Snapshots

I have a fair bit to catch up on from the last month, but I thought I would write it around snapshots of what I have been doing and seeing in that time.

Owls in the British Library

Well, as I had been warned, the British Library was absolutely packed over the summer, and unless you got there by 10 or very soon after, you could pretty much kiss goodbye to the idea of getting a desk or finding an empty locker down in the cloakroom... People resorted to interesting lengths to reserve desks for themselves - I spotted this one in Rare Books as I was popping out for a coffee break: a little cloth owl, and a bashed-up old notebook. Later on in the day I remembered to look and see whose desk it was, and it was occupied by a very respectable-looking middle-aged Japanese lady - she was working away surrounded by piles of bona fide-looking rare books, with the toy owl still in the same position...

We got into a very cosy habit working with Juliette - my arrival time in the library was slightly erratic and she would always save me a desk. We moved around a little bit - she got a bit bored of looking at the mustachioed Italian who alternated his beige or grey cardigans on a weekly basis...

It was an immensely productive month - as Glaire commented in an email, I was obviously ready to do this. I sent off my book proposal and sample material, and got about halfway through revising the thesis. Some of it is not very polished, and I created work for myself in some ways by deciding to add a new chapter - by turning my object appendix into an object-focused chapter - but I feel very satisfied with how much I got done. Plus I felt extremely relaxed by the end of it, and not at all keen on going back to work - especially with the 'age of austerity' looming and no-one quite knowing what is going to be in store for museums and heritage institutions in the upcoming Comprehensive Spending Review...

With Nick at Blickling

We got away for the Bank Holiday weekend (typical late August weather, as you can see from the photo!!) and went to visit Nick in Norfolk. We had a rather crazy weekend staying with him at his mother and stepfather's, along with their 3 young grand-daughters (all under 5), the parents of their daughter-in-law, Nick's brother and his wife, and four labradors!! It was actually great fun, though we slipped away during the day, to take in the gorgeous Norfolk countryside and exercise our National Trust membership cards a little - not being drivers, we don't get to do that very much! K had a bunch of places that he wanted to visit for various research reasons, and it was great just spending time with Nick and catching up. We also got to be the first dinner guests at Suzie & Drake's wonderful thatched cottage, which they had only moved into 2 weeks before!


The South Bank had a Morris dancing festival - inspired by the sarcastic remarks apparently made by Sebastian Coe at the opening ceremonies of the Olympics in Beijing: in reaction to the acrobatic Chinese dancing, he quipped that in London in 2012 we could instead look forward to the performance of 5000 Morris dancers. South Bank took him at his word, and pop artist David Owen created some memorable Morris dancing related images - one of them was (ha ha) Morissey, waving a bunch of wildflowers; another was the famous head from the bookcover of A Clockwork Orange, wearing a flower-festooned hat... But I liked this Star Wars Stormtrooper the best!

We actually didn't see any of the Morris dancing, but we did go to hear The Imagined Village playing at Queen Elizabeth Hall, which was excellent! The night before going back to work too, so I certainly was not sitting around at home moping over my 'back to school' feeling...


People have been emailing me to tell me they have spotted my book for sale in far-flung places! So far, the furthest-flung is the American University of Cairo bookshop - in Cairo! But this photo was taken by Lisa, "in an academic bookshop in a narrow street in Venice, about two weeks ago"... You can just spot it there in the middle on the top shelf!

Have you seen my book for sale anywhere exotic? I'd love to know!


I had one day back in the office last Monday, then went off again on a 3-day courier trip to Munich - installing a few pieces in an exhibition that is soon to open at the Haus der Kunst, commemorating 100 years since a major Islamic Art exhibition held in Munich in 1910. This one has a combination of 'historic' objects - which had been shown at the 1910 exhibition - together with contemporary works, which seems to be a current trend in exhibition curating in Germany these days. The exhibition in Berlin which I couriered in January took a similar approach. It was early days in the installation - I was the first courier - but I was impressed by the quality of the pieces. The Haus der Kunst is a rather ugly Fascist building - it was built in 1937, and seems ironically to be one of few buildings in Munich that actually survived the Allied bombings in 1945 - though they seem to have turned it into quite a thriving cultural and exhibition centre.

