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Another day at the pottery

I went back to Eastnor Pottery last weekend to do some more work on the tagines I threw last time. As I suspected, the lids needed a lot of clay shaving off the tip of the cone to make them a reasonable thickness all the way up. But then they looked a bit stumpy, so I tried a technique I’ve not used before, called “throwing on top”. Basically, I centred the lid on the wheel head and stuck it in place with rolls of clay, then attached a smallish lump of fresh clay to the top of the pot. I then threw that to give the lid extra height and make the top a better conical shape. It looked a bit wobbly, and only two out of three attempts even sort of worked, but it’s good to try to stretch myself with new throwing techniques. It looked as if the bases and lids ought to fit together, but I’ll have to wait until they’re fired to be sure.

I had intended to do some more throwing in the afternoon, as my father has commissioned a lidded pot which I wanted to have a go at. But I was so tired after a very long hard week at work that my hand-eye coordination was getting dodgy. So I decided to call it a day soon after lunch, and was home snoozing in my chair by 2pm. I am getting very fed up with being so exhausted all the time. It’s not just my working hours that are limited by the amount of energy I have, but my hobbies too. Altogether, it’s a right nuisance.

02 05 2013 icyjumbo Day out Comments (2) Permalink

Back at Fawlty Towers

I was staying at Fawlty Towers overnight again last week. It’s about six months since I was last there, and it’s got a new General Manager in the meantime who seems to be something of a new broom sweeping clean. Several of the members of staff who were there last time have left, some in a bit of a huff from what I heard from my taxi driver, though the obsequious head waiter is still there and recognised me by name. The menu hasn’t changed in the restaurant, and the food is no better than it used to be, but still surprisingly popular with large noisy groups.

The chairs in Reception have been taken away, so there is nowhere to sit and wait for a taxi in the morning. My driver was running late, so I had to wait in the bar for him which felt a bit uncomfortable. I commented to the Receptionist who was so new that she didn’t even know that Reception used to have chairs.

Overall though, it still felt like the same old Fawlty Towers, especially at 07:30 in the morning. I was in the shower when the fire alarm went off. I got out of the shower straight away, dripping wet of course, and started frantically towelling myself dry whilst thinking what clothes I had with me which would best tolerate being jumped into for a rather damp emergency escape. Then the alarm turned off. I got back into the shower. The alarm started again. I got out. It turned off. I waited several minutes to see what would happen. Nothing. No sounds of a hurried evacuation. No one hammering on my door either to tell me to evacuate or to say it was a false alarm. So I got back into the shower and started washing my hair. Guess what? The alarm went off again, for just long enough for me to get out of the shower, by now in a thoroughly bad mood.

At breakfast I asked one of the waitresses what the fuss had been about. Turns out the person in the room next door but two to me had had a particularly long hot shower, and all the steam had set off the smoke detectors. So the staff knew pretty much immediately that it was a false alarm but hadn’t actually bothered to communicate that to their guests. When I went to check out there was a note up in Reception apologising for the inconvenience due to the fire alarm. I told the Receptionist that was completely inadequate – what they need are slick procedures to tell all the guests very quickly if it’s a false alarm, or conversely to make sure that everyone evacuates the hotel promptly in the event of a real emergency. I pointed out that this was the second time this had happened to me in that hotel, and they had handled it very badly last time too. It will be interesting to see whether the new management is receptive to changes on important things like fire safety, rather than just moving chairs around.

29 04 2013 icyjumbo invective Comments Off on Back at Fawlty Towers Permalink

Locked out of the car again……

…..but this time it was entirely my own fault.

I’ve had a really busy week at work. I had an all-day project progress meeting at our Hampshire HQ on Wednesday, then on Thursday I had an “away day” and customer workshop at a conference centre near Windsor, which involved staying overnight, with more plenary sessions this morning. There were about a dozen people going to the workshop from the Malvern office, so a minibus was laid on to get us there on Thursday morning and back at lunchtime today. Unfortunately, the coach was due to leave work at 06:30 on Thursday, which would have meant my getting up not long after 5am. That’s just too much at the moment, especially since it was going to be a long hard day, and coming after another long day on Wednesday.

So I decided that the most sensible thing to do, given that I was not that far away from Windsor on Wednesday anyway, was to stay down there over night, and take a local taxi from Fawlty Towers to the conference centre on Thursday morning. Then I could get the minibus back to Malvern on Friday. I knew that the minibus would drop me off back at work, so that meant that I needed to leave my car there. I had arranged for a car and driver to pick me up from home early on Wednesday to get me down to the project progress meeting (I’m simply not up to driving long distances at the moment – I get so tired). So I left the car in work on Tuesday afternoon and got a colleague to drop me off at my house on his way home.

