And breathe ... 2 3

 Gordon Bennet life is throwing up some irritations  just now. 

I have lost my watch charger: since it is only ever in one of two places in the house this is absolutely incomprehensible, but we've looked in those two places and numerous others where we knew it wouldn't be, and wasn't,  and it has yet to show it's smug shiny charging prongs anywhere.  Hope now is that it got left in the Glasgow flat when we were over there last week. Surprised my watch hasn't needed charging since then, and I can't help feeling that surely I miust have charged it in the last seven days but who knows.....

My phone charger gave up the ghost overnight. My phone was 14% charged when I plugged it in last night, I listened to some audible stuff for half an hour then went to sleep about midnight. By 6 o'clock this morning the charge showed as 11% and it wasn't actually charging. New phone charger purchased by the OH at Tesco this morning. Hats off to him! 

Most unsettling was not being able to find some tickets that we need for this evening and tomorrow evening. Since I cannot believe I would not have transferred them to my e-nail ticket folder immediately upon receipt and forwarded the e-mail to the OH at the same time for our usual belt and braces  approach to such things, I suspect we never had an e-mail with the tickets attached in the first place. However I did not say this to ATG when I asked for duplicates as a) I can't be sure and b) I don't need the argument and c) why bother if they will re-send anyway. My major worry was that they would not arrive in time but full marks to ATG they arrived in less than an hour from me submitting the request for a duplicate set. 

So we are back off to Glasgow later today, staying two nights so that we can fit in two theatre performances ( although the buses are all higgledy  piggledy apparently because of roadworks near the theatre, just another irritation I could do without) and seeing the Tutankhamun exhibition tomorrow. I'm told it's very good - report here in due course no doubt. 

Meanwhile let's cheer ourselves up with a couple of penguins! 

Bad Day, Good Day

 So, Saturday was supposed to be such a good day. We were going up to Edinburgh, meeting an old friend in the early afternoon for a cup of tea and a bun, followed by an early evening meal with a recently retired friend and then we were going to the Festival Theatre to see Scottish Ballet's new ballet Mary Queen of Scots. 

The first thing to go wrong was that, when I rang to confirm arrangements for the tea and bun scenario on Thursday I discovered the friend and all his family were confined to bed with a terrible cold for the foreseeable future so he couldn't make it. Oh well we thought, that's OK, just means we can take  a later train into Edinburgh. 

Next up was a message on Saturday morning from the recently retired friend who was also bedridden with a lurgy and wouldn't be able to make it either. She said we could cancel the table she had booked for the meal or go regardless, she left it up to us. We considered cancelling, but then decided we'd quite benefit from a nice Italian meal, given the continuing stress around the flat so we decided to go. 

On the train into Edinburgh the OH checked the train times home. He had been convinced that on Saturdays, unlike Sundays, trains in the eveing were once an hour to Stirling, but his conviction had been misplaced. We then checked the running time of the ballet, whihc I was convinced was about 1 hour 20 and my conviction was also misplaced, as it was actually 2 hours 10 ( or 2 hours 20 depending on which Google answer you believed) This meant that we would miss the train just after ten, giving us a wait of 40/50 minutes for the Last Train Home just after 11, getting to Stirling at about midnight and home about half an hour after that. By the time we'd worked that out, I was not a happy bunny. 

Still we turned up at the restaurant ready to relax and enjoy an unhurried meal. We explained about our friend not being able to make it and the man checking us in said 'You should have phoned to tell us. Now there is a big problem rearranging tables'. He accompanied this with an exasperated sigh. 

