Book launch

I thought I would rather shamelessly share with you some photos of my book launch in Seville a few weekends back.


It was K's birthday weekend as well as a bank holiday on the Monday so we made a long weekend of it, and had a really lovely time. Just got sent these shots last week from colleagues at the Fundación Tres Culturas who organised the whole thing (they financed the Spanish translation of my book). It was part of one of those flat-pack book fairs that take over a whole plaza, that seem to be so common in Spain and which I have often wandered around and bought books from, so it was weird to be part of one myself.




They want to arrange some more in the autumn so I'll be an old hand at this soon.

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I am not keeping up with this blog these days - too much going on and I just feel tired a lot of the time (not helped by the horrible weather that seems to be gripping the UK this last month). One day soon I hope to finally sort our photos from the Central Asia trip (before I forget what they all are) and post them on Flickr, and post a few reports and stand-out anecdotes... We're seeing some of the friends we made on that trip this weekend so that will be an incentive, hopefully, to reminisce about it here.

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We finally watched Avatar on DVD. What a terrible film! I think we missed about 75% of the point by not watching it on a massive IMAX-sized screen in 3D. It's an effects film which doesn't transfer to the small screen. Can't believe it's one of the highest grossing films of all time, but thank goodness it didn't get the Oscar (though from what I remember about The Hurt Locker I am not sure that deserved it either - but hey it's politics). Not a patch on The Shadow Line - finally a British show good enough in terms of its writing and acting to stand up to the best of the American and European dramas we have been getting here recently. And with the lovely Chiwetel Ejiofor to boot! Catch it while it's still on iPlayer!

The Incident of the Rhubarb Tarte Tatin

It was Friday the 13th, and I quipped to Andrew by email, "I hope I don't burn the dinner!" Hmmm. I had chosen a fancy dessert recipe from Olive to wow our dinner guests, and also to use up the last batch of rhubarb from K's parents' garden. First problem - I haven't cooked with rhubarb much before, and had never made a tarte tatin, and found upon reading the recipe closely that this was supposed to be done in blini pans or in a Yorkshire pudding tray with four indents, neither of which I had. So a single tarte tatin in a cake tin it was going to be. Then came the issue of making the caramel base. I discovered the hard way (er, literally) that when the recipe says butter and granulated sugar, one should not use caster sugar to make caramel.

After two attempts (the first with golden caster sugar, the second with normal refined caster sugar, just in case its goldenness had been the problem), K was dispatched to the local corner shop to procure granulated sugar, and hurrah! all proceeded satisfactorily with caramel production. I made a nice arrangement of the rhubarb bits on top of this, and I must say the tarte tatin did look beautiful when it was turned out. I don't have a photo unfortunately. Andrew was presented with the first slice and we all waited for the verdict - poor man, having been put on the spot, he did a valiant job of keeping a straight face. I tried a bite of mine - decidedly sour!! What happened to all that sugar in the caramel??? Plus the recipe suggestion of serving this with mascarpone was not a good choice.

With lashings of caster sugar, the dessert was eaten, but lesson learned - always test a new dessert recipe before serving it to one's dinner guests!! Alas, I feel this episode might go down in personal legend - "remember when you did that rhubarb tarte tatin for Alison and Andrew....?"

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The nice thing, however, was that we had a dinner party at all. It has been far too long since we had people over for supper, and this is one of the very nice outcomes of the time I have off work at the moment. Five whole weeks! I had so much annual leave to use up, having taken almost no holiday over the busy last few years, that I decided to take a big batch of time off in the middle of the summer - when it is usually quiet anyway - and spend it in the library, finally starting to focus on how to turn my PhD thesis into a book... I get two different reactions to this:

1) "Don't work too hard / Make sure you actually give yourself some time off!"
2) "Five weeks in the library! What bliss!"

I fall into the latter category myself. Two weeks in, and I am feeling immensely relaxed! I have said before that I don't really know how to relax like normal people - I actually really enjoy going to the library, and it is wonderful just to have the time to read things. I made a list of books and articles that have been published since I submitted my thesis in 2002 - not too long fortunately - and have been working my way through that, but also reading the odd other article, which I'm interested in but isn't directly relevant... Plus - I have space in my brain! And time to get round to things I have been meaning to do for months! Like write emails, send people photos or references I said I would send them, and just see people and be sociable!

The British Library is a pretty sociable place, as I have noted before, and I have been meeting friends for lunch and coffee and a post-library drink. Now Juliette has joined me in Rare Books, on her own PhD sabbatical, and we're getting into a habit of taking our packed lunches outside at 1, to sit in the sun for half an hour or so, and debrief... K will be off work too soon, so the 3 of us will be chilling out together...

And two weeks in, I have nearly a complete first draft of a book proposal! Reading the thesis again after 8 years was an interesting experience, and I was gratified to discover that it wasn't too awful, and that mostly I still agreed with myself... It's a bit dry and in some places overly defensive, but that's what makes a PhD different from a book, and that's what I have got to work out how to tackle. I've even had some positive feedback from the professor who supervised me for the beginning of the process, but didn't see it through because he went off to the States to be a hot-shot museum director - amazing to have some actual feedback as the viva was such a let-down... But water under the bridge an' all.

So - the next dinner party is planned for just over a week's time, and I'm already plotting the menu. I'm starting with the dessert first this time...!

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And finally...

Signpost, Chenies © KR

Our calendar picture for this month. A very English country road sign, but for K one which conjures up the places of his childhood. Chenies was where his grandparents lived, both now passed away. It was exactly this time last year that we were in Hereford for the 3 Choirs Festival, unknowingly spending our last days with his grandfather Robert... Perhaps a little sombre for the kitchen calendar, but it prompts some happy memories.

Saturdays in the British Library

This has been our habit for a goodly while now, but since the start of the year, it has become a regular routine. There is something very relaxing about spending a quiet day in the library - when you're academics like us, and what you love doing is your research, yet have such hectic, crazy jobs that largely involve meeting other people's deadlines so that research gets pushed to the sidelines, ie your own time. It gives us the chance to spend a companionable day together, and we get on with work we need or want to do.


