I started out with a few aims: 1: call Rosa to arrange the weekend; 2: find stronger painkillers than paracetamol; 3 buy a USB C double to connect phone to car; 4: sun.
A call to Rosa proves better than expected – she is happy to meet for dinner tonight. I research a few places half way between Lloret and Girona and am delighted when Rosa selects Ca la Manela in Caldes de Malavella. Spain must have a farmacia for every ten people and the first one I encounter is organic/non chemical so I have some potion specially for joints. It has my knee on the packet so I buy it. I do however get plan B at a normal chemist later. Both come in a form I have not encountered before – they are sachets that you tear the top off and suck the contents into your mouth. The cable too is acquired from one of the multitude of phone shops and I have SatNav on the big screen. And there is a hint of sun on the beach at Lloret. So far so good.
Lloret is not for me. The Benidorm of the Costa Brava without the extent and height of the tower blocks. I did find a quite nice church but no casc antic that makes so many towns interesting. I walked the streets filled with gift shops, ceramics and how ever many watch shops. How are the Spanish renowned for a mañana attitude with so many options to keep them to time? And it dawned on me that Lamine Yamal is the new Messi given the almost total absence of other players’ strips parading the promenade and tourist traps. I found a square away from the front for a coffee and another local place for some tapas and then headed out of town for my planned dinner with Rosa.
I had stayed at the Vichy Catalan spa in Caldes de Malavella on my 2017 newly widowed sort-myself-out trip and, while small, it has some fine buildings and a good restaurant. As I was there well before our booking time at 20:30, I was able to explore further and discovered that the mineral water it is famed for was originally discovered by the Romans in 300 BCE. The Roman Baths are free to enter and proved an interesting wander for half a hour with some good multilingual explanatory display boards, charting is uses and misuses through the centuries/until the nineteenth century vogue for “taking the waters” gave the town a whole new commercial life. I think there are half a dozen companies the most famous of which is Vichy Catalan. And despite some very threatening clouds over the mountains I did get some sun with a green tea in the square watching much coming and going of the local populace.
The original sourceConvenient stepsThe sharing bath
There was a convenient free parking space two minutes from the restaurant in which I think I had a quick lunch ten years ago. It seemed much expanded and had an attractive menu from which we were encouraged to order far too much food. On enquiring what the portion sizes were the patron’s hands indicate a cazuela or saucer size. When they game they were charger sized and I am afraid there was some waste of very tasty seafood and grilled vegetables. I think the meal was unique in my history in that we each consumed one glass of verdejo as we both had to drive back.
It was a lovely evening catching up and making plans for the weekend in Girona. As a conceptual artist, often waiting for the next commission, Rosa is taking a sabbatical into the world of work with a 10 till 2 and 4 till 8 Spanish hours job which she finds wonderfully liberating being allocated tasks and timescales to achieve. Fortunately I did have a glass of last night’s Ramon Bilbao to render the evening a bit more normal.
It’s been a while since the last blog – far too much work and play (yippee!) – but a lot has been going on – much of it with a Japanese flavour.
Everybody has seen Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa even if they didn’t know that was what they were seeing. It’s from a series of wood block prints called 36 views of Mount Fuji. We have reproductions of two of them on the walls at home so the opportunity to see all of them in digitally analysed new versions was too good to miss. The exhibition was at the Old Truman Brewery on Brick Lane and to get there we went through the Spitalfields Market a lively area with craft, fashion and food stalls which we’d missed out on since it’s rebirth a few years ago. Great fun on a Saturday morning – very lively.
Some people are critical of ‘new’ versions of old works of art but seeing the whole series together was fascinating. Each print depicts aspects of everyday life in the Edo period (1603 to 1868)) always with a hint of Fujisan in the composition in the most imaginative ways. It showed just what a superb artist he was. The exhibition also confirmed the outstanding skills of the wood block makers and printers who worked with the artists of the period.
Prints on paper however well displayed always fade with age so seeing the colours as vibrant as they would have been in the first editions I found startling and a further tribute to the woodblock makers who had to make a block for each colour in the print. The exhibition also had various artists’ re-imaginings of Hokusai in an exhibition space laid out like the streets of old Edo with red lanterns and small rooms devoted to different visual approaches. A vast video wall completed the exhibition with images some of which gelled and some of which I failed to connect with. But a fascinating occasion all round.
Later in the month we saw lots more Hokusai in the brilliant Shunga exhibition at the British Museum – surely one of very few that have to carry a PG certificate! All the great artists of the period seem to have engaged in making erotic prints alongside their mainstream work. The extensive array gathered here shows that their drawings and the prints that followed were of the same quality as their mainstream work. It also confirms that sex can be elegant, energetic, exaggerated, delicate, delightful and dangerous but above all should be fun. There’s a great quote displayed relating to the old adage that size doesn’t matter:
“if ‘the thing’ were depicted in its actual size there would be nothing
of interest, for that reason don’t we say that art is fantasy?”
A couple of the more publishable shunga images for a family audience
The exhibition is clearly very popular given the crowds and the length of time people spent looking at each of the hundreds of prints displayed. The curators have done a brilliant job in putting them in context and explaining that they were usually produced in sets of 12 as with so many ukiyo-e prints and would be used as instruction manuals for newlyweds, as foreplay for couples, consolation for the separated and just for a laugh.
Seeing rooms full of people losing their embarrassment while peering at sheet after sheet of bi-gender genitalia having such fun made one doubt whether there’s much British reserve left. There were a few faces around looking a little confused though. The exhibition runs until 5 January 2014 and is well worth a visit.