It all looked to be working out well, as the minibus drew up to work at lunch time today. I’d worked well over my contracted hours this week, so was planning on taking the afternoon off. My car was in work, and I had time to drop my suitcase in the boot, grab some lunch at the canteen, then head into town to get my hair cut. I reached into my bag for my car keys, and it was then that the horrid realisation hit me. I’d emptied my pockets as usual on Tuesday night, and put the car keys on the hall shelf, just as I usually do. But I hadn’t picked them up on Wednesday because I was distracted by getting a 7am phone call from my taxi driver who was lost, and having to direct him to the house. So now my car was in work, but the keys were still on the hall shelf back home!

I had to throw myself on the mercy of one of my colleagues who was also on the bus, and ask him to drive me home, give me 30 seconds to let myself in and pick up my car keys, then drive me back to work. Fortunately I live less than ten minutes away, so it wasn’t as much of an imposition as it might have been, but I felt such an idiot. I was so grateful that Steve was able to rescue me from my own stupidity!

26 04 2013 icyjumbo car
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Aubretia Envy

I’ve been doing a considerable amount of travelling recently for work, which has involved passing through a number of rather chocolate-box villages in Wiltshire. There are lots of thatched cottages built with honey-coloured stone, rather like in the Cotswolds. But what has really caught my attention is the gardens of a number of the cottages. They have low stone walls fronting the main road, with a massive abundance of aubretia tumbling over the walls, turning them bright purple. It’s absolutely gorgeous, and I’ve got a major case of Aubretia Envy.

I’ve been trying to grow aubretia in the garden for years. It’s an alpine plant that should cope with poor soil, and I thought it would grow ok in the holes in the concrete blocks that formed the retaining walls to the terraces. One year I planted about 150 aubretia plants each in its own hole in the blocks. But they never thrived, and I never got the cascading walls of purple that I’d hoped for.

Aubretia struggling in the ex-water-feature

When I had the garden landscaped after Christopher died, the builders picked some of the less sickly-looking saxifrage and aubretia plants and transplanted them to the rockery that is all that is left of what was once a greatly unloved water feature. They haven’t died, and the aubretia must have at least a dozen flowers on it. But it’s hardly been a cascading success. On a more positive point – I’ve now got five daffodils in the garden, so Spring has arrived if a month or so late!

 

24 04 2013 Gillian garden Comments Off on Aubretia Envy Permalink

The Blues Brothers

This weekend it would have been our twentieth wedding anniversary, and I’ve understandably been feeling a bit down.  I thought that the best way to cheer myself up and get through the weekend would be to force myself to go out and do something. I checked what was on at Malvern Theatres, and found that I was in luck – they were showing The Blues Brothers Approved.  So I decided to take myself off out to the Saturday matinée. There were plenty of seats left, and I suspect that it would have been busier and had more atmosphere at the evening performance, but I’m too tired at the moment for a late night out.

The "Blues Brothers"

The act was basically a Blues Brothers tribute band, but one formally approved by Dan Ackroyd and Judith Belushi, so I expected the standard to be high and I wasn’t disappointed. The two main performers did a very good job of impersonating Jake and Elwood Blues, and sounded (and indeed danced) remarkably like them. They were supported by a six-piece band, and three backing singers (the Bluettes), all of whom were very good. They rattled through the standard Blues Brothers repertoire (Everybody Needs Somebody to Love, Sweet Home Chicago, Gimme Some Lovin’, Jailhouse Rock and the rest) at a fair old lick. Altogether they got through 32 numbers in two hours – and that included an interval.

It was a fun show – it’s impossible to feel depressed when you are tapping your foot to Shake a Tail Feather, or singing the audience responses to Minnie the Moocher. So I’m really glad I made the effort to go.

20 04 2013 Gillian Day out Comments (1) Permalink

Carbon Dating Study Day

I’ve been on another “Behind the scenes study day”, again organised by my favourite archaeological travel company, Andante Travels. This time it wasn’t a museum I visited, but rather the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit of the Research Laboratory for Archaeology and the History of Art, otherwise known as the Oxford University carbon dating laboratory. The day was hosted and run by two very enthusiastic post-docs from the research lab, who clearly relished passing on some of their knowledge and love of the subject. One of them in fact was so engrossed in his subject that whenever someone asked him a particularly interesting question, he gave a little jump of excitement! I went on the study day with my sister’s boyfriend, who is also an engineer with an interest in history. My sister decided that she would spend the day pottering around the shops and museums in Oxford, but joined us for lunch, and I was impressed at how flexible and accommodating the hosts were at making her feel included over lunch.

