The constant composter

Wool drying, Lewis & Harris, Outer Hebrides © KR

This month's calendar picture - the only one in colour, just because of the beautiful contrast of colours it shows, which is so typically Scottish, or so typical of what we now associate with the Outer Hebrides. This was taken outside the home and workshop of Marion Campbell, the tweed weaver we went to visit on Harris last summer. There is something amazing - but I suppose not all that surprising - about the way the earthy colours of the wool echo the colours of the hills on the horizon.

I haven't blogged about this year's Hebridean holiday - there are just not enough hours in a day to get down here all the things I would like to write about, all the thoughts that pass fleetingly through my brain... I have finally got round to loading up some images on Flickr, a selection of about 50 out of the 400 or so photographs I took, mainly of amazing landscapes, and K and my sister pulling silly faces... The home-movie, The Langass Witch Project, is worth a watch though! (We climbed Beinn Langass, and I was trying to figure out how to photograph the amazing views from the top, and had the brainwave that a panoramic movie would capture the scene much better than a series of stills - but my endeavour was rudely interrupted...)

This year we were on North Uist, where my sister has been living since November, which is the second-most northerly of a string of five islands linked by causeways - though the word 'islands' is in some ways a misnoma, since they are potted with so many lochs and bodies of water that it doesn't feel much like a landmass sometimes. As with Lewis and Harris last year, the landscape is almost achingly beautiful, with such contrasts from one view to the next - ragged mountains on the horizon in one direction, miles-long sandy beaches with transparent turquoise seas in another, undulating treeless peaty moorland all around you, suddenly interrupted by the bright colours and heavy scent of the machair, meadows which grow behind the sea and before the peat, which were covered with wildflowers and teeming with wildlife, full of species of flora and fauna I had never seen in my life before!


We spent most of the time outside - a wonderful change from being cooped up in libraries or offices or galleries. K bought a small book about the archaeology of the Uists, which had a helpful gazetteer in the back, and we used it as the starting point for long walks in different parts of the islands. The joke became that the archaeology consisted of piles of stones in different configurations, be it chambered cairn, or Iron Age wheelhouse (the oldest 'buildings' in Europe apparently!), or medieval chapel... In fact it didn't really matter, it was the walk there that counted. One feature we thought particularly beautiful was the dun, or artificial island built out in the middle of a loch, linked to the land by an ancient causeway. The dun usually had a structure built on it, a cairn or a burial mound or domestic structure. You'd see them all over as we were driving around.


This time round we stayed in a B&B, run by a rather eccentric Dutch artist - a wonderful place in a beautiful setting, but he had quite strict breakfast times, which sometimes involved having to talk to strangers (other people who were staying there) without having yet imbibed sufficient quantities of coffee to have properly woken up! So we didn't get as much sleep as I would have liked and I did very little reading (only got through one book), and it confirmed us in the view that self-catering is definitely the way to go - memories of that gorgeous little cottage on Harris last year... But the infrastructure for that kind of tourism doesn't exist on the Uists yet, somewhat surprisingly. I was only partly joking every time I saw a run-down blackhouse for sale, about buying it and doing it up and renting it out... (especially since our house-buying plans in London are rather on the backburner these days)

So many stories and happy memories - slightly embittered by the personal difficulties that my sister has been having, and her indecision about what to do with her life. It seems she might be moving to Edinburgh now, where she was at university - I won't mind! I love Edinburgh, and it will be great to have the excuse to visit it more, plus it will be easier to get to see her, since getting to the Hebrides is not all that easy (one of its charms, of course) and can be rather expensive. We might try the Inner Hebrides next year, especially since there is a possibility that my parents might be about to move there... (Hmmm, don't think I should be taking it personally that my immediate family are all moving away!)

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I've done a neighbourly turn this afternoon, which I am feeling rather self-satisfied about. I have donated a good load of the compost we have been making for over a year now to the friend of a friend, who lives two streets away and has an allotment. It's all very well composting our food waste, but the bin was getting full, and though it goes down as the waste rots, ultimately it seemed a bit pointless if we weren't going to do anything with it. I tried offering it to the Brockwell Park Community Greenhouses, who were very nice about it but understandably have to observe DEFRA health and safety guidelines about the compost they use being made on-site; then a colleague of K's said she was sure her friend Honor would be interested.

