Spanish conversation

Life - which is to say, work - has rather got in the way of blogging over the last couple of months. Since getting back to work after my long summer break, it seems busier than ever, with more to be done by fewer people, and an air of uncertainty underlying everything, with cuts cuts cuts the only thing being discussed - in the media and in people's daily lives. "Keep calm and carry on" seems a useful motto, as always. That resolution - of getting my work/life balance under better control - has not so far materialised.

I had a nice trip to Granada last week, to attend the meeting of a collaborative research project with the Alhambra which we're now engaged in. The weather was gorgeous - 23°C on Sunday! - but cold in the mornings and evenings, or if you stepped into the shade. It was an intense course in Spanish conversation, which did me a lot of good. I had that experience which I have always admired in friends for whom English is not their first language - like when Silvia and Rosa came here for dinner at the start of October, two Italians researching aspects of Italian-Islamic artistic encounter whom I wanted to introduce to each other. Of course we all spoke English, but when I stepped out of the room, and came back in a few minutes later, they were still speaking English to each other. Or when, in Berlin in January, I went out for dinner with some German colleagues from the Islamic museum, who were all still conversing in English when I got back from a trip to the loo. In this case, I was in Granada with a Spanish colleague from work, and a French colleague from the Louvre whom I know well, and with both of them I normally speak English - but because the lingua franca of our project meetings was Spanish, we continued to speak Spanish at the end of the day when out for dinner, and when I bumped into the French colleague, Sophie, on Sunday morning, having a coffee in a bar on the Plaza Nueva, we conversed in Spanish, because it felt odd to switch to English. How funny.

An interesting trip, as well, for understanding something about the internal politics of Spanish academia - sad, though, that in a city as small as Granada, with so many important groups of people who are experts in their own ways in local Islamic cultural history, that they should all be competing with each other, rather than working together to form a powerhouse of academic study in this area. They share information with us, as outsiders, but not with each other. It was good, though, to understand for the first time that I am not the only one who feels the tyranny of a certain couple, who seem to want to control what anyone anywhere says about Nasrid art history, by pillorying anyone who dares to express a theory different from one of theirs. Good, also, to understand that there are people within Granada who do not believe that their work is gospel any more. It gives me renewed hope for the new generation of upcoming Spanish scholars in the Islamic field, as well as a sense of reassurance that if one of this couple slates my book in a review - which I feel is fairly likely, especially since the Spanish translation is about to be launched - that not many people will pay them much attention.

There is not much other news, or what there is, is too boring to go into. I am giving a lecture tomorrow evening - the first in a while - so my time and thoughts over the last few days have been focused on that. It is on my book, a sort of promotional event which I had to organise for myself, since my publishers aren't doing anything. Compared to the publishers of the Spanish edition who have just invited me to participate in a launch event in Spain in the New Year! Anyway. I've been collecting book sightings - it's been spotted in the bookshops at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and the American University in Cairo. It was in the Alhambra bookshops, and will hopefully be more prominently placed when the Spanish translation is out. (And a nice little plug for that came out recently in Granada Hoy, though with quite a few mistakes!)

But the best book-related anecdote so far is that a work colleague took a copy to present as a gift to the Sultan of Sharjah on a recent business trip, only to be told, "I've already got that! My daughter gave it to me!" So the Sultan of Sharjah has a copy of my book! The best book-related comment I've had is from the great professor of Islamic art, Robert Hillenbrand - chatting to him after his recent Islamic Art Circle lecture, someone asked us what was the book we were talking about, and Robert said - "Islamic Arts from Spain. You'd think, all the old chestnuts... But there is not a chestnut in sight!" I took that as high praise indeed.

The clocks went back this morning so now I have that strange feeling of my body-clock being out of kilter with what the clock on the wall says. Now begins the winter.

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…!

Read this book!!

