Hogmanay

We climbed up Craiglockhart Hill, near where my sister lives in Morningside, to see the midnight fireworks light up the Edinburgh city horizon on New Year's Eve. This is a local tradition - we were a bit early so not really sure if we were in the right place, but soon noticed a cluster of seasoned old timers with a coolbox (transport the champers in it and sit on it afterwards - very sensible!) so decided they knew what was what so we'd lurk near them, and soon we were surrounded by very jolly groups of people wishing each other a happy new year. Much better than being one of the estimated 80,000 people to crush themselves into the Hogmanay Street Party on Princes Street, thank you very much...

It also seems to be quite a tradition to light sky lanterns and since it was a really clear, crisp night - beautiful - we could see these floating up into the sky from all over Edinburgh. The fireworks display was spectacular but could have gone on for longer! It lit up the outline of Edinburgh Castle, and for ages afterwards the smoke floated over the Salisbury Crags and Arthur's Seat, silhouetting them against the night (my camera battery died at that point, alas).


On New Year's Day, we climbed up Arthur's Seat - along with most of Edinburgh by the look of it! There was practically a queue to reach the trig point!


We made a little picnic of sausage sandwiches and a thermos of tea and ate them with icy fingers sitting on the side of the hill looking out over the city towards the Firth of Forth - until we were just too cold and had to start walking again to warm up!


Mission accomplished on - what was it? Drives in the Scottish countryside and visits to castles: we saw some fine ruined craggy Scottish castles at Craigmillar and Roslin (which was the site of another freezing picnic, but amazing setting, looking down over the glen... check out those icicles!)



as well of course as the wonderful 15th-century Roslin Chapel, every stone surface of which is exuberantly carved, with symbols and scenes that have given overactive imaginations a run for their money for the last 500 odd years, leading it to be claimed as one of the likely resting places of the Holy Grail. The tiny building is massively over-visited, which I fear has more to do with Dan Brown and The Da Vinci Code than with an appreciation of medieval architecture - but perhaps that's unfair.

We went round Holyroodhouse free of charge, thanks to K calling in a favour. The Scottish Parliament building is an amazingly thoughtful piece of architectural design - I would just like to know how well it works as a building. We took a long walk to what must be the archetypal "quaint pub" - the Sheep Heid Inn in Duddingston, though we didn't play skittles... And as to big fat books, I read Barbara Kingsolver's latest, The Lacuna, which was excellent. Oh and extra bonus excitement - K bought himself a fine tweed suit.

And as far as we were concerned, it was a White Christmas, even if the official definition is a single flake of snow actually falling on Christmas Day. I can't find anything to say whether the bookies have actually declared 2010 a White Christmas or not, but there was snow everywhere in Edinburgh on Christmas Day... It was fab.

Happy Christmas

Photo © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2010

I have been inspired by the current V&A exhibition on Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes to use this wonderful stage backcloth from the Wedding Scene in The Firebird - designed by Natalia Goncharova in 1926 - as my Christmas image this year. Though it deserves to be seen much bigger than this (click on the image above for a bigger version), preferably in the flesh - I saw it today and even though I was prepared for it to be big, it was astonishing. At over 10 metres wide, it's the largest object in the V&A's entire collection. But beautiful, and somehow wintry and Russian and therefore appropriate for Christmas.

We're heading for Edinburgh on Christmas Eve, to spend Christmas and New Year with my sister, who moved there a few months ago. She is finally - and very happily! - living in the city she loves (she went to university there), has a job in the sector she has been training for and trying to break into - editing/publishing - and using her Arabic degree. And I am just happy to have the excuse to spend time in Edinburgh, having only been back there a couple of times since she left university.

We haven't made many plans to do much once we get there - over the last few days we have been focusing our thoughts on actually getting ourselves there, since last week the Arctic weather conditions which we've been suffering from in the UK this month returned. Many Christmas travellers have had their flights or trains cancelled, and the roads have been a nightmare. It seems to be improving now - touch wood - and one of my colleagues successfully made it to Edinburgh on the same train route we're taking tomorrow evening...