I commandeered an abandoned barrow (I quickly realised why it was abandoned - it has a flat tyre), and borrowed some trowels from Lisa, the lady who technically owns the compost bin, though about 4 or 5 flats have been composting in it for a good long while now - then started excavating. It's quite good stuff! Amazing to see what all our food waste turns into! Lots of worms, which is apparently a good sign! Honor happily carried away three heavy bags worth, and will be back in the autumn for more! She gave us a lovely looking lettuce and two amazing courgettes in exchange - and it just seems so good that it will actually be going to some use. And it's created lots of space for more good composting! So now I can carry on composting with a clear conscience, and it has impressed K, I think, who was always a bit dubious about our compost. So good turns all round!

¡Campeones del Mundo!

'Pulpo Paul' - as they call him in Spain - predicts the Spanish win (100% success rate for this psychic octopus! I just want to know who on earth first thought of asking an octopus to predict football results!?)

and about time too!! Spain have been not-quite-achieving for so long but they are worthy World Cup winners - though, being a quarter Dutch, it was ever such a slight dilemma knowing who to support...

Actually it was never in doubt. I first started supporting Spanish fútbol when I was living in Madrid for a year, researching for my PhD, and Real Madrid won the Champions League - can you believe that is 10 years ago now, in 2000?? (Can you also believe there is actually a Wiki page on that particular match!) They returned to Madrid covered in glory, and there were processions and celebrations in the street - I just got caught up in the joy of it all.

So I can well imagine the logjams that wild partying in the streets of Madrid has apparently caused as Spaniards celebrate their victory! A picture on El País shows Gran Vía absolutely crammed with people in red and gold shirts! The outbreak of support for the national team - "La Roja" - across Spain has apparently also done much to heal separatist rifts: an interesting article on the Guardian about that here.

Great pictures on El País tonight of the team returning home and being received by the royal family at the palace - everyone just looks so happy and relaxed! Can you imagine our queen and prince consort looking so happy when faced with a squad of footballers?? There was a great moment, just after Iniesta scored his historic goal last night, when the TV camera caught la Reina Sofia whooping for joy with her arms in the air! I had hoped to find it on YouTube, but it doesn't seem to be up there - perhaps it is not an unusual occurrence! But if it had been England winning the World Cup (er, please excuse a moment of fantasy) can you imagine old Lilibet even twitching a smile?!

¡Enhorabuena España!

My book is in the shops!

and the Ceramics Study Galleries are open - the two major projects I have given all my time to over the last several years are successfully complete, and I am becoming increasingly aware of an unfamiliar feeling of aimlessness in my extra-curricular time. It's not that I don't have research or writing projects I could be doing, I just don't want to be doing them - or rather, I feel that I have earnt some time off from them, just that I don't really know what it is that normal people do with their free time. I suppose part of the problem is that K has two article deadlines to meet, so he is writing writing writing, so I can't make any plans for us to go off and do things together at the weekend. And I quite enjoy luxuriating in the pure fact of having nothing to do.

But I have read enough of the LRB and my current book, The Rings of Saturn (which I have to say I am not enjoying nearly as much as I ought to be - especially since it is one of K's most beloved books), and have caught up with the Guardian profile of Simon Mawer and review of his recently-Booker-nominated The Glass Room - the book I read on holiday, which was such a wonderfully evocative portrait of a Modernist building that when I eventually brought myself to look at photographs of the Tugendhat House in Brno, Czech Republic, upon which it based, I felt I had already seen it... I have caught up with a good few long-overdue emails, and we have even started to arrange to see people again!

I feel like I am re-emerging from a long period of hibernation, but am out of practice where basic social pastimes are concerned - perhaps because our habit over the last years has been to do our research in all the spare hours we can carve out from the day. I made a conscious decision early on in my working life to maintain an active academic strand alongside my job - of course those things should cross over more than they do - but I feel I have now got to the stage, especially now that I have been promoted, where I do not have anything to prove any more, and I am grateful for that. But it is difficult to suddenly learn to relax when you've never really been sure of how to do it! I have done quite a lot of cooking - hours in the kitchen last night producing Ottolenghi's turkey and sweetcorn meatballs, and as always with meatballs I am not sure that the end result really justified the hours of faff; I have even done all the washing up (things must be bad!).

