Happy Easter!

I wish I could take the credit for these beauties! But K has discovered baking, and has taken to it rather successfully - a wonderful stem ginger cake, a dark chocolate and beetroot cake, some soda bread, and now a batch of hot cross buns in time for Easter! Delicious! Here they are in progress...


Sorry for the deeper than usual radio silence. This year, though barely 3 months old, has already been horribly busy. The recent travelling has a lot to do with it, as well as preparing for those trips. After Spain, I had a couple of days to turn myself around and go to New York - another place I spent time in 2008, when I was there for 6 weeks on a curatorial exchange at the Met, which was fabulous. I was back this time to take our loans to an exhibition on Byzantium & Islam, and to finally see the Met's recently opened not-Islamic galleries - wonderful, because of the magnificent collection of masterpieces they house, but also very elegantly conceived and designed so you don't feel overwhelmed by the fact it is actually 1000 objects and 15 galleries. I also had lots of fun catching up with people, including some friends unexpectedly in town.

Then after returning from that trip I had another couple of days to get ready for the Gulf - Doha, Sharjah and Dubai. I was a bit trepidatious about this trip, partly I think because I was tired already from being constantly on the road, but also because I didn't think I would enjoy the Gulf very much, having previously only been to Qatar for a few days back in, amazingly, 2004, when it seemed little more than a building site with no heart and soul. Perhaps because my expectations of this trip were so low, I actually had a really good time.

I was in Doha for 5 days as a visiting scholar at the Museum of Islamic Art - again, the first time I had seen the museum since it opened in 2008 (when I was in Damascus, my other big trip that year) and not only is the building absolutely stunning, it is full of gorgeous things, and much happier curators.


Much more has been built in Doha in the intervening years since I was there so there are other things to go and see - such as Mathaf, the lovely Arab Museum of Modern Art, which had a fantastic Cai Guo-Qiang exhibition on, the Chinese artist who does such amazing work with gunpowder and fireworks. I was also there at the same time they were opening the Gifts of the Sultan exhibition, so I coincided with lots of friends and colleagues, some I hadn't seen for years, others new and happy acquaintances. I even managed to get some good work done - starting to think about the upcoming conference paper on oliphants, on which see below....

View of the skyscrapers of the West Bay, from the Museum of Islamic Art, Doha

Next stop was Sharjah for the opening of my own exhibition - the Museum of Islamic Civilisation is the next venue for Owen Jones, and it looks really lovely there, not least because they have so much space!


It was an intense couple of days (not helped by the fact that stupidly I missed my flight from Doha - I won't linger on my own idiocy, but suffice to say it will be a long time before I become blasée again about departure times...). The high point was probably having to give the Sultan of Sharjah a guided tour of the exhibition, and then making the front page of Al-Khaleej the next day!

Then, to 'relax' at the end, I joined my colleagues at Art Dubai, really to see what it was like. Since I didn't have any responsibilities at this point or any meetings to organise, I could just wander round the art fair and the participating galleries in various parts of the city, and really get a feel for what the contemporary Middle Eastern art market is like. Mad, basically. But I loved the 'fringe' art festival in the historic Bastakiyya district - alongside the creek, where old Dubai grew up, is a quarter where houses from the early 20th century have been carefully preserved and during Art Dubai this old quarter gets taken over by artists and installations, with music and performances taking place in some of the larger courtyards. I was there early evening on a Friday, so it was weekend time and full of families relaxing, a really lovely vibe.

This courtyard had a sound installation which consisted of someone reading George Orwell's 1984 with qawwali music playing from some of the speakers. I sat down on one of the beanbags and listened for a good 15 minutes - it made me think the time had definitely come to re-read 1984.

The traditional architecture of the Gulf is actually rather beautiful - courtyard houses built, remarkably, of coral stone (well, it is certainly locally available), with a lot of influences from the other side of the Gulf, such as these lovely wind-towers, which are a traditional feature of many Iranian buildings as well.

Since getting back (and to some extent, while away) every 'spare' waking hour has been necessarily devoted to the Festschrift volume I am editing - we're at proof checking stage and everything needs to be turned around really fast, and with 30 essays it takes a while. And now I am preparing my next conference paper - I have decided to venture into the thorny territory that is oliphants, though to focus on function rather than style, so it has been quite pleasant to read 'dissertations' on horns of tenure written by late 18th century Antiquarians. And the best thing is that this conference finally gets me to Sicily, which I have been studying long distance since I started my MA in Islamic art... So in a week's time I will be in Palermo, and after the conference K will join me and we will have a week of actual holiday! It will also be good to spend some time together, after I have been away so much recently.

