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.

On the road again

'I hear those voices that will not be drowned'
Maggi Hambling's 'Scallop' on Aldeburgh Beach, Suffolk

Where has January gone?! One of my New Year's resolutions to myself was to post here little and often, but then I quickly got inundated by the year, so 'often' went out of the window - probably 'little' won't last either... I've got a moment now - I've just finished writing a letter of application for a Summer School in Tunisia in May, which will focus on the art and archaeology of the late Classical and early Islamic periods, and which I am very keen on attending, so I have written rather a gushing letter; and dinner won't be ready for a while longer - K is cooking, and somehow he never manages to get the timing quite right! Smells gorgeous though (leek, spinach and goat's cheese pie - we're in training for Lent, during which he has declared that we will be giving up meat).

I went to Berlin for a short trip at the start of last week, to collect and accompany back some objects we had loaned to a rather strange exhibition at the Martin Gropius Bau. Berlin was covered in snow and fog (which caused more delays to my flights, although it is possible I have a jinx, after the travel fiascos of my recent Córdoba trip) - there were even ice floes in the Spree! It was beautifully atmospheric - especially the part I was staying and working in, which was right at the edge of the Wall, in the former East, so now a 'no man's land' of brand new skyscraper developments, but also where they have preserved a 200m stretch of the Wall. The opening of the Berlin Wall was one of the defining events of my teenage years, and I always feel strongly moved when I go to Berlin and see all the graffiti about freiheit. It feels like you have stepped back into the Cold War, but its so shockingly recent - within my own living memory.



I visited the Neues Museum, which reopened in October after 60 years of dereliction, since the Second World War. It's undergone a sympathetic restoration by the architect David Chipperfield, which preserves the state of decay of wall paintings and architectural interiors, which were clearly originally magnificent but now fragmentary - there is even a small room called the 'Fragmentarium' where they display pieces of the architectural decoration whose original locations they were not able to identify. The collection has some masterpieces - Nefertiti's bust of course, which gets an entire room to herself! - but it is worth going to see for the building alone.

I took the colour proofs of my book with me to do the final check and read-through - it was the only available time I had to do it, but also made worthwhile use of all the tedious time hanging around in airports. I think it's finally looking good - everyone seems to think it looks beautiful - and reading it all through again, I have satisfied myself that the text is not too crap, but I'm just so fed up with it now. My editor too, I think! We just have the index and picture credits left to check, and I think it will get sent off to production at the end of the week!!

In amongst the craziness that is the second phase of our Ceramics Galleries project (and I install my first case tomorrow!), I am spending the weekends working full time on the article - on religious architecture in 12th-century Morocco - which I have to send off at the end of the month - so, erm, this weekend. I wrote solidly through last weekend, and have too many words, but still more to write, and then all the refining to do. I had hoped to get some of it done during the evenings this week, but I spent most of last evening in Evans Cycles on Clapham High Street, sorting out my new new Ride2Work scheme bike...

But it means I am finally back on the road again. Let's hope that third time is lucky, and I manage to avoid this one being stolen! Alas it means that I will be doing much less reading - no more London Review of Books on the tube, and back to the two-pages-a-night-before-falling-asleep-with-the-book-on-my-head norm, which - considering I am now reading a book that is nearly 1000 pages long (Quicksilver, by Neal Stephenson) - might mean I read only one book all year.

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But before January was all over, I wanted to post our calendar image for this month. It's the picture at the top of this post, the magisterial Scallop by the artist Maggi Hambling, a stainless steel sculpture on Aldeburgh Beach in Suffolk, a commemoration and celebration of Benjamin Britten who lived in Aldeburgh - in the Red House, of which our friend Caroline is the curator - and founded the famous Aldeburgh music festival. The artist calls it her 'conversation with the sea' - you can read a short essay about it here. It has inexplicably been a controversial addition to the coastline - the conservative residents of Aldeburgh objected to it and it had to be moved further along the beach, so it was not so much in their sight line! - but we thought it was moving and beautiful, especially with the poetic inscription excised from the steel ("I hear those voices that will not be drowned") which evokes not only voices and people lost at sea, but the music of Britten's compositions that lives on and will never be lost.

