Happy Mail - Not Yarn

 

Yes - more Emma Bridgewater mugs. I say that as though we had gazillions of the things but in fact until now it was just the two winter flower ones and the one I got the OH for Valentines Day. 

I have however eyed up these two for a while as I love them, but I've never succumbed because EB china  is  Not Cheap and we are not short of mugs. 

I do consider myself  fairly immune to e-mails giving me 'amazing savings' and 'limited time bargain offers'; the only thing that amazes me really is how many marketing e-mails I get, because  I do a massive unsubscribe once every three months or so.

That said, having steadfastly ignored the half price offer on this set which had been landing in my in-box for  a couple of weeks,  I gave in when it was reduced by 60% because it was an absolute bargain and the mugs will bring us joy. Mine are the hares and his are the birds and we're both very happy and in fact, drinking from them even as I type. 

At Last! The Japanese Garden Post

 A friend of mine in Stirling has occasionally posted pictures of a beautiful Japanese garden that she visits, especially in Spring, and with our free day in Glasgow before the Loire holiday (ha!) I suggested we go. 

It's beautiful and we had a really lovely time; arrived in the morning looked at the gardens, had lunch in the tearoom then did a small part of their woodland walk. Here's the website if you're curious about it and its history, which is fascinating, and here are some of the many photos I took. 

we walked across this. It's fairly wide and the water is shallow but it's still incredibly difficult to negotiate - obviously a function of the 90 degree angles. It's a bridge that represents life and the way we have to accommodate the unexpected. (I should have known that was an omen perhaps?)

gravel garden

cherry blossom - obvs!

a part of the woodland walk where all the tree stumps have little doors, windows, porch roofs etc. Enchanting. 

and azaleas - such a beautiful colour. I expect it's a lovely place to visit at most times of the year, but I think spring is probably the best one. 

Early warning - I'm going away shortly - well on Monday, and I'll be away for three weeks, variously in Nottingham, Glasgow and then, barring the unforeseen, Finland. So radio silence here for a while but lots to blog about when I get back. 

The intention is that there will be at least three more posts before I go, but you know what they say about the road to hell....

So it's not exactly Masterchef, but

 

it tasted lovely. 

We'd seen some plums in the supermarket a couple of weeks ago but they were as hard as bullets, then a few days ago the OH was in the supermarket again and bought  a punnet thinking they were ripe. In fact one was a lot softer than the rest, obviously the one he has 'tested' and while we waited for the others to catch up, the soft one started to go mouldy. 

So on Wednesday I chopped them up and threw them in a pan with some sugar, some cinnamon, and a little bit of ginger and then yesterday I made a bit of crumble topping and did some individual crumbles. We were in town because I had a routine breast screening thing to go to so while we were there we picked up some vanilla ice cream to have with the crumble. Delicious. 

We will be having ice cream again this evening as the OH made some mango and passionfruit ice cream last week ( fortunately NOT using the kefir as a base!!!) and we'll have that with some mango. Anyone would think it was summer - although not if they looked out of the window. 

Cold Showers, Kefir and Early Morning Walks

A new series of Michael Moseley's Just One Thing started on Radio 4 a few weeks ago, not long  before he met his tragic end on a Greek Island. I usually hear at least the beginning because it comes on straight after More or Less which we listen to before we get up (late rising Wednesday we call it) and then I get dressed to Just One Thing. I'd been thinking for  awhile that it might be fun to try and do some of the Just One Things; go back to the beginning, listen to the first one, see if I could incorporate it into my life and then after a week listen to the next one and try incorporating that one as well, and so on, I have often been heard to remark that if you did all the just one things you wouldn't have any time to live life, but it seemed like a Good and Fun Thing to Try so I did. 

The first one was early morning walks and I didn't do too badly with this. Early morning apparently means 'in the two hours after breakfast', so I didn't have to get up at the crack of dawn to do it and courtesy of a new audio book (Jodi Taylor's The Good The Bad and The History, which I absolutely forbade myself to listen to at any other time of day I got off to a flying start. This one was going to be a fixture I told myself. And then the rain came. And it didn't; go away. And while I am reasonably happy to walk in winds that aren't tornado speed, or the cold - it's not as though I don't have a ton of knitted accessories to keep me warm, I draw the line at walking in the wet. So I managed four days of that before Showerageddon, and I have fitted in the occasional one since. If the weather stays OK I shall pick it up again shortly. 