We'll be cooking our traditional braised duck recipe for Christmas lunch, then after that the only other thing we have planned is a visit to the new Scottish Parliament building later in the week. In between we'll probably go for drives in the Scottish countryside and visit castles and quaint pubs and watch M R James stories on DVD and read big fat books. Can't wait.

So all that remains is for me to wish you all a very Merry Christmas and all best wishes for an excellent New Year - may 2011 bring peace and happiness to you all!

East Window

Yesterday we went with my parents to the Family Carol Concert at St Martin-in-the-Fields. K and I used to go to concerts there quite often but we haven't been for ages - perhaps because the repertoire began to seem a bit repetitive. We certainly haven't been since the church unveiled its new refurbishment in April 2008 - already 18 months ago, and particularly remiss of us since my mother worked on that fundraising campaign. So, while I very much enjoyed the concert - sung by the London Concert Choir, with some really unusual, quite folkish songs sung by them, and the hit parade of traditional carols accompanied lustily by us - I spent quite a lot of time transfixed by the new East Window.

St Martin's is one of London's gorgeous Baroque churches, built in 1726 by the architect James Gibbs. It has a wonderful open and light interior, heightened by the recent restoration of its plasterwork decoration, and its clear glass windows. Its original windows were blown out by a bomb in the Second World War, and as part of the refurbishment the church has commissioned a really significant work of contemporary art. Artists were invited to create a work that "embodied light" and worked in harmony with the historic interior, that would "challenge preconceptions and stimulate debate", as well as encouraging reflection and contemplation. So no small task. But the winning design - by husband and wife artist and architect collaborators, Pip Horne and Shirazeh Houshiary - has really achieved this.

The stainless steel framework ripples outwards from an opaque ellipse that seems to pulse at the centre of the window. I have to say that the resemblance of the window's structure to the crucifixion is the last thing I noticed, perhaps because I am not fully alert to Christian symbolism; but of the surprisingly little information about it I've been able to find online, this seems to be the first thing that people comment on - apparently, following an uncharacteristically tepid remark by Jonathan Glancey in the Guardian about how it resembles a cross reflected in water. But the eye is drawn to the ellipse at the centre, whose oval form recalls one of the key forms of the Georgian architecture around it. All the panes in the window are lightly etched, evoking a motif from Houshiary's paintings apparently, and these etched flecks grow more concentrated the closer they come to the central oculus, so you realise there is a sort of aura around it, which represents the crown of thorns. Of course that means the heart of the window stands for Christ but there is something profoundly moving - intellectually and spiritually - about it being entirely non-figurative, non-representational. An icon for our postmodern world. And because we were there on a wintry late afternoon, we could watch the amazing transformation of the window as the sky grew dark outside...

(with apologies for the not very good iPhone images - plus, as you can see, there was a rather tall chap sitting in the row in front of me!)

As the sun goes down, the ellipse at the centre of the window glows - embodying light, as the commission invited, and a kind of mystical evocation of Christ as the light of the church, the star guiding mankind to Jerusalem at the time of his birth, all those meanings, as well as just a pan-religious symbolism of light for God. We couldn't figure out how this physically happens - is there something in the glass itself that glows, or is it subtly lit from somewhere? If the latter, then the source of this light is entirely invisible, which just adds to the mystery and the effect.

It was a highly controversial design apparently, though I can't find out online exactly why this was. Much of the commentary seems rather patronisingly to focus on the fact that Houshiary is 1) a woman (another Guardian article calls the window "gynaecological"!!) and 2) Iranian in origin: it is therefore exotic, imbued with the inspiration she draws in her art from the 13th-century Sufi mystic, Rumi, non-figurative because her art draws on Iranian artistic traditions - bla bla bla. She might be Iranian but does that mean she is Muslim? My mother couldn't remember but thought she might be Zoroastrian. Anyway, Houshiary trained and has lived and practised in England since 1974. Would she like to be labelled "exotic"?