And nice just to have a bit of down time with the long Easter bank holiday weekend. We have just celebrated our first anniversary in our new flat - amazing how that time has flown by! On Easter Sunday last year, we were at Persepolis! It still feels like we have spent more time away from the flat than we have in it - we still haven't properly put up any pictures in our long 'picture gallery'-like hall. We seem to have new problems with the bathroom - a leak into downstairs' bathroom - which slightly makes it feel like this patching up the flat will be never-ending. I suppose that is the difference when you're a home-owner.

But we're feeling more at home too - this weekend, we're cat-sitting for one of our neighbours. I have also been trying to take a bit of time to tend to my window boxes - I have planted some pansies, and finally replanted our money plant (jade). This we inherited from Bev & James when they moved to Aus all those years ago! It has flourished (which I like to think was commensurate with our improved economic circumstances, getting a mortgage an' all that) but it really didn't like the move last year. That, or it couldn't cope with the global financial meltdown. But there seem to be green shoots, just in time for spring.

Three in a row

It's conference season, and over the last three weeks I have been at three of them, back to back. It's been rewarding, but exhausting!

© Julia Gonnella

This is me alongside one of the masterpieces of early Islamic architecture - the Malwiyya, or spiral minaret, at the great Iraqi palatine city of Samarra. I'm in the process of chairing one of the sessions at Conference 1, '100 years of excavations at Samarra', held at the Museum für Islamische Kunst in Berlin, somewhere I always enjoy going. That was a great and important event and hopefully we have incentivised enough people to finally get a project on the Samarra small finds off the ground, which a colleague and I have had in the works for a long while but never had the time to do anything with.

Back from two days in Berlin, I slept at home then the following afternoon travelled to Southampton for the biennial meeting of the Society for the Medieval Mediterranean, at which I had organised a double panel - on material culture and exchange across the Mediterranean, focusing on Sicily/Southern Italy and North Africa in particular. The beginnings of my campaign to bring North Africa properly into the discourse of Islamic art. Had an evening to wander around Southampton a bit and look at the medieval walls and some of the old buildings that survive there, though it was very heavily bombed in the Second World War - but the refuse collectors were on strike which meant that rubbish bags were just piled up in the street and there was loose litter everywhere, and I am afraid it looked like a total dump. I felt embarrassed to be with international visitors who might have taken a very adverse impression of English cities away with them...

Back at work for 3 days, then off to the next conference, on medieval Spain, where I was giving a paper - the first in fact, which meant I could relax for the rest of the conference. This one was in York, where I had only been once before and very briefly, but gosh it's so beautiful!! The antithesis - the remedy even - to Southampton, with the best preserved medieval town centre in all the land. K came up too, to explore the buildings of York while I was in the conference room, and had a brilliant time. I joined him at York Minster in time for evensong on the Saturday - always the best way of experiencing a medieval cathedral I think - then we had time to walk around the town together a bit on Sunday before a late lunch with Bruce, and the train back to London.

I am finally settling back again into whatever passes for 'normality' around here, but I think it's catching up with me as I feel exhausted this evening!

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There was a short but totally idyllic interlude between Southampton and York. We went back to The Ring of Bells...


A few years ago - 2006 in fact, how time flies - Glaire and I spent a few days here (after a totally unsatisfactory conference on medieval Iberia in Exeter) working on the closing stages of the volume of essays which we edited together. This totally quiet and beautiful inn, in an idyllic village of thatched cottages on the southeastern corner of Dartmoor, provided the perfect setting for getting to grips with the final tasks of whipping all the essays into shape. Glaire also had the joyless task of having to translate one of the articles from Spanish. Anyway, since she came over to participate in my Southampton panel, we decided to go back - without having any work to do - since our few days at The Ring of Bells have been an oasis of calm and tranquillity in both our memories ever since.

K decided to join us this time, to experience it for himself. And I am very pleased to say that it was just as wonderful the second time around (though there was a wedding in the next village over on the Saturday so it was quite a lot busier than last time). We took an OS map with us this time, and went for long walks - on the Friday we walked for 8 hours, over to Lustleigh for a pub lunch, and back again the long way round - and sat long talking over dinner in the evenings.

The landscape there is so amazingly beautiful, almost magical. The recent rain meant that the vegetation was almost unbelievably luscious and green!


That part of Dartmoor has a heavily wooded fringe, but then you climb up through bracken onto the high moor and have amazing views for miles around. The weather wasn't that great but, hey, this is England in the summer - as one of the Americans I met at the York conference said, "There is no such thing as bad weather - only inappropriate kit". I thought that was totally apt!

There are some photos of the triumphant Return to The Ring of Bells on my Flickr photostream. Enjoy!

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.