The British Library is an amazing building - the largest public building erected in the UK during the 20th century, apparently. K calls it 'the ziggurat of learning', and there is something awe-inspiring about approaching the building across that wide open plaza - which sits atop six storeys of book stacks - with the neo-Gothic spires of St Pancras station encrusting its horizon. It's so well-designed to frame the view of that historic building, and be sympathetic to its environment yet architecturally assertive at the same time.

We've taken to using the Manuscripts Reading Room. This is because K regularly looks at actual manuscripts, though I can make no such claim. Humanities I is the biggest reading room, which tends to get packed out with undergraduates. Serious readers use Rare Books & Music instead. Scholars ascend the conspicuously located staircase to the ivory tower that is Manuscripts, which is always pleasantly empty, dotted with academics engaged in the serious business of primary research. I call up printed books, which the librarians at the issuing counter are so uninterested in that they rarely even ask me which desk number I am sitting at when I go to collect them. That is after they have looked down their noses at me for only consulting printed works produced during the 20th or 21st centuries.

It's always pleasantly sociable too. The library is often packed on a Saturday - we're not the only saddoes that spend their weekends engaged in intellectual pursuits. Most of the other readers are regulars, and creatures of habit, who usually sit at the same desks or put their coats and bags away in the same lockers. We certainly do. And we're often bumping into people we know. We see Patricia there on such a regular basis that we often have lunch together.

And then at the end of a productive day, you file out feeling virtuous, and because it's only 5 o'clock, there's still a whole evening of relaxing ahead of you.

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After the library yesterday, we headed for Chinatown for an early dinner, and then to the theatre - the Donmar Warehouse for the last-night performance of Red, the new play by John Logan about Mark Rothko during the years he was working on the Seagram commission. You can read my post about last year's exhibition at Tate Modern, which reunited those paintings, here. The play was absolutely fantastic - I had forgotten it was the last night, but clearly knew that when I booked the tickets, and in retrospect it made sense of the almost violently passionate performances that the only two characters presented last night. Though perhaps that's how it's been every night. Alfred Molina kissed his hand to the stage when they went out after their second curtain call.

The Donmar is a fantastically intimate almost in-the-round space, which seats only 250 people and puts on amazing shows. We went to see Life is a Dream there with Gareth last year, which was also a revelation. The set for Red was Rothko's studio in the Bowery, and the designers had recreated the feeling of being in a real artist's studio, with every surface encrusted with dried (red) paint. The centrepiece was a gigantic 'easel' from which hung a series of really good replica Rothkos - I would love to know how they got that genuine oil painting feel. Each 'scene' was punctuated by a different painting - Rothko and his studio assistant (played by Alfred Molina and Eddie Redmayne, both excellent) would lower the canvas on its pulley system and carry it over to the back wall of the theatre where there was a stack of 'in progress' canvases, and bring out another one. As the play went on, and Rothko's mood became darker and more despairing - as he realised the ultimate irony, tragedy even, of hanging his paintings on the walls of a fashionable New York restaurant - more and more black took over the surface of those pulsating (the word used in the play) red canvases...

The play itself was a battle of words and wits between Rothko - as the synecdoche of the past-it generation of Abstract Expressionists - and his young assistant - a painter himself, of the Pop Art generation. It was about art and philosophy, seeing and thinking, but also about ageing and the human urge to hang on to a past that seems to be slipping away. They had sold out of all the scripts, but the next time we're at the National Theatre I plan to buy a copy in the bookshop and read it again, since the writing seemed to capture that intangible ability to talk about art, as well as the spiritual quality of those Seagram paintings.

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It was the second amazing thing we'd seen in as many nights. On Friday night we saw Un Prophète - the new Jacques Audiard film - at the Ritzy. It's been haunting both of us ever since. It's gritty and hard to watch sometimes, but slow-moving and meditative too, and newcomer Tahar Rahim, who is in almost every frame, is just fantastic.

I've been trying to relax in the evenings this week. I sent off the article on Almoravid religious architecture on Sunday night and have been feeling pretty exhausted as a result of not really having had a break the last two weekends straight. And since things are heating up with the Ceramics Galleries installation phase, I need to be on the ball. I've been waking myself up thinking about it quite a bit lately - usually about 2.30 in the morning, I wake up with music playing in my head, and work thoughts crowding in, and the only way to drown them out is to play myself back to sleep with something on the iPod. I've also gone and got a stinking cold, which hit me out of nowhere mid-week, so I have been feeling a bit under par. I still managed to get all my ceramics labels written and sent off on time though!

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!

Back to life? I'm certainly back to reality...

I can't believe it's been nearly a month since my last post. The last few months seem to have gone by in a blur of writing, an activity which it is quite difficult to measure in normal temporal terms. I am now peaking my nose over the top of the parapet of the book-writing world I feel like I have been slightly trapped in, and reminding myself there is a world (and a life) out there...

So, against all expectations, the rewritten book chapters got sent off to the editor at about 7pm on Friday 29th May. When I had a meeting with him a few days later to talk about scheduling the next few stages, he didn't have anything prepared because no-one had ever actually sent him a manuscript on time before!! We agreed I could have until 18th June to submit the end-matter - footnotes, bibliography, captions, all the other little bits and pieces (map locations, acknowledgements...) - as well as the 'signed-off' text, in the sense that my boss has read it and agrees it's ready to go. Herein lies the rub. My boss is not the world's most efficient person at scheduling his time, and he is also always immensely busy. I also returned to the Department (bidding a regretful farewell to that hot, stuffy but calm office in Research) at a particularly busy time - just as my colleagues were at panic-stations, wrestling with the logistics of shipping artworks from various international destinations which are going to be shown in the Jameel Prize, which opens in under a month. So instead of having time and space to think about footnotes, I got thrown into the deep end of liaising with art shippers, which involved conversations about artists I had never heard of and artworks I knew nothing about! Well, we need to be adaptable in this job, and it was nice to be back around people, in a thriving environment (one of the reasons I love working where I work) but this has meant for the last two weeks I have been ending crazy days in the office with trying to get as much work on the book done in the evenings and weekends as it is humanly possible to do when you are already running on empty.

