Out and About

The week before last I went out for the afternoon. It was the annual outing for our WI branch and such is the paucity of my social calendar that it counts as a highlight.

I am not complaining. There is plenty to do here and my social calendar could be full every other evening in summer and every evening with activities to spare in the winter, it's just I'm a bit of an anti social curmudgeonly thing and I like to keep my life quiet.  

For those who are interested in such things, in Scotland the WI's full title is the Scottish Women's Rural Institute. In most parts of Scotland it is affectionately known as The Rural. But not in Orkney, which has to be different. In Orkney we normally call it the SWRI. It's a bit of a mouthful to be honest. But there you go.

 

Anyway every year we have an outing and mostly we stay within Orkney, although when I was on the committee I did organise what turned out to be a glorious trip to  the Castle of Mey. I don't take much credit for that as it only involved a few phone calls and making sure everyone knew when to turn up at the ferry and tbh it was the weather that made it. But it's a happy memory.

 

This year we visited two new-ish attractions over on West Mainland*, neither of which I'd been to before. Shocking I know, but it's that thing about places on the doorstep never getting visited.

 

*Before non-Orkney readers get totally confused - the main island of the Orkney Group is called Mainland. The western half is called West Mainland and the eastern half is called - yes, you guessed it - East Mainland. So Scotland is not referred to as The Mainland as that would be confusing, it's just known as Scotland or more laconically South. South can mean England as well but you work that out from the context. If you live in Burray, as I do, or even more so if you live on South Ronaldsay, the next island down, you very rarely venture to West Mainland. I hope that clears up any possible confusion!

 

Anyway we went to the The Orkney Brewery Visitors Centre and Barony Mill

 

The Brewery Visitor Centre is situated in the old school at Quoyloo. It's been really nicely done with refurbished old desks in the café, complete with stoppered ink wells, and there are various old school photos and records round the walls. We got a cup of tea and a piece of shortbread, followed by a quick tour of the Brewery. It's a very successful micro-brewery which wins lots of awards, and has a fine range of beers to its name. (So I'm told. I don't drink beer of any description so I don't really know). We had the chance to sample three of their brews but obviously I didn't. We do though put a couple of bottles in the welcome hamper at the flat so that people can try them. It seems popular.

 

Here's the entrance. You can see the date stone for the school, which is 1878. The brewery have released a limited edition beer called 1878 this year to celebrate the brewery extension and opening of the visitor centre.

 

Then it was on to Barony Mill. The miller/guide was very entertaining and had most of us in stitches although it's to be hoped he takes the edge off his Orcadian accent for visitors from elsewhere, or they will be totally bemused. The mill grinds not wheat but Bere Barley, a very ancient grain that is no longer grown in most places but is still farmed here. I bought some beremeal and a recipe booklet to go with it and tried out the apple and cinnamon cake. I can't say it was a total success, although OH and Son No 2 liked it well enough. It tasted fine, it just wasn't spectacular enough to justify the hassle of making it. I don't often do melting and whisking cakes which this was, and then I had to get the food processor out to liquidise some of the stuff and the recipe was vague in the extreme about size of tin and cooking times. I may however try out some of the other recipes in the booklet, the shortbread and the cranberry biscuits eg at a later date. It's quite a pretty place as you can see....

 

well maybe if you could see more of the flowers it would look nicer. There is also a mill cat but she doesn't pose for pictures sadly.

We rounded off the day with an early evening meal in The Kirkwall Hotel. For reasons into which I need not go, I generally boycott this establishment but I stretched a point since it was a group outing and I have to say the food was lovely. I particularly enjoyed the lemon posset I had for dessert which came with a brandy snap and was delicious.

So good company, good food, interesting places to go, what could have been not to like? It was a good afternoon out.

 

 

 

 

Top of the Lake

If anyone doesn't know, Top of the Lake is a new sort-of crime-ish drama series, set in the South Island of New Zealand made by Jane Campion and starring Holly Hunter and Elizabeth Moss, currently being shown here in the UK  on BBC2.

 

I might well have given it a miss since neither Campion nor Hunter are a draw for me. Am I the only person in the Western Hemisphere who just wanted to give Hunter's character in The Piano Player a good slap? Possibly I am, but I don't care. I thought it was one of the most pretentious films I had ever seen. But I digress....

 

The reason I watched Top of the Lake was because David Wenham is in it and he's a fine actor for whom I have a lot of time. His comic sidekick in Van Helsing was the only thing that made that film even remotely watchable. He was a heart breaking Faramir in Lord of the Rings.  He was almost convincing as a Spartan general in 300, a film I love but which does fall a bit short on credibility in many respects, not least the (lack of) costuming. And he gave a stand out performance in Oranges and Sunshine. If you haven't seen Oranges and Sunshine incidentally it is well worth watching.

