WHERE THE EYE WANDERS
January 2025
Here’s to a quarter century! Happy 2025 and welcome to the first of our journals on art, architecture and design.
As I gaze out of my window at the frost-covered trees and pale skies of the new year, I’m reminded that 25 years ago I welcomed in the new millennium under a summer sky in Punta del Este, Uruguay. We counted down to the year 2000 twice that night. The first countdown was hijacked by a second automated timer, which kicked in just as we were reaching DOS-UNO… I also remember Maradona being in the room.
I was living in Buenos Aires, Argentina at the time. My grandfather had visited the city in 1928 as a sailor in the German navy, and I had heard enough stories from him to want to spend my study year there, as part of a language degree from the University of Edinburgh. I hadn’t learnt a word of Spanish in my first two years and so I finally learned to speak it with a Porteño accent (the unmistakably sing-song Italian-influenced Spanish of Buenos Aires).
From the very first foggy day in August that I arrived in Buenos Aires I had felt instantly at home. Armed with my ‘Lumi’ guide I would walk the city streets until they felt familiar and my own. And I would remain in the city on and off for the next decade.
Tango lessons under the flickering lights of ‘La Ideal’. After its renovation, the building was returned to its glory days.
Malcoordinated but curious, I attended weekly tango classes organised by the wonderfully nicknamed, and also endlessly patient, duo of ‘Poroto’ (Bean) and ‘Mariquita’, (‘Ladybird’). There were also Tango tea-dances at the beautiful – but in those days somewhat shabby – Confitería Ideal. Once a pastry shop, it was the setting for a very moving scene in the film ‘La Historia Oficial’, about the horrors of the military dictatorship in the late ‘70’s. ‘La Ideal’ is now back to its full original Belle Époque splendour.
Above are photos of the beautiful living rooms at Estancia El Rocío in the province of Buenos Aires that my husband and I visited last time we were there. Argentina has incredible craftsmanship – particularly leather, textiles and silverware. I would recommend visiting Arundú in central Buenos Aires to find some real gems. And Casa Fagliano in Hurlingham for leather riding boots to last a lifetime.
Some dear Argentinian friends recently visited Oxford and this journal was going to be about the William Morris and Dante Rossetti murals in the Oxford Union library that I took them to see. That will have to wait for next time. Tempus fugit! So, onwards to the next quarter century and all that it may bring, and wishing you all a truly meaningful year.
Time is the substance from which I am made. Time is a river which carries me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that devours me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.
El tiempo es la sustancia de que estoy hecho. El tiempo es un río que me arrebata, pero yo soy el río; es un tigre que me destroza, pero yo soy el tigre; es un fuego que me consume, pero yo soy el fuego.
Jorge Luis Borges