This is a discussion that is quite current these days, with the growing debate over what "contemporary Islamic art" is, if it even exists. Most contemporary artists surely prefer to see themselves precisely as contemporary artists, practising in a globalised world without borders between artistic disciplines, rather than as "a contemporary artist from Iran" or wherever. Do such pigeon holes make Westerners feel more comfortable?

I was rather shocked to read the comment - posted by 'Highby' in response to the gynaecological Guardian article - that Houshiary "had simply applied the Iranian style. Means, no pictures of humans. Just graphical elements - lines. Arabesques. Geometrical forms". To start with, there seems to me nothing "simple" about this window. And goodness only knows what Highby thinks an arabesque is. But it also smacked of the attitude I often come across in discussions of the Islamic style in art made for Christians or Jews in medieval Spain - what has come to be called Mudéjar. For a long time, the attitude among art historians was (perhaps still is) that if an art work was in an Islamic style, it had to have been made by an Islamic artist or craftsman; there was absolutely no way that a medieval Christian or Jewish craftsman would find the Islamic style appealing and be influenced by it. This always struck me as illogical because why would a wealthy Christian patron spend money on building a church or a palace or commissioning a carpet or a geometric ceiling in an Islamic style if that isn't what they wanted in their material surroundings?

And precisely the same could be said of the St Martin's authorities who chose this window design, which is so profound and beautiful and seems to engage both mind and soul, and work on so many levels.

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Perhaps next year we'll go to the candlelit evening carol concert - the 'family concert', of course, attracts families, mainly parents and grandparents with very young children, who don't much fancy sitting still and quietly through an hour's worth of concert and don't know any of the carols (apart from 'Away in a Manger') so can't join in. There was a particularly grizzly child in the row behind us, and a general low hum of children's restlessness all around us. Still it was fun and put us in the Christmas spirit. In fact with the recent Big Chill and the fact that we have booked our train tickets to Edinburgh to visit my sister for Christmas and New Year, we've been feeling cosy and wintry for a few weeks now.

This was my sister's little car at the beginning of the week:

Almost as much snow as there is car!

The snow has pretty much all thawed now. It happened quickly yesterday. Walking to meet K at the pub on Friday evening, I was slipping and sliding over compressed snow all along St Matthew's Road, but the next morning we woke up to the sound of dripping outside the bedroom window - the sun had come back and it was a little bit rainy. Not before time - I fell down the escalators at Brixton station the other day. I had my walking boots on but it was so slippy on the escalators that there was nothing to grip onto and I couldn't get up again. I floundered for a moment until someone helped me up - I never saw who, just a voice behind me that said, 'Up you get'. My thanks to that good Samaritan.

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I'm making stock and, while I write this, wonderful smells keep wafting up from downstairs. I'm using the carcass of the lemony roast chicken we made a few weekends ago (I froze it in the meantime!) when Gareth was supposed to come round for a long overdue dinner and catch-up, but poor him, his grandmother died and he spent the weekend looking after his grandfather and helping with funeral arrangements... I like making stock: it seems like a good wintry make-do-and-mend thing to do, and a good way to use up old bunches of herbs and random bits of celery and other veggies languishing in the bottom of the fridge. We're planning to use some of this new batch of stock in the rabbit stew we'll be making in a couple of weekends' time - Cornelius and Giles are coming to share it with us. Maybe Gareth will be able to make it over too.

Snow blanket

Photo taken by Nasa's Terra satellite on 2 December 2010, captured by the University of Dundee satellite receiving station, courtesy of the BBC

We seem to be finishing the year as we started it - covered in snow. But will it be a white Christmas??

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.

The Big Freeze

Some wry graffiti photographed while the snow falls on Brixton...

It's snowing in the UK. We're having the coldest weather snap for 30 years apparently, and records for gas consumption are due to be set tonight - predicted to be the coldest night of the winter - as everyone has the heating pumped up to keep warm. It is really cold outside. We're covered in snow in Brixton, which did not melt by even a flake today, despite the sun shining weakly.

