Spring forward, fall back

The clocks went forward this morning, so it is officially - erm - British summertime, though the idea of summer still seems an incredibly long way off at this point. Lets be content to call it spring shall we? Though the weather can't seem to make up its mind about that either. Anyway, point is, it only feels like a few weeks ago that the clocks went back! This year is just zapping by in a blur of Ceramics Galleries work, without me really having the time to pay attention.

A springy picture to bring a smile to your face - daffodils are probably my favourite flowers, seen blooming brightly and happily away here in our lovely Sargadelos vase...

The last few weeks we have been piling stress on to the madness by moving judderingly yet unerringly forward with the business of getting a mortgage and buying a flat. Yikes. This is something that we have been talking about and nudging our way towards for a couple of years now - ever since K's parents kindly offered to give us the money we needed for a deposit, which was the only conceivable way we would ever be able to afford to do this - but our finances were in such a state that we needed to spend quite a long time sorting them out. It was hearing the phrase "to be brutally honest..." coming out of the mouth of the mortgage advisor some friends had put us in contact with.

Anyway, the long and short of it is, thanks to K's inheritance from his grandfather, we have just this week paid off the huge loan that we took out to pay off all our debts in one fell swoop - which actually means that for the first time in about 10 years, we are debt free. I know I should be whooping for joy about this, but I guess it hasn't really sunk in properly yet, probably because it is just a stepping stone on the way to being in more debt than either of us have possibly imagined... The sudden incentive to get things sorted out is because we have seen a flat in our block that some neighbours are selling and have decided to just go for it. We're going to try to buy it from them privately, so once we get the mortgage application in - hopefully in the next couple of weeks - we'll be at the delicate negotiating stage. So it might not work out, but we're going to try to do whatever we can to ensure it will!! Exciting - but also frankly terrifying.

----------------------------------------------------------

At the same time, I have been nominated for a promotion at work. Which I was very chuffed about - until the full reality of the bureaucratic process that this entails struck me. I have to go through something ominous-sounding called the Curatorial Review Board, which means putting together copies of all my publications (actually rather a lot - mostly done in my own time!) for consideration by the Board - this I have to do by Wednesday; a "portfolio", which I have a bit more time to think about (end April); and then an interview in front of a panel of 4, including an external assessor (end May). I know colleagues who have been through this process, and it is not much fun apparently. You pretty much have to sell yourself, which I am not much good at. Plus there isn't space in my brain to think about all this at the moment. But I am hoping a bit of relief comes in April from the full-on workload - most of my ceramics displays will have been installed by then - and I can start to gear myself up for it. I bloody well deserve a promotion after all!!

----------------------------------------------------------

A nice thing that's happened - I got a place on that Summer School in Tunisia that I applied for, so I will be going there for 10 days in mid-May. I knew that part of it was giving presentations, but I understood that these were on topics that you already knew something about or were in the process of researching. As it turns out, I have been selected to present on the "minor arts" - a phrase I absolutely hate, since it implies the primacy of painting as the most important art form - plus I don't really know what it means. Basically, it looks like I have to talk knowledgeably about the objects on display in museums I have never been to. We are supposed to do preparation for this - they have sent me some references to articles - but this is time and work I have not anticipated doing! The others on the course all seem to be academics in research institutions, who may have time on their hands to read articles - but some of us have crazy busy working lives! Still, I am very much looking forward to the trip - I think it's going to be amazing! I have to start making travel plans soon...

----------------------------------------------------------

Another nice thing that's happened - my sister has finally found herself a permanent job in North Uist!! This is not an easy thing to achieve, because the jobs are few and far between to being with, and mostly seasonal. But she has persevered, and just this week landed a job at the Hebridean Smokehouse - hurrah! She worked there over their crazy pre-Christmas period and said it was a bit of a nightmare, and it's busy at the moment because of the pre-Easter orders, but hopefully things will settle down soon. She was really worried that if she didn't find something soon, she wouldn't be able to stay up there. So this gives her some stability and a regular income, and because it is just mornings it means she can get on with her own editing and writing in the afternoons. Phew.

----------------------------------------------------------

And finally...

When we walk out of the front door of our block of flats on to Brixton Hill, we can see straight down into central London and have a clear view of the Gherkin, one of the most iconic buildings on the London skyline. A few months back, we noticed a new skyscraper had reared itself above the Brixton skyline... Officially known as the Strata Tower, this has already become known as "the Razor", because after "the Gherkin" all landmark buildings in London have to have a nickname. It's a new tower-block in Elephant and Castle, and sounds like an amazing building - with three huge wind turbines at its peak that give it its distinctive appearance, and will generate energy to power the building. You can read all about it here.

"The Razor" under construction, courtesy of zupermaus

Problem is, every time we see it, we can't help but think of the Tower of Mordor, and that a huge eye is going to appear above those wind turbines, and blink...

Roses, a Palace, Pancakes, a Cathedral

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


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

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

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

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

--------------------------------------------------------------------

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


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

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

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


located on officially the shortest street in Britain!


What a Dickensian confluence of circumstances!

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

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

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

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

--------------------------------------------------------------------

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

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

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

--------------------------------------------------------------------

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

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


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

Over and out.

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!