I found the day fascinating. It was a mixture of lectures on the theory of radiocarbon dating, case-studies (including the Oxford contributions to the recent Richard III project, and dating the Turin Shroud – the latter clearly mediaeval according to their measurements) and lab visits. We saw both the “wet chemistry” labs where the samples are meticulously prepared, and the particle accelerator where the C14/C12 ratio is measured. I found it really interesting hearing the researchers talk about the massive efforts they go to to get accurate dates, and the huge numbers of potential variables they need to take into account. That included such things as the diet of the individual whose bones they might be dating (a diet high in fish makes their radiocarbon age look older than it should really be – an issue they had with Richard III who had a very high-status diet rich in fish) to the impact of the Industrial Revolution and atomic bomb tests in the 1950s on the amount of C14 in the atmosphere.

I personally was interested in the mathematical modelling which allows the researchers to take into account known archaeological information about sequences to more precisely date linked groups of items. Treating a group of related objects as a whole rather than as completely independent items allows them to reduce the uncertainty of dates potentially from hundreds of years down to just a few dozen years. One example that the researcher gave, as it was his own special area of interest, was dating a sequence of artefacts from Ancient Egypt. He knew which pharaoh was reigning at the time each artefacts (mostly papyrus) was produced, and the order in which the pharaohs reigned is well known from King-Lists on the walls of some Egyptian temples. In many cases the rough length of a reign is known too, as jubilees are frequently documented in the records. What isn’t known is the exact dates for each pharaoh. But by modelling a Bayesian network to include all of the prior information about reign order and duration, and propagating the raw C14 dates through that network, they were able to come up with a pretty tight chronology. To me, this approach was really interesting – I’ve worked closely for years with a group of Bayesian statisticians, who would naturally approach the problem this way. I found it surprising that it was considered such a completely new and revelatory approach in archaeology – it does make you wonder how many more breakthroughs could be made with a more inter-disciplinary approach to a problem.

It felt most peculiar being back in Oxford again. The three of us stayed overnight in a B&B, and went out for dinner to Brown’s, an Oxford institution which I used to frequent when I was a student (particularly when I had a boyfriend with a job who could afford to take me out to dinner!) Although in many ways Oxford has changed a lot over the last 20+ years since I was a student, I found that if I didn’t think too hard about where I was going, my feet just automatically took me there!

19 04 2013 icyjumbo Day out Comments Off on Carbon Dating Study Day Permalink

Here’s hoping that Winter is finally over

The last of the snow finally melted overnight on Wednesday, when some heavy rain washed away the last of the piles around the garage. I can now see my garden properly for the first time in several weeks, and it’s not a pretty sight! My herb garden seems to have been particularly badly hit by the harsh winter. At least half of my rosemary bush seems to be completely dead, with much of the rest looking very sick. The oregano, thyme and sage are all pretty much black and very sad-looking. I’ll have to wait and see whether any growth regenerates from the roots as the weather warms up, or whether I’ll have to replant and start again from scratch. I suppose that’s the risk you run if you try to grow Mediterranean style herbs under a foot of snow!

I noticed when the snow was blanketing my lawn that it was looking surprisingly bumpy, and not as smooth and pristine as I would have expected. And now the snow has melted I can see why. I’ve got another mole. Just like last year I’ve got a mole digging feeding tunnels directly below the surface, and making a right mess of the lawn.

Mole tunnels

You can also see that the snow drops under the apple trees are only just turning – they’ve had a massively long season this year, and are one of the very few plants in my garden which seem to have actively benefited from the snow. I’ve got three very brave crocuses just trying to show their heads, and not one single daffodil yet.  So yesterday I treated myself to a bunch of cheery red tulips from Waitrose. My garden may still be in snow-induced shock, but at least I’ve got some colourful flowers indoors to perk up my spirits.

13 04 2013 Gillian garden Comments (1) Permalink

A busy day at the British Museum

There are a couple of exhibitions on at the British Museum at the moment, which I particularly wanted to see. I don’t get down to London very often, so I decided to take advantage of staying at my parents’ on my return from Germany, and do both exhibitions in one day.