Munich was lovely - I had never been before - and it was really nice to catch up with Marion (hello! I know she reads this!). The Glockenspiel in the picture above is one of Munich's major tourist attractions - it is installed in the impressive belltower of the neo-Gothic Rathaus, though it dates from the early 20th century. It commemorates two events from Munich's history. Everyone gathers in the main square for 11 o'clock when it starts to play, and there is a great cry of approval when the Bavarian jouster knocks his Austrian opponent off his perch - lots of fun!

But what a busy week! I was giving a lecture yesterday - in a study afternoon on Seville - so as soon as I got back from Munich, I had to think about that. No wonder I feel like a zombie today!


And last, but by no means least, our calendar image for the month - K's grandfather, Robert, who died this time last year. This lovely photo of him was taken during the war, when he must have been in his 30s. He didn't change a bit all his life!

Getting Christmassy...

The front pages of all the newspapers were carrying this photo yesterday - Queen takes train to Sandringham shock! The palace insisted it was not a publicity stunt, and there was no follow-on car transporting all her belongings, à la David Cameron and his bike - though the Duke of Edbinburgh had "already travelled ahead" (obviously feeling that First Capital Connect was beneath his dignity...) Hmmm... More than any of this frugal Queen lark, what I want to know is how she managed to get a first class ticket for only £44.40!?

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I've been starting to feel a bit Christmassy in the last couple of days. Glühwein and lebkuchen in to the small hours at Sonja's last night can't have hurt. The book I am reading is also inducing a wintry mood - Barry Unsworth's Morality Play, about a group of medieval mystery players, travelling through the snowy wastes of the north of England in the week before Christmas (it's great by the way). A lot of people are already off work as of now (though K and I are both in until the bitter end on Christmas Eve...) so I've been wishing quite a lot of 'Happy Christmases' over the last few days - though it seemed too early. Too early too for the work Christmas party at the start of last week. But it has suddenly got really cold, and has been snowing on and off all this week. It hasn't settled in London, of course, though it has managed to screw up trains, planes and automobiles - those poor passengers on the Eurostar who got stranded when the trains just failed on entering the warmth of the Channel Tunnel after the freezing temperatures of northern France! Amazing that such things happen in the 21st century!

Last weekend, after a productive day in the library, we went with my parents to St Pancras Old Church - a lovely mainly Norman church, stranded in the wastes behind King's Cross - to hear a concert of Elizabethan Christmas music, performed by a group called Passamezzo, who are music academics as well as performers, and research and bring to life historic music. It was a really lovely evening, performed by candle light, and one of the pieces they played had been reconstructed from a marginal note that one of them had come across in a manuscript in the Bodleian library... Not exactly carol singing, but much more amusing and atmospheric. We do have some carols lined up for next week though, in St Peter ad Vincula in the Tower of London. Another amazing privilege of working in the places we do...

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There is something about this time of year - midwinter - that brings out a primeval human urge for the ghostly and supernatural. We love the spooky short stories by M. R. James (1862-1936), that he used to write and recite to a select gathering of students and colleagues in King's College Cambridge, and last Christmas we went to a fantastic little story-telling production of some of these stories performed by Robert Lloyd Parry at the Barons Court Theatre - a tiny place in the basement of a pub, that reminded me of the theatrical venues we used to attend as students. Alas, he is doing no London performances this year, but we think we have found a satisfactory alternative, which we're off to tomorrow night - a play called Darker Shores at the Hampstead Theatre. It's about strange goings-on and bumps in the night in a house by the sea (a very M. R. Jamesian subject) but since we're about to go off to a house by the sea (we have our cottage in St Ives booked again - I'm counting down the days...) I hope it doesn't freak me out too much!