And then eventually I managed to have a conversation with my boss about whether or not he had looked at my chapters, and he of course said he did not have time to do that before the day it was all supposed to go off to the copy-editor. Sigh. I let the editor know and haven't heard from him since - I don't think I'm in his good books any more. Annoying too, because I am actually taking a day off on 19th June, and flying to Berlin for the weekend to spend time with my friend Glaire, who lives in North Carolina, but will be over there for university meetings - so I am taking the chance to see her, and the idea was we'd also have fun celebrating my getting the book all done and dusted.

While it means that potentially I now have time to calm down a little on my work on the end-matter, I still want to get all this done by Thursday. I want it to be ready to go as soon as I get the go-ahead. I also want to have the satisfaction of knowing that I have fulfilled my sides of the bargain. But I just could not face working today. On top of all the book work, I had to give a paper yesterday! At a study day we held on Owen Jones, to accompany the display my colleague has curated, to commemorate his bicentenary, and to draw long overdue attention to this extremely versatile and influential design theorist, in the run-up to the international touring exhibition I will be co-curating later this year. I was talking on 'The Alhambra in the 19th century', drawing largely on material from Chapter 4 - but I still had to draw it together into half-hour paper length, put my Powerpoint together, then go and give the darn thing!

Still, it seemed to go down well. Luckily, I was second, so I could get it out of the way early on, then relax and enjoy the rest of the day - the other papers were all really high quality, and very interesting, though not directly relevant to my research, which made it more relaxing! We went out for drinks and dinner afterwards, and then more drinks - ending up with just the 'hardcore' at an appropriately Victorian pub, The Bunch of Grapes, on Knightsbridge, listening to anecdotes about the museum and past curators from one of our company who was a retired curator with an endless supply of such amusing tales, of times when fellow curators were known to their colleagues as 'Dirty Dingle', for example!! We all wished we'd been curators fifty years ago!

So, despite the good intentions of spending this sunny Sunday working on image captions for Chapter 4, I just can't be arsed. I think a day off at the weekend is not too much to ask! We got up late, I caught up with a few emails, started to put my mind to thoughts about Berlin next weekend, and then K and I went out for a leisurely lunch at Negril on Brixton Hill, a great little place that does fantastic Caribbean home-made food.


Any visit there is perforce leisurely, especially on a sunny day like today when their front yard gets really busy, and it can take absolutely aaaaages for your food to arrive. But if you go there in full knowledge that you will not eat soon, it's very relaxing! We got a table outside, read the newspaper, drank mango juice, and waited for jerk chicken, rice and peas, and homemade coleslaw - yum! Going there feels a little bit like going on holiday - their yard is surrounded by trees and plants (this picture is an old one), and if you don't look up too far, you can't see the double-deckers and terraced houses of Brixton Hill. It feels like the cool kind of place you normally find on holiday in trendy European cities. Well, that just goes to show that London is one!

K is doing a bit of research for the conference paper he has to give next month, and in a while we thought we'd go and have some tea outside in our communal garden. I might read my book - I'm now onto the second Stieg Larsson book, The Girl who Played with Fire. I was going to wait until it came out in paperback, since I only read in bed at the moment and I'm usually so tired in the evenings these days that a big sharp-edged hardback book can be a dangerous undertaking! But my colleague who lent me the Camilla Läckberg had borrowed it from a friend and lent it to me before giving it back! I do like that I now exchange Scandinavian crime fiction with one of the Senior Curators of Textiles...!

But before I go, I have been remiss at posting this month's calendar picture:

Lonja de la Seda, Valencia, Spain © MRO

This is actually one of my photos! This was taken a year and a month ago in Valencia. These rather beautiful medieval angels supporting the coat-of-arms of the city of Valencia are on the corner of the Gothic building called La Lonja, the 15th-century silk exchange, which is one of the city's oldest and most beautiful buildings. A very impressive, cavernous interior space as well, an appropriately grand monument to one of Valencia's most important industries. Ahhh, makes me want to go back to Spain... (It doesn't take much!)

Well, there are many, many other things to say - but a cup of tea and a Viennese whirl in the sunshine is beckoning. I hope it won't be so long next time.

Back in the Big Wide World - for now!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spring Cleaning!

Hard to believe, as housework is probably the Thing I Hate Above All Else, but gently over the course of the last week we've been having a clear-out and a clean-up - K has gone through all the clothes in his wardrobe and binned or charity shopped about half, and I actually hoovered the flat (well, Dysoned, to be strictly accurate) on Saturday morning. It is one of the few activities in life where you see immediate results - not that this makes me want to do it any more often, but it is rather satisfying when you do. I picked up a fridge magnet somewhere a few years ago, which says - "Dull women have immaculate houses". I immediately connected with this concept, and the magnet is still going strong, stuck to the boiler! Anyway the weather has certainly been springy, so it is obviously something in the air - but it still hasn't made me want to clean the oven...

We've been relaxing over this May Day bank holiday weekend - K has a week off work now, spending some of the time off in lieu that he has accrued on the Henry VIII project. I decided to relax too, though the last week's work has not been exactly rigorous, and I have not got very far at all with Chapter 4 - quite a lot of urgent last-minute sorting of papers and "I had just better read this one last article..." Anyway I have to pull my finger out and really get into it this week, since it is now MAY and I suddenly only have a month of research leave left, which is somewhat terrifying, considering how much there still is to do - and who knows how much reworking to accommodate my readers' comments...

