Category: Photos

This is a little cast metal tiger, one of a pair that belong to an inkstand we bought in Delhi. We don’t actually have the inkstand any more, just the two tigers and the back panel, which has three reliefs on it.

The tigers are only a few inches tall, and because they have lost their inkstand home, they don’t have a real home: they can’t stand up on the screws that extend below their feet. This one is balanced on the mantelshelf (yes, that’s the living room wallpaper behind him, and believe me when I say it’s the quietest wallpaper in the house).

We bought the inkstand from an indian antiques and art shop in Delhi four years ago. We went to Simla for Christmas, and had a day in Delhi before we had to fly home. We went for a walk and met a man who escorted us to the antiques shop, which appeared to be some kind of government institution, with some very expensive art. I know perfectly well the man made commission on us, but I don’t mind. We did spend quite a bit of money there, including a painting that cost a substantial amount. I did resist the amazing jewellery, though, which could easily have bankrupted us.

I think I can safely say that at least ninety percent of the days in my life so far have begun with a cup of tea. Real tea, camellia sinensis assamica, fermented, brewed with boiling water and served in a cup with cow’s milk and possibly sugar.

I was raised on tea – from my earliest childhood I remember drinking tea (albeit weak and milky tea with lots of sugar). My mother used to make mugs of tea for everyone in the family every morning, a ritual solid as sunrise, even when she was ill. After she died, my father tried to keep this up, but it soon petered out. Nevertheless, I was old enough to make my own tea, and did. Tea every morning. Probably no breakfast, but definitely tea.

As a teenager, I discovered coffee, and for a few years as a student, I drank coffee in the mornings, like a good North American. I still love coffee, but waking up requires tea. When I went back to Africa, I was back in the land of tea, and returned to it, as to mother’s milk. Sweet milky tea, in east Africa, boiled in a big enamel kettle with tinned milk and sugar and served in enamel cups too hot to hold, served in fine china cups-and-saucers in fancy hotels, mugs of tea made over fires, plastic cups of tea served with the bag still in on trains and in bus stations, tea is everywhere.

This is just a plain old mug of tea, Dilmah Gold Breakfast tea made from teabags (on this occasion – we also have loose tea to hand) brewed for a good five minutes in one of the seven or so teapots we have, kept warm with my handmade tea cosy, milk poured in first, then the tea. Made for me by Martin, and served in one of our new mugs we bought for Christmas this year.

It was only a matter of time before the boys showed up on this blog. This is Giles. He is, as you can tell, extremely elegant and shiny. He is also terrified of his own shadow (seen behind him here).

We adopted Giles as a kitten in Johannesburg, along with his sister, Mabel. Emily, the best cat in the known universe was still with us, but she had leukaemia, and we knew she wasn’t going to live to a ripe old age. Hannah had run away from us in Grahamstown, and moved in with the neighbours, so we had only one cat. We didn’t intend to adopt a pair – we were actually after their older brother, but we decided he was a bully and came home with two tiny little scraps of nothing and fur. Mabel, his sister, escaped the flat and was killed in traffic, two weeks after we got them. Giles once got out, about a year later. We found him underneath the stairs, metres from his front door, crying with fear.

Poor Giles, we’ve dragged him halfway round the world, and he hates leaving his home. He spent four months in quarantine in the UK as well, and hated it. I think he spent the whole time under a blanket. He loves us, and trusts us, despite this, and we love him, even if he will never be a fierce jungle cat, defending us from all comers.

Our street is cobbled. Proper cobbles. It’s one of the few around here that still is, and although it’s pretty it has its hazards, particularly in the winter.

Wet cobbles are slippery, and look greasy in the light (although the camera’s flash tends to flatten that out), snow on cobbles is nasty, and packed snow/ice on cobbles is lethal. Not to cars, that I can tell, but then the road is only a block long and one and a half cars wide, so we don’t often get people losing control outside the house. I don’t like riding my bike on wet cobbles, though, and confess that I ride on the pavement until I get to a cross street with more familiar tarmac.

The recent snow, though, got packed down hard, melted and frozen repeatedly, making a lumpy icy treacherous mess. I hate being nervous when leaving my house, although I don’t mind the cold, and I hated the snow for that reason mostly. I live in fear of broken bones, having broken too many already.

We live in a very standard English two-up and two-down, probably built some time before the first world war. It’s on Mafeking Road, in a little neighbourhood of streets (and houses) named after battles of the Anglo-Boer war (Mafeking, Colenso, Belmont, Ladysmith, and Kimberly), which ended in 1902, and I suspect that this neighbourhood was developed for returning veterans of those wars – the Queen’s Lancashire Regiment was active in it, and are based here in Preston.