 

Sadly the casting of DW does little to reconcile me to this extremely slow and irritating series. I'm not a fan of Elizabeth Moss either as an actor or for her character in this piece. The 'characters' are cardboard cut outs who scarcely deserve the accolade of 'stereotypes', the pace is excruciatingly slow and the police procedure, what little of it that there seems to be,  is quite frankly non-credible.

 

I'm led to wonder if Campion knew what she wanted to do with this piece. It might be satirical, when you look at the buffoons who apparently* frequent the bars of small NZ towns and man its police force, not to mention the strange assortment of women at the locally established 'women's camp'. It might be a comment on corruption, or child abuse, it might be a story about how you can never go back to your past, or that a prophet is never honoured in their own country. It has elements of all of these things but it doesn't add up to a whole of anything. In fact I have grave doubts that I shall manage to stick with it, the presence of DW notwithstanding.

 

*I say apparently because when we visited NZ a few years ago we met with nothing but charming, helpful and friendly people, who had about as much in common with the dreary misanthropes and miserable downtrodden inhabitants of Top of the Lake as real space travel has to the antics of Flash Gordon.

 

It does have one thing in common with The Piano though. I still want to give Holly Hunter's character a good slap.

 

 

I Didn't Expect a Sauna

We went over to the flat at the weekend to do the turnaround. Started off in the usual fashion; OH picks up rubbish, scouts round the kitchen to see what needs doing, I take duster polish and vacuum cleaner into the living room. All was going well until I transferred my attention to the double bedroom. The windows were running with condensation, which is not usual. I mopped up, opened the window and turned my attention to stripping the bed. The mattress was sodden. Pulled bed away from the wall and found black mould spreading up the [now damp]  wall behind the bed, obviously from proximity of wet mattress. Not surprising then to see when I investigated further that couple had apparently decamped with baby into the other bedroom for part of their stay.

 

So what happened? We handed over a clean dry flat and returned to find part of it had been turned into a sauna. My suspicion is that they had had the baby in the bed with them and it had been sick or got very wet, they'd tried to wash the mattress and to dry it out they had turned up the heating and closed the windows, a shortcut to condensation and horrible humidity.

 

Of course no note left to explain or apologise, and we were left with a huge problem; people coming into the flat that day who weren't going to want to sleep on what was effectively a fabric waterbed.

 

OH did a 90 mile round trip back home to fetch the mattress from our guest room bed and we hauled the wet one out into what was fortunately a sunny day to start to dry out. We brought it home later, and it seems OK now, so we'll be taking it back next weekend when we have our Visit Scotland grading visit. Since OH is gallivanting off that day playing nice with some people from the Caithness Archaeology Society Committee I'm going to have to do the mega prep for the Inspector's visit on my own. I'm not a happy bunny about that, but just have to bite the bullet.

 

What annoys me most is the lack of any attempt to let us know what had happened, it's not as though we don't leave people with our phone number in case they need to contact us and I'd have thought common courtesy would lead them to at least alert us to the situation. I'm not saying I'd have been pleased if they'd rung us with the information that the mattress was now a sodden mass that couldn't be slept on, but we could at least then have take the spare with us saving time and a not inconsiderable amount of fuel money.

 

People do amaze me sometimes, and rarely in a good way.

Rounding Up

It occurred to me recently that if I don't finish the story of our trip to Devon soon we will be on our way to Yorkshire and I will then have another set of tales to tell....So here we go. On our second full day we spent the morning in Exeter. We split up as I had arranged to meet up with a friend from Ravelry, and OH and his Mum went to the Museum, where as far as I can make out they spent most of their time in the café having a good long talk. They did pass a Pandora stockist though and he bought me a wooden bead. Which was nice. Meanwhile friend and I  had coffee, followed by a trip to a very well stocked shop called Expressions, and then had lunch in a very nice pub.

 

I had to laugh because I paid for this with my debit card. My debit card has a picture on it of the Stones of Callenish  on the Isle of Lewis. When I handed it over the guy glanced at it and said 'Oh I used to live near there. Stonehenge.' When I told this story to Son No 1, he said 'Oh, you didn't. Please tell me you didn't embarrass him....'. Well I didn't. I was so flabbergasted I was struck dumb to be honest. However unlike the OH I don't expect everyone I meet to have a working knowledge of a) every significant stone age monument in Britain or b) archaeology in Scotland.

 

In the afternoon my mother in law suggested that we go to Otterton Mill which we did. We weren't hungry enough to sample the café but we did a little light shopping and, as is my current wont, I took a photo of a tree in blossom.

 

Possibly the blossom isn't showing up so well there. As I get older I get more and more haunted by Houseman's lines about cherry blossom

Of my three score years and ten, twenty will not come again,
....and since to look at things in bloom fifty years is little room....

and quite a lot more than twenty of my allotted span has passed.

We took two days over getting home, partly as mentioned previously to pick up the OH's new toy in Sale. The next morning we took ourselves off to the Lady Lever Art Gallery in Port Sunlight. I have a passing interest in workers model villages and had not visited this one before. The pictures aren't brilliant but for what they're worth:-

 

 

Mock Tudor houses. Also fountains are very difficult to get right!

