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.

Touting for Jesus

Brixton is renowned - at least among its residents - for the vibrancy of all the various evangelical religious denominations which call it home. These figures are so much a part of the rich tapestry that is life in Brixton, that you hardly even notice them. Sometimes, though, the particularly determined among them do something that makes them stand out. The 'KFC preacher', for example, who used to have a permanent station on 'KFC plaza' - the paved esplanade at the corner of Brixton Hill / Effra Road / Coldharbour Lane which occasionally serves as a mini town square - until he decided that there were richer pickings at the tube station and bought a megaphone.

At the weekends, when the weather is warmer, 'KFC plaza' is often the venue for Christian performance - like those Chinese Christian groups who sing haunting songs and do martial arts-like dancing, though personally our favourite has always been 'Jazz for Jesus'. The Nation of Islam guy usually hangs out on the other side of the road, dapperly handing out his copies of The Final Call - though one day K witnessed the memorable scene of an enormous Nation of Islam guy engaged in virulent debate with a tiny black guy wearing a white habit with a big red cross on it, as if the Crusades had touched down in 21st-century Inner London. Over the years we've also overheard some profound theological discussions taking place between the bouncers outside The Fridge - one of Brixton's many nightclubs.

At the same time, Brixton is a party town - perhaps partying and preaching always go together. Whenever there is a popular gig on at The Academy, Brixton fills up with concert-goers - most usually gangs of teens wearing the fashion uniform du jour, and who all look far too young to be out late without parental supervision. Sometimes you see them travelling down to Brixton on the tube, with their carefully ripped jeans. Trying to leave the station is sometimes a struggle - you have to shuffle along behind a packed train-load of youngsters who have never ventured so far south of the river, and then you get assaulted by ticket touts, who crowd around the pavement at the top of the stairs, shouting "Buy or Sell! Buy or Sell!" very loudly and annoyingly.

Tonight these two groups converged. The concert in question is by a band hitherto unknown to me, called Lostprophets. As I emerged from the tube station to the usual aural assault from the ticket touts ("Buy or Sell! Lostprophets! Buy or Sell!"), another voice could be heard shouting - "Anyone need Jesus??"

A novel approach I thought.

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!

In a jam...

My jam doesn't look like this!

Last night I thought I would experiment with making strawberry jam. Remember all that fruit we picked on my birthday last year? (if not, click here, and scroll down...) Well quite a lot of it ended up in tubs in the freezer, taking up room that we need for less permanent storage... I vowed to do interesting things with it all over the Christmas break, and of course ended up doing nothing of the sort. But the inkling was kindled (is that a mixed metaphor?) and all the empty jam jars we'd been saving were getting in the way, so I rashly decided to defrost a tub of strawberries.

Having never made jam before, I had previously done some consulting, principally of my parents, who swore that pectin was the thing you needed. Also that you need equal quantities of sugar and fruit. I decided to further consult some of the many recipe books we never seem to look at often enough, and ended up following not just one but two, slightly different, recipes for strawberry jam. Perhaps therein lay the mistake.

One of them (Apples for Jam by Tessa Kiros) did not advocate equal quantities of sugar and fruit, but it did suggest the juice of a lemon (important for the pectin you see) and seemed to have good advice on sterilising the jars and on the consistency I needed to aim for - so I mostly followed that recipe, except for levelling out the quantities.

I was boiling boiling boiling this sugar and strawberry concoction (while talking on the phone to my sister) and nothing very much seemed to be happening in terms of the consistency so I added the lemon juice. Then at about 20 minutes of boiling and stirring, the consistency and colour started to change, so I hung up, and tested a teaspoonful on a plate as advised. It seemed right so the time had time to spoon the jam into the jars...

This ended up taking so long (and after all that only managed to fill two jars!) that it was cooling fast by the time I was halfway through the second jar. It was around this time that I noticed the wooden spoon I had been stirring the jam with was stuck hard to the plate I had put it down on in an absent moment. Also that my test gloop had pretty much solidified... It seems that, in fact, I had made strawberry flavoured toffee.

I persisted with following Apples for Jam in its advice to let the jam-filled jars cool upside down, so they form a vacuum which preserves the jam for longer. Problem with this advice is, when I thought I might have toast and strawberry jam for breakfast this morning, I discovered the lids were welded shut.