Anyway, we're relaxing today. We have been very fortunate to be invited round to friends' houses every day this long weekend, so we have eaten some very fine meals, and had some very fine conversation, and a very nice time all round! Lunch on Saturday with Kirstin in Pilgrims' Cloisters, the always unexpectedly gorgeous oasis of Victorian residential architecture which is the only remotely old thing still standing in a sea of tower-block estates in Camberwell... Yesterday in Guildford, with Alison and Steve, meeting Nate for the first time (though I can't believe he is already 8 months' old!) and being introduced to the world of Rainbow Magic books which Ellie and her 4-year-old friends absolutely love! There are nearly 80 of these books, and there's a fairy for everything you could possibly conceive of in life - from Alice the Tennis Fairy, to Tasha the Tap Dance fairy (this was the first one I read to Ellie, so will always hold a special place in my heart!) I was amazed - something about these books utterly mesmerised little Ellie... Whoever came up with this idea is clearly raking it in!!

Today we had lunch with Cornelius in Kennington (I do like it when we can travel to and from friends' places just on the bus), followed by a film at the Ritzy. We often go and see films with Cornelius, and it's really nice as a way to see things you would not otherwise think to go to. We suggested State of Play, he suggested Let the Right One In - which I have to say I knew very little about but had gathered that it involved vampires and was, according to the poster, a "chilling fairytale", which was enough to put me off wanting to see it, and avoiding reading any reviews. Normally I only watch 'horror' movies (though it defies that categorisation) under extreme protest, though Salem's Lot, to which this film nods in at least one memorable scene, was once a favourite film, but most recently, the closest I have been to vampires is watching the last few series of Angel, the friendly vampire-with-a-soul who crusades against evil, which is all rather outlandish and amusing TV, in a Joss Whedon kind of way. But when Cornelius suggested this film, I looked up Peter Bradshaw's review, whose critical opinion I utterly trust, which made me think it could be interesting - not quite Rainbow Magic, but certainly another way of taking my mind off my work...! In the end, we flipped a coin (when was the last time I did that?!) and Let the Right One In was the winner.

And I loved it! It's an achingly beautiful film - set in snowy urban Sweden, with a quiet but beautiful soundtrack, not much dialogue, and quite minimalist when it comes. I liked the fact that the subtitles were quite minimalist as well - there was a lot more Swedish on screen, in newspaper cuttings, and notes between the young protagonists, than was translated, and I thought that was a sympathetic way of respecting the lack of spoken word. I won't tell you the story - read the review, if you want to know, it won't give too much away. If you're worried like I was about the horror movie aspect, don't be - it is gruesome in parts, but won't wake you up with nightmares (I hope!!) But it's hauntingly memorable, and as other reviews have said, it's a "major addition to the vampire genre", and "infinitely superior to Twilight" - which I have not seen, and quite frankly don't wish to after this! Though my heart sank to read just now that a "wholly unnecessary" American remake is in pre-production... Why do they do this?? Is it that taxing to read subtitles? We'd gone to an afternoon showing, and it was odd to re-emerge into daylight - everything seemed slightly disturbed, not quite normal. Cornelius seemed quite shaken, so I think we'll be going to see State of Play next time!

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It being May, though, it must be time to share the picture from our home-made calendar! This does not cease to bring joy by the way - it was an excellent thing to do!

Iglesia de San Antonio, Aranjuez © KR

This is another photo from our trip to Spain last May - nearly a year ago, which is unbelievable... K joined me in Madrid halfway through my month's trip, and the next day I made him go to a palace, which was hardly a fun holiday activity for him, considering he works in one - and one that has the best preserved set of royal rooms in the Baroque style in Europe, apparently, so dragging him to Aranjuez, a day-trip outside the capital, which was the Spanish monarchy's summer palace, remodelled in the 18th century to be fashionably Baroque, was, in retrospect, a bit cruel. But he seemed to love it - he went into photography mode, and took a few thousand images that day I think! No pictures allowed inside the palace, though, which was annoying since my reason for wanting to go there was to see the 'Moorish' smoking room that had been added to the royal apartments by Isabel II in 1850, commissioned from Rafael Contreras, the man who was working for her as restorer at the Alhambra palace, and was built and decorated entirely in the Alhambra style. It was pretty fantastic and worth putting up with the Baroque enfilade of rooms, and the truly monstrous chinoiserie porcelain room. We also had some very fine strawberries and cream, which is the thing to do at Aranjuez apparently.

Anyway we had some time to kill before taking the train back to Madrid, and had a wander around the very small town, which was all remodelled at the same time as the palace. K got particularly carried away taking photos of this church and a barrack block next to it. I am used to having to wait for him to take his photos and catch me up, but usually there are nice things to look at, so it doesn't matter, but I had had my fill of Baroque for one day, and I think it was starting to rain. Anyway I had to phone him to see where he was! But now he has seen the Baroque exhibition, and like me, was frustrated about the lack of a definition of what the Baroque style actually is, according to K, this church is typical Baroque because it's bendy. So there you go.

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Today is the 30th anniversary of Margaret Thatcher coming to power as the first female prime minister. I'm not celebrating, and I always think it's slightly debatable how much of a woman she was, but it is still remarkable, when you look around at our international politicians and see how few of them are women. When we had the G20 summit in town a few weeks ago, there was all this coverage about the meal that Jamie Oliver was cooking for the presidential spouses, and which talented British women were going to be invited, and who was going to sit next to who... And I just thought, hey, does Angela Merkel's husband come to that dinner? Turns out he stayed behind in Berlin!! Why? Because it's too humiliating for him to be one man among all those women at the patronising spousal dinner?? One coup for women I am happy to celebrate in the news this week is the appointment of our first ever female Poet Laureate - not that I am sure this is an institution I entirely support, though it sounds like Carol Ann Duffy has a strong sense of the good that poetry can bring to peoples' lives and of the good she can do in this role. So good luck to her. And I also appreciate the way that the discussion this week has not been all about her sexuality - which it certainly would have been in Thatcher's day.