We are blitzing the family gatherings at the end of this week - off to K's brother's on Christmas Day where his family is congregating, and then my parents are coming here on Boxing Day... then at 08.57 on the 27th, we're off! I can't wait! But we're - finally - not doing Christmas presents this year. It always strikes me as a colossal waste of time, money and effort, battling Christmas shopping crowds to spend money you don't have on presents that people don't want, and which just go to the charity shop in the New Year. I am all for buying goats for African villages, paying to train a school teacher in Indonesia, and other such gifts - which spend money where it really counts. Problem is, K hasn't yet told his family this is what we're doing!!

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My sister is getting on well in North Uist. She found some temporary work at the Hebridean Smokehouse, preparing the huge number of Christmas orders they have unexpectedly been inundated with. It's such a small and close-knit community that everyone knows everyone else, so you get these jobs by word of mouth. She texted me the other day: "How's this for an island postal service? Postie has a package for [her friend] Will, but can't be arsed to go all the way to his house, so comes to the Smokehouse as he knows his neighbour works there, who then passes it to me so that I can give it to Will when I see him tomorrow!" Brilliant!

Just another day at the beach...

As usual, I have been struggling to find time to catch up with this blog. The longer I leave it, the more things that come along that I want to blog about, which makes for interminably long posts…! But today I am going to limit myself to blogging about the fun I have had celebrating my birthday, and a few rambled digressions…

It was my birthday on the 19th. I’m now 35. Feels like a landmark. As K encouragingly put it, I'm halfway to 70!

We both took the day off work, and brilliantly, it was an absolutely gorgeous summer day - a mini heatwave, according to the BBC - and by far the best day to be out and about. I highly recommend mid-week days off! It makes you feel like you've worked two two-day weeks! We started our fun-packed and busy day by getting the 9.36 train to Brighton where we ambled around taking in the trendy, buzzy seaside town – and, rather unexpectedly, a fine neo-Nasrid building which is now the Brighton Dome concert hall and city museum - until finding the perfect spot for the morning's third cup of coffee, in the Pavilion Gardens.

The tower block in the background rather spoiled the effect of the turrets!

This guy busking on the French horn while standing on stilts was rather fun!


The point was to go to the Brighton Pavilion, where neither of us had ever been, and which - though I knew it was one of the earliest examples of Orientalist architecture in Britain - we knew very little about. It turned out to be a royal palace built by the Prince of Wales, later George IV, son of Mad King George, when he set up home in the society town of Brighton to escape from the pressures of being heir apparent. It also turns out to have the best interior decorative scheme in the Chinoiserie style that was so popular in the late 18th century! No photos inside, so I can't show you, but it was absolutely awe-inspiring in parts! The banqueting room and ballroom were particularly luxurious and overwhelming, including an amazing chandelier above the dining table, which hung from the claws of an enormous dragon. The whole thing weighed a ton and some of the king’s guests were scared to sit underneath it! I could sympathise! But visiting the pavilion was a real and memorable treat, and just enough outside of both of our areas of work to be a mini-holiday.

If it weren't for the grass, would you believe you were in Brighton?!

We were not the only people who had the bright idea of a trip to the seaside on a lovely English summer day - and Brighton beach was a far cry from the quiet idyll of Harris, or the delightfully relaxing day we spent at Bexhill at Easter... Despite the online warnings against doing so, we decided to get fish and chips from one of the stalls on the beach, so we could sit and look at the sea view, which we did, and they were not great quality, but the principle of the thing needed to be observed...!


It was crazily crowded, because of the school holidays, which naively we had not taken into account - but we got some good paddling in (no Kent method was attempted, though it was tempting apparently...) before heading back up the hill to the station... Alas, it was all too brief - we'll definitely go back and have a more extended wander round the interesting-looking shops and cafés, especially in the old warren-like part of town known as The Lanes - but we had to be at the National Theatre for 5, since we'd booked to go on a Backstage Tour! We were a bit early so we walked from Embankment and wandered along the South Bank in the sunshine, and I just took random photos of some of the things I love most about that part of London, since I don't often just wander around my haunts with a camera...