It's only a few centimetres, but having the predictable effects - banks were closing early yesterday due to "heavy snow" (!), and our Tescos shop couldn't be delivered, so we went and shopped in Brixton Market - which we should do more often anyway. Wandering around Brixton yesterday afternoon, it was amazing how empty it was - only one or two of the market traders had been brave enough to spend the day in the freezing cold trying to sell fruit and veg to the few people foolish enough to be slipping and sloshing along Electric Avenue...

(We're still on leave this week, and trying to 'make the most of Brixton', which in practice means having lunch in a different local café every day, and finding a variety of tactics to avoid sitting down and actually writing the article I have to send in at the end of the month. Sigh. Still, one advantage of the adverse weather conditions - no queue at Franco Manca! Gorgeous sourdough pizza just what was needed to warm us from the inside out...)

Keep warm wherever you are!

Photo taken by Nasa's Terra satellite on 7 January 2010, showing the snowy weather pattern over Great Britain
Photo: NASA/GSFC, MODIS Rapid Response, via the BBC

Damascus - and Waddesdon

A quick note to share these beautiful photographs, taken by my colleague, who co-ordinated the ceramics exhibition I worked on and lived with in Damascus for five weeks at the end of last year - she has captured some really serene and beautiful moments in the life of that great and ancient city, as well as some of the other places in Syria which she managed to get away to visit during her rather stress-packed extended stay there. Check them out.

And while I am on the subject of photos - this now being March (where does the time go??), it is time to share with you our calendar image for this month.

Waddesdon Manor, Buckinghamshire © KR

This rather grand façade is the back of Waddesdon Manor, the extremely over-the-top home of the Rothschild family, built between 1874 and 1889 to house both them and their important art collection, and which we visited at Easter last year. Among the objects in this collection are an ivory casket painted with designs in the Islamic style, made in 12th-century Sicily, and a fine lustre flower pot from 15th-century Valencia. I had suggested a trip with the sneaky hope that I might get to see either of these objects, but sadly the gallery displaying highlights of the collection was closed, or we did not find it - though by that point I didn't care too much, since it was supposed to be a day off from work! The house and its furnishings were that weird kind of construction that seems to have been so popular among the late 19th-century super rich - I encountered many more examples among the 'Robber Barons' of New York, when I was in that august city last autumn, and was searching for traces of the fever for the 'Moorish' style that was so popular among international wealthy elites. The Waddesdon collection is largely French and 18th-century - not at all to our taste - encased within a glamorous house that also purports to be from that period, but is late 19th-century. It's a little bit weird, but exceedingly opulent, and we decided just to give ourselves up to the aesthetic experience, which was refreshingly unrelated to anything we know or really care about!

Getting there by public transport was a challenge - we had quite a long walk from and to the station, and were not very impressed with all the other visitors who swept past us up the long drive in their 4x4s, and not a single person stopped to offer us a lift...! The walk was pleasant, though on the way back a snow blizzard started up, which we were not at all prepared for - but it was beautiful, and the thing I remember with most fondness about the day.

More soon - when I have time to write - about our very pleasant family weekend away in Swansea. It's my father's birthday today! A good omen, I think, given that today is also the day I have moved into an office of my own to begin the work of writing my book, which can no longer be ignored - and the day my sister starts a new job! And a beautiful warm sunny day as well, so it almost felt like spring - a true new beginning?

Hundreds attend global warming protest...

My sister just emailed me this. I think it's excellent!!


The day it snowed already has an official name - people are referring to it as "Snow Monday"!

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!

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow!

As you might have heard, it is snowing in England! We have had more snowfall in the last two days than London has seen for about 20 years! I certainly don't remember seeing anything like this for a good long time - if ever! Normally you get a few damp flakes that just don't settle, or do and almost immediately turn into annoying sludge. Not this time! We've had more than 15 cm of snowfall in London, and it only stopped actually snowing around 4pm this afternoon. Public transport was in complete meltdown - there were no train services into London, all the buses were suspended, which was amazing, and every single line on the tube was suspended or suffering from severe delays. Except, for once, the Victoria line! K decided to work at home today since he was supposed to be going for a meeting at the Tower of London, but all routes he would normally take to get there were not operating. I had no such excuse, though I had to wait a long while for a District line train at Victoria, and South Kensington station was closed due to staff shortages, so I had to walk through the sludge from Gloucester Road - and my feet were utterly soaking and freezing cold by the time I got to work!