Radio Silence

Well, howdy! It's been a while. Sorry for the radio silence - I have been wrangling with Chapter 3, and have been avoiding email, and pretty much anything that is not in some way influenced by the art of Islamic Spain. Apart from Henry VIII - though he was influenced, but this is not the time or place for that discussion. All the big Henry VIII launches have been happening in the last few weeks - the opening on Wednesday evening at the British Library, of their exhibition Man and Monarch, was on the actual 500th anniversary of Henry officially assuming the throne - marked by K and his fellow Tudor historians all wryly commiserating each other on the death of Henry VII... I'll have to defer talking about that exhibition until I've been back to look at it properly.

The previous week was the party to launch all K's work at Hampton Court - details here. It all looks fantastic - they have re-presented the Tudor palaces, including hanging the 'Haunted Gallery' (a long corridor which is used as a paintings gallery, hung with fabulous portraits from the Royal Collection) with rich fabrics, as it would have been in the Tudor period, and bringing together in Henry's council chamber (never before open to the public!) a small exhibition of contemporary portraits of Henry's wives (the first time that's ever been done!) and daughters, together with an object of significance from their lives - and much much more ... The conceit is that the palace is 'dressed' for the wedding of Henry and Katherine Parr ("survived"), which was held at Hampton Court in 1543, and you are the courtiers in attendance: there are staged events throughout the day, when you can meet help the bride and groom prepare for the wedding, or be the first to congratulate them after the ceremony... They have hired three actors to rotate playing Henry every day for a year, and I must say it really brings everything to life, when you're just wandering around the palace and then everything stops to make way for the King ... You get caught up in the scenario and really believe it's him!


I could go on and on - but you'll just have to go along and see for yourself! It is certainly enough to fill a fun day out, which has been one of the main purposes. Hampton Court is just that little bit too far away (though it is really easy to get to - when the trains are running!) for people to automatically think of going there, but amazingly, they had 16,000 visitors over the Easter bank holiday weekend!! We were some of them - K had to go in anyway, so we arranged to go with friends on Easter Sunday. The range of projects that K was involved in for this was so wide that I really had not that much idea what he was working on, as it was too much to talk about after he'd been hard at it at work all day, so that was the first time I really got the chance to find out, and to see it all in action, and people enjoying themselves. Visitors are encouraged to dress for court, by putting on these fine velvet(een) robes - here's K and our friend Az pretending to be Holbein's Ambassadors!


Not that K can relax now it's all open - he's been involved in a whirl of media coverage, including his spot on Today a few weeks back, and the Time Team special on Tudor palaces on Easter Monday! There's also a documentary going around on the History channel, but no-one we know has Sky, so we have to wait for the DVD to watch that!! And this week he has had to give two study day papers, so ended up working through the night on Monday to get the first one written...

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As a result, we're desperately planning to 'get away from it all' and have a holiday this year, so we're planning a retreat to the Outer Hebrides (literally) for mid-July - the earliest 'window' in both our schedules... But we did make sure to take Easter Monday off, and had an absolutely wonderful day out at Bexhill. I wanted to go to the seaside and see some nice architecture, so we decided on Bexhill because of the De La Warr Pavilion, built in 1935, the UK's first public building to be constructed in the Modernist style.


You just can't take a bad photo of it. There was also something truly amazing about the contrasting colours - of the sea and the sky and the pavilion, and the lawn out front which seemed impossibly green. This picture doesn't do it justice.

We got up reasonably early (considering how tired we were!) and managed to get a 9.30 train, and somehow I'd been organised enough to prepare a thermos of coffee and some hot cross buns for breakfast on the train. We read our books and dozed for the two-hour journey (already sounding good, eh?) Beautiful weather had been forecast for the Easter weekend, which had so far failed to materialise, but the clouds burned off and the sun came out as we sat on a perfectly-located bench overlooking the sea, with an easy view backwards to the pavilion, eating what I am reliably informed were the best fish-and-chips on the South Coast (from Louis's Fish Bar on Sea Road - go there)


We literally spent every last penny we had on this feast and it was worth every one of them!!

Quite a number of boats came out as well - it turned into a gorgeously beautiful day.


The thing was, we had absolutely no mental energy left, so it was the perfect day out, because it was all just so beautiful to look at and soak up, and we pretty much just wandered and sat and gazed all day, without having anything at all to say.

This picture sums up my mental state that day!

We sat on the shingle and K found it endlessly rewarding to throw stones at the sea. He took this picture while lying on the beach!


The added bonus was that while I had known pretty much what to expect from the Pavilion, I was totally unprepared for the gorgeous Victorian Orientalist sea-front cottages - we're seriously considering moving there!


Here are some gratuitous gorgeous views of Bexhill and the Pavilion (it's an exhibition venue, but we had absolutely no difficulty in avoiding looking at any of the art - tea on the terrace was much more the order of the day).

View from the terrace

Up the stairwell © KR

Down the stairwell © KR
I love the colours - though they seem to be slightly flattened here

A meditative view out to sea...

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So it turns out I have an inflamed ulnar. This is compressing the nerves which run down the left side of my body and giving me numbness and tingling sensations in my arm and leg - and making it not so easy to type for long stretches. At least it is that and not some other more worrying cause of numbness and tingling down one side ... it induced some anxiety for several days until I decided to be grown-up and go and see the doctor yesterday. I have to take ibuprofen for two weeks to help the swelling go down and hopefully the symptoms will subside. It is probably caused by how I tuck my arm under my head while sleeping, aggravated by the intensive typing I'm doing while I write my book, and by cycling - apparently this condition is quite common in cyclists, and is also known as "handlebar palsy"!!! What is it with me and oddly-named nervous inflammations?? I had plantar fasciitis in my heel last year!!