I have decided to write separate thoughts in separate postings. I think this probably makes it easier for you to read them (if indeed you are doing so), as well as, later on, for me or you to find and link to them. So, some extra musings for today:

I have been meaning to share something with you for about a week now. There is a ‘gallery’ space by South Kensington tube station, which used to be a frame shop, but now stands pretty much empty, and is occasionally taken over by a temporary shop or an art installation. It is currently hosting a company called Stuff and Nonsense, which I can’t find online, but if you can’t get down to South Ken before 26 March when their ‘residency’ ends, I’d try a more concerted effort at Google than I have done. Basically, they sell designer lights. These lights are made out of stuffed animals. And not just any stuffed animals – stuffed vermin. The lighting they have on display in the window I have to walk past every day to get to work features stuffed pigeons, and I am pretty sure that at the beginning of the week there was a stuffed squirrel clutching a light, frozen in the act of scampering up the wall. This must have sold, as I don’t remember seeing it again. It’s a clever idea, and a very modern (postmodern?) take on taxidermy, but who in their right mind actually wants one of these lights in their home? The thought of it makes my flesh creep!

Something else I need to share: a fantastic graphic novel which I picked up yesterday afternoon in Clapham Books – a pleasant discovery in itself. It’s The Museum Vaults: Excerpts from the Journal of an Expert, by Marc-Antoine Mathieu (see the picture at the head of this posting), and no description can do it justice. It is one of a series of four graphic novels being produced in collaboration with the Louvre, which is a fantastic idea. There’s a really insightful interview with the artist here, about this and his other work, and one of the quotes describes it as “a kind of parallel world in which he examines, not the work [on display in the Louvre], but the discourse around art.”

The conceit is that “the Expert” (I love it!) has come to evaluate the contents of the subbasement levels of a museum so grand and old that its very name has been forgotten. He and his assistant spend fifty years exploring subbasement level after subbasement level, and their encounters with the various department supervisors they find along the way are existentialist musings on the very nature of art, in a simultaneously deeply comic and extremely profound way – the Flooded Gallery (“I was a guard before … now I’m a ferrywoman”), the Repository for Moulds (“All these moulds constitute the entire memory of the Museum’s statuary art”), the Fragments Room (perhaps my personal favourite, given my predilection for broken bits of pot…), the Restoration Workshop, where a minor paint touch-up is depicted as a precise surgical operation, the Frame Depot (of which there are some previews here)…

The idea that has stayed with me the longest is the chapter entitled “The Icon”, wherein The Expert muses upon all the slightly different variations which The Master created of You-Can-Guess-Which-Painting, which are subtly rotated so that no visitor ever has the same experience of the painting – “the interpretations are accordingly divergent and give rise to opinions, debates, interpretations and exegesis that, each time, only thicken the mystery a little bit more. Through this ploy, The Master wanted to represent the very mystery of representation” – though this mystery is threatened by the invention of “a magic box, a sort of camera obscura that can freeze the real and can reproduce it”, which will ensnare the painting and cause “the cold eye of exactitude [to] imprison the smile on exhibition that day”… Ahhh, just brilliant. I sat on Clapham Common in the sun and read this while eating my lunch, but I will have to read it again and again. What a wonderful way to give myself some well-earned time off from writing my own book!!

Pinch Punch First of the Month

I always beat K to this – it takes him a while to wake up to what day it is, let alone what date! Anyway, welcome February! I say this with a huge sigh of relief that the intense January I have just had is over. Not that, in the end, I think February will necessarily be any better, just different, and it’s a state of mind. Phew, January was suddenly ridiculously busy, a sudden avalanche of work… Partly self-inflicted as I have crammed into January and February all the appointments and other deadlines I could not attend to during my three-month absence at the end of last year, and the upcoming absence when I go and write my book… But it’s not just me – I get the feeling that everyone feels under pressure at the moment. This is going to be a busy year… There’s a certain element of nervous panic, too, as I near the moment (2 March - coincidentally my father's birthday) when I have to start writing the book – one day a week to research it has never been enough, and over the last few weeks I have fallen back on my default ‘imminent deadline’ mode, which means I am reading, reading, reading at every spare moment, on the tube, after work, all weekend… We have reverted to our old habit of going to the British Library on Saturdays, and spent a very companionable day yesterday in the Manuscripts Reading Room – K looking at actual manuscripts (describing ceremonial at Henry VIII’s court), while I took a break from Spain and worked on making some final amendments to my article on ivories decorated with the technique of incrustation, which took me to Egypt and Sicily, and was rather satisfying, since – though I say it myself – I think it is a good article.

