The Challenges of Home Ownership, Part 1: The Pigeon in the Chimney

As you can see from the title I am anticipating that there will be other challenges as well. But this is one we didn't expect.

We came home from our now rather-too-regular Friday evening post-work/week drink at Mango Landin' to discover a large pile of crumbled fire brick filling the living room fireplace and spilling out onto the carpet in front. Odd we thought, but it had been a bit windy so perhaps something had got dislodged in the chimney and fallen down the stack onto our carpet. A bit annoying, but we hoovered it up and thought nothing more of it.

Coming home again on Saturday evening - this time after a long, exhausting and extremely expensive shopping spree in High Street Kensington to buy clothes, toiletries, medical supplies and other sundries for our upcoming trip - there was another little pile of chimney detritus in the fireplace, this time with a few small feathers scattered over the top. And some birdshit.

Hmm. Odd, we thought again. But hoovered it up... And then K found a torch in one of our semi-unpacked boxes and stuck it up the chimney. There, just a little way up, is a ledge, where the flue from our fireplace connects with the chimney stack. And there, on the ledge, was a pigeon. We decided to call it Petunia.

What to do? Googling 'How to get a pigeon out of your chimney' turns up a variety of hilarious home videos on YouTube, whose advice - in the end - we had to fall back on, because Lambeth Council had no interest in coming out at a weekend, and a private company we called, who claimed to have a 30 to 90 minute rapid response time and no call-out fee, told us they didn't handle incidents involving single birds. If we had a whole family of pigeons up our chimney that would have been fine.

K tried with a poke to encourage the pigeon down off the ledge and into the living room - having previously opened all the windows wide - but this didn't succeed in doing what it was meant to, and just traumatised the poor bird. Having waited until Sunday morning to call Lambeth Pest Control - which someone had told us might respond on a Sunday, only to discover that no, try again on Monday, which was clearly unhelpful - K pondered for a while and came up with a new tactic involving a colander and a cardboard box. It may have been the same colander that he used to catch the family of mice that plagued us while we were renting Yamin's flat in Catford. Poor K - he gets all the duff jobs.

Method: gently insert colander into chimney flue (K) while holding cardboard box in front of fireplace (M). Place colander over bird and pull it out of chimney and into cardboard box. Fold down leaves of box lid. Hold tight while carrying box outside into front garden. Gently open box to lower pigeon onto ground, in case wings are damaged from colander treatment or it's weak from 3 days in a chimney. Stand back in amazement while pigeon powers up up and away, not able to get away fast enough.

Only problem is that clearly the top of the chimney is uncapped and it may happen all over again at any time. We're just hoping that it doesn't happen again while we're in Central Asia!

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And talking of which - we're off tonight!!!! We're leaving the flat in an hour to head to Heathrow, arriving in Tashkent tomorrow morning. Neither of us can quite believe it yet, but I guess it will hit us pretty quickly! For the last week or so we've both been having conversations with people that go something like:

M/K: "I'm off on holiday next week."

Friend/colleague: "Oooh, where are you going?"

M/K: "Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Iran."

Friend/colleague (slightly nervously): "Oooookaaaay...." Then realises we're serious. "Wow - exotic!"

I think it will be the trip of a lifetime. So watch this space around the beginning of May, after we get back, for a full report! Until then - Happy Easter!

It was 30 years ago today...

© Neil Libbert for the Observer - see other photos here

The Brixton riots broke out - the worst racially motivated riots in UK history I think, a combination of severe social deprivation, including 55% unemployment among black youths in Brixton, and disproportionate stop-and-search tactics on the part of the police, which erupted violently one April weekend. Nearly 300 policemen were injured in the riots and many buildings were burned.