 

Moving on, the main event was the Gallery but I found it very disappointing. They do have a collection of Pre-Raphs, a whole big roomful in fact, but several are versions of pictures I've seen elsewhere, several are just awful - Bubbles, for example, and all in all, I think either the Laing in Newcastle or Birmingham City Art Gallery are better for Pre-Raphs, if they're your thing. In addition the café was dark and noisy and the shop was a great disappointment. No postcards, no jigsaw puzzles. And a lot of stuff totally unrelated to the collection.

 

There was one really lovely picture though

 



Sybilla Palmifera. The colours in that reproduction are rubbish. But that, and a couple of Waterhouses made the trip worthwhile.

After Port Sunlight we headed north and stayed overnight in the very welcoming and restful Hightae Inn where we had the first comfortable bed we'd had for almost a week. The food was wonderful too. I tend not to eat much when I'm travelling but here are the OH's starter and main

smoked duck salad and salmon steak. When we come home from our projected trip to Yorkshire in September we are seriously thinking of staying here again. Highly recommended if you're wanting somewhere to stay near Lockerbie.

And next day it was a case of home again, home again. And it was Good to be Back.

 

I Sit Corrected

Apparently there has previously been a Scottish winner of the men's championship at Wimbledon. Back in 1896 or something. While I can be forgiven for not knowing, since I don't carry around the tennis equivalent of Wisden in my head, I cannot really be forgiven for not checking my facts before I wrote.

 

In another part of the forest I have been studying. And booking a holiday for next April. And avoiding doing more painting. But mainly just studying. It's a quiet way to pass the time, and I feel I need some quiet after last week's high jinks with the eyes.

He Did It!

Andy Murray won.

In the process he shredded my nerves, did terrible things to my blood pressure and when he won I almost cried. First British winner for 70 odd years, first Scottish winner ever. It was a great match, which I would happily re-watch now that I know it has the 'right' ending. Great stuff.

What I Did in June

Well, I managed to get a bit more done in June than I did in May (detention for the mutterer at the back who just said 'Well, that wouldn't be difficult') Not much of it is all that good, but for the record:-

a no sew cushion, which looks sort of OK, but the fabric stretched and distorted and to be honest I think the cushion itself was a bit big for the size of the cover. I can say that because I didn't cut the fabric, it all came to me as a 'ready to go' bag.

a small blanket for a premature baby. I acquired the wool for this in an odd way when we went to Devon and really I just wanted to use it up. It will be off to Bonnie Babies (which is a charity I knit for off and on and support all the time)  very soon, possibly with a warning on the outside of the envelope that the organiser needs to put on sunglasses before she opens it up.

Bright, isn't it?

and finally, I finished the napkins for the local WI Group Work for the annual competition. The overall theme for everyone is Black and White an our groups theme is Tea for Two. Hence the two napkins

I'm not 100% happy with them, but equally they're not a disaster, and the main thing is they are finally done and I can stop worrying about whether or not I will get them finished in time!

 

Still hoping to up my productivity rate for the current month.

Update

Well I have seen the optician and, apart from the fact that I look like a dope fiend due to the atropine that was put in my eye, all is well. I'm exhausted too; I didn't sleep well last night for the worry and atropine also tends to cut you off at the knees. So it'll be calming stuff for the rest of the day and an early night and by tomorrow I should be as right as rain.

Still really really cross about the unhelpful and uncaring attitude of doctor at the hospital though. Not to mention the fact that although he said to me categorically that the hospital does not have a slit lamp, according to the optician, they do. I hate being lied to.

Sort of scared - just a little bit.

Coming home from town this afternoon I started to experience what bitter past experience has taught me to call 'visual disturbances'.

Rang doctor to see if he could squeeze me in, but his advice was to go to the hospital, since if he saw me he'd probably send me there anyway.

At the hospital I saw a fairly impatient doctor who told me several times there was no ophthalmic surgeon available (which I knew; this is Orkney, specialists visit, or you get sent to see them). He told me what I was describing didn't sound like a floater, which I also knew. I've had that, I've had the retinal detachment of which it was a portent, I've had the op for the detachment which led to a huge macular hole four weeks later, and which was then followed by cataract development.

 

Anyway the hospital doctor  told me to go and see the optician tomorrow as he has a slit lamp and can look at my eye properly. Of course the strange moving wavy line disappeared after about 20 minutes, long before I got to the hospital and if I'd never had anything wrong with the other eye I would have shrugged it off as one of those things.

 

Trouble is once you have one eye that's become neither use nor ornament you get a bit panic-y when you think something might be going wrong with the single good eye you have left. I shall ring the optician in the morning and arrange to submit myself to the torture that is the slit lamp. I hope he will be able to reassure me that everything is in order. Because I don't know how I'll cope if it's not.