The view – in the foreground is Waterloo Bridge, which we often go over on the 59 bus travelling to and from Brixton, and from the top deck you get the best view in London: St Paul’s, the Gherkin and the City in one direction, the Houses of Parliament and the London Eye in the other, and on both sides the curl of the Thames. Just fab.

I have always loved the fact that this one part of the South Bank is completely given over to graffiti and skateboarders – and the fact that all the youngsters who hang out looking oh-so-cool and rebellious have no sense of being completely institutionalised by an area where these otherwise rather anti-social activities are perfectly allowed, even encouraged!

Of course the best thing is the second hand book market under the vast curve of the arch of Waterloo Bridge – I love browsing here. On my birthday, we scraped together our last few pound coins to buy The Blind Rider by Juan Goytisolo, which apparently he has said will be his last novel. I really like his writing (Cinema Eden is just fantastic) and I wanted to buy a book there on my birthday as a memento of that lovely day…

What we were less pleased to discover is that the area in front of the BFI – which used to be the best place to go for a drink in that part of London, and had wonderful long wooden bench tables which you had to share with your fellow drinkers, in a truly socialist South Bank experience – has been poshed up and turned into a terraza for fine pre-film or -theatre dining. The grungey BFI bar of old is no longer. We were quite disappointed to see that.

The Backstage Tour was fun and interesting, though perhaps would have been more so had we gone during the working day (ours started at 5.15), when more people would have been behind the scenes, in the art studio and prop stores, actually doing things. Also having been heavily involved in the backstage side of theatre when we were at university, I wanted to know more about where the stage manager sat, how they prepared for a show, gave their cues, how the lighting design worked etc etc… But we got to see the sets for the plays were weren’t going to see that night, including All’s Well That Ends Well, whose set looked great – a bit like A Nightmare Before Christmas in massive 3D…

It made me want to go and see it – though we have seen quite a lot of Shakespeare already this year: we had a trip to As You Like It at the Globe a month ago, with Jane for her birthday, which was brilliant fun as always at the Globe, and nice as well since it was a text I had studied for A-level and seen staged by friends as the Oriel College summer show. The second Shakespeare we have seen this year was The Merchant of Venice, an outdoor production in the Bishop’s Garden at Hereford, when we went down a few weeks ago for the 3 Choirs Festival – K’s father was local festival administrator this year (a bad case of ‘recycling deputy headmasters’, as he amusingly put it). We had a really lovely long weekend – in all these years of going to Hereford, where my grandparents also lived when they were alive, I had never been to 3 Choirs, but the night I arrived on the train (K went down for the whole week), we went off to the Cathedral for a performance of Bach’s violin sonatas by Rachel Podger. It was absolutely, stunningly beautiful. The acoustics of the unaccompanied violin in one of the most beautiful medieval cathedrals in England. And Rachel Podger was an absolute virtuoso – somehow she managed to make two layers of completely different sounds come out of her strings at the same time. Wonderful.

Anyway, The Merchant of Venice was good too – I don't think I had ever seen it performed. There was a nicely down-to-earth amateurish quality about the set but the acting was excellent (this company, The Festival Players, specialises in giving opportunities to up-and-coming young actors). It was an all-male production, which really makes you understand just how funny all the cross-dressing and mistaken identity of Shakespeare’s plays would have been in his own day.