I remember them - or I remember hearing about them from the news and people around me talking about them, as I was only 6 years old. But they have always been something I have wanted to understand better. There was an event in Brixton yesterday to mark 30 years on from the 'Brixton Uprising' and I would have liked to have gone along, but alas I had an article to finish writing (which I sent off today - hurray!). I have been watching these excellent short films on YouTube, Battle 4 Brixton, which weirdly shows places that I know very well from living here but looking terribly run-down 30 years ago. This edition of the Radio 4 programme, The Reunion, is also very instructive.

The Brixton riots led to a change in Metropolitan police tactics but it seems to be taking a very long time for these to really change at grass roots. Linton Kwesi Johnson talked on the radio this morning about how his grandson still faces stop-and-search by the police in Brixton today. You like to think that everything is much better socially in Brixton now, but looking back on a day like today makes you think about whether that is actually the case. There is certainly still a lot of unemployment and disaffection among black youths which leads to gang activity. God, how white middle class do I sound? It makes you remember that there are two social strata in Brixton - the comparatively privileged home-owning, mainly white, middle classes and the more disadvantaged majority that live all around us in the council estates. One does well to remember.

We're in - and I'm off again!

Imagine this. You move house at the weekend. You don't take any time off work the next week but instead try to write an 8500 word essay for an exhibition catalogue which should be finished at the end of the week - you don't succeed. You take your mind off how tired you are by going to see The Eagle on Friday night (excellent). You spend Saturday thinking about and writing the talk you have to give the next day at your book launch! You relax on Saturday night by having your sister to stay in the new flat. You attend book launch - it seems to go well though it would have been nice if more people had been there. But it was Mothers' Day and the sun was shining. After lots of hobnobbing at said book launch you go out for Mothers' Day lunch with your mother. You eventually go home but can't collapse because early the next morning you are going to Amsterdam for 3 days to take part in a conference about 'Presenting "Islamic" Art in the Contemporary Context'. You are on a panel, something you have never done before, asked to present for 10 minutes on 'What makes Islamic art Islamic?' and to respond to three key questions the conference organisers have posed, which you don't understand. You will fly back from Amsterdam early Thursday morning and go straight into work, because you then have 3 working days to finish the aforementioned catalogue essay and deal with everything else that needs to be done before going away until the end of the month, to Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Iran... Who would manage to arrange such a crazy work schedule? Me, that's who.

We're in Day 2 of Amsterdam at this point. I have participated in the panel today - which seemed to go ok actually - and tomorrow unexpectedly have the morning off, before participating in a Think Tank in the afternoon about a planned exhibition of Islamic art. We're being well looked after, and staying in the once-grand musaktastic Hotel Krasnapolsky - I am blogging from the lobby, the first time I have managed to get online (we don't have an internet connection yet in the new flat) and not had to worry about change-of-address admin, trying to move over our contents insurance, etc etc.


The new flat is great, though we went through a stage the middle of last week of being very disorientated and slightly traumatised by the whole uprooting/touching down in a new place (though at the same time not new because only 250 m from the old place) where we don't know anyone. Probably because we were so tired and hadn't taken any time off work to 'settle in'. As you can see from the photos, we're living in a state of semi-chaos, semi-civilisation - we unpacked the kitchen, the bedroom and about half the living room, so it is livable in and it is starting to feel like home. But we're putting everthing else on hold until we get back from Central Asia.

My half hour's free internet connection is about to run out, and there's the conference dinner to rush to in a moment, so I will sign out for now. We should get online at home on Thursday so I will aim to blog again before our travel adventures! Just wanted to check in as I know some of you are wondering how the move went... I leave you with some flamingoes in Amsterdam zoo.

March catch-up

I'm not feeling particularly inspired this evening - tired, more than anything - but I thought it was time for a quick catch-up for those of you who are wondering how it is going with the new flat! Well, we have successfully exchanged contracts, and have set a completion date of 25 March; we've booked the packers and will be moving on 26 March! Exciting!!

We had hoped to be in a week earlier, since that would have given us a little bit more time to get settled and sorted before the busy time at the turn of April, when I have to do a book launch and a quick work trip to Amsterdam before we head for Central Asia and Iran for the rest of that month...! But never mind - the settling in and unpacking is likely to be a slow, organic process, which means we'll properly have the feel of the place when we do it - but I also hope it is not too drawn out, as the prospect of not being able to find anything for months is a little boring...