Both “Ice Age Art, Arrival of the Modern Mind” and “Life and Death in Pompeii and Herculaneum” are quite popular, the latter extremely so – it looks like it could well be one of the BM’s “Blockbuster” exhibitions. So, unless you’re a Member (which I’m not), it’s necessary to pre-book a ticket for a timed slot for each of the exhibitions.  The Pompeii exhibition is currently fully-booked until half-way through May! I originally tried to book the tickets on-line several weeks ago, as soon as my Germany trip was confirmed. But there’s clearly a bug in the British Museum’s on-line ticket-office software. I could pick a date and time-slot, and put the tickets in my virtual “shopping-cart”. But when I came to pay, it threw a major wobbly. Several years ago, I’d booked tickets on-line for Christopher and me to go to the exhibition on the Emperor Hadrian, and used a discount code that I’d got from somewhere – probably English Heritage. But that discount code was still associated on the BM’s database with my account and email address, and it clearly isn’t valid any more, but there was no way for me to delete it from the shopping cart. I tried several times, and got absolutely nowhere – talk about a poor user interface! So in the end I phoned up the ticket-office and ordered and paid for the tickets the old-fashioned way.

On Friday morning I got to the British Museum as it opened, and went straight to the Ice Age exhibition for my 10am timed entry slot. I found it absolutely fascinating, with beautiful and stunning carvings of animals and people – the latter mostly female fertility figures. It was very interesting indeed, though I found some of the parallels the curators were trying to draw between palaeolithic figurines and paintings/sculptures by Matisse and Henry Moore to be rather far-fetched.

Christopher's photo of an Ice-Age carving of a bison

Christopher was particularly interested in the palaeolithic period, and at his urging we went on several holidays looking at cave art, in both the Dordogne and the Pyrenees. He would have absolutely loved this exhibition, and would have been very keen to compare the artefacts with ones we’d seen, particularly at the French National Prehistoric Museum at Les Eyzies in the Dordogne.  The photo above is one that he took on holiday there in 2006 – it’s an ivory carving of a bison. There was a very similar carving in the exhibition at the British Museum – it may even have been the same one on loan – and it gave me a bit of a shiver when I saw it.

That was nothing though to the shivers I got in the museum café  – I had lunch there and it was the first time I’d been back since Chris died. We always used to eat there if we were going to an exhibition at the British Museum, and it felt very odd indeed being there on my own. Next time, I might take a packed lunch!

After lunch, I went back to the main court of the museum for my timed entry to the Pompeii exhibition. Even though I, and indeed every one else, had a pre-booked ticket, it was so busy that you had to queue for 10 minutes before your time-slot in order to get in. It was heaving – too busy in my opinion. There were so many people there that it was difficult to see some of the exhibits.

Christopher and I went to both Pompeii and Herculaenum, and thoroughly “did” the Archaeological Museum in Naples from which most of the artefacts came (including a good look around the semi-pornographic “Cabinet of Secrets” where many of the more eye-popping Roman statues are kept so that they don’t sully the minds of the innocent!) So I’d actually seen most of it before, and certainly knew the basic story of the destruction of both towns. The exhibition seemed to me to be rather dumbed-down, but then I suppose that this is a subject I’m particularly interested in and am fairly knowledgeable about. Certainly the large numbers of children going round the exhibition with their parents seemed to be learning a lot (thankfully it was still the school holidays, so there were no school parties!)

However, even though I didn’t learn anything much, it was very interesting seeing so many beautiful wall-paintings, mosaics, jewellery and statues in one place, without having to go to Naples to see it. I got the feeling that the Naples Museum had been largely stripped of many of its treasures – it is certainly very generous of them to send such precious items out on loan. And I found the plaster casts of some of the inhabitants, frozen in time in their final death throws as the pyroclastic surge overcame them, to be very moving.

Wall painting of the baker Terentius Neo and his wife. From the House of Terentius Neo, Pompeii. AD 50–79

I also particularly liked the wall painting of the baker and his wife in the photo above (taken from the exhibition web-site). I like the way that the woman is holding a stylus and writing tablet, so is clearly literate, and is depicted as  an equal partner in the bakery business. Me, a feminist? Where did you get that idea? I also think that Terentius Neo has a very modern face – you could just imagine bumping into someone called Terry in the local supermarket who looked just like him!

09 04 2013 Gillian Day out
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Speaking Foreign

Augusta Treverorum may have been well connected to all the places that mattered in the Roman Empire two thousand years ago, but the modern city of Trier is not particularly easy to get to. The nearest airport appears to be in Luxembourg, and it doesn’t seem to be in the “portfolio” of city-breaks provided by the main short-break specialists.  I decided that, since I only had time for a very short break anyway,  I would make a virtue of Trier’s relative remoteness and make the journey there and back an integral part of the holiday. So I decided to go by train, and booked a train-and-hotel package through railbookers.com. I’d never travelled with them before, but I have to say that I was impressed – the journey was well planned with surprisingly easy connections, and the hotel they chose for me was well appointed, within a very easy walk of Trier station, directly opposite the Porta Nigra, with English-speaking reception staff. I’d be happy to do another city break with them again – it all worked very well.