The second one was eating fermented foods and the easiest one seemed to be kefir, i.e. fermented yoghurt, although I was fairly convinced that  we weren't going to be able to source this in Orkney. However I was doing the place a disservice, because the Kirkwall Tesco not only had kefir but they even had it in an appealing flavour, mango and passionfruit. So we bought that, four tubs in a pack and the day after we bought it I ate a tub of it. The day after that was not nice. I don't want to be too graphic here, but if you Google something like 'side effects of kefir' and then bear in mind that I suffered all of them you will get the picture. Doctor Google did tell me that if I persevered the side effects would wear off, but I wasn't prepared to put up with them and how they made me feel for however long it took them to wear off for the doubtful health benefits that might ultimately accrue. 

Number three, which I must admit I haven't actually listened to yet is cold showers. I have seen that it is  cold showers and I honestly don't think I can go there. Having said that for my last three I have turned down the temperature at the end of the shower, not to cold exactly but certainly to 'gosh is there any warmth in this water?' levels for the last 30 or 40 seconds. Michael Moseley is not the first person I have heard extolling the benefits of the cold shower so I expect I will listen to the  program in a while  and then see if I am brave enough....

Meanwhile here are a few flower pictures that I took on yesterday's not-so-early-but-definitely-between-breakfast-and-lunch walk. 

is this the biggest bag of liquorice fudge in the world?

 

It has to be a contender, right?

We've had some visitors from South; they are the ones for whom I made the little hanging VW camper, although I find they have upgraded to something larger and smarter - they were still delighted with the  cross stitch though. They are touring Scotland and spending three days on Orkney and asked if there was anything I'd like them to bring  that I couldn't get here. Without much hope, as it is difficult to source these days, John Bull having given up on it, I said not to put themselves out but if they could find some liquorice fudge that would be great. 

And when they arrived on Monday afternoon they presented me with the huge bag pictured above. And a bottle of wine. We had a lovely time catching up. some of it inside and then when the sun came out we went for a walk on one of the local beaches. After that we took them  out for  a meal at our local restaurant and then they spent the night in their van parked on our drive. We waved them away yesterday morning to continue their Orcadian adventure and I hope they are having a good time, although it has to be said that the weather, apart from that first afternoon has been pretty poor. It hasn't rained heavily,  or all the time but ... well it's been damp. Orkney is at its best in the sunshine really but they did catch some of that on Monday so that was good.  

Alessandro the Visiting Cat

Just as the Cat Markko got used to being Only Cat we started getting visits from a smaller marmalade cat (I have done the line about how my husband has that only-visible-to-cats Sucker brand on his forehead haven't I?) 

He was just an occasional drop in for a while and then his owner went on holiday and obviously dissatisfied with the service from the designated  pro-tem staff at home, he became a bit of a fixture here. Since then, he seems to divide his time between his real owner and us, plus of course lurking in the undergrowth in our garden hoping to catch a bunny. 

One of them did bring in a bunny the other day. I swear we were out of the living room for two minutes at most, didn't even see a cat enter the house, but there it was on the living room floor when we went back in - a bunny corpse. Just to even things up a bit, we did manage to save a mouse the other day that had been brought in 'to play', so its a 1-1 draw rather than Cats 2 - Wildlife 0. We're not sure who was responsible for the bunny but we suspect Alessandro because he also had a flea on his ear that day. Wild baby bunnies are cute to look at but flea ridden. 

I don't object to Alessandro despite my No More Cats Edict because he shows no sign of deciding he wants to up sticks and move in permanently. His official name at his official owners is Boy-Boy but all our recent cats have had names that end in O and I couldn't keep calling him Jinja Cat. So Alessandro he became.  He's very affectionate, and very playful, and both of those are good things, but he's also very vocal. I swear I have never met such a vocal cat, and that can be wearing. But we put up with it. 

