Weddings and restaurants

'Angel Face' beakers by contemporary potter Anja Lubach

From the Royal Academy (see previous post), we decamped to tea in The Gallery café at Fortnum and Mason, a joint treat for my parents for my father's birthday at the start of March, and Mothers' Day last weekend. We used to go there for tea with my grandmother when my sister and I were little and she came 'up to town', and when I suggested it, little did I know that a proper Fortnum's afternoon tea in the St James's Restaurant costs more than £30 a head!! So we didn't go there... But abiding memories of bumping into the actress Lorraine Chase in the ladies loos, and my toddler sister saying something which made her laugh - though whatever it was she said is now lost in the mists of time...

We caught them up on my cousin Henry's wedding yesterday - a slightly surreal affair, since it was incredibly High Church, which didn't seem at all in keeping with their personalities, which tend towards the Gothic... Henry's taste in music basically equals Iron Maiden, not Fauré's Canticle for Jean Racine, which was one of the musical interludes sung by the church's very own choir; and Rhiannon's bridesmaids were extensively tattooed, all of which made the proceedings a little disconnected from the surroundings. Which were beautiful - the high Victorian glamour of All Saints church off Regent Street, followed by the spectacular views across London from the top floor restaurant of the St George's Hotel...

They looked happy and it was obviously the wedding that they wanted, which is the main thing. We did some very superficial catching up with my uncle and aunt - my uncle being my father's first cousin - and had quite interesting conversations over dinner with the other family extras with whom we were seated: assorted godparents and parental cousins, one of whom turned out to be a former Tory MP, another the chap who invented Lincolnshire Poacher, one of K's favourite cheeses! Amusing to see him so star-struck when he learned this, and suddenly incapable of making conversation about cheese! Lincolnshire Poacher is one of our staples at our now-traditional Sunday night cheese board - and inspired by last night, K stocked up at Fortnum's this afternoon!

As for wedding present - we bought Henry and Rhiannon a bowl in the style of the beakers illustrated at the top of this post, a handmade piece by ceramic artist Anja Lubach, from her 'Angel Face' series. I find them beautiful but also slightly disturbing - I am hoping their gothic style appeals to the newlyweds! We bought it at Contemporary Ceramics in Somerset House - a small gallery which exhibits the work of many contemporary potters, a really nice place to browse, and not overly expensive if you want to buy a unique present for someone.

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We both indulged in a little bit of beef during dinner last night - naughtily as, don't forget, K has given up meat for Lent, which perforce means I have too. I have to admit that I have had fish a few times, though K has been very good about sticking to his principles (apart from a couple of occasions when he actually forgot he'd given up meat!). I was amazed he didn't give himself a little holiday when we went to Moro last weekend with Nigel and Ginny - a really fabulous experience that we certainly hope to repeat after Easter, but also after we have saved up since it was not cheap!

For those that do not know, it's a restaurant in the attractive parade of shops and restaurants at Exmouth Market - which I think has largely grown up due to the Moro owners' patronage of the area - run by a husband and wife team of chefs (Sam and Sam Clark) who combine Spanish and North African cooking and well-sourced ingredients. We have all their cookbooks, and regularly use their recipes, which I find to be reliable and delicious. But in all these years - despite frequent good intentions - we have never actually been to eat there. Mainly because until very recently, we have not been in a financial position to do so.

But what an experience! The first thing that assailed us was the amazing smell coming from the open kitchen at the back of the restaurant - which was a constant delight, changing and wafting over us throughout the two and a bit hours we were there. The menu was short and simple, and you just knew that everything on it would be fantastic. Nigel and Ginny both had amazing looking meat dishes - in fact, I did have a nibble of Ginny's lamb which was gorgeous! - while I had an absolutely huge plate of grilled bream, and K had the vegetable mezze, which actually looked pretty gorgeous too.

But I think what amazed us all the most was the service - completely unostentatious, just quietly and confidently excellent. Somehow they knew who had ordered what, despite it being somebody different bringing the food from the person who had taken our order. There is probably a crude trick to doing this, but my, it's impressive and makes you feel you're in the presence of great restaurateurs!