I am also under doctor's orders to relax this weekend! Which fortunately coincides with that slight fallow period between finishing one chapter and beginning the planning process of the next - which will also be the last!! (apart from the Introduction) Chapter 4 is about the 19th-century rediscovery of Spain's Islamic past and the revival of 'Moorish' (if you must, though I don't like to) styles in art and architecture... So I plan to do some gentle reading about that today, to get me in the mood - and then my sister is coming over tonight (hurrah!) and we're going to see In the Loop at the Ritzy - the first film we've been to see since Frost/Nixon (oh dear!) ... And tomorrow we're going to plan our holiday, over brunch. Doctor's orders.

Where's Obama today?

Turns out he's just arrived in Baghdad!! He's really packing it in on this round-the-world trip! There's a headline in K's Economist (April 4th-10th, p. 59) that says, "If atmospherics were all that mattered, the American president would be well on the way to curing the world's ills". It was good to have him in London, and I loved the fact that he gave the Queen an iPod!! There are some amusing track suggestions for her here. Michelle seemed to go down a storm at the inner London secondary school she visited - we heard some very eloquent teenage girls talking on the radio about how her visit had inspired them. (Talking of radio, did you catch K on Today??) I did not go on any protests, and to be quite honest, I really did not see the point of them. "Jobs, Justice and Climate"? Plus the usual add-ons that you get at protests like that. I tried it over Iraq - it didn't work. Its absolutely shocking, though, about that guy who died of a heart attack, on his way home - especially since it seems like the heart attack was set off by police assault.

Call me shallow, but I was frankly more interested in watching the footage of the Obamas meeting the Sarkozys at Strasbourg - Nicolas looked like a cartoon character next to Barack!! And what was Sarkozy doing with Obama's tie?? There was some fascination with the "sartorial battle" between Carla and Michelle ("two fashion titans"!), which is always amusing to read - though I am not sure I approve that you can now post comments at the end of stories on the Guardian website. I find myself reading them almost against my will, in a sort of morbid fascination, though very rarely do you get anything actually worth paying attention to - and how is it that people have time to participate in this kind of online conversation, sometimes several times??

Anyway, book update. I have finished Chapter 2, and sent that off to my readers, but I am having some difficulty getting going with writing Chapter 3. I have decided it's PMT - well, I've got to have something to blame. It also feels like a holiday - all the schools have broken up, and many of my colleagues have taken the week off, so there is a holiday air which is rather effecting. I also feel it's ok to have a little break between chapters - but there's just no time for that, I keep having to tell myself.

I spent this morning in the Baroque exhibition - classic work-avoidance activity. Now, I really do not like baroque as an artistic style - but I liked this exhibition. It is really well laid out, with a simple but effective design - like the section about secular spaces (ie. the palace) being laid out like an enfilade of rooms in a baroque palace, culminating in the king's bedchamber - as you would if you were a courtier visiting. It feels quite empty - though there is not a shortage of objects, though some of them are BIG, but they get a chance to breathe, and so do you - I always find if you're in an original baroque space it is just too overwrought and overwhelming that you just can't appreciate its individual elements, whereas you can here.

The one let-down was that nowhere does it actually tell you what baroque is, or how it develops, or why it spreads as widely as it did - why did it appeal so much? They imply it was through the patronage of the Catholic church and the absolute monarchs of the 17th century - though it doesn't ever really say what they were trying to use this style to express, apart from wealth, and power, which is self-evident. It was also slightly disappointing that - though much is made of this being the "first global style" (because it is the first style to travel out of Europe, though I am not sure this is necessarily something to be proud of, since it's imposed on colonies by European imperialists) this was only represented in a rather tokenistic way, with very few objects (though one of them was, admittedly, again, very large) and just there as "examples", rather than objects in themselves, if you see what I mean.

The theatre section was great - they had found this 17th-century castle theatre in the Czech Republic, which has retained its original stage set and furnishings, and it is obviously still used, since there was a short film of performances underway, and the guys under the stage turning pulleys to change the set. Fascinating. Opera was invented at this time, and much was made about the "total work of art", so that a baroque setting was multi-sensory, and included musical as well as visual stimulation. I really liked the use of music in the spaces, though at certain points these clashed with each other, but I think this experience would have been rather lost on you had you been going round with the audio guide (and you know how I feel about those...)

Anyway I think it has opened this week because of Easter - being, perhaps, the most Baroque of church rituals. And nowhere is it more Baroque than Semana Santa in Seville - of which there were some more film clips. In all my years of visiting Spain, I have never witnessed this, and is something I would really love to do sometime - though I am not sure I could get past been terrified by the penitents in their pointed KKK-inspiring hoods... Some seasonal photos I have enjoyed from the Guardian website (is it obvious which newspaper I read?):

Barbie and Ken go to Mass!

April Fool

Lordy, this has been a busy March! Somehow I find it slightly inconceivable that I have actually managed to draft the first two chapters of my book – though Chapter 2 is still a little rough, and a little long (though 3000 words less too-long than it was this morning), and I have given a work-in-progress seminar on it all, yesterday. Phew. I feel exhausted! And sadly there’s no let-up – Chapter 3 needs to be drafted! I am aiming to have something down on paper for all four chapters by the end of April. A chapter every two weeks. Am I mad?

So, time to post the calendar image for the month.

Descent from the Cross, Catalonia 12th-13th century, MNAC, Barcelona © KR

This is one of groups of monumental wooden sculpture from medieval Cataluña, among the fantastic collections of Spanish Romanesque art in the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya in Barcelona – taken last May, when K joined me for two weeks in Spain, after I had taken my group of Museum Patrons on their guided tour of ‘Islamic Spain’, and was staying on for the rest of the month to do research, museum and site visits for my book. We always try and fit in a visit to Barcelona, to visit Sarah and Julius, and their children Leila and Isaac – this was our last visit to their lovely (tiny!) old apartment just steps from the sea at Barceloneta. They were just in the process of sorting out a mortgage when we were there (they beat us to it!!) and have since moved to a larger place, just a few streets down, which is even easier to stay in than the last one, by all accounts – must go and find out some time soon!