So the weekends have been completely given over to sorting and chucking. An enormous load went to the charity shop - our next-door neighbour Sue gave K a lift, since it was an entire car-load of stuff. The poor staff in Barnardo's looked totally fazed as it just kept on coming... Since then we've created another few piles. Last weekend we went through the study and took about a forest worth of paper down to the recycling. Slightly weird sensations induced by sorting through a decade of paperwork, mainly relating to the transition from graduate study to adult working lives - you sort of re-live your life as the papers pass before your eyes, not all of it pleasant or happy to remember...

There's still more to go - we have got to the stage where it's not easy to decide what stays and what goes. Plus I'm running out of steam. It doesn't help that during the week we're incredibly busy as well - we seem to be doing something every evening. Last week I was giving a lecture, to the London Society for Medieval Studies. After spending the whole of Saturday sorting out my desk and files, on Sunday morning I turned my thoughts to writing the lecture and found that by mid-afternoon my head felt like it was going to explode. We went out for a very muddy walk in Brockwell Park - it reminded me of when I was writing up my PhD thesis and would hardly ever set foot outside, unless K took me out for walks around Magdalen Deer Park... We wandered up to the little café in Brockwell House and thought about how nice it will be to be that much closer to the park when we're in the new flat.

We're feeling jolly satisfied with ourselves for eating our way through the cupboards, fridge and freezer. We made an inventory of all the accumulated tins and dry goods and frozen leftovers and ends of veg, and came up with some imaginative ways to concoct it all into meals. We had a nice venison pie last weekend (frozen diced venison from the East Molesey butchers + leftover shortcrust pastry), accompanied by red cabbage and green beans which had been languishing in the crisper for a while! It's amazing how much cheaper the weekly shop is if you plan the meals around the ingredients you already have!

Vote for the Ceramics Galleries!!

The new Ceramics Study Galleries which I spent all of last year working on have been longlisted for The Art Fund Prize!! Please vote for us by clicking here - before 5 May!

Finally on the move?

Perhaps it's time to announce that it looks like we're buying a flat. I have been a bit wary of saying anything to anyone, after our unsuccessful attempt to buy a flat in our block last year - but though we haven't exchanged contracts yet (hope to do so this week) it all seems to be going through smoothly this time around. Of course we keep touching wood every time we think or talk about it - actually we should probably be carrying little bits of wood around in our pockets, or like the Log Lady in Twin Peaks, remember her? Funny how we still cling to these superstitions, no matter how secularised we are in the rest of our lives...

Anyway perhaps I will say no more on the subject until it is signed and sealed. But we have decided to prepare ourselves for the putative move by starting to clear out our possessions - of which we have far too many anyway so it is a Good Thing To Do. In the past we used to move every few years, so would have a cathartic clear-out at every move, but we have been where we are now for about 7 and a half years so we have been acquiring without shedding.

Mainly books. We ran out of bookshelf space long ago, and a while back I adopted a one-in-one-out policy. We have now weeded a very large stack of novels and unread non-fiction books and yesterday I spent several hours putting them up for sale on Amazon. (If you're interested, you can view my storefront here). By the time we were leaving to go out for dinner at Abi's, I had sold one!! Very exciting, even if only for the grand sum of £1. Thing is, now I obsessively check my email to see if I have sold any more - none so far...

Today I have gone through my clothes and cupboards and filled three bin liners with stuff for the charity shop and another of rubbish. It's a start - and quite satisfying too.

Next stage is getting rid of the furniture that there just isn't room for in the new place. Anyone for a lectern??


