Farmyard Friends

well, fields rather than a yard really, but farmyard sounds better. 

We took what we've started to call out 'donkey walk' yesterday. It takes us past a field with - yes, a donkey in it. And also another one a bit further on with some rare breed pigs. The gate to the pig field has a notice on it which encourages you to feed the pigs and gives a list of what they like to eat. Which actually is nice. 

At my suggestion we took a few carrots with us. The idea was to give two to the donkey and anther two to the pigs. We hadn't foreseen the presence in the donkey field of a very pushy pony, so by the time we got to the pigs we had no carrots left. The walk is circular so next time we'll do it in the other direction, to make sure the pigs don't lose out. 

Meanwhile some pics

Charitable Endeavours

Someone in one of my Ravelry groups had a shout out a wee while ago for knitted things which the Crisis group in Edinburgh could include in their packages for the temporarily housed homeless at Christmas (temporary housing courtesy of the pandemic of course). I sent off some hats that I'd done for the Seafarer's Society since, also due to the pandemic, there had been no  seafarers calling in Orkney  in need of hats since March, and also a pair of socks that were lying about because I hadn't liked them when they were done (or indeed liked the wool which I had bought from someone else on the strength of a photograph where it turned out the colour reproduction had not been good) 

And over the last couple of weeks I've been kitting more socks for them, using up stash sock wool. I'd hoped to do four pairs but I don't have time; however  I finished the third pair today. Voila!

A friend is coming round for coffee on Friday (much rejoicing over that too!) and bringing more hats and they will go off at the weekend. And I will probably produce a few more pairs over the next few months ready for next Christmas. Because even if the pandemic is behind us there will still be homeless people who need care and attention and warm feet, and I suspect Crisis will still be there doing their best to fulfil the need. 

More Fun to Watch than Experience

We went into town earlier this afternoon and I fell out of the car in the library car park. 

I'd left my handbag in there because I was only going to drop a couple of books off on the returns table, and I tripped over the straps as I got out and ended up on the ground. 

It felt like it happened in slow motion and according to the OH it looked that way too. On the bright side I had decided against changing into clean trousers this morning, putting that off until tomorrow. It would have been 10x as annoying had I got clean trousers dirty and soggy. On the not quite so bright side it's a lot further to fall from the Range Rover than it would have been from our previous car, the Citroen. 

I wasn't particularly hurt, although the ground was wet and cold and hard and I expect I have a few bruises forming. I'm still glad we went to town though as we were delivering the info to the accountant for the tax return and it's always good to get that off our hands. Every year we say we'll sort it out earlier and every year we fail miserably to do so. Given that our tax affairs are not particularly complicated and that I used to earn my living looking after other people's it amazes me that it it seems like such an awful chore, because nowadays it really doesn't take long. 

Anyway it's a weight off my mind to have delivered the paperwork and I'm going to settle down now in front of the fire with some knitting. Tomorrow is parcelling stuff up for Canada day, and then putting on a face that will not say 'How much did you say that would cost to send' when I get to the Post Office. Ah, the joys of having children who live abroad! 

Easy Peasy Ice Lanterns

 Dear Ms Allsopp,

I enjoy watching your ever so slightly bonkers Christmas preparation shows every year and goodness knows it would be lovely to have some of those coloured ice lanterns you demonstrated yesterday which are so easy to make with balloons, food colouring and water. 

The only slight problem is that my freezer is generally full of food and there is insufficient space to place even one  water filled balloon in there let alone the half dozen that would be needed for a reasonably satisfying ice lantern show. 

Still keep up the good work. I'm sure there are hundreds of people out there with empty freezers, kept for just such projects. 

best wishes

Anne

Another Miss!

The current Saturday Slaughters read is The Way of All  Flesh by Ambrose Parry, Ambrose Parry being a pen name for books written by Christopher Brookmyre, a writer of crime fiction with a big following in Scotland, and his wife, Marisa Haetzman, who is an anaesthetist. 