We’d been to MNAC before, but K didn’t seem to remember (it was a fair few years previously, and I had been back on my own a number of times since then), and he just went crazy for the Romanesque. I phoned him at one point from Gothic Spain (and got stern looks from the wardens) and he was still halfway through the Romanesque period! That stuff is just absolutely fantastic though – we both really love it. There is something so – human – about its artistic naivety. The architecture is pretty fab too. Anyway we chose this photo for the calendar this month, because of its Easter-related theme, of the death of Christ.

And, in case you’re wondering, K has been doing very well at the not-drinking-alcohol-for-Lent. He has been taking Sundays off – this has obviously helped. I think last year he spoke to actual Christians about it, and apparently Sundays are not counted in the number of days for which Lent lasts – they’re a religious feast day, ergo you don’t have to give up what you gave up. He has been known occasionally to rather over-compensate – when Nick was here a few weekends back (so wonderful to see him! Was it really three years since the last time…?), K awoke on Monday morning with something of a headache. A whiskey too far, I fear.

And one last by the way – Stieg Larsson is excellent. Still a little way to go, but it has definitely been the thing to switch the brain off from The Book last thing at night. Highly recommended.

Another thing that has kept me sane the last couple of weeks - watching back issues of Brothers and Sisters. Gaaaad, I love that programme! I am not sure exactly why it is so good - on the surface the characters seem quite stereotyped and the idea of it doesn't sound that interesting: a big ensemble cast (12 main characters!), a loving but explosively expressive family and their escapades through daily life, all revolving around the personality and the absence of the husband/father, who (brilliantly) died right at the beginning of the first episode. But the writing and the acting is just fantastic! Welsh actor Matthew Rhys is so watchable as as Kevin Walker.

Another last 'by the way'. K has just informed me that he might be interviewed on the Today programme on Saturday morning, talking about Henry VIII! Be sure to listen!!

Podgrams

That's just a great word - trust Stephen Fry to come up with that! I just wanted to share this with you - I've been listening to his Podgrams on and off since he started them, gosh, a year ago. Last night, while cooking (risotto - and very nice it was too!), I finally got round to listening to his most recent one (from last December), about language - the joys of language, and how sad it is that the enjoyment of language should be considered somehow elitist. Among many many other things. That doesn't even begin to do it justice. The risotto was done and I just had to keep standing in the kitchen listening until it was finished. I swear, I actually felt more intelligent afterwards. How wonderful to have the intellect massaged so sweetly by Stephen's dulcet tones and thoughts! I am going to have to listen to it again and again to get the full benefit - if only this blog could be so aspirational and inspiring! I loved his phrase, "I linguify for a living!" And the following passage struck home with me, having been someone who grew up on the Classics, and even has a degree in it, would you believe. On language being a defining part of who you are, he says:

In my case, it's in part a classical ruin, inherited boulders of Tacitus and Cicero bleaching in the sun, along with grass-overrun elements of Thucydides and Aeschylus, not because I was a Classical scholar, but because I was taught by Classical scholars, and grew up on poets, dramatists, and novelists who knew the Classics as intimately as most people of my generation know the Beatles and the Stones. Without knowing it therefore, heroic Ciceronian clausulae and elaborate Tacitan litotes can always be found in the English of people like me.

Brief book update: Chapter 1 exists in an almost-complete draft, which I have decided to put to one side for a while before sending it off to my readers (I will have to have another sneak peak at the end of the week to reassure myself it's good enough to go), and this afternoon I have made a halting start to Chapter 2. Writing Chapter 1 was not just a process of getting the information down, but of understanding quite what this book is, and refining what I am going to be able to say in it: i.e. not, as I naively had in the back of my mind since the beginning, the last word survey text on Islamic Arts from Spain, which simultaneously meets a general and an academic audience. The format is just not long enough for that. I have had to cut out swathes of interesting thoughts, because fundamentally we have nothing in the collection that makes them relevant to the book. These thoughts - and probably even these texts - will get used elsewhere, but Chapter 1 was also a process of learning the art of compromise. Soon I will have to become proficient at the art of condensing thoughts into as few words as possible. So it's not an entirely positive feeling at this point, and makes starting on Chapter 2 harder than it should be. Anyway, tomorrow I am just going to dive in anywhere and get writing.

The Wonderful World of Byzantium

Last Sunday, I finally went to the Byzantium exhibition, the next ‘culture’ that the Royal Academy has decided to colonise. Wow. It is only on for a few more weeks (typical of me to leave it almost to the end), and I think everyone in London is trying to make sure they see it before it closes. It was packed! I got there as lunchtime was just starting, so during the two hours I was there, I experienced a comparative lull while everyone else went off to ingest some energy to get them through it. I walked straight through to the end of the show, and worked my way backwards – in my experience Royal Academy exhibitions are usually so huge that you are just too tired to take in the last few rooms, so I wanted to see what was there, and then focus on what I was really interested in – though unfortunately this meant that by the time I had got back to the beginning, lunchtime was over, and the first two galleries were jammed again. I felt so sorry for the several people I saw trying to go round in wheelchairs – one guy was particularly vocal about his frustration at not being able to see anything. I don’t think the height of the cases or position of the labels was very DDA compliant, so I really don’t know what he was able to see.

It managed to live up to all my usual gripes about Royal Academy exhibitions – terrible lighting, how can they get away with it? Objects are in darkness, or lit so that you can’t avoid throwing your shadow over them, or so over-lit that the surface of the object just reflects it back to you, and you can’t see any of the detail. Also, small objects with immensely delicate and detailed decoration, positioned so far back in the case that you can’t see a thing. I really must get into the habit of bringing a torch and a magnifier with me to RA exhibitions. They also seem to have developed a new habit of giving only (what we call in the trade) ‘tombstone’ information on the labels (which were in a new kind of reflective silver material which meant that there was no chance of seeing anything if you tried to read them at a sharp angle through the glass because of the long queue of people clustering round one object…), which gives you absolutely no understanding at all of the complex iconography of Byzantine art, where things were found or how they survived or even really why they were in the show at all. ‘Interpretation’ is never the RA’s strong suit, and they seem to have done away with it completely here. If you want to learn anything, you have to get the audio guide, which I am too much of a snob to do, since I hate the way it turns exhibition-goers into automata, looking only at what the machine tells you to. Or you buy the catalogue, which I had already decided to do before I even arrived. A nice traditional publication of the exhibition as it was, with the added bonus of essays by people who know what they’re talking about. And information about the objects – hurrah!