Now my tolerance level for men speaking to me as though I am an idiot and a trouble maker had been well breached earlier in the week by a surveyor who treated me as though I were a cretin, and when I tied to insist he stop telling me something I had understood even before he told me it the first time, let alone after his third repetition and actually answered the question I was asking, had told me to 'stop shouting'. I wasn't shouting but I have noticed occasionally with other people that hurling an accusation of shouting  seems to be a new tactic for getting someone to shut up. Presumably they then back off lest they be thought rude. I suspect this is a tactic that only works in Britain. Anyway, I'd had enough of stroppy men for a week,  so I asked the maitre d', which is presumably how he saw himself, if he would prefer that we go somewhere else instead?  Quite why it should be such a major problem since it involved nothing more than possibly taking away a chair from  a table or even just having us sit at a table with an  empty chair I don't know. Note also the 'now there is a problem ...' which didn't straight out accuse us of being the problem but certainly wasn't accepting that it was his problem and nothing to do with us. I bet people are forever booking tables and then not turning up and we certainly hadn't done that! Although by then I was wishing we'd cancelled it. 

This did nothing at all to lighten my mood and since we were annoyed we skipped the bruschetta we'd been planning to have, and confined ourselves to one soft drink apiece with what we did eat.  I will say that the food was very nice and the waiting staff friendly and efficient, and had it not been for the attitude of the man with the table plan I'd be planning to go again. However he did have an attitude and we won't be going again even if it  is Italian and less than a minute's walk from the Festival Theatre. 

We didn't have coffee there but had that in the theatre bar instead. 

I have to give you that photo because it's the only one I have of the day.  Taking photos of the ballet was forbidden as usual. I think I could probably have taken one at the curtain call had we been there but we weren't. We didn't enjoy Act 1 so we left  in the interval. That at least meant we got the just after 9 train and were home just before half ten. Had we loved the ballet we would have bitten the bullet and stayed but it certainly wasn't worth, to us, the extra time and hanging about that staying until the end would have meant. 

I loved Mary's first act costume and I loved the music. The dancers were all excellent.  However there were too many gimmicks and for those of my readers who remember it, there was a lot of 'Pingu' movement. It was also very longwinded and repetitive in places. So repetitive indeed that the OH dropped off several times. Also given that this was a national Scottish company, who commissioned a ballet about a Scottish icon ( I know, it's weird that MQ0S IS an icon and I wouldn't accord her iconic status myself but there you go) I found it offensive that the ballet opened with the English Queen Elizabeth and that she was given equal prominence with Mary - certainly in Act 1 and as far as I could see from the synopsis in Act 2 as well. This wouldn't have mattered if the ballet had been called Mary and Elizabeth, or even, Elizabeth and Mary but it wasn't. It was called  Mary Queen of Scots and to build it around the concept that Mary was defined only in opposition to the ultimately ' winning' Elizabeth ( itself an historic construction of arguable validity) is the biggest act of cultural cringe I've seen in a   Scottish institution for - well not as long as I'd like, but certainly several years. 

So Saturday was a day to forget. Sunday we were promised rain all day which is what we go and I did some ironing, finished a jigsaw puzzle, read a book and did some sewing. It was much more enjoyable than Saturday was. 

Here's the puzzle 

It is on loan from my sister and she's coming to stay early in November so I wanted it done ( this was my second attempt) before then, so that she could take it home with her. It is very much a sign of my disturbed equilibrium last week that I was doing a jigsaw puzzle at all. I'm hoping I won't need to resort to another one any time soon. 

Happy Mail

 

Yes it's the 2025 Bonne Maman Advent Calendar. It arrived on Thursday which seems w-a-y- early to me, but at least we know it's arrived. Complete with the large bonus jar of the BM answer to Nutella. Yum! 

This is the third year we've had this and it makes me smile to think about it. Because four years ago when I saw someone with it on a You Tube video I laughed like a drain at the thought that anyone could take a jam advent calendar seriously. And yet, here we are. 