Of course, we don’t know the provenance of the house exactly, but we do know that compared to many of its kind, it has been little interfered with. One of its  features, and one we are very fond of, is a set of glass-paned double doors between the two reception rooms on the ground floor. When the house was built, the front room, into which these doors lead would have been the parlour, reserved for visiting company for weddings and funerals, most likely. The main room would have functioned as the all-purpose cooking, living and even washing room, with a small scullery at the back. The scullery was expanded into a full kitchen, probably when indoor plumbing was put in, this room is now our living room, and the front room is Martin’s study. This picture is of the light in Martin’s study through the patterned glass doors  – it manages to combine being warm and inviting with being rather surreal, to my mind.

Yet another church, this one has been converted into an arts centre for the university. I’ve never actually been inside; the one time the university held an open day in the fine arts department it was in the most non-descript building imaginable.

This was taken this evening: as the term gets under way my concerns that the remainder of this blog will consist of pictures of my office, my house, and pictures taken in the dark of the route between them seem to be well-founded. I took this at the bus stop, waiting for a bus in the rain, hence the distortion on the top right. It didn’t turn out badly, I don’t think – it has a nice ambience. I’m clearly going to have to work to get good and interesting pics when my life really starts to get busy.

Martin likes to rescue plants. Whenever we buy groceries and they are selling live growing herbs in pots, Martin wants to rescue them. This poor thing was a chili plant in an English supermarket, and you can imagine how that felt. We brought it home several months ago, and it’s now thriving, living on the kitchen windowsill where it gets some sun, at least. It’s produced several new pods in the last little while.

It’s too cold to grow herbs well here – everything seems to die over the winter. We added a shelf to the kitchen window, and now have a little colony of rescued herbs, but aside from this chili plant and a venus fly trap which was being sold as a novelty and is doing surprisingly well, not much else lives for long. Basil, particularly, doesn’t seem to cope at all. Poor things, grown in hothouses and sent to supermarkets to be used, abused and thrown away. It’s no life for a plant, really.

This is my teddy bear, and I have had him since I was born. He is very well-loved, as you can see, and he and the little knitted rabbit my mother made me were my constant companions throughout my childhood. We never had dolls: my mother hated them, and we inherited her dislike of their creepy plastic semi-humanness. Aside from a brief rebellious desire for a barbie-type doll when I was around 11, I don’t recall ever wanting a doll, but I loved my teddy bear. I probably held on to him longer than other kids my age: I remember being teased about taking him along on a car trip by my sister and brother, well after I had started school.

When I was eight I had appendicitis that turned into peritonitis and spent weeks in hospital. I doubt my teddy came to the hospital with me at first (both occasions were late-night emergencies as I recall), but he soon joined me there. The nurses made much of him, giving him an IV drip and a surgical bandage to match mine.

The jumper he’s wearing was rather inexpertly crocheted by me, probably when I was around fourteen or so. Every now and then I look at him and think I should make him a proper one, that fits, but this one has its own sentimental value, lumpen and misshapen as it is.

This is the building my office, and much of the journalism department is in, taken from the ground floor atrium. It’s one of the newer buildings on the campus, whose architecture covers the last 120-odd years (as does the institution’s history). It’s a fine building, as university buildings go, although it does seem to leak a lot. There’s a glass roof at the top of this atrium, which does make the place light and airy, but also makes it wet and cold. The first floor coffee shop also has leaking skylights. I seem to be doomed to leaking universities – I did my undergraduate degree at the famously damp and mouldy Simon Fraser University in Vancouver.

The coffee shop is probably the best feature of this building – it’s university-run, but Starbucks-branded, so the coffee is actually pretty good, much better than the automated dispenser coffee on offer elsewhere on campus. The coffee shop is also very busy because the powers that be decided for some reason that we can’t have common rooms, so the only place to talk to colleagues is in someone’s [shared] office, in an empty classroom, or in the coffee shop, so there’s a constant community of assorted academics hanging out holding meetings and such. There’s also a large television, controlled by the coffee ladies, and usually showing Jeremy Kyle. I’ve learnt a lot about the world from that television set.

I’m still getting used to European winters. In Vancouver, it’s cold and wet and snowy and rainy and all, but the trees are almost entirely evergreens, so at the least there is greenery (of a sort – dark green branches, sopping wet against a grey sky is not as cheerful as you would think). Johannesburg has deciduous trees, but winter is so short (although it can be nasty in its own way), that you don’t often see bare branches like this: in fact you may well see autumn leaves and green fresh leaves all at once.

Preston is cold, wet, rainy, snowy and horrible in winter, and the trees all lose their leaves, so this, the naked branches, is a common sight. Today, at least, there was a tiny amount of blue sky to leaven the gloom, but it’s still all pretty bleak.