We went to see it at New Year last year, when we spent New Year's Eve and a few days afterwards staying with Caroline, in her idyllic rural Suffolk cottage, walking across fields to country pubs, lounging on her sofa reading while she valiantly supplied us with food and drink, showing us her place of work and talking us through all her exciting plans for the collection and exhibition projects, a lightning visit to Orford where I went with my grandparents as a child and vividly remember having lunch in a pub where there were stuffed muff dogs mounted in a glass case on the wall. I still remember my grandmother explaining how Victorian women used to carry these miniature dogs around in their muffs to keep their hands warm! We didn't find the pub again, but this time we went to Orford Castle, which had amazing views of the estuary and all the flat land around, and kept K happy. An idyllic start to the year - and memories recaptured by seeing this image every day on our home-made kitchen calendar. Best idea we've ever had!

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?

A London cabbie's philosophy

There are major roadworks going on at both ends of my journey at the moment. I have lost track of what they are doing in Brixton - it started out with refurbishing the Victorian water mains, but whatever they are doing now, seems to have been going on for years. In South Kensington, they have just pedestrianised the area around the tube station, and rerouted all the traffic, which makes not only for major roadworks, but also utter confusion. The traffic is a complete nightmare around there at the moment, especially in the evenings.

Coming home this evening, I was as usual stuck in a line of traffic, behind cars pointing at stupid angles across lanes, having changed their mind at the last minute, waiting for the lights to change in order to inch forward. I managed to make it round the corner, where there was an utter logjam - a green light off in the distance, but absolutely no movement, and a car blocking the way of a black cab. The taxi driver had been standing out on the road shouting at the driver of the car blocking him, but got back in his car as I pulled up. But since there was absolutely no way round or through I just had to wait there with my bike. The cabbie could not resist including me in his (justified) frustation.

"You know what the problem is, don't you? Transport for London. They've just got too much money."

This is a frequent complaint, and one whose validity I am never quite sure about - leftover budgets needing to be spent before the round-up of the financiaI year, so let's blow it all on needless roadworks... (though actually when it's finished South Kensington will be much more pleasant)

And I am not sure I believe what a cabbie says about TfL - a company that exists to manage the city's public transport, and thereby to deny cab drivers an income. And I also wonder - if they have too much money, then why on earth are they talking about hiking the prices on the tube, again?

Autumnal musings...

Well, K completed his half-marathon in an amazing (I think!) 2 hours and 7 minutes!! I have uploaded some photos of the day to our Flickr photostream, but here are a couple of before and after shots, and a close-up of his well-earned eco-friendly medal, that he proudly sported for the rest of the day!

It was gorgeously autumnal - the temperature was cold, but just right for running (I am reliably informed). While he did the hard work of running, I wandered around the 'Food and Fitness festival', getting some breakfast (the marathon started at 9.30!) and picking up as many freebies for K as I could - Lucozade recovery drinks, and energy bars. I was amused that the members of the Welsh Guards band seemed to be making the most of this as well!


After reaching my tolerance level of browsing through marquees, I went to sit by the Serpentine and drink my thermos of coffee and read my book (Wolf Hall, by Hilary Mantel - a well-deserved winner of the Booker Prize recently! I'm loving it!) until it was time to wander down towards the finishing line to see if I could see K coming in... Eventually I did, though of course I was not quite ready in time with the camera, so only got a picture of his back disappearing into the distance... Because of the crush of people at the finish line - there were 10,000 runners taking part!! - we had agreed to meet at the Albert Memorial, where we sat for a while watching the stream of runners flowing past... I had to wonder to myself what on earth makes people put themselves through this! But trying to raise money for a worthy cause goes a long way to helping you towards the finish line...

Speaking of which, K has not quite reached his sponsorship target, so if you're reading this, please go to his JustGiving page and help him raise money for International Action for Iraqi Refugees - there are 4.5 million orphans in Iraq and about 1 million young widows, and even if each of us gave a small amount, together we can help them to survive and build themselves a future and a better life.

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We have just got back from a lovely weekend in Oxford, visiting wonderful friends Bob and Bev for dinner on Saturday night (after a full day spent in the British Library, so we felt very virtuous), and a lovely Sunday lunch in Woodstock today with Annie and Honey, whom I don't think we've seen since their wedding, nearly 3 years ago... shocking. It was great to catch up, and it felt so lovely to be 'out in the country' - and as always cosily nostalgic to be back in Oxford, wandering around old haunts, seeing what has closed down and what is new, and letting those old memories flood in - things you have not thought about for years....