But back to my birthday and the National Theatre. That night we went to see Phèdre, by Jean Racine, a 17th-century French playwright who drew heavily on the classical tragedies – in this case, the Seneca play Phaedra, which I had studied for finals (and, typically, could not remember all that much about…). This was in a translation by Ted Hughes, and I really loved the Hughesian poetry of it – especially since Racine’s original text was also self-consciously literary – but I think K is right in his assessment that it did not make for a very dramatic play. On top of that, we didn’t think the quality of the acting was very good – and this was the great Helen Mirren in the title role, and the leading man of the moment, Dominic Cooper. It was also directed by Nicholas Hytner, the National Theatre director, so it should have been brilliant – but it wasn’t, sadly. The two supporting actors carried the show and their acting abilities really shone – Margaret Tyzack as the nurse, who had a really wonderful voice, and John Shrapnel as Hippolyte’s companion, especially in the scene where he has to report his gruesome death. And the set was magnificent, in true National Theatre style – and somehow the changing light on the glowing horizon really managed to capture the quality of the light in Greece… So it wasn’t all bad!!

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Last Saturday, the birthday celebrations continued. We went fruit picking with my parents and my sister, at Parkside Farm just outside Enfield. It was a brilliant day out! We had a picnic lunch to start with, and all brought enough for several picnics, so we had far too much food…

My father is here seen wearing his Terry Pratchett hat. When he was wearing this at home in Shepherd’s Bush recently, some of the local Aussies passed by, and one of them asked him – ‘Are you a real wizard?’ !!

Then we hit the fields!! We picked up a load of empty punnets and a cart which we trundled around behind us as we picked ever more and more fruit and vegetables and eventually completely filled it! I had decided I wanted to try making jam so everyone really got carried away on my behalf, especially with the berries – there is also something completely addictive about picking fruit! It was just so wonderful to be outside in the sun all afternoon (we have actually had several weeks of an actual summer here in England!!) – and a brilliant family thing to do. My sister and I have really fond memories of doing this with our grandparents in Herefordshire, and on that day there were loads of kids getting carried away in the bushes, as it were. Occasionally a loud cry would ring out – ‘I’ve just found the biggest raspberry in the whole world!’

Does anyone know what a ‘Himbo’ is??


My mother and my sister both pretending to be raspberries!

The farm had developed this ‘table-top’ system for growing their strawberries which meant you could pick away without having to bend down and break your back! Very civilised!

Some, ahem, ‘low-hanging fruit’, which we quickly picked! These strawberries - warmed by the sun - were so sweet and tasty!

Stained hands after blackberry picking (and some judicious munching)!

Our cart weighed down by our pickings!

K defeated by hunter-gathering!

We have been living off plums, sweetcorn, spinach, marrow, french beans and raspberries all week – the blackberries I have pureed and frozen, in preparation for making ice cream, though some of them I have baked with apples in a pie we are going to eat with my sister tonight; the raspberries and strawberries have been sorted, hulled, weighed and frozen, while I work out how on earth one makes jam…!

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After what seemed like an interminably long car ride from Enfield to Brixton – with all the punnets of fruit very carefully packed in the tiny boot of my sister’s (bright orange) Daewoo Matiz, we finished the day with a Victoria sponge birthday cake at home! I had made the sponges in the morning before setting out to the farm, and we filled it with strawberry jam bought from our lovely friendly deli on Abbeville Road, Jersey cream bought from the farm, and strawberries we had picked with our own fair hands! YUM!

They brought the candles!

It didn’t last long…!

Back in the Big Wide World - for now!

Well, I have re-emerged from the world I have been immersed in for the last two weeks, of the international influence of Islamic Spanish art in the 19th century, while I have been writing Chapter 4 - but as of 9.30 last night, I sent that off to my readers, and took the rest of the weekend off! That's the last chapter of the book - so, nearly there. Just the small matter of the rewrites to incorporate comments and corrections from my readers, finding some time to write the introduction, and whipping my image needs into shape - not all of which I am going to be able to do in the next two weeks, which is how much more research leave I have. I will try and do what I can to keep focused when I get back to the 'day job' in early June, but I know it will be difficult, so I'm feeling a little bit of pressure there.