In other news I went to the U3A Crime Fiction group again last week and enjoyed it. I went to the Knitting Group again yesterday and enjoyed that too.. So I think they're now established as fixtures on the calendar. Things have not panned out quite so well with the Pilates class. I went one week, the next one was cancelled for lack of numbers and this week it's cancelled for half term. So I'm going to have to rethink that one. It was good in that it was close to home but I need something that I know is going to be there regularly, not a  hit and miss  event. It may be time to bite the bullet and join the local gym/swimming pool/ice rink conglomerate and I'll look into that next month. The rest of October is looking quite busy so we'll fit in some walks when the weather is nice, which apparently it's not going to be tomorrow! as out exercise and I'll focus on sorting out something else come November. 

Serendipity in Florence

The day we had earmarked for spending in the area around Il Duomo and a visit to its interior  turned out to be wet. I have to say that it rained at some stage every day we were in Florence, generally quite lightly. But this day was wet most of the time. We had not, as previously mentioned, reserved tickets to go and climb the Bell Tower, nor for climbing into the Dome itself. In theory you can visit the inside of the Cathedral for free, but when we arrived at about 10,00 a.m. there was a very long queue. Supposedly it was about two hours long. We walked to the frint where the entrance was roped off and no-one in the queue was going anywhere, so that was 2 hours plus however long it was before they let anyone in, and as I say it was wet. We sat and contemplated the outside of the cathedral for about half an hour, watching people come and go and the queue not move an inch, and trying to take  reasonable photographs of the outside,  and then  we decided to have a wander about, preferably along some small overhung streets as the rain was getting harder. 

This was how we fell across the Baptistry of San Lorenzo. It's huge and, having looked it up since, extremely important in Florentine history and architecture but what drew us in were the cloisters. You could just catch a glimpse of them from the street and we're suckers for cloisters at the best of times so we coughed up 9 euros apiece and walked in. They were lovely. Also dry.  As a bonus the tickets weren't; for the cloisters per se but the Medici Library which was on the second storey and fabulous. 

yup, very wet. This is half the long side of the Church, it's huge. 

the cloisters at ground level

and from the second storey

and a view of the first and second storeys

the Medici library 

 above and below the reading room 

yet again a magnificently painted ceiling and the question has to be why? did medieval Florentines spend most of their time on the floor? 

We didn't know much about San Lorenzo before we went to Florence and even now we know very little. Twenty or thirty years ago we'd have been more prepared, have read up more and known more about what to look at, not just here but Florence in general. And that's very laudatory but actually I wonder if perhaps just wandering about and following our noses and going to places that catch our eye and interest isn't in the end more enjoyable. I couldn't have appreciated the cloisters more if I had known the date they were built or who had designed them, we went to see them because we just like cloisters. And the Medici library was just a wonderful extra. 

Japanese Garden Reprise

I know, it should be Florence but we are all somewhat stressed over an ongoing situation with the Glasgow flat and I just can't face looking at more photos of Florence and deciding what to write and which photos to share. I'm hoping to calm down over the next couple of days and be able to concentrate better. 

Meanwhile Son No 2 is with us for a week and as the weather looked sort of OK-ish we decided to go back to the Japanese Garden at Cowden, which the OH and I visited last spring,  as in spring 2024. The OH is a big acer fan and son no 2 had never been and was keen to see it, so off we went. 

The weather turned beautiful; warm and sunny. Oddly when coming out of the office having presented our tickets I heard an early middle aged-ish man say to the woman he was with, 'we'll be glad of our coats, it's turned chilly'. Which astonished me as I just had a shirt and jumper on, and felt a bit warm tbh. And the OH is always telling me how I feel the cold. 

We had a lovely stroll around the garden followed by a not terribly satisfactory lunch in the cafe, mainly because two of us made bad choices. We all took lots and lots of photographs and here are a few of mine.

Son no 2 on the Bridge of Doom. I went over it last time; I wasn't going to make the mistake of doing it again! 

It's a very beautiful and peaceful place and we all enjoyed our visit very much. I'm sure that as we live here longer we will have many more visits. 