Weekend in Scandinavia

Oslo Opera House, built by Norwegian architects Snøhetta in 2008

Last Friday I flew to Oslo for the weekend. The exhibition I have co-curated on Owen Jones and the influence of Islamic design was opening at the Kunstindustrimuseet, and my co-curator Abraham and I had arranged to attend. We both had a really fantastic time. I had never been to Norway before - to Iceland once for a two week Geography field trip while doing my A-levels, and had really loved it, but didn't know much about Oslo and felt rather unprepared. But what a great city! Small - with only 600,000 inhabitants (only 4 million in the whole of Norway - half the population of London!) and you can walk round most of it in a morning, as I did on Saturday. I headed straight down to the harbour to see the magnificent Opera House, the first structure in a regeneration of the whole port as a cultural quarter - they're building whole new buildings to house their museums! - and has been rapidly embraced by Oslo's residents as a city landmark as well as a touchstone for the current heyday of Scandinavian design. It was covered in snow and the day was slightly hazy with a mix of sun and fog giving it the effect of seeming a little unreal, but the great thing is you can walk all over it, and people do - taking their dogs and kids for a walk...! Amazing views from the top as well.

And our Nasjonalmuseet colleagues were very hospitable. On Friday evening, we were invited to a special dinner in the National Gallery, which houses Munch's The Scream, along with past and present directors of other Oslo museums, who were all extremely friendly and down to earth. On Saturday we attended the formal opening in the afternoon, which featured the premiere performance by piano and violin of a piece of music composed in Seville in 1847 by Ole Bull, a famous Norwegian violinist and composer who was said to be so handsome that women fainted when he came into the room! This piece - alas I can't remember the title - was composed for Isabel II of Spain as a gift (of course they were rumoured to be lovers), and was only rediscovered a few years ago in the Spanish royal archives! It was an amazing piece too.

The exhibition looks fantastic - it's the first venue, and as we weren't involved in the installation, it has suddenly jumped from paper sketches to real exhibition hang, though of course the success of the design has much to do with our Norwegian colleagues. It seemed to be really well received, and apparently one lady was so overwhelmed by the positive message of how Islamic ornament was rediscovered in the 19th century and applied in European design that she was seen almost crying on her way to the cloakroom... Abraham and I took ourselves off for a celebratory dinner that night at the wonderful Viennese-style Theatre Cafe, and treated ourselves to reindeer steak - rather nice, a gamey version of a nice beef fillet steak.

On Sunday morning I went to the Viking Ship Museum for a bit of Norwegian cultural history - an old-fashioned but beautiful museum with astonishing exhibits: two complete and one fragmentary 9th-century ships used as burials and loaded with grave goods to see their passengers well on their way to the afterlife... I couldn't believe some of the stuff which has survived intact due to the excellent burial conditions: wooden sleds, even a whole carriage, cooking utensils, food and drink receptacles... but what I was most amazed by were the fragments of Byzantine textiles which had been cut into strips and sewn onto clothing as precious and ostentatious appliqués. Those Vikings really got around!

In the afternoon I went back to the Nasjonalmuseet to give a lecture, which was quite well attended and, I think, well-received. Afterwards our host, the Kunstindustrimuseet's director and chief curator, and his partner, took me on a little excursion up into the mountains to see the terrifyingly steep world-famous ski jump, and also in time to see the sun setting over the fjords... God, it was beautiful!


We had a delicious dinner of smoked lamb and berries at the Frognerseteren Restaurant, watching the sun set over Oslo, while they told me about Norway and I resolved to bring K here as soon as possible. He'd absolutely love it. When they told me about a cruise you can take up the coast on the old Post Office boat, and an 11th-century wooden church on an island in a fjord with views of glaciers behind, I was sold! We're planning to escape London during the Olympics next year so this might just be the perfect solution!

I came home via a couple of days in Copenhagen because I wanted to visit the recently reopened David Collection with its wonderful jewel-like rooms of Islamic art. I found the Danes a little snooty about Oslo which slightly upset me since I had had such a lovely time there - but Copenhagen is also a beautiful city, much much larger in comparison, and my hosts at the museum friendly and welcoming. What a great few days!

Spanish conversation

Life - which is to say, work - has rather got in the way of blogging over the last couple of months. Since getting back to work after my long summer break, it seems busier than ever, with more to be done by fewer people, and an air of uncertainty underlying everything, with cuts cuts cuts the only thing being discussed - in the media and in people's daily lives. "Keep calm and carry on" seems a useful motto, as always. That resolution - of getting my work/life balance under better control - has not so far materialised.