My holiday started on Tuesday morning when I took the Eurostar from London St Pancras to Brussels Midi station. I changed there onto an intercity train to Luxembourg. Well, it billed itself as  an “Intercity”, but clearly that was in the sense that First Great Western trains from Hereford to London call themselves “Intercity” – yes they go through a few cities, but they also stop at all the significant oak trees over the Cotswolds.  The train to Luxembourg was much the same, as it meandered through the Belgian countryside, stopping every fifteen minutes or so. Not many people seemed to be going the whole distance – rather, it was heavily used by locals travelling just a few stops.

At Luxembourg I was absolutely shocked by the price of entry to the toilets at the station. €1.10. That’s over a pound! The most expensive penny I’ve ever spent! I know that Luxembourg is famous for its high GDP and its bankers (and look at where they’ve got us all…….) but I didn’t expect the cost of living (or rather, of peeing) to be that extortionate!

At Luxembourg I changed trains again onto a “Regional Express” train to Trier, which trundled slowly through the Luxembourg countryside and then along the banks of the River Moselle to Trier. This train was a double-decker, so I sat upstairs with panoramic views out over the countryside. The views along the Moselle were so spectacular that I put my iPad away and just looked out of the windows watching the scenery go by.

Then on Thursday I repeated the whole journey in the opposite direction, except that I got off the Eurostar train at Ebbsfleet International where I had a taxi waiting to take me the 15 minutes or so drive to my parents’ house where I was staying for a couple of nights.

The whole trip worked extremely smoothly. The only thing I found confusing was crossing so many international (and more importantly linguistic) borders in one day. All the announcements on the Eurostar were in four languages – English, French, Flemish and German. The announcements on the Intercity from Brussels were all in French, except within the city of Brussels itself, where they were in French and Flemish. The regional express from Luxembourg started off with all the announcements in French, but as soon as it crossed into Germany they switched to German. At Luxembourg station, I asked someone in French if I was on the right platform for Trier, and he answered in German. At Trier on the way back, I asked in German for directions to the platform for the Luxembourg train, and was answered in English.

Languages are not, and never have been, my strongest subject. I did both French and German at O-level, but that was 30 years ago, and I’ve spoken very little German since. My French is poor but serviceable for tourist matters, though I don’t have the vocabulary to sustain a long conversation. My German however is pretty shocking – I’ve forgotten most of the vocabulary I once had, find the grammar very difficult,  and just concentrate on trying to make myself understood rather than on getting genders and cases to agree. Plus I find it takes a couple of days to “get my ear back in” to the rhythms of a language and to have it start to come back to me – time that I simply didn’t have on this holiday. The upshot was that, unless I was very careful and thought hard about what I wanted to say before I opened my mouth, I was liable to end up doing what Christopher rather rudely used to call “talking Foreign” – i.e. speaking a rather random mixture of French, German, Italian and Spanish! “Grazie” and “si” kept slipping in unbidden instead of “Danke schön” and “ja”!

Fortunately, all of the main sites in Trier had pamphlets available in English, some to take away, others were laminated leaflets that you could use to guide yourself around the site but then had to hand back on exit. But either way, the city authorities had gone to some effort to make sure that English-speaking tourists could find their way around. The surprising exception was the Archaeological Museum – all the exhibits were labelled only in German (fair enough) but there wasn’t an English guide book available. The ticket-seller said that there was an English audio-guide available to describe some of the key exhibits, but I really don’t like those – I find you get so caught up in listening to what the audio-guide has to say that you forget to look at the other equally interesting exhibits. Plus they insisted on taking custody of your passport as a deposit for the loan of the audio-guide – no way does my passport leave my possession!

Overall, I was pleased that I managed to make myself understood – I navigated my way across five countries, explained my journey to a number of ticket inspectors, ordered some entirely acceptable meals and, crucially, remembered the German for “Where are the toilets?” and “Another glass of wine please”!

08 04 2013 Gillian Day out Comments (2) Permalink

Scattering the ashes in the Moselle

The Roman bridge over the River Moselle

Since Christopher and I had often thought about visiting “Roman Germany”, albeit without actually getting around to doing so, I thought it fitting to take some of his ashes with me to scatter somewhere appropriate. This is the spot I chose –  into the Moselle River running through Trier, at the base of the original Roman bridge. The big basalt piers date from AD144, though the vaulting is an 18th century rebuild. It was surprisingly quiet down at the river banks, away from the busy dual-carriageway, and I think he would have approved.

07 04 2013 Gillian Day out
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