Another Lovely Walk

 It seems Sunday morning is  becoming our  walk time since yesterday we did a walk for the second Sunday morning in a row. Perhaps that's not quite often enough to establish it as a habit and certainly I can't see us venturing out if and when the weather turns, but yesterday it was fine and so we looked at the walk books and decided on Plean Country Park. 

It was a pleasant enough woodland walk, but it taught me that I prefer walks where I can see water. And also reminded us that walk book descriptions are not 100% to be relied upon. However we didn't get really lost, despite some very vague instructions at one point,  we met lots of friendly dogs, mostly with friendly owners and I took some nice photographs. 

A little bit of autumn colour in the trees/leaves

yay! a tree tunnel

and the would be arty DK shot! 

Taking of habits I went back to Knit Group last week and really enjoyed myself, I would have gone back to Pilates on Saturday but it was cancelled for lack of numbers ( hope that's not going to become a thing) and this morning I also went to the U3A crime fiction book group which again I enjoyed.So that all looks promising for establishing an autumn/winter routine which I feel is important. 

Tomorrow - more, and possibly the last of,  Florence.

A Lovely Start to October

 We've had a good few days, I thought I'd write them up before I did any more of Florence. 

First off we have a 'good grief, how long has that been hanging about unfinished?' craft project, which is now finished.

a day and night stuffed hare. I machined round this when I was having my sewing lessons a couple of years ago but then they stopped, at which point all it really needed was stuffing. However I have absolutely no faith in my ability to stuff anything, so it had languished in a drawer. Until about four days ago when I told myself to just get on with it, on the grounds that my stuffing expertise was not going to magically improve while the thing lay there untouched. So I got it out, stuffed it and then sewed up the gap. It does actually stand (?sit) on its own and I'm really pleased with it because 

1) it's a finished project

2) not only did I finish a project but I used up a lot of stuffing 

3) it's really nice

Next up - Happy Mail

It is a Christmas Bunting Knitting Kit from Debbie Abrahams. If you're not a long term reader you might like to check out my previous posts concerning my conversion to knitted Christmas Bunting which are here and  here . I was sort of vaguely aware that there were bunting kits other than the one I had already done,  and as I had enjoyed knitting the first one, and as I really liked this one, and as I got an e-mail offering me 10% off which came to just over the postage cost, I succumbed. 

And before anyone rolls their eyes heavenwards, can I just say I have already made a start!

Sunday was a lovely day and we decided to try another walk from one of our local walk books. Happily this one did not take us through a dank and dark canal tunnel partly excavated by the body snatchers Burke and Hare, but much more pleasantly around Loch Airthrey, which lies at the heart of the University of Stirling campus. The weather was glorious, as were the views. 

As when we went to Gartmorn Dam, there was a heron

Yesterday we went to lunch with some friends which was lovely and I got to look at someone else's wool stash which was fun. It wasn't really an occasion for photos. I'd hoped, since we were going into Perthshire aka Big Tree Country, for swathes of autumn colours on the trees, but it was still maybe a mite too early and possibly we weren't quite far enough north. Another couple of weeks maybe. 

Today we went to Dunfermline, mainly to catch The Lost Words exhibition; words by Robert Macfarlane and images by Jackie Morris. I'm a fan of Morris, Macfarlane not so much. That said, I will admit, albeit through gritted teeth, that I found his words on this occasion to be mainly very well done; hugely evocative and, unlike his books, he hadn't put himself at the centre of them. Sadly, and oddly I thought,  taking pictures at the exhibition was  expressly forbidden, which I found doubly irritating as there were no cards or postcards of the artwork to be had in the shop where there were various other things related to the exhibition for sale. So here's a picture of the really nice cafe in the Dunfermline Library and Gallery where we had a light lunch after visiting the exhibition.

Dunfermline has a very splendid abbey, not that we went in, and a very steep set of streets with lovely views towards the hills.

There was also a very nice craft shop, mainly sewing, but with some wool as well. I didn't buy anything, as they didn't have the specific thing I went in search of, but I'm sure I'll be back - to both the shop and to the town as there was lots more to it that seemed worth exploring than we had time for today. 