It is set in Edinburgh at the time of Queen Victoria. The main male protagonist is a just qualified medical doctor with a shady past, no visible means of support and a predilection for getting into trouble. The main female protagonist is a maid in an upper class (medical) household who is clever but held back from fulfilling her potential because of her gender and her class. I am falling asleep even as I type this list of clichéd characterisations and situations. (To make matters worse the maid looks after yet another C19 cliché, the verging on desperate spinster. Just to underline the difficulties of the women of the time, although it's really not necessary,  maid and mistress are reading and discussing Jane Eyre and are of course in total admiration of the brave heroine who self defines as being worthy of a space in society without a man. Despite the fact that the minute said man is free she snatches his hand off when he offers her marriage.)

The big not quite USP of this book is that the newly qualified doctor has been taken on as an apprentice by Joseph Simpson, a real life medical doctor who pioneered the use of anaesthetics in Midwifery, to the great relief of Queen Victoria and many many women since. 

I am giving up on this book because  - boredom really. I do not need to read any further to know that some of the plot will hang on a back street abortionist/doctor performing illegal abortions badly, because why otherwise have they chosen Dr Simpson to house our hero and heroine? I just cannot be bothered. I will however be attending the discussion because I want to be sure I am not wrong on this point. And if I am I shall come here and say so. 

Meanwhile if I want Edinburgh-set Victorian crime I have on Audible all twelve seasons of  BBC4's  Inspector McLeavy. Twelve series, none of them fewer than six episodes, some longer and do you know what? Not one back street butcher in a single one of them. You see, it can be done. 

Where Have I Been?

Well nowhere, which is part of the problem. I've been home, doing the various restricted-by-virus home things that I do, not finishing much and finding little of note to say. However I suppose that having little to say is a feature of the times we live in and should be recorded as much as anything else.  

I finished a couple of puzzles. One I knew before I did it was destined for the library/charity shop pile. It's fun to do - but only  the first time really. 

and then I did a little 500 piece one that I  knew wouldn't take me long. It's a keeper.

Having finished that I have now pulled out a much older one that was designated 'do once more and give away' and I hope to start that later today.

On the knitting front I've done lots of knitting without finishing much apart from this scarf, which is for a friend's  Christmas present. It's in Rowan Kidsilk Haze which is beautifully light and soft and warm, which makes it wonderful for scarves, but it is also an absolute trial to knit with.

I also finished the Saturday Slaughters book club book, which alert readers will remember was The Memory Wood, last mentioned when I was part way through. I struggled to the end but took the decision not to attend the discussion last Saturday, as the subject matter became more and more unbearable for me. Decades ago I was at school with a girl called Lucy Partington, who disappeared without trace from the town where I lived during her final year at University, only to turn up a  very long time later buried in the cellar of Fred and Rosemary West. In those circumstances books about the kidnap and torture of teenage girls and young women do nothing but distress me and I honestly could not have discussed this book as though it were an entertaining read. When the summary of the discussion came through I marvelled at the opening line which said that the group had fallen into two distinct camps. Surely, I thought, no-one had liked the book? Turns out the two camps were those who, like me, had fought their way from cover to cover, and those who hadn't been able to face that and so had skim read it to catch the salient points of the plot. I honestly cannot imagine why anyone would find this a worthwhile or fulfilling or enjoyable read, but presumably the publisher thought there was a market for it. 

Today, I have decided, is officially the start of the Countdown to Christmas, which basically means I'm going to do one thing every day to get me towards getting everything needful done by 24th. I sort of started this yesterday by buying the OH a chocolate Advent Calendar, although I feel this doesn't really count as it entailed no effort on my part bar asking the shopkeeper to pass me one, and then getting out my wallet to pay for it. Today however I am going to wrap my nephew's Christmas presents, which will stretch me slightly more and therefore feel more like a  meaningful task completed once it's done. 

Can I tempt you to read this book ...