But what objects! It was amazing to see all the real celebrities of Byzantine ivory carving in one room – and such a treat to be able to see their backs! I have, however, seen more icons than I needed to, but I had no idea how large some of them were! Something I thought was really interesting was that the large collection of 6th-century icons in the Monastery of St Catherine on Mount Sinai, in Egypt, was actually saved from iconoclasm by having been absorbed into the Islamic Empire some hundred years before the decree of iconoclasm (730-845) – so now it has one of the best preserved sets of icons from the whole Byzantine world. Nowadays, The One Thing That Everyone Knows About Islamic Art is that there is no figural representation (which is true only in religious contexts, and even then it is not universally enforced), and it seems to be entirely forgotten that other religions, not least Christianity, had their aniconic phases too. I thought the way they covered to and fro of artistic influences with Islam was a bit tokenistic (and they certainly focused on the ‘to’, but there was most definitely ‘fro’ as well, as evidenced by some of the ivories, and the palmette scroll designs in the repoussé silver adornments on many of the icons), and much more could have been made of this important topic – but perhaps that’s actually a subject for a whole exhibition in itself.

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You will be pleased to hear that my book writing is progressing well – I am nearly at the end of the second week of my research leave, though I am not quite on the verge of achieving my target of having a complete finished draft of Chapter 1 by tomorrow. This is because I ended up spending most of the first week gradually moving my accumulated piles of papers and notes and useful books from home into my new office in the Research Department at work, then sorting and filing these. Well, “it’s an essential part of the process”, as I was pleased to hear one of my new colleagues say to me! (And my desk at home has not been so clear for years!)

I decided not to be too worried about trying to over-achieve in the first few days, and I was giving a lecture two days in – to the Friends of Dulwich Picture Gallery (close to home at least) – so I just let the creative juices start to flow in their own time. Towards the end, Nick, one of my Asian Department colleagues, told me something very important, which immediately turned into my mantra – “Don’t get it right, get it written” (with thanks to his cousin). Now, as you know I don’t have a problem with getting things written, as evidenced by the length of my blog postings – whether they actually say anything interesting is another matter (and one I won’t invite you to comment on!). So, I am very nearly there with a complete first draft of Chapter 1 (which covers the early medieval period in the art history of Islamic Spain, focusing mainly on the 10th to 13th centuries) – trouble is, it’s already twice as long as the chapter is supposed to be. Turns out there are quite a lot of interesting things to say about the rather neglected (in art historical terms) Berber dynasties, the Almoravids and Almohads. So, I’m going to be spending a fair bit of time doing some serious polishing and refining, which is going to take me at least into the middle of next week, by which point I will be behind my entirely unrealistic work schedule. Sigh.

Two things that were keeping me going last week:

1) Catching up on the last seven episodes of Season 4 of Battlestar Galactica (not the original!) – with sincere thanks to Az for his episode pirating skills. Only three more episodes to go – ever!

2) Scandinavian crime fiction, in the form of The Ice Princess, by Camilla Läckberg (with thanks to Lesley for the loan). As people who owned the Complete Works of Henning Mankell before anyone else in the UK had heard of him (and, by the way, weren’t the Kenneth Branagh TV adaptations good? Hope he does more!), and now that Scandinavian crime writing is The New Black, it was with mild disdain mingled with curiosity that I embarked on this new discovery – though helped along by Lesley’s recommendation. I enjoyed it – it certainly helped to take my mind off my own stresses, at the usual two pages a night before falling asleep… But I am not sure it lived up to the hyperbole of the back cover (“a masterclass in Scandinavian crime writing” – er, no), and I thought that most of the subsidiary characters were rather stereotyped. There’s an insightful write-up on it at this blog – I actually though the “obligatory big knicker homage to Bridget Jones” was pretty disappointing. The main protagonist is someone who makes her career writing literary biographies of important Swedish women – and her “favourite literary heroine” is Bridget Jones?? Come on!

Still, I would read more books by Camilla Läckberg (especially if I don’t have to buy them!). Since then I’ve been splashing about in that strange myre you sometimes find yourself in when you finish a book and don’t have anything immediately lined up. I temporarily returned to The Gormenghast Trilogy, since I still have the third book (Titus Alone) to go. But though I love it, it is just too heavy-going for me at the moment – plus now that Titus is out of Gormenghast, discovering the big wide Modernist world, with new weird characters verging on the science fiction, have turned it into a very different, less escapist, reading experience. I will return to it another time.

So, I stopped off at the wonderful Bookthrift on my way to the tube station this evening, and picked up Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo – more Scandinavian crime fiction (it might just see me all the way through my own book project!), but I have read a number of plaudits for this guy, who died tragically young just after submitting the manuscripts of three crime novels to his publishers. I’ve enjoyed the few pages I managed to sneak-read on the tube on the way home, so I’ll let you know.

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Last thought for the day, then I’ll leave you in peace: have you noticed how the ad campaigns from our youth are gradually returning? And especially the characters that used to populate these ads? First it was Fido Dido returning to the 7Up campaign – now the bunny from Cadbury’s caramel has returned! (Remember – said in seductively hushed tones, with a slight hint of a West Country burr – “caaaaadbury’s caaaaaaramel”... Indulge in some nostalgia here). I have to admit, I didn’t think that chocolate bar was even around any more – guess that’s the point. But it makes me wonder – has the advertising world run out of ideas? Or is it just that the advertising world is now staffed by guys of our generation, nostalgic for the ad campaigns of our youth? Well, I am just glad the Wispa came back.