I was expecting some visiting researchers from the Louvre who were flying in from Paris this morning - and though Radio 4 was full of reports of airports and runways closed, I had to proceed as if all was ok, and see if they turned up. Of course they didn't - all flights from Paris to London were cancelled all day today - but one half of the team travelled over on the Eurostar, and arrived without incident - early in fact! So it was a good job I was there, so they could proceed as planned with the samples of glaze and body fabric they had come to remove from a late 14th-/early 15th-century storage jar made in Islamic Spain, which are going to be analysed by thermoluminescence as part of a research project the Louvre are conducting on an object in their own collection. The analysis results will hopefully indicate place and date of manufacture, as well as tell us about the ingredients used in making the glaze. The XRF was going to happen tomorrow and this equipment was due to come over on the plane - it has been an utter nightmare to organise, and colleagues and I have been working on setting this up for over a month. And then, a little bit of snow, and all is cancelled. Sigh. At least I have an unexpected free day tomorrow - if I can get into work again! As our trusted Mayor said on BBC London news this evening, "It's the right kind of snow, just the wrong kind of quantity"!!

So, here is a little photo-diary of my journey to work in the snow today:







It was at this point that the batteries finally died on my camera, and I simultaneously dropped my lens cap to be irrevocably lost inside a flurry of snow. So that brought an end to my photography fun for the day. K went for a walk in Brockwell Park - perhaps trudge would be more apt - and took this photo on his iPhone:


There is something rather sepia and Victorian about it. He said some people were building an igloo!!! Even the youths from the local gangs were out building snowmen!

There's a wonderfully apposite article here about "London's day of innocence" - how the great smoke reverted to a giant playground for a day, as credit crunch blues were forgotten!

Other cities - Winnipeg, say, Moscow or Bergen - cope with snow, subdue it and go to work through impeccably gritted roads. London isn't like that: it rarely copes with anything; these days, it masters nothing. Equipped with a loveably tragi-comic public transport system, our capital fails on a daily basis. The poor suckers who live here get - at best - inured to this hopelessness. Yesterday London was so hobbled by the snow that the situation was even worse than hopeless: usually six million Londoners get to work by bus; yesterday there were no buses; the tube was even more spectacularly unreliable than usual... Just for a day Londoners got hit by something special.

And good old Guardian, always on the lookout for the nation's wellbeing - they printed these endlessly useful and delightfully practical instructions on "How to make the perfect snowball"!

We wish you a Merry Christmas and a Very Excellent New Year!!

Capilla de los Condestables, Burgos Cathedral © KR

On New Year’s Day 2008, we went for a walk in Crystal Palace, among the ruins of the venue of the Great Exhibition of 1851 – an easy bus ride from Brixton on the number 3 bus, which transports you to the rather ghostly traces of what must have been an amazing spectacle until it was destroyed by fire in 1936… K had to give a paper in Oxford on 4th January, and has resolved never to ruin the Christmas holidays like that again.

In February, we celebrated our twelfth anniversary, and K was viva’d in Oxford for his PhD, which he passed with minor corrections.

At Easter, we visited Waddesdon in the snow, and joined the National Trust, which inspired us to visit London properties, such as William Morris’s Arts and Crafts home in Bexleyheath, The Red House, which we did the next day. It was still snowing on Easter Monday when we walked up to Alexandra Palace for a drink with Helen G.

M gave a ridiculous number of lectures this year, including a series of three in April, on Córdoba, Granada and Seville, to members of The Art Fund. She is resolving to learn how to say ‘no’ but already the line-up for 2009 suggests she has a lot of practising to do.