It is well and truly autumn now. The trees are at that point where they have not yet shed all their leaves and they are turning all the colours of the autumn spectrum. It has been really beautiful cycling through the parks. Very cold though, with crisp autumn mornings, which turn into those lovely days where the sky is blue and sunny but there is a chill in the air. People are starting to burn logs on their fires, or make bonfires of fallen leaves, and there is a wonderful woodsmoke smell in the air, which I always associate with autumn. It is still that period before the clocks go back, when it is just dark all the time - when you travel to and from work in the dark - but at the moment it is lovely in the mornings, and gets gradually darker as I cycle home... Lights come on in houses, and as you glide past you can see glimpses of people's cosy interior worlds...

I had not been cycling regularly for a while and had found myself feeling really quite stressed out - one of the reasons for not cycling was the need to get to work promptly, then working really long stressed out days and just wanting to get home quickly and flop. I was feeling like I was not at all on top of my work and that it was all just too much. Plus, it coincided with a period when I had run out of Evening Primrose Oil - which is supposed to keep your hormonal levels nice and balanced, though I don't know whether any of that alternative medicine stuff is really true... But I decided that the exercise from cycling would help me cope with feeling stressed. Also, my plantar fasciitis had come back after - I don't know, maybe it's just over a year since I had it - and cycling seemed to help it last time. And indeed having cycled almost every day for the last two weeks (and got some new Evening Primrose...) I feel much much better and far less angsty about everything now - though I still have a sore heel. The first two days I decided to get back on the bike it rained - it has been very dry this year - but I was determined, and even though I was soaked by the time I got to work, I also found it fresh and invigorating!

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The other day, I was cycling along Hayter Road, having just set off for work, and one of these new bike-mounted traffic wardens was there writing someone a ticket and he called out to me as I went past, so I stopped and turned back to him expectantly - I didn't think I had done anything to inflate the ire of a traffic warden (or parking enforcement officer, or whatever we're supposed to call them these days...). He said, "Excuse me - what colour would you call this car?" I looked at it, and to me it seemed a kind of dark greyish silver, so I said, "Silver?", which seemed to be a word he had never heard before. He thanked me and I went on my way. But as I mused on this humorous encounter, I soon began to realise it was in fact a rather philosophical question he had asked me, because almost every car parked along that part of my journey was some or other shade of silver, and how would you differentiate between them?

I began to think that if I were Paul Auster or W.G.Sebald - which quite clearly I am not, and never could even begin to approach the brilliance of those literary geniuses who are my heroes - that this momentary encounter with the traffic warden could have been the inspiration for some brilliant piece of writing... Oh well, being me, this is what you get.

Radio Silence

Well, howdy! It's been a while. Sorry for the radio silence - I have been wrangling with Chapter 3, and have been avoiding email, and pretty much anything that is not in some way influenced by the art of Islamic Spain. Apart from Henry VIII - though he was influenced, but this is not the time or place for that discussion. All the big Henry VIII launches have been happening in the last few weeks - the opening on Wednesday evening at the British Library, of their exhibition Man and Monarch, was on the actual 500th anniversary of Henry officially assuming the throne - marked by K and his fellow Tudor historians all wryly commiserating each other on the death of Henry VII... I'll have to defer talking about that exhibition until I've been back to look at it properly.

The previous week was the party to launch all K's work at Hampton Court - details here. It all looks fantastic - they have re-presented the Tudor palaces, including hanging the 'Haunted Gallery' (a long corridor which is used as a paintings gallery, hung with fabulous portraits from the Royal Collection) with rich fabrics, as it would have been in the Tudor period, and bringing together in Henry's council chamber (never before open to the public!) a small exhibition of contemporary portraits of Henry's wives (the first time that's ever been done!) and daughters, together with an object of significance from their lives - and much much more ... The conceit is that the palace is 'dressed' for the wedding of Henry and Katherine Parr ("survived"), which was held at Hampton Court in 1543, and you are the courtiers in attendance: there are staged events throughout the day, when you can meet help the bride and groom prepare for the wedding, or be the first to congratulate them after the ceremony... They have hired three actors to rotate playing Henry every day for a year, and I must say it really brings everything to life, when you're just wandering around the palace and then everything stops to make way for the King ... You get caught up in the scenario and really believe it's him!