Despite the fabulousness of Moro, we have found that it is easy to be vegetarian - if you cook your meals yourself. On the few occasions we have eaten lunch or dinner out over the last five weeks, our experience has been that interesting vegetarian options cannot regularly be found on menus. Vegetarian options yes, but options that you might actually want to and enjoy eating - not so much. Surprisingly, since I thought vegetarianism would have been pretty mainstream by now.

Though I haven't exactly missed eating meat, I have found myself craving sausages and mash a couple of times. And K's idea of a meat-free meal generally involves plenty of cheese, so it has not been an altogether healthy few weeks!

I still can't believe it...

... but my lovely, seven-month young, Ride2Work scheme bike was stolen last weekend. Again. Or rather, that is the second bike that I have had stolen. I never cycle it anywhere other than between work and home, but ironically last Sunday evening, we took a ten minute ride down to Abbeville Road, to stock up on fine cheeses at Macfarlane's, which we had not done for months, and then met up for a drink with a colleague of K's who has just moved to the flat above the hairdresser's next door... We were a maximum of two hours, and when we got back to the hoop where we had locked up both our bikes, there was K's, and just an empty space where mine should have been. The lock was still there - they must have taken the saddle off to get it out...

You never quite believe it - you think for a moment you must actually have locked it up somewhere else, and I had a futile wander up and down the road just in case it happened to be leaning around somewhere else, but of course it was not. Some bastards saw an opportunity and went for it. Thing is, because I am paying it off in instalments, I will be paying for another six months for a bike I don't own any more!! Am waiting to hear from HR at work about what I should do now - was it perhaps covered by some Museum insurance, because technically (I guess) I do not own it until I have finished paying for it? Can I have another Ride2Work scheme bike on the go while I am still paying off the last one?

Sooooo annoying, as the weather has been beautiful this week - mild and autumnal - and I keep wistfully looking out of the window and wondering how lovely it would be to cycle home in... Also I have been feeling under a lot of pressure with work - again, as I suppose is becoming usual now, as we lose staff and don't have the money to replace them, so everyone is doing an insane amount of work... so it would have been great to have the cycle home to de-stress. Instead I have to battle with the tube - and the Victoria Line has been positively boiling with the unseasonally warm temperatures this week. I was at Green Park station during rush hour last week - coming back from attending the Oriental Ceramic Society council meeting, followed by a very fine tea with George in the Royal Academy café - and there must also have been some problem with defective trains, or defective tracks, or god knows what, because three tube trains came and went and there was no way that all the people on the platform, which was constantly filling up, could cram themselves into the already-full carriages. In the end, I changed platforms and went north to Warren Street, changed platforms again and went back south. It was the only way to get home!! (without losing too many of my marbles)

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I have started a new research project - for an encyclopaedia article I have to write by the end of January, on Almoravid religious spaces in Fes and Marrakesh. It's nice to start something new, and also to get back to research areas I want to expand into, rather than endlessly going over old ground, which is what it feels like with my Islamic Arts from Spain book, now that the third set of proofs is about to come in... I have been reading photocopied articles while I travel to and fro on the tube, most of which are in French, since it was mainly French scholars of the early 20th century who have worked on the architectural history of North Africa - and not much done since, due to an unfortunate hangover of European imperialist perspectives that the cultural achievements of Africa are not worthy of serious scholarly attention... Happily, that is changing now. And it's good for my French too.

But in between trying to get my research done on the tube, I have been enjoying having a free subscription to the London Review of Books. A colleague 'gave' me this subscription by putting my name forward - she got something out of it too, a book token or some such. But I am completely hooked and will certainly pay to renew the subscription when the time comes - very clever marketing on the part of the LRB. It is very satisfyingly left wing, and snobbishly makes me feel very intellectual, surrounded - as one usually is on the tube - by readers of the Metro. When I first moved back to London and started commuting to work (my own "year in Catford", as satirised - that very year! - by The Chap magazine, which is very sadly not available on their online archive...) I was taken aback by getting on the train in the morning and being met by a wall of everyone reading the very same newspaper. Talk about brainwashing. Since then we have had to endure the ridiculous street competition of the free evening rags - the London Lite, and the London Paper, which has already mercifully folded, excuse the pun. Hopefully the London Lite will go soon, now that the Evening Standard is back, and being given away for free!! (oh the politics of freebie London newspapers!)