I had a nice trip to Granada last week, to attend the meeting of a collaborative research project with the Alhambra which we're now engaged in. The weather was gorgeous - 23°C on Sunday! - but cold in the mornings and evenings, or if you stepped into the shade. It was an intense course in Spanish conversation, which did me a lot of good. I had that experience which I have always admired in friends for whom English is not their first language - like when Silvia and Rosa came here for dinner at the start of October, two Italians researching aspects of Italian-Islamic artistic encounter whom I wanted to introduce to each other. Of course we all spoke English, but when I stepped out of the room, and came back in a few minutes later, they were still speaking English to each other. Or when, in Berlin in January, I went out for dinner with some German colleagues from the Islamic museum, who were all still conversing in English when I got back from a trip to the loo. In this case, I was in Granada with a Spanish colleague from work, and a French colleague from the Louvre whom I know well, and with both of them I normally speak English - but because the lingua franca of our project meetings was Spanish, we continued to speak Spanish at the end of the day when out for dinner, and when I bumped into the French colleague, Sophie, on Sunday morning, having a coffee in a bar on the Plaza Nueva, we conversed in Spanish, because it felt odd to switch to English. How funny.

An interesting trip, as well, for understanding something about the internal politics of Spanish academia - sad, though, that in a city as small as Granada, with so many important groups of people who are experts in their own ways in local Islamic cultural history, that they should all be competing with each other, rather than working together to form a powerhouse of academic study in this area. They share information with us, as outsiders, but not with each other. It was good, though, to understand for the first time that I am not the only one who feels the tyranny of a certain couple, who seem to want to control what anyone anywhere says about Nasrid art history, by pillorying anyone who dares to express a theory different from one of theirs. Good, also, to understand that there are people within Granada who do not believe that their work is gospel any more. It gives me renewed hope for the new generation of upcoming Spanish scholars in the Islamic field, as well as a sense of reassurance that if one of this couple slates my book in a review - which I feel is fairly likely, especially since the Spanish translation is about to be launched - that not many people will pay them much attention.

There is not much other news, or what there is, is too boring to go into. I am giving a lecture tomorrow evening - the first in a while - so my time and thoughts over the last few days have been focused on that. It is on my book, a sort of promotional event which I had to organise for myself, since my publishers aren't doing anything. Compared to the publishers of the Spanish edition who have just invited me to participate in a launch event in Spain in the New Year! Anyway. I've been collecting book sightings - it's been spotted in the bookshops at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and the American University in Cairo. It was in the Alhambra bookshops, and will hopefully be more prominently placed when the Spanish translation is out. (And a nice little plug for that came out recently in Granada Hoy, though with quite a few mistakes!)

But the best book-related anecdote so far is that a work colleague took a copy to present as a gift to the Sultan of Sharjah on a recent business trip, only to be told, "I've already got that! My daughter gave it to me!" So the Sultan of Sharjah has a copy of my book! The best book-related comment I've had is from the great professor of Islamic art, Robert Hillenbrand - chatting to him after his recent Islamic Art Circle lecture, someone asked us what was the book we were talking about, and Robert said - "Islamic Arts from Spain. You'd think, all the old chestnuts... But there is not a chestnut in sight!" I took that as high praise indeed.

The clocks went back this morning so now I have that strange feeling of my body-clock being out of kilter with what the clock on the wall says. Now begins the winter.

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!

Two pots

In honour of our new Ceramics Study Galleries - the break-neck project I have been working on full-time for the last 9 months, which had their gala opening last night, and which open to the public tomorrow - I wanted to blog about two pots I have acquired recently.


This vase was designed by Keith Murray for Wedgwood in the 1930s. Murray was trained as an architect and brought an architectural eye to his ceramic designs. My colleague, the curator of modern and contemporary ceramics, tells me that he thinks Murray was one of the best Modernist designers for pottery, and I love its simple yet very structural elegance. This design was glazed in this 'Moonstone' white, in an olive green, and a metallic grey, and other versions of it were made with more and thinner ribs, and in different functional forms including a gorgeous pair of bookends which I would love to have! You can find more info here on the Museum's example of this vase - with a rather better photograph.

This is the only thing I chose to keep from among K's grandparents' possessions. He made a long list, including the two bookcases which arrived in time for lunch on Easter Sunday, probably made in the 1930s as well, so the vase looks right at home on top of them, in the corner of a 1930s flat. I was invited to keep whatever I liked, but the only thing that had always rather caught my eye was this vase - tucked away on top of the kitchen cabinets and wonderfully unfussy in the context of Betty and Robert's rather more decorative taste... Apparently when they had valuers in to assess their collection, it was the only thing that they said was really worth anything. But it was already spoken for.


And facing it, a rather different object. This is a late 19th-century storage jar which I bought in Tunisia recently. Again it is very close to one we have in the collection, which was acquired in 1894, which therefore helps me to date this one.