I could go on and on - but you'll just have to go along and see for yourself! It is certainly enough to fill a fun day out, which has been one of the main purposes. Hampton Court is just that little bit too far away (though it is really easy to get to - when the trains are running!) for people to automatically think of going there, but amazingly, they had 16,000 visitors over the Easter bank holiday weekend!! We were some of them - K had to go in anyway, so we arranged to go with friends on Easter Sunday. The range of projects that K was involved in for this was so wide that I really had not that much idea what he was working on, as it was too much to talk about after he'd been hard at it at work all day, so that was the first time I really got the chance to find out, and to see it all in action, and people enjoying themselves. Visitors are encouraged to dress for court, by putting on these fine velvet(een) robes - here's K and our friend Az pretending to be Holbein's Ambassadors!


Not that K can relax now it's all open - he's been involved in a whirl of media coverage, including his spot on Today a few weeks back, and the Time Team special on Tudor palaces on Easter Monday! There's also a documentary going around on the History channel, but no-one we know has Sky, so we have to wait for the DVD to watch that!! And this week he has had to give two study day papers, so ended up working through the night on Monday to get the first one written...

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As a result, we're desperately planning to 'get away from it all' and have a holiday this year, so we're planning a retreat to the Outer Hebrides (literally) for mid-July - the earliest 'window' in both our schedules... But we did make sure to take Easter Monday off, and had an absolutely wonderful day out at Bexhill. I wanted to go to the seaside and see some nice architecture, so we decided on Bexhill because of the De La Warr Pavilion, built in 1935, the UK's first public building to be constructed in the Modernist style.


You just can't take a bad photo of it. There was also something truly amazing about the contrasting colours - of the sea and the sky and the pavilion, and the lawn out front which seemed impossibly green. This picture doesn't do it justice.

We got up reasonably early (considering how tired we were!) and managed to get a 9.30 train, and somehow I'd been organised enough to prepare a thermos of coffee and some hot cross buns for breakfast on the train. We read our books and dozed for the two-hour journey (already sounding good, eh?) Beautiful weather had been forecast for the Easter weekend, which had so far failed to materialise, but the clouds burned off and the sun came out as we sat on a perfectly-located bench overlooking the sea, with an easy view backwards to the pavilion, eating what I am reliably informed were the best fish-and-chips on the South Coast (from Louis's Fish Bar on Sea Road - go there)


We literally spent every last penny we had on this feast and it was worth every one of them!!

Quite a number of boats came out as well - it turned into a gorgeously beautiful day.


The thing was, we had absolutely no mental energy left, so it was the perfect day out, because it was all just so beautiful to look at and soak up, and we pretty much just wandered and sat and gazed all day, without having anything at all to say.

This picture sums up my mental state that day!

We sat on the shingle and K found it endlessly rewarding to throw stones at the sea. He took this picture while lying on the beach!


The added bonus was that while I had known pretty much what to expect from the Pavilion, I was totally unprepared for the gorgeous Victorian Orientalist sea-front cottages - we're seriously considering moving there!


Here are some gratuitous gorgeous views of Bexhill and the Pavilion (it's an exhibition venue, but we had absolutely no difficulty in avoiding looking at any of the art - tea on the terrace was much more the order of the day).

View from the terrace

Up the stairwell © KR

Down the stairwell © KR
I love the colours - though they seem to be slightly flattened here

A meditative view out to sea...

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So it turns out I have an inflamed ulnar. This is compressing the nerves which run down the left side of my body and giving me numbness and tingling sensations in my arm and leg - and making it not so easy to type for long stretches. At least it is that and not some other more worrying cause of numbness and tingling down one side ... it induced some anxiety for several days until I decided to be grown-up and go and see the doctor yesterday. I have to take ibuprofen for two weeks to help the swelling go down and hopefully the symptoms will subside. It is probably caused by how I tuck my arm under my head while sleeping, aggravated by the intensive typing I'm doing while I write my book, and by cycling - apparently this condition is quite common in cyclists, and is also known as "handlebar palsy"!!! What is it with me and oddly-named nervous inflammations?? I had plantar fasciitis in my heel last year!!