So, picture of the month from our 2009 calendar:

Grand staircase, Crystal Palace © KR

This is one of the pictures that Kent took of the Grand Staircase at what was once the Crystal Palace in Sydenham, when we went up there for our memorable walk on New Year’s Day last year. Walking around the ruins of Crystal Palace gives you a curious sensation of discovering the vestiges of some ancient Egyptian temple in the middle of rural north Europe – the concrete sphinxes of the old Egyptian Court now nestle in amongst deciduous trees and a cover of fallen, rotting leaves – and nothing is that old anyway, it all dates from the 1850s, and was only ruined in the great fire of 1936. But that sense of dislocation from time and place makes it a magical site to visit.

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I have decided that a blog – this blog anyway – is a bit like a scrapbook. I collect things for it during the week and when I have a little bit of time, sometimes at the weekend, I sit down and stick them all in. What is weird about it is that it is sort of public and private at the same time – public, because it is stuck (or written) on the aether, private because you have absolutely no idea if anyone is looking at it… Is there anyone out there?

Here are some of the things I have collected this week (apart from another cold):

- a new pair of glasses:


It’s about three years since I had an eye test, and the last time I did an intensive period of writing (writing up my PhD) without having had my eyes tested for a while, I developed migraines – the Hildegard of Bingen flashing lights variety, though I am not aware of having received any divine visions. I figured I didn’t want them to develop again while I am writing my book in the spring, and it did turn out I needed a new prescription. It is also a long time since I had new frames – I was too impoverished, and kept reusing old ones – so this time I treated myself to a new look. They’re still tortoiseshell, but lighter, and I decided to go square. They’re also Giorgio Armani!

- some Iraqi coins:


On Monday we took some Iraqi curators out for lunch, who are spending a few months undertaking placements at the British Museum, under the auspices of the World Collections Programme. It was wonderful to see how much more upbeat they are than previous visitors we have had over the last few years – they actually said that for the first time they feel full of hope for the future. One of them was from Basra – his family was forcibly resettled to the north of Iraq by Saddam Hussein but they have recently gone back. Amazingly, they seemed to be really happy with the way the British army has handled the situation in Basra. It was possible to laugh about all the fish options on the menu – “I eat fish all the time in Basra [it’s a port city], I don’t want to eat fish in London”! One of them was a specialist in Islamic coins. After expressing disappointment that we didn’t have any Islamic coins on display (we have very few in the collection), he dug into his wallet and gave both of us a set of the new Iraqi coins. They seemed really proud of them.

- Carnivàle:


We have been Lovefilm members for years – it’s brilliant, films or TV series you missed or are nostalgic about or were too young ever to see come right through your front door and you can watch them in your own good time! I had once read something about a new HBO series, Carnivàle – I am not sure if it was even aired in the UK – so I put it on our Lovefilm list and the first disc arrived some time ago, but we were a bit unsure (not to mention too busy in the evenings), so we only just got round to watching it last week. We’ve had the second disc since then, and I’m completely hooked. K is not so sure. But it’s just Twin Peaks-y enough (and not just because of the presence of Michael J. Anderson) to keep me interested. Only two episodes per disc though, which is very annoying! (our Lovefilm deal is only four discs a month… which, realistically, is quite enough)

- more Obama hagiography (with thanks to Karen):

This is really touching – I only watched it once, but the chorus has been haunting me all week.

Rosa sat, so Martin could walk - Martin walked,
So Barack could run - Barack ran,
He ran and he won,
So that all our children could fly.

What is great about all the coverage of Obama at the moment, is the utter absence of cynicism – it’s so refreshing to just really believe in someone for a change. Have you noticed how Jon Stewart is like an innocent young child idolising a hero at the moment? Of course I know there are cynics out there – I am just choosing to ignore them.

Slow Blogging

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

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

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

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

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

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