This was an impulse buy from the junk shop on Brixton Hill ... last summer? It looked smaller on the street than it turned out to be once we got it into the flat! I think we thought we might one day live in a huge farmhouse with an enormous kitchen where we could use this for standing cookery books on... Also, even though its tracery is obviously rather damaged, it has a fantastic dedicatory plaque:

which announces that it was 'Presented to the Dulwich Road Wesleyan Mission Hall by the Trustees as a Memorial of the late Miss Craig's interest in and generosity towards the work of the Mission. 1898'. The antiquarians in us got the better of us! Who was this Miss Craig and how did her interest and generosity manifest itself? And how did the lectern come to the sad pass of sitting outside the junk shop on Brixton Hill...? At least we have admired and loved it while it has been with us... But alas, no room for extraneous lecterns in the new flat.

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This evening we have given ourselves 'repetitive form injury', as K so wittily put it just now, by filling out - in duplicate - visa forms for Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Iran, where we are going in April!! Very exciting - though we have not had much time to think about it. It's an organised tour, so once the visa hassle is out of the way we don't actually have to do anything, except turn up at the airport at the right time - but the forms are a killer, especially since we hardly handwrite anything any more. Next thing to arrange is to be fingerprinted at the Iranian consulate - an arrangement insisted upon by Iran ever since the British government introduced compulsory fingerprinting for any Iranian citizens wishing to enter the UK. Ahhh, so great to live in a liberal democracy...

Joyreading

The cuts imposed by the coalition government have resulted in many local councils planning to cut library resources, and appallingly over 400 local libraries are now threatened with closure. Yesterday was 'Save our Libraries' day with protests and Shhh-ins (!) going on all across the UK. In solidarity we took ourselves off to the British Library, where I felt more than ever what an amazing privilege it is to be able to consult the material there.

This time, I was reading the manuscripts! I called up some of the volumes of the Layard papers - the enormous accumulated correspondence of Sir Austen Henry Layard (1817-94), discoverer of Nineveh and distinguished diplomat in Her Majesty's government. The first letter I looked at was from Henry Cole thanking Layard for the offer to source reproductions of Italian sculpture for the South Kensington Museum; the second was from the Earl of Clarendon offering Layard the position of ambassador to Spain! I think about the third or fourth letter was from Gladstone, another from the designer of the Albert Memorial seeking to ask Layard's opinion - at that time Commissioner of Works - on the monument's orientation! I flicked through these volumes increasingly amazed at the worthies of the Victorian age whose handwriting was passing beneath my gaze... I could have lost myself for hours just dipping in and out of this correspondence which I am sure sheds amazing light on the international political and cultural concerns of the times.

I was looking at these to read the correspondence from Rafael Contreras, the restorer of the Alhambra from 1847 to his death in 1890, which was addressed to Layard between 1870 and 1873 while he was ambassador in Madrid. He was there until 1877 but the letters stop in 1873, I'm not sure why. Though Contreras has been little studied, he has gained the reputation of defacing the monument rather than protecting it, of having an unscientific approach informed by Orientalism. Reading his increasingly plaintive letters, I developed quite a lot of sympathy for him - he was clearly passionate about saving the Alhambra for the nation and about the important discoveries he believed he was making. There aren't many letters and they don't say all that much, but they show the difficulties he was facing in terms of lack of funding for his restorations and the criminal unconcern of the local authorities for the building. It was a difficult time in Spain, with the Carlist insurrections, and he is obviously sorely touched by this - including the imprisonment of some of the Carlistas in the Torre de la Vela. Amazing to see his handwriting and his signature for the first time - which in the earlier letters has a rather pompous flourish, and by the last letters seems rather careworn, spattered with ink splodges.

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After the library, we went to see The Painter, a new play about Turner by Rebecca Lenkiewicz at the Arcola Theatre. They have just moved to a new location and it's a great warehousey kind of space, and it was a nice production, but alas not a great play. It just couldn't decide what it was about - his art? the origin of his genius? his relationships? his mad mother in the attic? We couldn't help comparing it unfavourably with Red. But Toby Jones as Turner was really good, and we'll go and see other things there as it was nicely done.