I'm starting to chafe at the confinement slightly too - whole days at the desk when you don't go outside or (since my office in the Research Dept has no window) even see the sky. When I was writing Chapter 3 I closeted myself in the flat and didn't go out for about three days. This is all bringing back memories of writing up the PhD. I have also been remembering the difficulty of finding music to write to - you need something that makes the background fade away (especially in the Research Dept, where there is quite a lot of background) but is not itself distracting. I can't write to Bach for example - the music is so complicated that it engages your brain too much. Trouble is, you find something that works and then over-listen to it - I haven't been able to listen to Satie's Gymnopédies since I finished my thesis. This time round I have been listening to a lot of Max Richter, which is great but is now also starting to drive me slightly crazy. It's time to put this book to bed and get on with the rest of my life!!

This is a random picture to show the kind thing I have been writing about - this one of the pavilions built for the International Exposición Iberoaméricana in Seville in 1929, in a 'neo-Mudéjar' style, i.e. reviving a form of medieval Iberian architecture which adapted Islamic styles to Christian functions. The style was revived during the eclecticism of the late 19th century, when nations were looking for an architectural style to encapsulate their national identity, and which could represent their culture and aspirations at International Expos. At that time, Islamic styles became Spanish. The pavilion still stands, in Seville's Parque de María Luisa - along with various other structures built for that Expo.

Still. Today was a carefully-planned lazy Sunday, beginning with a cooked breakfast at the Vera Cruz on Brixton Hill, with Lindsay, followed by a short cycle ride over to the Clapham Farmers' Market, where we haven't been for aaages. It's not the biggest market you've ever seen, and I think stallholders were put off by the gusty, chilly, rainy weather we've been having over the last week - so there were only about ten stalls today, but all the same, it was nice to wander and think about buying things you would never otherwise buy. I got some rhubarb! I have no idea what to do with rhubarb but I plan to find out! We also bought some game pies (one venison and one rabbit), K picked up some homemade cider, and somehow the guy on the bakery stall managed to persuade us to buy his last two slices of pear and chocolate cake for a £1 each - he drove a hard bargain!

I don't care all that much about the fact that the food is organically-grown, I just like the fact that it is grown as it should be, and when, and that it's not flown in from cash crops in Zimbabwe. I'd love it if we could get a veggie box, and you just get what you get, cos it's in season that week, and you have to work out what to do with it - but where we live, there is nowhere for the delivery guy to leave it. Tescos was doing it for a while, in partnership (apparently) with local farmers in Kent, which seemed like the ideal solution as they could deliver it with your other groceries - but I got annoyed with it, because most of the stuff in the box was freighted in from distant lands, and that was not my idea of supporting local farmers. I guess other people objected to this too because they stopped it. 'Grow your own' is a big thing now, especially on community gardens - with people turning common garden areas in council estates into kitchen gardens, and the government proclaiming 2012 new allotments in London in time for the Olympics (it's not just Michelle Obama and her organic garden, though that is obviously fantastic!) - and that's something I have wondered about us trying to do with some of the unused common garden areas in our block of flats, though I have never had a garden in my life and wouldn't know what to do with it, let alone have the time....

But in terms of 'green lifestyle' for now we're contenting ourselves with composting - thanks to our neighbour Lisa, who actually went out and bought a compost bin, which nestles under a tree round the back, out of everyone's way, and which about five flats share now, including us. I got fed up with how much organic waste we were throwing away every week - and it's amazing what a difference it makes. It is so satisfying putting the peelings and the offcuts in our little compost bin then once a week taking it down to the big bin! I am sure some nice juicy compost has developed by now - Lisa has had the bin for about a year - but we have to work out how to get to it and what we're going to do with it! Hence the momentary thought about community gardening, when we were in the pub one night... Hmmm.... What I get annoyed about now (!) is how much plastic packaging there is - on almost everything you buy! There is so rarely an option not to buy something covered in plastic - I hate it! Our rubbish bin is just full of plastic bags and wrappers now. There was some horrible statistic I heard once - on a Jon Stewart interview I think - that plastic will outlive the human race, or some such. That's the monster we've created! The truth of this was visible everywhere in Syria last autumn, especially out in the countryside - plastic bags everywhere, just awful.