I was in Mahdia, and finally had a bit of free time to wander around in the souk of that small and special town. Two of us went to buy a present for the lady who had done most of the organising of the Summer School (which I will write about soon!) and we had been directed by some colleagues to a street that was slightly off the beaten tourist track, where there were looms and textile shops. We bought her a lovely silk scarf (and one each for ourselves, ahem) then before we knew it had been lured into a neighbouring shop. It was all shiny touristy kitsch in which I had no interest at all, and we disengaged ourselves pretty quickly, but the kindly gentleman proprietor was not going to give up that easily and asked if he could show us one last thing in the shop opposite. As we stepped in, I could see there were some genuine antiques in here and said to myself "Aaah, this is the real stuff" - which he heard so of course we started talking about the fact that I worked in a museum in London which had some Tunisian ceramics in its collection, and which I had been looking at recently for the Study Galleries.

I had sort of promised K that I wouldn't buy any pots on this trip (since I have rather a habit of doing so and we are running out of space in our small flat...) but I couldn't resist when I saw the collection of 19th-century wares he had underneath a table loaded with jewellery - forgive the Orientalist simile, but was a true Aladdin's cave! My only consideration was size and which one I could feasibly fit into my suitcase! I had run out of dinars so paid him in sterling - £40 which I thought was a complete bargain!!

The shopowner - Mr Ben Rhouma - said he acquired the pots from people who had them in their homes, inherited from forebears, and knew that the occasional tourist liked to buy them, so sold them to him for a bit of ready money. He does nothing at all to them, so it was a bit cobwebby and still is a bit dusty, but since learning how to clean pots for our Ceramics Project I will be applying my cotton swab any time now. There is a broken section at the rim, but the piece was inside, and one of my conservator colleagues has loaned me some paraloid and instructions for how to reattach it in a conservation-approved manner.

Two pots, completely different aesthetics, but I love them both, and the memories they conjure.

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And thank goodness the project has finally come to a triumphant close! The galleries look amazing - "overwhelming" and "awe-inspiring" were some of the phrases that people mentioned to me last night. They are visible storage galleries with massed groupings of objects organised geographically and chronologically, but the sheer quantity and scale is so impressive, it takes your breath away. But now it is time for a holiday. On Friday morning at the crack of dawn we leave for North Uist to visit my sister, chill out for a week, visit seal colonies, eat smoked salmon, and read the 3 for 2 book selection I acquired in Waterstone's in Hereford last weekend (having finally come to the end of the 3000-and-some-pages of the Baroque Cycle - magnificent, but it has taken me 6 months!!). So I'll check in again in a couple of weeks. Over and out.

Sans Souci

Sans Souci, Potsdam, Berlin © MRO

I can't believe it's almost exactly a year ago that I took this picture - after finishing and submitting all the work on my book, I treated myself to a long weekend in Berlin to coincide with Glaire being there from North Carolina on a work trip. I stayed with Nadania in her lovely apartment in Prenzlauer Berg. While G met with colleagues at the Frei Universität during the day, I entertained myself - as is very easy to do in Berlin - and one day I took myself off to Potsdam, where I had never had time to go before. Since I was mentally still in book-mode, I was also interested to see the famous examples of Orientalist architecture, especially the Pump House which was built to draw water for the complex system which supplied the many gardens of the royal pleasure palace. The Pump House is built like a Mamluk mosque on the outside, and decorated on the inside like a miniature version of the Great Mosque of Cordoba. Fascinating - though the guided tour was in German only, so I didn't learn as much as I could have!

By the time I walked up to Sans Souci - Frederick the Great of Prussia's own (much smaller) version of Versailles - it was a really hot and sunny day, and the park was absolutely full of sightseers. I skirted round the palace for a while, visiting all the interesting little garden pavilions, then found I was too late to visit the palace itself - tickets were sold out for the day. I was happy wandering around the outside and taking photos of the rather over-the-top Baroque decoration - I thought K would like these chaps. And now this is our calendar image for June - hopefully it will also bring us respite from our cares...

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Foremost among these is that, try as we might, we cannot get a mortgage on the flat we want to buy. It all got very complicated, and K spent weeks solidly on the phone to our mortgage advisor and the reps of different mortgage companies and finally the surveyor who came to assess the flat, all to no avail... The building is unmortgageable in the current financial climate. It turns out that the thickness of the walls is half what it should be for a mortgage lender to consider it suitable for resale. This makes it prone to condensation and damp - which certainly is a problem in these flats - though I still don't quite understand why that should mean lenders won't touch it. Apparently this kind of 'higher risk' flat used to be covered by the sub-prime mortgage market, which just doesn't exist any more, being as how it was the root cause of the global recession an' all. All the smaller sub-prime lenders have been bought up in the last year by bigger companies who are getting rid of all possible risk from their lending policies.