Florence - Buildings and Views

 I can't really call this one Florence - Architecture, much as I'd love to, but I just don't know enough about architecture for that not to feel pretentious. So this is a collection of photos of famous and perhaps not so famous buildings in Florence and some views over the city which were taken from various different places. I did my best to keep the omnipresent building cranes out of my photos but it was a difficult thing to do and occasionally I failed. 

above and below, photos taken from windows of the Uffizi - you can see the rain on the hills in the top one

this is the terrace cafe at the Uffizi looking towards Il Duomo

and this from the same place looking over to the much nearer Palazzo Vecchio

This is the front of Santa Croce from the ground ...

...and this is Santa Croce from part way up the Palazzo Vecchio. You can see how far back it goes, it's absolutely huge and presumably it would have cost too much, even in Florence, to face the sides and back with marble as well as the front!

This is a very small part of Il Duomo, it's impossible to get all of it in at ground level. It's amazing. Years ago someone told me I wouldn't like it because it was garish, but you know, I did like it. As I said to someone else, I wouldn't build one like it in my back garden but taken for what it is it's rather lovely. And totally breathtaking. 

This is the bell tower of Il Duomo. You can pay to climb it. We didn't. 

Part of the charm of Florence, like Paris, is just being there and slowing down and looking at stiff that might not be famous but somehow says something about the city. We did a fair bit of sitting and people watching and building spotting; this one was in the square in front of the Cathedral. I loved it.You can also see how crowded the area around the cathedral is, even in the wet! It rained quite hard that day. 

Today's  was definitely a photo heavy post!

Florence - Art

 or some of it anyway. 

The main pull of Florence for me was the art so it will be no surprise to anyone that we spent our first day in the Uffizi. The OH was inclined to the view that it wouldn't take us that long as it was 'only two floors' Ha! 

It was only two floors but they were both huge. Also the lift wasn't functioning so that was a lot of stairs to climb. The top of the Uffizi is a l-o-n-g way up. In fact it's so far up that at the top there is a notice advising you not to look down. 

It's very regimented. They call the Alhambra 'the factory' in Granada, but honestly that's  a lot more relaxed than this was. I forget how many times our tickets were checked but it was at least four,and we had our bags scanned as well. There is also a one way system so you can't just check out the bits you're interested in and then leave, or skip bits. We did rush past the sculpture. We know nothing about sculpture. And to be fair there are lots of seats so whenever we felt the need for a sit down and a breath catch, there was somewhere to sit. Full marks on that score. And of course the places was rammed with tourists. 

I feel to fully appreciate the paintings in Florence you really need at least an MA in Early Italian Religious Painting. Otherwise it's just a lot of Annunciations and Visits of the Magi and lives of saints that, if you';re not Catholic, you've probably never heard of. There are, I discovered, only so many annunciations and Visits of the Magi that I can cope with and the Uffizi reached that limit quite early on. 

However, a few highlights

This one does come from a series of a life of a saint of whom I had never heard and depicts his miraculous repair of a broken kitchen sieve. (I kid you not). Personally I cannot detect a kitchen sieve, broken or otherwise, in this picture, unless it's the rhomboid(?) on the floor near the right hand corner, bu anyway it tickled me. 

I was gobsmacked by the skill of whoever painted this picture of an open book 

Then there were the Botticellis , of course 

That birth of Venus photo is rubbish but as always with famous pictures there were crowds round it - and the Primavera of course - which is why it's sideways on. I'm not bothered because I bought a post card. For once a gallery shop actually stocked a postcard of a picture that I wanted. 

And there were just loads more; a beautiful Leonardo, some lovely Rafaels although not many, a few amazing portraits,  mainly by Flemish artists! 

The Leonardo

and if you looked at that angel and said Gosh, how Burne Jones is that? - well snap! 