I currently have them both standing in a bowl of boiling water to see if they will ever open again... If they do, though, I'm not confident that I'm not going to break a knife on this toffee-jam!

Still, it was an experiment. And fun at the time. And there's a bit more space in the freezer.

The Big Freeze

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

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

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

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

Keep warm wherever you are!

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

As I was going to St Ives...

I met a man with seven wives
Each wife had seven sacks
Each sack had seven cats
Each cat had seven kits
Kits, cats, sacks, wives
How many were going to St Ives?

The traditional answer to this riddle is 1 ("I") though it turns out there are a surprising number of philosophical and mathematical interpretations of this old nursery rhyme - which you can read here.


In any case, on this occasion, there were two of us. K and I spent a week's retreat in a lovely 18th-century stone cottage in St Ives, which we have rented a couple of times before, as a Christmas hideaway. This time we went over New Year. We couldn't remember exactly when we had been before (our collective short term memory is terrible), but there we were in the comments book, Christmases 2005 and 2006. We had to cut the second trip short, since K's grandmother, Betty, died. I suppose we have always harboured a sense of unfulfillment, so it was wonderful to be coming back.

As usual, my full set of photos are over on Flickr - you should see my slideshow in the window below, otherwise click here.

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It's the perfect cottage for two, and was an excellent find - though I did spend the equivalent of several days online until I found it!


St Ives is also the perfect destination - we can get there by train, which is essential since neither of us can drive (and we've discovered it helps if you treat the loooong train journey as part of the holiday!); it's beautiful and picturesque, full of traditional granite houses, whitewashed with slate rooves covered with lichen, giving the town its distinctive range of colours; it's by the sea - and for some reason I am always drawn to the sea, I could sit and stare at it for hours ... as well as being surrounded by amazing landscape; and it's got Culture, all of the above having attracted a colony of artists to settle there since the late 19th century, but made most famous by the likes of Barbara Hepworth and Bernard Leach, as well as the 'primitive' (such a disparaging adjective) local fisherman and artist, Alfred Wallis, whose work I love. In fact, 'our' cottage is right opposite Barbara Hepworth's former studio - now a small museum and sculpture garden, which is a wonderful and inspiring place to visit, even though freezing cold in the winter! I love her sculptures, which can also be seen in various spots around the town.


This strong artistic legacy - which I always intend to learn more about and never get round to - led to the foundation of an outpost of the Tate there in 1993, in this retro-Modernist building, in homage to the importance of abstract modernists such as Hepworth and her husband Ben Nicholson to the history of the town.

Every time I visit, I am disappointed that there is no permanent corner of the gallery given over to the history of art in St Ives. Their temporary exhibitions always feature the work of local artists but, alas, you cannot learn anything about the history or artistic trends sponsored by this local community by visiting the gallery whose very existence is due to their fame and their legacy. I seem to write this on the evaluation form each time I go and it obviously has no influence! No Alfred Wallis on display anywhere this time around - and I have to say we did not think much of the current exhibition. One of the problems with having such a strong architectural space, which responds to and encompasses views of the sea and the landscape within two of the major gallery spaces, is that the artwork on display within has to be really strong to compete with what is around and outside. I am always far more interested in gazing out of this picture window than I am in gazing at the works behind me.


A highlight of this trip was our first visit to the Bernard Leach Pottery, which reopened in March 2008 after a major refurbishment. The old pottery workshop has been really sympathetically restored so it very much has the feel of a functioning pottery, from which the potters have just stepped out for the moment, and you can watch a fascinating film made in the 1950s, showing Leach and his studio in action, with a recent voiceover from one of the potters who worked there at the time. Leach was the founding father of British studio pottery and was deeply influenced by his time in Japan, and the new areas of the building reflect that by having a very Zen style to them - low wooden buildings with walkways between, housing a modern pottery which continues the Leach tradition of teaching through working. We bought two very beautiful black, salt-glazed mugs as a memento - I am drinking my morning coffee out of one right now! - but I could have totally bankrupted myself in the shop...