So this is the current climate that we have stumbled right into... Looking on the bright side, at least the problem does not lie with us. And our mortgage advisor is trying to reassure us that we have had a lucky escape - if we had managed to buy the flat, there is every chance that we couldn't sell it again. Which is in fact now the situation that all our flat-owning neighbours are going to find themselves in - it really doesn't bear thinking about. Apparently there are a number of 1930s-built properties like this in London, where the only way people can sell their flats is to cash buyers - and I wonder how many of those there are around in the current market?

So - everything was going smoothly and we had completely thought ourselves into the purchase and the move - and then this bombshell, just as I got back from Tunisia (about which more another day). The prospect of moving - and especially somewhere so nice and modernised as the flat we were going to be buying - makes you notice all the things you endure about where you actually live but which you can't do much about: the damp and mould in the bedroom; the mildewy shower curtain in the bathroom; a new floorboard starting to creak in the kitchen; the dodgy valves in the boiler that means the radiators come on when you run the hot water... And I really was looking forward to having a dishwasher...

The thing is, as soon as I was faced with the prospect of not being able to stay here - or rather not being able to put down roots here, as there is no urgent necessity to leave this flat - it made me realise quite how much this has come to be my home. Capital 'h' Home, in that deep emotional attachment kind of way. We've been here 6 and a half years now, so it's not surprising. It's not only the fact that as a maisonette it's like a little house, but it has all the advantages of being in a block of flats in terms of security, a shared garden for whose upkeep we have absolutely no responsibility but which we love to look down on and sit in, and above all the sense of community and the friendship of our neighbours. We're starting to realise that what we have here is very very rare, and now that we are casting an eye around at other things, we are quickly realising that for the same price we cannot get the same amount of space, nothing as nice architecturally or in terms of the arrangement of the rooms, and certainly nowhere with a ready-built community of friends on your doorstep.

We kind of feel that this is our moment to buy - since we have the momentum, and there is only so long the stamp duty holiday will last, since even though at the time the Tories claimed Labour had stolen their policy, it doesn't look like they're going to hold to it now they're in government... But I don't want to rush into anything, and I certainly have not let go of the simple, original plan of staying right where we are. Plan B is to keep a lazy eye on the market, and think about it in a more focused way when we get back from holiday in late June...

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And talking of the new coalition government... When I left for Tunisia, no-one knew what was going to happen - just that the Liberal Democrats had failed to pull the votes that everyone had predicted. Labour did surprisingly well - my Green votes in the local council election counted for nought as all 3 Labour councillors were re-elected, and Chuka Umunna got his parliamentary seat (I decided straight away that I could live with the latter - less happy about the former). K texted me while I was on a bus in Tunisia to tell me that Gordon Brown was resigning!! Which was exciting news, but then what?? Too complicated to convey in text messages... I got back to a Liberal Conservative government, a genuine coalition by all accounts, with Lib Dem MPs in cabinet positions, which no-one expected. It means that my speculative Lib Dem vote was not wasted, but more importantly, it seems like it might actually be a good government for the time we're in. It's a change anyway, and a new start. It's already been sorely tested, with the unfortunate scandal over poor David Laws (my personal theory is that right wing Tories are targeting the Lib Dem officers of the coalition) but we're definitely prepared to give it the benefit of the doubt...

Lambeth Life

This excellent picture - taken by Stefan Finnis - was printed in the most recent edition of our local newspaper, Lambeth Life (15 April). It shows someone riding his pennyfarthing through the BMX and skate park on Stockwell Road. I love it! Somehow it sums up the quirkiness of London and perhaps of Lambeth in particular - or the little part of it that I live in anyway. That meeting of respected cultural icon with the realism of the modern world - and a meeting which is not a clash, but a perfectly happy adaptation of one to the other.

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Today has been a glorious spring day - and I have spent it indoors, at the computer, finally making a start on the joyless task of preparing the portfolio I need to submit in 10 days' time in support of my promotion. At least I have made a start, which makes me feel ever so slightly better about the whole thing.

I have had a 3-day weekend - I needed to use up my leave or lose it, so I am taking the last 3 Fridays off this month, which means that with the two Easter bank holidays, this will have been a month of 4-day weeks. All very well, but I always find that you are busier and more stressed, since there is the same amount of work to squeeze into less time.

But I went and sat in Brockwell Park on Friday afternoon, and read my book with a cup of tea from the rather rundown café that occupies Brockwell Hall. I know it's a complete pain for people not being able to travel by air because of the ash cloud spewing out of the volcano in Iceland... but I have to say, it is delightfully quiet without the constant flyover of aeroplanes. We are on the flight path out of Heathrow (I suppose) and there is usually a plane flying through the sky at least once a minute. We don't actually hear them very loudly, but it is amazing what a difference it makes not having them at all.