I've been making a start today on a good old tidy of my study and I came across a sheet of paper on which I had photocopied a page of James Meek's To Calais in Ordinary Time. I'd meant to review it when I read it, but life must have got a bit busy, or other subjects presented themselves, and it fell by the wayside apart from a passing mention of how awful I found it. 

To demonstrate its unique qualities I had photocopied this page before returning the book to the library so that I could quote from it. Here you go 

Ces ne gave no thanks, and her neb ne tokened no feeling of blitheness that she was free. She kept a hard stern cheer, and her gaze wouldn't meet Will's. It was like to she hated him'. 

390 pages all written like that. It was hard going. I might have found it worth while struggling my way through it had any of the characters in it been at all likeable but this was yet another example of a book peopled by the violent, the misogynistic and the plain and simple unpleasant. I did not want to spend time with these people and if I had to I certainly didn't want to be struggling through almost 400 pages of weird syntax and odd vocabulary to do it. 

As the title suggests the book centres on a group of people making their way to Calais from the Cotswolds. I was rather startled to realise that almost at the end of the book they hadn't even reached Bristol where they were gong to get on a ship for France. I felt like I had travelled with them to the end of the world by that stage.

It's set at the time of the Black Death, and I gave a small cheer every time one of the group succumbed to the disease. I was cheering quite a lot towards the end - although not enough, as the three most irritating characters of all were sadly still alive on page 390. 

I'm not going to deny that it's a very clever book, written by a man who is himself clever, although possibly not quite as clever as he considers himself. It is apparently about identity and gender and language and constructing the world and I'm sure it is about all these things and many more, and scholars will, in the years to come, have a field day writing about the book, its themes, its structure, its meaning etc etc. Which presumably will delight Meek, or his shade, because if ever a book was written in order to be written about, rather than read and enjoyed, this is it. 

And now I can throw away that photocopied sheet, and think about which bit of the study I will tidy tomorrow. 

100 Books to Read Poster 22

 

This was Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle. I have no idea how it is that I have never read this before as I must have known of its existence for 50 years or more. Somehow it never came my way. 

In a way I wish I had read it when I was in my late teens as she captures so accurately all the difficult emotions and thought processes of that age, but there again perhaps that would have led me to wallow, rather than reminisce. And I wouldn't have appreciated how well she writes about girls of that age had I still been one, because that would have seemed as natural to me as breathing and nothing that took any writerly skill. But f course it takes a good deal.

The book was funny and touching and charming by turns, with - good heavens! likeable people. Some of them, it is true, behave in less than likeable ways some of the time, but it's behaviour that is understandable within the terms of their characters and situations. And surprisingly, for a book first written in 1949 and set in the period before World War 2 it has dated very little. 

Definitely a hit for me. 

Well, that was unexpected

Getting up in the early hours of Friday morning to visit the bathroom I thought 'Gosh the house seems very cold!' This proved to be because the front door had blown wide open. A large swathe of the sunroom floor was very damp and two discombobulated cats were wandering in and out, damp and puzzled. Further investigation revealed that the door between the living room and the kitchen had blown shut and that there was moreover a large pool of cat sick on the kitchen floor. Additionally the smart meter was showing red almost off the scale as the underfloor heating in the sunroom attempted to heat the whole island through the open door. 

This is not the sort of thing you want to discover at 4.00 a.m. 

I closed and locked the front door, I said a few soothing words to the confused cats and  opened the door to the kitchen so that they could access their food and water. I then dried my feet and went to bed, giving a full report to the OH. After about 30 minutes he dragged himself out of bed and dealt with the cat sick and come back to bed, noting that the underfloor heating had dried the sunroom floor very nicely and that the smart meter had returned to green. He was a bit worried that the cold shock would have damaged the coffee plant, but it seems to be surviving OK, so fingers crossed for that. 

The winds here have not stropped since Friday evening so we're now being very careful about locking rather than just closing the front door when we go to bed. As Sean Bean, in his iteration as Eddard Stark, would doubtless say 'Winter is Coming'. (And that's assuming it isn't already here)