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I've accidentally finished The Gormenghast Trilogy. I didn't have another Swedish crime book lined up after I finished The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and Bookthrift didn't have anything in that jumped out at me, so I reverted to Titus Alone, and after a few pages a night here and there, I discovered I was most of the way through, so I just went for it! It was very different from the previous two books - written much later, and completed after Mervyn Peake's death from his notes, but there is also such a contrast between the world of Gormenghast, which seems so remote from the real world in time as well as in space, and the sort of Brave New Modernist World which Titus encounters during his adventures in the last book. It all becomes a little bit weirdly hallucinogenic as well. But the writing is so beautiful - I've had a bookmark in this passage almost since the start of the book:

Suddenly and unexpectedly the last of the cedars floated away behind him as though from a laying-on of hands, and the wide sky looked down, and there before him was the first of the structures.

He had heard of them but had not expected anything quite so far removed from the buildings he had known, let alone the architecture of Gormenghast.

The first to catch his eye was a pale-green edifice, very elegant, but so simple in design that Titus's gaze could find no resting place upon its slippery surface...

Titus sat down by the side of the road and frowned. He had been born and bred to the assumption that buildings were ancient by nature, and were and always had been in the process of crumbling away. The white dust lolling between the gaping bricks; the worm in the wood. The weed dislodging the stone; corrosion and mildew; the crumbing patina; the fading shades; the beauty of decay.

I love that! The idea that buildings "were and always had been in the process of crumbling away", of not being able to find a resting place for your eye on the plain surface of a Modernist design - I can just imagine what it must have felt like living through the development of those new architectural fashions, how stark that contrast must have been between the heavily-decorated Victorian constructions of the previous century, and the move towards new, sleek, undecorated designs and their machine-made materials... It must have been exactly like how Titus experiences the unnamed world he is travelling through in that passage. (A by-the-by - we went to the Le Corbusier exhibition last Sunday - another disappointingly put-together exhibition with fabulous material)

Now I am reading The Suspicions of Mr Whicher (Bookthrift came through this time, and I set aside my snobbish reaction to the 'Richard and Judy book club' sticker on its cover) which I'm really enjoying - I hadn't realised it is an account of a true-life country house murder mystery, investigated by one of the earliest ever detectives, which was sensationalist at the time and inspired a wave of Victorian crime novels, not least Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone - well, we like those kinds of books, so it's got to be a winner. Really pared down language, which is refreshing too, somehow - after Gormenghast, and my own florid literary creations!

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Quick plug before I go. On Thursday night I joined my family to celebrate a friend's book launch - The Iraqi Cookbook, by our great family friend Lamees Ibrahim. Lamees is an Iraqi who has lived most of her adult life in England. The recent war in Iraq really hurt her, and she's been really driven to do something to raise understanding about the Iraqi people and their culture - she's been instrumental in setting up the new International Action for Iraqi Refugees. She's also an amazing cook, and the book started out as a way to pass on recipes to her children. She started throwing in memories and anecdotes about her childhood, and researching the history of Iraq and its cuisine, and the book was born. In her little speech on Thursday, she talked about why Iraqi cuisine is so different from that of its Middle Eastern neighbours - even from one end of the country to the other (all the fresh fish that is cooked and eaten in the port cities of the south are not known in the north, for example), partly because of all the empires and rulers that have passed through Mesopotamia during the course of millenia and left their mark on the food. She paused and said, "I don't think the current regime is going to have the same influence!"

(A brief aside on the British "draw-down" from Basra - there's an article here about my cousin, Dickie Head, who won the Military Cross for leading the force which went in to recover the bodies of the British soldiers killed in that helicopter crash in 2006 - proud of him)

Anyway, I'm looking forward to browsing the book and learning to cook some Iraqi dishes. I wonder what they might do with rhubarb...?

P.S. You can also check Lamees and some of her recipes out on the Guardian 'word of mouth' section, here.