I am also under doctor's orders to relax this weekend! Which fortunately coincides with that slight fallow period between finishing one chapter and beginning the planning process of the next - which will also be the last!! (apart from the Introduction) Chapter 4 is about the 19th-century rediscovery of Spain's Islamic past and the revival of 'Moorish' (if you must, though I don't like to) styles in art and architecture... So I plan to do some gentle reading about that today, to get me in the mood - and then my sister is coming over tonight (hurrah!) and we're going to see In the Loop at the Ritzy - the first film we've been to see since Frost/Nixon (oh dear!) ... And tomorrow we're going to plan our holiday, over brunch. Doctor's orders.

Pedal Power

I have been enjoying the cycling. What was it I said about the lovely weather?? Of course I knew at the time – shouldn’t have tempted fate like that. It was probably all down to me that the Indian Premier League chose South Africa instead – weather too unreliable in England? Er, yes. Anyway after a week of early spring loveliness, we had gale-force winds last week! Now it's "changeable" (read, "windy"). I am remembering what I used to hate about cycling in Oxford – wind. All those wind tunnels between the colleges. Well, this time I cycle over one common, where the wind does occasionally literally knock you sideways, and through one park where enormous whooshing plane trees seem to create their own supplementary wind microclimate. But it’s all good for the fitness, I tell myself.

Since I was last cycling - early last summer - they have finally resurfaced the cycle path across Clapham Common, which makes life a lot easier! There are a few other roads I have to go along which are still riddled (what a good word that is, and under-used!) with pot-holes - as I am juddering along over them I always think "I must write to the Council about this", and then always forget by the time I've turned the corner.

I had forgotten how enormous the cars are now. This was the main difference I noted with Oxford, when I started cycling in London - the cars were all bigger. I don't just think it was being in The Big Smoke - when I was in Oxford, SUVs hadn't been invented, and a bloody good thing too. "Chelsea tractors" they're called - well, they have them in Clapham too! (I think some of them actually are tractors!) There is absolutely no reason that I can see to drive one of these gigantic cars in London - apart, that is, from an ostentatious display of wealth. They take up so much room, that it can't make your life any easier if you drive one of these - how hard must it be to find a parking space? My biggest gripe with them is that they are too wide to leave you any passing space, and their drivers always seem to want to play 'chicken' with cyclists - driving right down the centre of the road (to leave enough space between them and the parked cars on either side).

Still, some good moments – I'd forgotten that when I turn the corner onto Silverthorne Road, when I am at the highest point of my cycle, I can see on the dome of my museum on the horizon: that's always a pretty nice moment, knowing that I'll be cycling to the horizon. Also, coming up on Holy Trinity Church on Clapham Common the other day – scene of that fateful marriage in Atonement (and what a good book that was!) – just as the bells were tolling at the end of Mass… Today someone was flying a kite on the Common – a pretty big one, and he was standing on a little wheeled trolley, and it was pulling him back and forth across the grass! I thought he might take off! The blossom is out everywhere, and in Battersea Park they have been fertilising, so there is quite a pungent but somehow really refreshing smell of manure!

This evening I have mapped my ride with the aptly-named mapmyride.com – though I had once worked out a general route with the Transport for London journey planner, I was curious to know how far I actually cycle to work, now that I’ve refined my route. It’s just over 6 miles, one way! 12 miles a day – not bad! If you’re interested, you should be able to get to the route map I created by clicking the button below.



It's not the fastest way I could go - because of not being the world's most confident cyclist just yet, I decided to mainly go through parks and residential roads, though there are a few busy (and occasionally slightly hairy) moments. I tried a few different routes when I started cycling and this turned out to be the nicest one. I like watching the world go by, as I go by - you notice little things like the social and geographic divide between Clapham and Brixton, through such things as the grocery delivery vans you pass along the way - Tescos in Brixton (who deliver weekly to us as well!), Ocado in Clapham - of course!!

Have bike, will travel to work!