He's also very photogenic. 

And yes he snuggles and sleeps a lot too. 

It's been a whole week????

 since I last posted? Good Grief. 

The thing is, nothing is happening. The weather is horrible so we're not really going out anywhere. I'm knitting and crocheting but I keep that stuff for end of month round ups these days - and also, as the blanket is a mega project it seems to be taking ages and contrariwise not taking up as much wool as I might have liked. I am dong some reading but we've been a bit heavy on book posts here recently, and watching some telly - mainly old series of The Great British Sewing Bee. 

I have however discovered a list of things I was going to write about from last month so over the coming  days you should get something about a trip to Inverness, Alessandro the visiting cat, and the Japanese garden we visited before setting off for our aborted french trip. 

A propos of the latter I had an e-mail from NFU this morning. 

Your claim was recently settled and we'd be very interested to hear more about your experience.

We're always working to improve the service we deliver, and by answering a few short questions - which should take no more than 5 minutes - you'll help us to get better at what we do.  I really don't think they want my response to this. But perhaps I should let them have it regardless?

Insurance Update

 In the interests of fairness I should record that, after intimating to our insurance company that we were planning to make a complaint on Friday, we were telephoned on Monday morning by someone with whom we had not previously dealt. She said that they had taken another look at the claim because of course these things are 'always  reviewed' and although they could not pay out under the cancellation clause because, as previously noted here or elsewhere, we hadn't died, been made redundant or had the house fall down around our ears, they could pay us something more under a different clause - so wibbly wobbly timey winey, we have more money. Instead of being 2/3 out of pocket for the whole thing we are now only 1/3  and there is still the possibility that BA might do us a refund for a return flight we didn't take. So we accepted that and graciously agreed not to pursue our complaint although she said we could still do that if we liked. Perhaps if we'd persisted we might have got more, but really I have better things to do with my time and nerves than expend them on this. It could have been much worse, so we have learned the lesson about checking and re-checking holiday insurance and we'll press on. Onwards and Upwards. 

Firth Park in May

 We only just got to the park in May, things like ruined holidays having thrown us off somewhat but I remembered in time. The growth since April was spectacular and the change is more noticeable from my new viewpoint than it was from the old one in 2021.  There  were so many lovely things to look at that I took more photos than usual and even on Facebook I put an extra pic in the appropriate album; I try to do the general view plus only one close up but actually put in two this time. And I have no reason to restrict myself on the blog. So, photos - 

the usual viewpoint. The stone arch is completely hidden this month by the leaf cover on the trees. 

but here it is at ground level, just to prove it's still there 

a small carpet (rug?!) of forget me not

the small burn with the water hardly visible through the plant growth

yeah, no idea, but isn't it a pretty colour?

a rather splendid laburnum and 

 a rampant rose. 

Looking forward to seeing how it looks in June. 

Hooray! Two Books I Enjoyed

 and one I really didn't. 

The ones in the photo are the Waterstones Sci-Fi/Fantasy Books of the month for April and May. You honestly couldn't get two books from the same genre that were further apart but I liked them both. 

Fourth Wing is apparently very divisive amongst the Sci-F-/Fantasy community although I had no idea of this when I started reading it on the long drive back to Orkney after our aborted holiday. Luckily it was very immersive and I read almost the whole thing in a day. When I first started it I thought I was not going to like it - because let's face it I wasn't in a good to be pleased, and quite  a lot of the early elements of the plot were going over old ground; pushy parents, sibling rivalry, elite military squadrons, dragons, fatal training, etc etc. But the characters were largely quite engaging, some of the nicer ones did actually die, along with some if not all of the nasty ones, and, given that it's the first of a series, there was a nice plot arc developing by the end. I'm not quite sure what the controversy is all about. I've only seen it reported second or third hand in a few knitting groups, and I can't be bothered to enquire further. It seems to be mainly hard sci-fi readers moaning about how it's not hard sci-fi. Possibly they were led astray by the title and thought they were going to be reading some sort of Top Gun on a made up planet type thing. Given that it becomes obvious very early on that that is not what you're getting with this book I don't know why they don't just stop reading once they realise that. Anyway as I once said at Saturday Slaughters criticising a book for not being the sort of book you like to read isn't really valid criticism at all. (I don't think that was a sentiment that went down well but you know, it is true. I don't like psychological thrillers but I never dissed one in the group by saying well I didn't like this because it was a psychological thriller set on a sun kissed island  and I wanted to read a police procedural set in rain drenched  Manchester. I dissed them by saying the characters were cardboard, or the plot had holes in it you could drive  a tank through.) Anyway that was Fourth Wing; an enjoyable and entertaining, if shallow, read.