This lull is also actually only a brief window before embarking on the next book project - in August, I am using up 5 weeks of my accumulated leave (having not really taken any holidays over the last few years) to start focusing on how to turn my thesis into a book. I haven't looked at it for 8 years, and don't really want to think about it at all before 2 August - when I plan to pitch my metaphorical tent in the British Library for the duration (people who don't realise I am not going on a month's holiday say, "I hope you're going somewhere nice"!) - so I am trying to get my ducks in a row (scans from Spanish colleagues of articles that have come out in the last 8 years, a sense from EUP - where I plan to propose it - of what I should have achieved by the end of August) without really engaging my brain, since I want to come to it absolutely fresh when I finally sit down and re-read it. I am hoping that the intervening years and publishing projects will make it immediately obvious to me what it needs, but I also don't want to do too much rewriting, mainly restructuring and reducing. But who knows what will possess me.

In the meantime, we're having a glorious summer and I really should be outside. Thank goodness we have the Lambeth Country Show next weekend!

Two pots

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


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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

Cast ne'er a clout...

... till may be out. So goes the old proverb, warning the optimistic against shedding too many clothes before - either the month of May, or before the hawthorn blossom appears, called 'may' because that is the month it traditionally blooms. And boy was it in bloom in Herefordshire last weekend!!


All those bushes with the glowing white blossoms. It was K's birthday on Friday and bank holiday on the Monday, so we took a long weekend and went to visit his parents. We took an early Thursday evening train after work, which also meant I could get away from it all after my promotion interview which was that morning (on which more below) - and as always when we go to Hereford, you get out in to countryside quite quickly, and as the train pulls further from London and gradually empties and the landscape through the window becomes more and more picturesque, you feel the weight gradually lifting from your shoulders...

And now that they are both retired, K's parents are making the most of exploring the Herefordshire countryside, which is something we have not done much with them at all - so on Friday evening we drove to a country pub for K's birthday dinner, taking in a gorgeous early evening walk along the ridge at Much Marcle (I also love the placenames in that part of the country...) with its panoramic views on both sides; and on Sunday we took a picnic and went to Wigmore, in the far north-west of the county, the region known as the Welsh Marches because it is right on the border with Wales and historically was a major defensive zone for the English. My marauding ancestors were on the far side of that border! In fact, not too far and not too marauding, and not too ancestral - my father grew up in Presteigne!

But this is where we were last Sunday -



- Wigmore Castle, a 12th-century ruined castle, managed by English Heritage. When they opened it to the public in the 1980s, the fact that they had preserved the castle's ruinous state was highly controversial - I guess people thought it should have been rebuilt so you could see and experience how the castle would originally have looked. But you can see and experience that in many other places, and over the centuries, this site had become a major ecological site for wildlife and wildflowers, so English Heritage were quite ahead of their time in treating this as a conservation area - they stabilised and strengthened the walls of course, and obviously did a lot of work, in very subtle ways. It was an extremely atmospheric and beautiful place. These were the views from our picnic spot - towards England...


towards Wales...


If you look at the large version of this picture, you can even see the spire of the church at the wonderfully-named Leintwardine.

Magnificent rolling hills. Sometimes you just can't beat the British countryside for beauty.

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And I got that promotion. I heard on Friday morning. I had been stressing about it and trying not to since the interview, which really takes it out of you, I can tell you. So I now feel enormously relieved, and proud and happy, and rather more relaxed than I have done in a while. Two colleagues from my department also went through, and we went out for impromptu celebratory cocktails on Friday evening - then K and I went out for a truly wonderful dinner at Upstairs - another one of Brixton's gastronomic delights. This gorgeous little place opened a few years ago, and we gradually heard about it via word-of-mouth because it doesn't advertise itself. You would never know it was there if you didn't know it was there - if you know what I mean! It's a converted flat above a cafe, with a bar on one floor, and the 'restaurant' at the top, all very tastefully-decorated and the food beautifully-presented and delicious. The dining area only seats about 25 people at the tables so it's an intimate place, and we started eating late so sat there gradually more illuminated by candlelight as the sun went down... Lovely. Even better for just having a 10-minute walk to get home.