About 18 months ago, I bought my colleague Helen’s bike (for a ridiculously cheap price, I must say) – she had moved into a new flat and couldn’t carry it upstairs to store it inside, and there was nowhere else safe to park it (one of the problems of being a cyclist in London – we were living with K’s bike as a third housemate for about two years). It took me ages, and rather a lot of money (to be recouped by the money not spent on inordinately expensive tube fares), to get the appropriate gear together, and into a habit of regularly cycling to work, which eventually I did, and was starting to feel great from the exercise and the time outdoors, though the one drawback of not commuting (minor, in the great scheme of having a heathier lifestyle) was having so much less time for reading. The gods were clearly conspiring to get me cycling – every time I felt too lazy to bother, there would be some annoying problem on the tube (which happens about once a week – recently anyway), which made me curse myself for not having cycled that day…

Since we could not live with two bikes in the flat (and K’s bike had been much more expensive than mine!), I had to content myself with locking it up outside our block of flats, at the end of the row of garages, in the one place where there was any space to store bikes. The problem with this little area for leaving bikes is that there is nothing to lock them to – one of our neighbours who cycles everywhere has managed to colonise the only immovable object (an iron bracket in the wall) and she makes her bike look as old and unattractive as possible, which seems to work. A petition a few years to get the managing agents to erect a bike shed had come to nought, and this same neighbour has been trying for about the last ten years to get them to do something about bike storage, even to just put in some simple hoops to lock the bikes to – but they’re crap so they have ignored everyone.

So, no matter how many locks you have on your bike (and I had two), it matters not if someone drives up in a van in the middle of the night and just lifts it. Which is what happened last summer. I always knew that one morning on my way to work, I would round the corner and the bike just wouldn’t be there. And when it eventually happened, I did a double-take and wondered if actually I’d left it at work the evening before … but then I noticed that the tarpaulin lying rejected on the ground was mine, and there was a decided emptiness about the area. The caretaker was wandering about and I told him, “I think my bike’s been stolen” – “That makes five”, he said. Some bastards had just helped themselves. And there was nothing to stop them – at least now a security gate has just finally been installed in the gaping hole at the side of our building which just allowed anyone (including the local prostitutes and their clients, unfortunately) to just wander in off Brixton Hill. But trying to get our managing agents to do anything requires immense patience on the part of our residents’ association (of which K is now treasurer – ha ha!) and waiting a length of time comparable to the geological timescale.

I thought I might get a folding bike, which we could store inside, and arranged to try a friend’s Brompton for a couple of weeks, which are now extremely popular in London – but also really expensive, and I didn’t like the ride at all. There was also no way the tiny little wheels were going to get me up the big hill between Battersea and Clapham that is on my route, and which I had just managed to conquer when my bike was stolen! I wanted a real bike, but given how much I was going to be away at the end of last year, I decided not to think too much about replacing the bike, since there was no change to the problem of storage, the security gate still being a twinkle in everyone’s eye at that point. In the New Year, though, I decided I couldn’t wait for the managing agents to get their act together, and I just had to get a new bike and cross the storage bridge when we came to it. We now have a Ride2Work scheme, which another colleague had used, so I thought I would look into that. A bit like paying for an annual season ticket, your company pays up-front, and you pay them back by “salary sacrifice” (such an odd expression). I worked out the bike I wanted, which accessories I needed to replace and which new ones I wanted, and that my monthly payments for a year would come to £28.99!! In comparison with roughly £80 a month that I spend on travelling by tube! So I decided to go for it! Unfortunately it took Evans Cycles so long to process my voucher, that by the time it arrived I was too busy thinking about clearing my decks and writing my book to spend the time going back over my list and getting order numbers from their website and phoning in my order… But this week I finally took a couple of hours to do all that, and yesterday I collected my bike!

The picture’s at the top of this posting. It looks even grander than that in real life! It has an amazingly comfortable seat, and even has front-wheel suspension which makes London pot-holes a lot easier to cope with! I took it for a practice ride around Clapham Common yesterday afternoon, which was teeming with people since we’ve had a week of beautiful, sunny, spring weather. For old times’ sake, on the way home, I stopped to buy cheese at the deli on Abbeville Road, a really lovely shop- and café-lined street in Clapham, where we often used to cycle together, occasionally getting there in time for the Farmers’ Market – a habit we will have to get back into now that we both have functioning bikes again.

And thanks to another neighbour (one of the things I love about living in this block of flats is that you know your neighbours and they’re generally a really supportive bunch of people… more on that anon), our bike storage problem has been solved – completely unexpectedly – by her offering us part-use of her garage, which she doesn’t use to store all that much, and pretty much stands empty. So a happy ending all round! And tomorrow I will start cycling to work again! I just hope the gorgeous weather holds up…