I have been getting bulletins from friends stranded in various places and trying to find alternative ways of travelling back. A couple in separate parts of the US on different business trips - they've now found a way to get together, and are waiting for flights to London to resume. Another couple who flew to Istanbul for their first holiday without the kids, about to embark on a 2-day bus journey across Europe to Berlin, from where they hoped to get a train to London - sounded epic and quite fun actually. (My parents did something similar when I was about 6 weeks old, except going in the other direction - they drove in a camper van from London to Istanbul. Perhaps that's where my wanderlust comes from?)

Then people stranded here - there has been a big archaeology conference in London, and a big art history conference in Glasgow, and the delegates can't get home!

My sister was sent home early from the Smokehouse on Friday - no planes from the mainland meant no postal service, so no point packing perishable goods like smoked fish as there was no way to send them out! And there are reports in the papers about food shortages in the supermarkets for the same reason...

Amazing how occasionally nature reasserts itself so unequivocally over man. With all our modern technology and communications, there is just no way to safely fly through a cloud of volcanic ash. I heard one commentator mention that the last time this volcano had erupted to this extent was in the early 19th century - and it lasted for two years!! Are we going to have to completely rethink long distance travel?

The photographs have been amazing - this satellite image of the ash cloud was in the Guardian's picture gallery, courtesy of Getty Images:


I went to Eyjafjallajökull once - though I think at the time I didn't realise it was a volcano. Once upon a time, when I was doing Geography A-level, we had a fantastically memorable 2-week field trip to Iceland, led by our inspirational teacher, Mr Job. He looked like a pixie. We camped - it was in July, and it took a while to get used to the fact that it never got dark outside the walls of our tent - and trekked from one end of the small country to the other. Absolutely brilliant. And the first time I had really travelled, since neither I nor my parents had ever been able to afford it, but I worked a Saturday job at The General Trading Company in Sloane Square, which was not much fun but that was not the point. I earnt my way, and enjoyed the trip all the more.

We climbed Hekla - the biggest volcano in Iceland, not far from Eyjafjallajökull - only a few months after it had erupted. The slopes of the mountain and all the surrounding landscape were carpeted in black rocky ash - as I imagine the environs of the current eruption are looking at the moment. At Eyjafjallajökull, we climbed over the glacier and even went down inside it - I remember that it was amazingly blue, and that the view of the glacier from our campsite as the sun didn't really set was one of the most beautiful experiences of the trip. Incredibly, I find I still have a mental image of it in my mind's eye. There are photographs somewhere, and a diary - the first time that I coherently wrote down my observations and experiences - stranded at my parents' somewhere I think.

All these happy memories are coming back as I read about the volcano. Still, I hope it gets sorted out soon as I want to go to Tunisia in 3 weeks!

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.

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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!!

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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...

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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.

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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...

Trois jours en Paris

Phew. February. Glad that's (nearly) over. We've all been working like crazy people preparing to install the Ceramics Study Galleries (26,000 objects in visible storage!!), which finally actually begins on Monday. I didn't think I'd be saying this but I might be just about ready. I'm the first to install - weird to think that one of the Middle Eastern pots I put in on Monday will be the first object in those new dense displays, where the intention is they will remain for several decades. So the most important thing to ponder over this weekend is which object it should be...

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The highlight of the last few weeks, however, was our long weekend in Paris last weekend - for our (14th!!) anniversary. We booked Eurostar tickets months ago when there was a half price offer, and both took Friday off work, got a breakfast-time train, and sailed off through the French countryside... Trains really are the only way to travel - especially if they are fast and efficient like the few European high speed lines I've travelled on. Our train left on the dot. Alas, we ran into a security alert on the way back, which meant a horrendous queue to check in, and the train leaving an hour later than scheduled - but it could have been worse: I have just seen that the passengers who left on the train before ours (also delayed) had to endure the additional nightmare of their train breaking down in the tunnel outside Ashford and then sitting in the dark for two hours until another train turned up to rescue them! Apparently our train bypassed theirs! I had no idea - poor people...

Paris is just so beautiful. There really is just no place like it. It was an extra special treat for K who - unbelievably - had not been there for about 10 years. Not since we used to go and visit my aunt and uncle and cousins, who were living and working there for a few years, at Christmas times. Happy memories of their wonderful, typically Parisienne house in Le Vesinet; the night it snowed and fell so heavily that it woke K up... I have had the fortune to go to Paris a few times since then, on courier trips or research visits, so as always it was a treat to go, but it was extra to see it through K's excitement.

We stayed near the Palais Royal and just walked everywhere. That's what you have to do in Paris - it's an important part of soaking up the atmosphere and the architecture. Flaneant, indeed - though sadly we couldn't put our hands on that wonderful book by Edmund White (The Flâneur: A Stroll through the Paradoxes of Paris) which is obviously one of the books currently lodged in K's parents' attic...