Sans Souci

Sans Souci, Potsdam, Berlin © MRO

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sundry frustrations

Mumbles Pier, March 2009 © KR

I haven't been posting the calendar pictures for a while, since they are all images I posted here at the time we took them - in February, the snow on Cromwell Road on my way to work; in March, the Crooked House in Windsor, where we had lunch on our anniversary day trip; in April, the gorgeous Modernist spiral stairwell at the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea... But this month we have this beautiful photograph that K took of the run-down benches and ironwork on Mumbles Pier, when we went to Swansea en famille for my father's birthday last year.

The pier dates from 1898 and was originally 835ft long. It functioned mainly as a landing jetty for steamer excursions from Swansea to other towns on the Welsh or southern English coast, and my father talked of how he remembered coming down to meet his grandmother alighting here, when he was a child. There's something so elegant and picturesque about the flaking paintwork in this photograph, and I love the two jumping dolphins with entwined tails...

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I have been feeling rather frustrated recently. Turns out this mortgage business is fraught with frustration! People often say that buying a house is the most stressful thing you will do in your life - well, K and I have done some pretty stressful things (up there at the top of both lists would be finishing PhDs...) so that has not been our experience, just an initial flurry of excitement and activity and then long anti-climactic waiting... The first mortgage company we applied to took two weeks to get back to us! And to cut long and boring stories short, it is turning out that it is not so easy to find a mortgage company willing to lend for the purchase of flats in buildings taller than 4 or 5 storeys, such as ours. There is also a lingering distrust of the fact that it was originally built under the auspices of the London County Council. Basically, the companies think we live in a council estate, and without doing any valuations for themselves are not exactly turning us down, but not giving us generous terms. I think K and our mortgage advisor have finally cracked it between them, but I can't feel excited about it, because there is now a sense of that's all very well, until the next problem arises... So watch this space.

I have finally signed up for an iPhone - which I am quite excited about except for i) I was extremely frustrated (note recurring theme) at waiting in the flat all day on Friday (the last of my Fridays off) for DHL to deliver it, only to be told when I rang to check on it at 3.30 in the afternoon that it had never left the depot. I cycled over to Nine Elms to pick it up, and what was more frustrating is that I had been working in that area - at our store by Battersea Power Station - on two separate days earlier in the week, so could have gone and collected it, if I'd known they wouldn't bother to deliver it!!

and ii) it's taking aeons to have my number moved over from Vodafone, who in the meantime have been calling me every day trying to persuade me to sign up for other deals with them. Hence further frustration.

And I was frustrated with the annoying length of my hair - until I went and had a haircut on Friday!! This is actually a significant moment for me, as I literally cannot remember the last time I had my hair cut professionally - not during my adult life I don't think. My sister cuts my hair, and I cut hers. We've done that ever since we were children - although then we weren't supposed to... I have basically straight hair and I never do anything interesting with it, just have a few inches chopped off the bottom, and I have always resented the extortionate rates charged by hairdressers to do this for you - £40 seems to be an average price in London. And frankly, until now, I have never been able to afford this. Throughout my student days, it was literally a choice between food, or a haircut.

So, my regular coiffeuse having moved to the Outer Hebrides, I pondered whether or not I could hold out until mid-June when we go and visit her (tickets booked, Icelandic volcanic eruption allowing!!), decided I couldn't really, and then noticed for the first time a little hair salon on Brixton Hill that I must have walked past a hundred times... I enquired within about the cost of a hair cut and was told £15. It turned out to be £19 for some reason, but I decided this was entirely reasonable. They even gave me a cup of tea and a piece of cake! Somewhat oddly, there was an elderly Irish lady hanging around - not a customer, not an employee, but obviously known to the staff - who then proceeded to have a row with the lady who had cut my hair! I was hanging around at the counter drinking my tea and waiting to pay and not really knowing where to look... Still, I'll probably go back at some point - I need a long-term alternative to having my hair cut once a year in the Hebrides!

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I turned in my portfolio (for my promotion) on Wednesday last - writing and assembling it was a pretty painful experience (this is how fantastic I am etc etc). But at least now I can forget about the process for a while - the interview is at the end of this month. And on Saturday - the god Vulcan permitting - I am off to Tunisia!!!! So there will be a bit of radio silence here for a while... But then you're used to that...