Another highlight was unexpectedly seeing a pod of dolphins playing in the sea off Porthmeor Beach. After visiting the Leach Pottery, we wandered back down to the sea, to sit and eat our packed lunch of Cornish pasties. Suddenly several specks appeared in the water, which we gradually realised were fins. There were at least 10 of them, quite close to the beach, and after weaving their way deeper out to sea, some of them started leaping and playing in the waves. Porthmeor Beach is popular with surfers because of the size of its waves, and the dolphins seemed to be joining in! In fact one of them made its way quite close to one of the surfers who was out that day - crazy dude - but then backed off again when it seemed to realise it was just a human being. It was amazing! They played like that for about 20 minutes. I unsuccessfully attempted to take some photographs - K much more sensibly filmed them:

When I looked up from this spectacle, the whole length of the beach and the edges of the surrounding cliffs were lined with people all watching - it was great, how this unexpected event of nature really wowed everyone and drew them all together.

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On past visits, because we have been there over Christmas, everything has been closed so there was very little pressure to do anything... More was open this time, but for the first few days we still managed to resist doing very much at all. Relaxing was what we were there for after all. We had ordered our groceries via a Tesco delivery and were both rather surprised when this actually arrived without any fuss on Monday morning - on past trips, we've got to the cottage, unpacked our suitcases, then lugged them by bus to the out-of-town supermarket to stock up. No such hassle this time! After which we promptly nested. I don't think we did all that much for the first couple of days apart from snuggle up in front of the wonderful log fires that K built and read our books.


Yes it really was that cosy!

We just took a little light reading with us...


We were there for New Year's Eve which is a big deal in St Ives. We had heard rumours about it but didn't really know what to expect. We went out at the start of the evening for a pre-prandial drink at The Sloop Inn - a wonderfully atmospheric pub on the harbour-front which they say dates back to 1312, and which you have no problem imagining smugglers and pirates frequenting... as indeed they were this evening, since as we sat there a steady stream of people in fancy dress, some of it extremely elaborate, came and went at the bar...


Basically everyone in town dresses up in fancy dress, and the small town is inundated by people from around Cornwall and beyond, also dressed up in fancy dress... Apart from the many smugglers and pirates, we saw quite a few Roman centurions, some Darleks, quartets of people dressed up as all the characters from the Wizard of Oz, and a veritable menagerie of people dressed up as animals... Thus attired, an enormous street party ensues! We popped back out again just before midnight and joined the throngs congregated around the harbour, where the tide was far out, and at midnight people started letting off fireworks on the beach. The whole thing had a great happy buzz about it, and was a really fun way to see the New Year in! (though we did so in our normal clothing!)



St Ives has also got some really top-class cafes and restaurants: we tried some new ones this time, spurred on by the recommendations in June's issue of Olive, the foodie magazine we subscribe to. Some of these places did not even exist the last time we were there! Cornish cream tea in the Porthminster Beach Cafe was particularly fine - I think it's the clotted cream that does it! Though the amazing views of the sea help as well...


The Digey Cafe was fantastic as well - a really cosy little deli-cafe selling locally-sourced produce, and judging by the lunch we had, excellent cooking too. Amazing steak-filled crumbly Cornish pasties from the new St Ives Bakery provided the perfect packed lunch for our long coastal walk to Lelant, while The Dolphin on Fore Street provided really gorgeous juicy fish and chips which were the perfect accompaniment to the special episode of Dr Who on New Year's Day!!

One thing we did not manage to do - though we're determined to do it next time - was the lantern-lit ghost walk around the town, led by the magnificently-named storyteller, Shanty Baba. However, late one evening we were sitting in front of the fire, reading, when we heard them stop outside the cottage and overheard Shanty tell about the man who used to live there, one James Wallis, the last of the local "ghost layers" - exorcists, or 'ghostbusters'. We couldn't quite hear everything he said, but it was amazing to think he was talking about 'our' cottage! This James Wallis was also a maths teacher, and all the local smugglers used to send their lads along to him, to sit in that front room where we were sitting reading by the fire, to learn some basic tricks of the trade! This explained why the cottage has a home-made sundial attached to the front wall with 'J. Wallis, 1780' rather naively inscribed on it. A brilliant little bit of history to add to our appreciation of the cottage and our surroundings!

I think St Ives would be a complete hell-hole in the summer, when those wide open beaches are mobbed by endless crowds of sunbathers... We have vowed never to go in the summer, but it makes the perfect winter retreat! I have come home with a desire to reread the Daphne du Maurier tales of smugglers and remote inns on Cornish moors and feisty heroines, which I so enjoyed as a teenager! And fortunately, we both still have another week's leave, a bit more time to prepare ourselves to go back to work and the onslaught of 2010... though feeling recharged after our Cornish hideaway.