BUT in the LRB, I have become completely addicted to the classifieds, or rather I should say the personals. This is a typical offering:

Small but perfectly formed ex-hack turned jurisprudential insurrectionist seeks proper gent/unicorn with wit, charm and optimistic approach to Bakhtinian dialogics. (F, 29)

A few months ago, there was one in Latin! I would have loved to see the responses - I hope they were in Latin too!

I also love the fact that I read about things I would not have read about otherwise ... but I suppose that is in the nature of magazine subscriptions.

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The clocks have gone back now, so it's dark when I leave work. My body clock is so adjusted to 'working till it gets dark', that I now think about leaving work a bit earlier, which is a good thing, but then I don't actually do it, which isn't. They went back last Sunday, which meant I spent the whole day experiencing that feeling of it being later than it was, because it was, and then the whole week feeling I was late for things. Why is it we do this again??

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Thought for the day: If you Twitter, are you a Twat?

Is there more to come?

What a gorgeous almost-spring-like day we’ve had in London today! And how completely different from the weather this time last week – when we were walking home from the deli in Clapham, where we had gone to stock up on cheeses (yum!), and the snow started blizzarding on us (and stupidly I had decided against bringing my woolly hat…)! The snow of not-quite a week ago is almost all gone now – the weather has been so cold that it took ages for it to start to melt, and then really only on the roads and busy streets, where there was car and foot traffic (and eventually buses again), but in the residential side streets, where apparently enough grit could not be spared to stop them icing over, the snow compacted under the trudge of commuters’ feet into a glacial layer of ice that creaked under your feet until you slipped off it. Our Tescos shop could not be delivered this week because of the snow, so we had to actually go to the supermarket on Wednesday night (something we try to avoid as much as possible!) and I ended up having to walk down the middle of the road to get there, stepping into empty car-parking spaces to avoid being run over by the cars creeping up behind me. The pavement was just too icy. It made me think of other countries which are actually used to snowfall where people unquestioningly do the public service of sweeping the snow off the pavement in front of their house. Someone told me something ridiculous – that people were actually being advised not to grit outside the front of their houses, because if someone were to slip anyway, they could sue you for not gritting enough! So you should just not grit at all! Can this really be true?? If so, what a disgustingly arse-about-face litigious Health-And-Safety-obsessed society we live in now!

Eventually on Thursday it started to rain a bit, and the ice and snow started to dissolve. It has not completely gone though – there are frequent mounds of compacted snow sprouting up from the grass, remnants of snow-people. A very enterprising person, or group of people (since the snowfall really seemed to pull people together in a 'spirit of the Blitz' kind of way, as I heard someone on the radio describe it) built a little snow-family on the communal lawn in between the two blocks of our flats, right where I pass in and out every day. It had a snow-mother, a snow-father and a snow-child, really well done, with clothes, and eyes, and red ribbon to make smiling faces! During the week, as they have melted, they have increasingly leaned in towards each other in a rather touching way, as if they were huddling together against the warmth. Today they are just three little different-sized mounds sprinkled with carrots. Whoever built them has obviously reclaimed the scarves and ear-muffs that originally decorated them.

I did notice that some daffodil shoots have started to appear, and some snowdrops are out. Seeing snowdrops always reminds me of the touching memory that my grandfather always picked my grandmother the first snowdrop of the spring. We planted some snowdrops on their grave when we buried my grandmother in December 2007, and when I saw the snowdrops on the lawn outside the Ritzy in Brixton, I wondered if they were growing down in Swansea. We’ll all be going down there on a family trip at the end of the month, so if they are growing, I hope they’ll still be out for us to see.

In honour of the almost-spring-like feeling of the world emerging from the snow, I bought some daffodils from the florist outside Brixton station. Daffodils are certainly one of my favourite flowers - they’re so bright and optimistic against the winter! They’re blooming nicely in the window of our sitting room. But is there more to come? The snow has gradually been moving across the rest of the UK, and heavy snow showers are apparently forecast for London again next Tuesday. It’s strange to think that while we’re in the grip of this ‘big freeze’, temperatures are soaring to inconceivable heights in Australia (47ºC!) and people are dying in forest fires. I am relieved to read on Bev and James’s blog that they’re ok, but it must feel far too close for comfort. And with such extreme weather conditions on either side of the world, how an anyone deny that global warming is a fact??

Right, that’s the week’s catharsis out of the way. Now to start thinking about the lecture I have to give in ten days’ time!