apart from 'Away in a Manger') so can't join in. There was a particularly grizzly child in the row behind us, and a general low hum of children's restlessness all around us. Still it was fun and put us in the Christmas spirit. In fact with the recent Big Chill and the fact that we have booked our train tickets to Edinburgh to visit my sister for Christmas and New Year, we've been feeling cosy and wintry for a few weeks now.

This was my sister's little car at the beginning of the week:

Almost as much snow as there is car!

The snow has pretty much all thawed now. It happened quickly yesterday. Walking to meet K at the pub on Friday evening, I was slipping and sliding over compressed snow all along St Matthew's Road, but the next morning we woke up to the sound of dripping outside the bedroom window - the sun had come back and it was a little bit rainy. Not before time - I fell down the escalators at Brixton station the other day. I had my walking boots on but it was so slippy on the escalators that there was nothing to grip onto and I couldn't get up again. I floundered for a moment until someone helped me up - I never saw who, just a voice behind me that said, 'Up you get'. My thanks to that good Samaritan.

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I'm making stock and, while I write this, wonderful smells keep wafting up from downstairs. I'm using the carcass of the lemony roast chicken we made a few weekends ago (I froze it in the meantime!) when Gareth was supposed to come round for a long overdue dinner and catch-up, but poor him, his grandmother died and he spent the weekend looking after his grandfather and helping with funeral arrangements... I like making stock: it seems like a good wintry make-do-and-mend thing to do, and a good way to use up old bunches of herbs and random bits of celery and other veggies languishing in the bottom of the fridge. We're planning to use some of this new batch of stock in the rabbit stew we'll be making in a couple of weekends' time - Cornelius and Giles are coming to share it with us. Maybe Gareth will be able to make it over too.

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.

Open City

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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


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

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

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

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.

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!

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'?

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.

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...

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…!