Following last month’s Japan Foundation lecture on zen in gardens (our own Japanese maples are looking especially fine this year) and ceramics we were keen to find some really elegant cups for green tea consumption. We found them in the most unlikely place while on a two-day break in Wiltshire.
Mike in the gloom at Lacock
We drove down through alternating rain and drizzle, checked in and decided to go and view an outdoor sculpture exhibition at Lacock Abbey. By the time we arrived it was closed and nearly dark anyway, so we wandered around the village – in Cranford, Pride and Prejudice and Harry Potter land – and came across Lacock Pottery. We climbed the stairs to the deserted loft gallery and there were two bowls that were just what we needed. We looked at the other exhibits but kept coming back and eventually rang the bell for service which brought forth David McDowell who filled us in on his own intriguing history as the offspring of a FitzChurchill. After a time he vouchsafed the information that the pots were by a local potter Matt Waite and used a very uncommon glaze called Chün or Jun. It has no colour in itself but when light strikes it it takes on the finest pale blue tone because of reflection on metallic particles in the glaze – fascinating stuff. We bought them, were given a lengthy guided tour of the glorious B&B David and his wife Simone run at the pottery and eventually escaped back for dinner at Marco Pierre White’s latest project Rudloe Arms. It’s work in progress at present but the art from his collection displayed all over the hotel means you could just walk around for hours enjoying the paintings, mobiles, cartoons, photographs and memorabilia.
Dee making a bright – if chilly – start at the hotel
The next day a total contrast in terms of weather but held the same surprises and delights. A bright blue sunny morning dawned – ideal for our planned trip to Bath. We caught the bus from the end of the hotel driveway benefitting from Freedom Passes’ nation-wide (except Scotland – boo – have your independence!) validity for free bus transport and we’d also been warned that Bath was notoriously difficult for parking.
Neither of us had been to Bath for ages and so set out to do the main touristy things: Pump Room, Roman Baths, Assembly Rooms, Fashion Museum and the less well known Museum of East Asian Art which houses a lot of Chinese pottery, lacquer and jade with some good examples of Japanese ceramics too. We scuttled round being close to closing time and then had a long chat in the museum shop to a young Japanese lady with whom we exchanged views about the collection, her enjoyment of the UK and our trip to Japan.
Our need to scuttle was caused by spending much longer than we ever thought we would at the Roman Baths – a truly amazing “visitor attraction” (dreadful phrase). History, archaeology, reconstructions and interactivity coupled with the incredible extent of the site mean that you could easily pass a whole day in the Baths but that would not do justice to Bath which really deserves its World Heritage Site status.
Dee and Mike taking in the Baths Bath’s chandelier-themed lights The real thing in the Assembly Rooms
Back to the hotel on the bus and tonight’s dinner is at another Marco Pierre White pub The Pear Tree about five miles from Rudloe. It’s been part of his empire for three years now and feels much better bedded in – indeed it has eight rooms so you can stay there too. The dining room is in a large conservatory on the side of an old stone pub and very tastefully decorated and designed. Food and wine were up to scratch too.
Then it was back to London but via the workshop of potter Matt Waite whose pots we bought earlier in the week. He didn’t have any others available but undertook to make us two more and to fashion us a sake jug and beakers in a similar style. We await the outcome with bated breath. Matt is interested in oriental ceramics and ancient glazes and produces elegant tableware in a variety of styles but all individually thrown so each pot, cup or bowl is unique. We were pleased to meet him and kept him from his kiln for far too long chatting about travel, pottery and everything under the sun. He was great company and is a fine potter.
Another Japan Foundation discussion evening focused on a Japanese project to catalogue all Japanese art objects in foreign collections – I don’t think it’s a sinister move to demand them all back! It was fascinating to see how many collections there are in stately homes and private houses as well as more accessibly in museums. We’ve ordered a promising-looking book A Guide to Japanese Art Collections in UK which will help us track them down as we travel around. It seems like there’s a good Japanese gallery in the Maidstone Museum which we might get to visit over Christmas.
And as with every blog there has been some more Japanese food. After the Shunga exhibition we paid a return visit to Abeno now with its licence restored so no free beer this time. Despite the availability of okonomiyaki we tried the soba rice which has rice, noodles, meat and vegetables and the yaki soba fried noodles. Both were excellent as were the kari kari renkon – crispy slices of lotus root with sea salt.
Then following the Japan Foundation evening we tried a fairly newly opened restaurant in Coptic Street called Cocoro. It specialises in ramen (noodles) and curry. We had one of each and they were very good – the speciality tonkotsu ramen with pork belly and broth made from stewed pork bone was really tasty. Judging from the salarymen behind us who had clearly been in for a long evening and several other tables occupied by Japanese diners it’s proving a popular addition to the area.
Finally my own first efforts at sushi making have been moderately successful. Taste is good, shape and symmetry leave a lot to be desired. I also made the delicious slightly sweet omelette we use to have frequently for breakfast in Japan. It is great on its own and also makes a good sushi filling. I used it with some roasted pepper in one set of sushi while the others were prawn and avocado.
Dee and I are going on a sushi-making course next year as a Christmas present to ourselves so we hope that rapid progress will be made.
The month was rounded off nicely with some Murakami to add to the mix – he’s been missing a bit lately. In the New Yorker magazine on 28 October a new short story appeared called Samsa in Love. You can read it here and it makes for an good easy introduction to aspects of his world. The combination of disorientation, dysfunction, political edginess and the obvious nod to Franz Kakfa’s The Metamorphosis make for an interesting read. His descriptions of the interaction between Gregor Samsa and a hunchbacked woman with an ill-fitting bra are both poignant and hilarious.
The 