The problem with galleries like this ( apart from the tourists) is overload. Ideally you would live next to one, and visit every day for  a year and just look at a very limited number of paintings each day, and then you could appreciate each of them more fully.  Counsel of perfection I know. So I shall just be grateful that I got the chance to go at all. 

Wool stats and finished projects for September

 A more satisfying result than the last couple of months, that's for sure. In was only 100g which was the Yarn Unique artists club skein and I have not ordered September's even though it is Matisse so I'm giving myself a pat on the back for that. Out was 464; net decrease for the month 364, net decrease for the year now 5840. So that's something. 

Unsurprisingly, I finished yet another  pair of socks - a very old skein from The Knitting Goddess and these were for the OH. A bit subdued for him but he seemed pleased with them regardless, and they went on holiday to Florence. 

The 'big finish' was this stole for which I used the Giddy yarns 2023 Advent which was A  Midsummer Night's Dream themed. I find stoles easier to wear than other shawl shapes which was why I chose this pattern, the Adventuresome wrap by Ambah O Brian which someone had given me as a gift a while back. It too made a debut in Florence. Once I got going it was easier to knit than it probably looks. 

No predictions whatsoever about how October's numbers will go, I don't have a clue! 

Florence - Food

I thought just to mix things up  a bit I'd do Florence by theme rather than day by day, and I'm starting with the food because we arrived late afternoon and went out for a stroll and a meal so the first photos I have are of our first evening meal. 

We had pre-booked tickets for the Uffizi on our first full day so we went out to time our walk to there, so that we could turn up on time, and then once we'd found that we had a quick look around the Piazza della Signoria,  and then wandered off down several of the side streets trying to decide where to eat. It's always a bit of  gamble isn't it? Too close to a tourist hot spot and you're sure you're getting ripped off; too far away and can you make yourself understood/find anything on the menu that you recognise? 

Anyway we found a little place that looked nice, and the menu had several things on it that we did recognise,  and it had pannacotta on the dessert menu so we went in. And we had a lovely meal. We started with bruschetta, which was fabulous

and followed that up with lasagne for me and wild boar pappardelle for the OH ( don't have photos of either of those and then for dessert I had the pannacotta and the OH had tiramisu. Sadly the pannacotta was a bit gelatine heavy and so I wished I'd gone with  the tiramisu myself but you live and learn. 

And here's the OH looking wildly enthusiastic about being in Italy. 

The next day we had 'lunch' in the cafe at the Uffizzi!

No photos of  the evening  meal which we had in our hotel; I had ravioli which was very nice and the OH had a cheeseburger. 

I don't think we had any lunch the next day as we had booked a restaurant for the evening which had been recommended by a friend. It was, as I often say, Not Cheap and we wanted to do full justice to it. so we 'saved ourselves' as the old phrase has it. 

It may not have been cheap but the food was beautiful and the views from our table overlooking the Arno were amazing. There was great bread with olive oil and balsamic vinegar, the OH started off with a risotto with lemon, mint and zucchini, and then we both had the same main and dessert. The main was lamb with little cubes of potato, leek. onion, and plums and the dessert was a chocolate and hazelnut concoction that was totally delicious. 

The views from our table 

to the left ( Ponte Vecchio) 

straight over the river

and to the right

I didn't actually take any photos of the food but I did take one of the table and it does show the  OH's risotto

A special evening.

And the following night, given that we had to be up early the next day for breakfast and then the airport transfer, we ate at the hotel again and this time I follower the OH's lead and we both had cheeseburgers.

I don't know why the OH is always telling people that I don't like foreign food. I think what he means is that I don't like curry and although that is foreign, and although I don't like it, this leaves a long list of foreign cuisines that I'm happy with; Italian, Spanish, Swedish,  Czech, Austrian, Mexican, North African and Chinese.  As well as plenty that I have yet to try. Also, if you've been paying attention, you'll note I had one more Italian meal on this trip than he did!