We're in - and I'm off again!

Imagine this. You move house at the weekend. You don't take any time off work the next week but instead try to write an 8500 word essay for an exhibition catalogue which should be finished at the end of the week - you don't succeed. You take your mind off how tired you are by going to see The Eagle on Friday night (excellent). You spend Saturday thinking about and writing the talk you have to give the next day at your book launch! You relax on Saturday night by having your sister to stay in the new flat. You attend book launch - it seems to go well though it would have been nice if more people had been there. But it was Mothers' Day and the sun was shining. After lots of hobnobbing at said book launch you go out for Mothers' Day lunch with your mother. You eventually go home but can't collapse because early the next morning you are going to Amsterdam for 3 days to take part in a conference about 'Presenting "Islamic" Art in the Contemporary Context'. You are on a panel, something you have never done before, asked to present for 10 minutes on 'What makes Islamic art Islamic?' and to respond to three key questions the conference organisers have posed, which you don't understand. You will fly back from Amsterdam early Thursday morning and go straight into work, because you then have 3 working days to finish the aforementioned catalogue essay and deal with everything else that needs to be done before going away until the end of the month, to Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Iran... Who would manage to arrange such a crazy work schedule? Me, that's who.

We're in Day 2 of Amsterdam at this point. I have participated in the panel today - which seemed to go ok actually - and tomorrow unexpectedly have the morning off, before participating in a Think Tank in the afternoon about a planned exhibition of Islamic art. We're being well looked after, and staying in the once-grand musaktastic Hotel Krasnapolsky - I am blogging from the lobby, the first time I have managed to get online (we don't have an internet connection yet in the new flat) and not had to worry about change-of-address admin, trying to move over our contents insurance, etc etc.


The new flat is great, though we went through a stage the middle of last week of being very disorientated and slightly traumatised by the whole uprooting/touching down in a new place (though at the same time not new because only 250 m from the old place) where we don't know anyone. Probably because we were so tired and hadn't taken any time off work to 'settle in'. As you can see from the photos, we're living in a state of semi-chaos, semi-civilisation - we unpacked the kitchen, the bedroom and about half the living room, so it is livable in and it is starting to feel like home. But we're putting everthing else on hold until we get back from Central Asia.

My half hour's free internet connection is about to run out, and there's the conference dinner to rush to in a moment, so I will sign out for now. We should get online at home on Thursday so I will aim to blog again before our travel adventures! Just wanted to check in as I know some of you are wondering how the move went... I leave you with some flamingoes in Amsterdam zoo.

March catch-up

I'm not feeling particularly inspired this evening - tired, more than anything - but I thought it was time for a quick catch-up for those of you who are wondering how it is going with the new flat! Well, we have successfully exchanged contracts, and have set a completion date of 25 March; we've booked the packers and will be moving on 26 March! Exciting!!

We had hoped to be in a week earlier, since that would have given us a little bit more time to get settled and sorted before the busy time at the turn of April, when I have to do a book launch and a quick work trip to Amsterdam before we head for Central Asia and Iran for the rest of that month...! But never mind - the settling in and unpacking is likely to be a slow, organic process, which means we'll properly have the feel of the place when we do it - but I also hope it is not too drawn out, as the prospect of not being able to find anything for months is a little boring...

So the weekends have been completely given over to sorting and chucking. An enormous load went to the charity shop - our next-door neighbour Sue gave K a lift, since it was an entire car-load of stuff. The poor staff in Barnardo's looked totally fazed as it just kept on coming... Since then we've created another few piles. Last weekend we went through the study and took about a forest worth of paper down to the recycling. Slightly weird sensations induced by sorting through a decade of paperwork, mainly relating to the transition from graduate study to adult working lives - you sort of re-live your life as the papers pass before your eyes, not all of it pleasant or happy to remember...

There's still more to go - we have got to the stage where it's not easy to decide what stays and what goes. Plus I'm running out of steam. It doesn't help that during the week we're incredibly busy as well - we seem to be doing something every evening. Last week I was giving a lecture, to the London Society for Medieval Studies. After spending the whole of Saturday sorting out my desk and files, on Sunday morning I turned my thoughts to writing the lecture and found that by mid-afternoon my head felt like it was going to explode. We went out for a very muddy walk in Brockwell Park - it reminded me of when I was writing up my PhD thesis and would hardly ever set foot outside, unless K took me out for walks around Magdalen Deer Park... We wandered up to the little café in Brockwell House and thought about how nice it will be to be that much closer to the park when we're in the new flat.

We're feeling jolly satisfied with ourselves for eating our way through the cupboards, fridge and freezer. We made an inventory of all the accumulated tins and dry goods and frozen leftovers and ends of veg, and came up with some imaginative ways to concoct it all into meals. We had a nice venison pie last weekend (frozen diced venison from the East Molesey butchers + leftover shortcrust pastry), accompanied by red cabbage and green beans which had been languishing in the crisper for a while! It's amazing how much cheaper the weekly shop is if you plan the meals around the ingredients you already have!