Spain

We spent ten days in the South of Spain - traveling round Andalusia. We stayed in Granada, Seville and Cordoba, and whilost I was expecting to like Seville most, I thought it was a bit disappointing. The best example being the contemporary art museum which had exactly 24 exhibits , and the permanent collection had disappeared entirely.

Highlights...
The Mezquita/Cathedral in Cordoba. Its an intriguing building. Essentially a mosque with a cathedral core built in the middle of it, and lots of statues of the Virgin Mary. Well worth seeing

Carmona. We went here on the way to Seville, and the little town was reaching the end of its festival. Its a charming place, full of winding streets, old churches, with a village square where lots of people sit in the afternoon

Baena. Centre of Andalusian olive-oil poduction - the very best to be found, and we bought two
bottles. Its heavenly stuff - far too good for cooking, definitely salads and bread only.

Wine! In particular sherry - we went out to Sanlucar, one of the three towns in the Sherry triangle, where they produce largely manzanilla, my favourite dry sherry.

Julio Romero de Torres. I don't know if any of you have heard of this Cordoban painter and his somewhat unique style. Half naked swarthy Spanish women in seductive poses, furtive looking male guitar players, images of death - all quite bizarre. definitely worth seeing!

Lecturing begins next week - a fair bit on this week....

Memo to self...I must not forget to write my blog...

Publishers. Hmmmm. At one time, if you did a piece of research,a substantial piece, there was a fair chance that a publication deal would be a possibility. There was no expectation that huge sales would occur, but it meant that there was a solid range of academic research being published in full book form, rather than via the bite-sized option of articles in journals no-one reads...

Having been trying to find someone to publish my thesis, the responses have been interesting. A significant number of publishers simply said 'we only want to publish textbooks'. What will be the outcome of that sort of policy - that there will be no substantive work for the textbooks to include as references? Others want material which has potential for international sales. Read 'America'. So, if you're research is not American, or isn't general enough to be able to be marketed in America, forget it (it should be noted that monographs are still published in America, and when I was looking for relevant previous studies, I could find plenty of American ones, but precious few about the UK. Not very useful in an ethnographic study...)

Anyway, I shall plod on. I'm not the only one in this situation, as I found at a conference I attended this week...anyone reading this who works in publishing, you know where I am

Everton lost to Portsmouth yesterday. Yes, Portsmouth. We were embarrassingly rubbish.

I'll need to do a memory-check and return to this later...