In May, M led a group of V&A Patrons on a tailor-made guided tour of ‘Islamic Spain’, visiting Granada, Córdoba and Seville over the course of a week, and then staying on in Spain for the rest of the month, travelling from south to very north researching for the book she will be writing in Spring 2009. K joined her for the last two weeks, and we celebrated his 32nd birthday in a lovely local place at the end of an alley in Zaragoza, which was about the only restaurant we could find open. Almost everything in the city was closed, in the calm before the storm of the international expo! We had arranged to meet Glaire in Toledo, but also met Jeremy quite by chance, and spent an excellent few days in their company. In Barcelona, it was wonderful as always to see Sarah, Julius, Leila and Isaac, and spent what later turned out to be our last few days in their old home.

In June, K graduated for his PhD in Durham Cathedral, attended by his parents and his (then) 94-year-old grandfather. He wore a very exuberant red and purple gown, which he did not want to give back at the end of the day. (There are some photos here)

In July, we were visited by Bev and James, our long-lost friends returned from Australia for a round of visits. It was brilliant to see them and spend so much time with them! K gave another conference paper, at Leeds International Medieval Congress, and M had the honour to attend her mother’s graduation ceremony (photos here), in Guildford Cathedral, which she suspected and later confirmed was the church that scared Damien in The Omen. We spent a lovely evening with Alison, Steve and Ellie, a few months before the arrival of Nathan.

In August, M took her customary two weeks off work to make the most of living in London, but the weather was terrible, so it was largely spent indoors. Though we did go with Isla to the Canary Wharf Jazz Festival, and picnicked in the rain – something the English will have to get used to doing more and more, I suspect. Gareth celebrated her birthday with us, at Gastro in Clapham. At the end of the month we went to Hereford for a few days to celebrate K’s mother’s 60th birthday and retirement party.

In September, we spent a very pleasant day with Cornelius, visiting buildings all over London which threw open their doors for Open House Weekend – the highlight was definitely the former Granada Cinema in Tooting, now a bingo hall, built in the 1930s in high Victorian Gothic style (see http://cinematreasures.org/theater/9424). We joined K’s family again to celebrate his grandfather’s 95th birthday. K ran a 10k charity run at Hampton Court in aid of Cancer Research, which he made in 58 minutes, and he’s now addicted to running!

M left for New York at the end of the month, to participate in a curatorial exchange at the Metropolitan Museum for a month, but was away in the States for six weeks altogether, with a week in California at the beginning (book research again – honest!), and most of a week in Philadelphia attending the Historians of Islamic Art Association conference. Again K joined her for the last two weeks, having given a paper at the Sixteenth-Century Society conference in St Louis. We were in the States for the Presidential Election which was hugely exciting, especially because of the excellent result. Election night with Albert at Cleopatra’s Needle, watching the early results on a TV whose sound we could not hear and whose subtitling software was spitting out gobbledegook, followed by a late supper at Karen’s in Spanish Harlem where the result was declared and you could hear the whooping in the streets from all over Manhattan! Walking back through the Upper East Side at 1 in the morning with groups of happy people periodically shouting out, ‘Yes we can!’

We were visited in New York by another long-lost friend, Rebecca (though sadly Adam couldn’t make it), and we celebrated the release of her debut EP! (details here).

M was back in London for four days before flying to Damascus to install an exhibition of World Ceramics, the first time the V&A has ever loaned an exhibition to the Middle East, which was hailed in the British press as the right kind of diplomacy (see the excellent Guardian comment by Simon Jenkins here). She then stayed on to supervise it for the first half of its run, and was in Syria for five weeks altogether, trying to make the most of her one day off a week to visit some of the amazing classical, early Christian, and Crusader sites, not to mention Islamic, for which Syria is justly famous. A fantastic experience.

She is very happy, though, to be back home just in time for Christmas, and to be spending the festive season with loved ones. We’re confident that 2009 will be a good year, with Obama at the helm, and we look forward to all the happy hours we’ll spend with friends and family over the coming months. A very Happy New Year to one and all!