I had stayed in this area before, near the Galérie Véro-Dodat (built 1826), and had noticed a lovely looking restaurant which only seemed to be open at lunchtimes, when I was working, so we headed straight there after dumping our bag at the hotel, and jumped straight into a wonderful French food experience. Not only that but completely unexpectedly the ceiling was covered in anaglyptic (embossed) wallpaper in the Alhambra style, which must have been up there since the late 19th century! I was very chuffed at such a fortuitous find.

Anaglyptic wallpaper was popular in the late 19th century, especially among those who wanted to create rich interiors decorated in the revivalist styles that were en vogue at that time - the decoration of the Alhambra being one of the most widespread of these international historicist styles.

The Galérie Véro-Dodat (named for the two men who built it, in 1826). It's one of the few surviving commercial passages in Paris - one of the best preserved too, I think, since it seems to have all the original shop fronts and many of their signs. The tables you can see about halfway down are outside the restaurant where we had lunch.

From there we wandered around the Marais, meandering along to the Place des Vosges, taking in the various gorgeous 16th-century hôtels and modern boutiques along the way. Dinner in the atmospheric Coude à Coude on Rue St Honoré where they squeeze you in "elbow to elbow". For the rest of the weekend, we went medieval - though K was a little surprised (I think) to discover he is no longer a 'proper' medievalist: nearly 4 hours in the Musée de Cluny, and he was disappointed that there wasn't more 16th-century stuff! He still managed to take about 10,000 photographs though.

One of the amazing windows at Sainte Chappelle. It is a relatively small space and was absolutely packed with tour parties, which completely removed any sense of awe or tranquility at being in the space. Every now and again some laconic guard would ssssssshhh!!!! everyone, until the chatter inevitably started up again. It was a little bit like being in the Sistine Chapel - not an experience I enjoyed very much the last time I went.

We did the main churches of medieval Paris - Sainte Chappelle, with its truly stunning stained glass windows, though the apse was behind some rather unattractive hoardings while they do a big restoration project on the glass and lead fittings; Notre Dame, where they were conducting a mass confirmation service for all the parishes in Paris (it seemed), so it was crowded and full of buzz and activity; St Germain des Pres, which has rather suffered from over heavy restoration and repainting in the 19th century; and Saint Denis, the royal pantheon - where K was happy to discover more 16th-century tomb sculpture than is reasonable in a church. But it was the site and excuse for another fine culinary experience - at the extremely elegant Mets du Roy, facing on to the square in front of the basilica. Expensive but amazing beef fillet.

I have always thought that going away for a long weekend like that in the middle of a busy work period would be exhausting - but, on the contrary, it was invigorating and relaxing, because there was so much to see and think about, that I spent very little time at all thinking or worrying about work. So more city breaks - that's the resolution. Especially to cities we can get to on the train. We're thinking Bruges next.

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In Paris we also took a holiday from K's enforced giving up of meat for Lent - only partly because France is, I think, officially the worst place in the world to be a vegetarian. Since getting back, though, he has been strictly enforcing this new regime. Even fish is off the menu. Practically, from a shopping and cooking point of view, it is easiest if we do this together - but I told him I couldn't guarantee that I wouldn't eat meat at lunch times. But so far I haven't and I am not missing it. Though I did join some colleagues for dinner at China City after the SOAS Islamic art research seminar yesterday evening, and I could not resist the prawns...

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I have not posted the calendar image for this month, since it is one you have seen before - something that might become a common occurrence, since the pictures we have selected for the calendar are some of the iconic images of last year, many of which I have already shared here. This month the image is the Natural History Museum in the heavy snow of last February - something which seemed magically rare when I wrote about it at the time, but which has been repeated this year, almost ad infinitum. When it first snowed, early on in the New Year, people were off work and schools were closed and fun and toboganning was had in the streets... But after weeks of the big chill, even the school kids didn't seem to care much for snowball fights any more.

It has been absolutely freezing, though in London in the last couple of days it has started to get milder. Cycling through Battersea Park on the way to work yesterday morning, I was suddenly assaulted by an amazing scent, and then I noticed a huge carpet of crocuses, all about to burst into bloom. How wonderful if spring was actually on the way!

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I finished reading the 900-page-long book - Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver, the first trilogy-in-one of his Baroque Cycle. It's a fictionalised and partly fantastical historical novel about Europe during the 17th century, woven around Natural Philosophy and the Royal Society (appropriate in its 350th year), the rise and fall of kings, money, commerce, pirates, Puritans, brilliantly and amusingly written... I had nothing better to read so I carried straight on to the next volume, The Confusion - 800 pages this time. There is another one after that too. These may be the only books I read all year! But I'm completely sucked in. Highly recommended reading.

On the road again

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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