The Ferryman was something quite other. It was very readable, but it addressed some deep ideas in a challenging and sometimes disorienting way. There were a lot of twists and turns in it, and every time my reaction was, ' there's no way I could have seen that coming but now that it has come, yes of course it had to be that way'. And there isn't just one major twist but two and several smaller ancillary but important ones as well. It's clever, it's unsettling, its full of surprises, it's like nothing I have ever read before. If I have a teensy weensy criticism I would say it's maybe about 50 pages too long but that's nitpicking. Wholeheartedly recommended. 

I note in passing that this brings me almost up to date with the Waterstone's Books of the Month. So that's pleasing. I have yet to tackle February but I may get to that this month (no hard promise though)  and of course I won't be able to pick up June's until I pass through Glasgow next month. 

The one I didn't like was an Audible buy called The Charity Shop Detective Agency. A subpar Richard Osman rip off, also the first of a series. I shan't be getting any more, and indeed rather resent the fact that I was suckered into wasting an Audible credit on this one. 

The Great Wool Sort Out Update 4*

 First the stats which were very very pleasing. Wool in was 800g which is quite a lot but the bulk of that was my Monet 'Consolation for the lost holiday' yarn and the rest was a little bit of commercial 4-ply in solid colours to hold double with my sock leftovers in the granny stripe blanket where needed.

Wool out was a massive 4720g! There were two main reasons for this. One was the blanket in which I have used 2300g to date. Sadly there still seems to be a lot of left over wool to go ... but here are a couple of photos of it so far. It's not tasteful but I'm still very happy with it and it is gong to keep me very warm in the winter. 

The other reason I did so well with reducing the wool mountain was this. 

This was a crate of wool which has lived for a long time under the bed in the spare room and the contents didn't even really count as stash as some of it is so old it goes back to our first house in Leeds, and some of it came from my mother when she died.  And yes, that is some Rowan Denim there on the top and yes I did sell that. Most of the rest went off to the charity shop and the box now looks like this 

A few useful bits of DK which I have a project in mind for and some half knitted baby jumpers which I plan to finish and donate. Fingers crossed there will be another empty box by the end of this month. 

In the interests of full disclosure there is also another container of wool lurking under the spare room bed, one of those soft sided zip-up things. I'm really not sure what is in there, other than a half completed purple camel (probably best not to ask) but I plan to dig it out and have a look  sometime in July. 

I'm still thrilled that the cumulative reduction of stash for this year is 7099g. Amazing what you can do when you apply yourself. 

Completed projects in May - such a poor result they don't warrant a post to themselves. I did a pair of socks for myself 

pattern Vanilla Latte Socks, and the yarn was from The Lonely Knitter's Dr Who Collection in the colour Clara. 

And then the non-knitting thing was a cross stitch tree decoration for some friends who are coming to visit us, in their VW camper van, later this month. 

It is not an impressive total. I have been working on some things that are almost finished and of course the blanket takes up a lot of time and I've tended to privilege that because it is relaxing and oh boy have I needed thoughtless relaxing crafting this month. However I have marked my report card with Must Try Harder and hopefully there will be more to show at the end of this month. We're not planning on going anywhere, except the OH to the Ness of Brodgar dig at the end of the month so in theory I have lots and lots of time. 

* I don't really expect these posts to be of much interest to anyone other than me by the way, I just do it as an aide memoire so that I can see how I'm doing and how far I have come.