Getting There

Absolute nightmare. There is no getting away from the fact that Japan is a long way from Scotland. And that means a long time in the air. In our case it also meant a long connection time in Dubai.  So we had to check in in Glasgow four hours before our first flight to Dubai, that took eight hours and was full of the most restless passengers I have ever encountered on an international flight, up and down like yo-yos and congregating in the aisles, then we had six hours in Dubai before the plane to Tokyo and that was another nine hours. And then we had to tackle Japanese Immigration which took - well I was going to say forever, but obviously that would be a lie! it did take hours though. Our transfer driver was getting more and more agitated, sending us messages saying he was waiting for us and we were sending messages back saying we were wafting for bags, going through immigration, we were through immigration and where was he now? By the time we got to our hotel it was almost two in the morning local time and we'd ben up for about 30 hours. We were definitely ready for bed. It was just as well we were so tired,  or we might have been even more dismayed by the size of our room. (It was very small). But as it was, all we cared about was finding somewhere to put the cases so we didn't fall over them on the way to the bathroom and crawling into bed for some much needed sleep.

I Iz back

 

I iz also full of cold, as is the OH, which is unfortunate as there is lots of catching up to do as there always is when you've been away and although I say 'full of cold' what I mean is basically poleaxed by some sort of bug which has snuck in while we thought all we were dealing with was lots of sneezing and the odd cough. 

We got back on Sunday afternoon and our suitcases arrived early evening Monday. This was due to what we were told was a safety protocol preventing the opening of the baggage hold door, which may or may not have been true. I almost wrote 'have been the case' there, but decided against ... The luggage was at least delivered to our door at the airline's expense and it did mean that I was relieved of the guilty feeling that I should  unpack and fill the washing machine as soon as we had got home and greeted both son no 2 and the cat. 

(I have now done two lots of washing but have yet to approach the ironing board. )

I have counted up this morning and I had 328 photos of our travels on my phone, now safely transferred to my laptop. They won't all be appearing on the blog, but at least I will have plenty to choose from. Some general thoughts on Japan and on cruising are upcoming, plus naturally a destination by destination description of 'what we did on our holidays'. Probably interspersed with our day to day stuff now we're back home, but fingers crossed I'll get it all in before Christmas. Or even Advent Season. 

A Relaxing Afternoon Out

 

I seemed to have been spending a lot of time indoors at the end of last week, plus we had son no 2 with us and we hadn't done much together,  so on Sunday I insisted we go out for a while. We ended up going to the Nature /RSPB reserve at Loch Leven which on paper looked like just what I needed. In the event that RSPB place is not at the end of the loch I would have liked to be at, i.e. the end with the island castle so that was a bit sad, but not, you know, huge. 

There is a heritage trail which goes all the way round and I hope to go back on several occasions in future,  join it at different points and walk a different bit of it each time. That said we did the wetlands walk which was about the right length for us, although sadly you don't see an awful lot of the loch as you do that, then we treated ourselves to some hot chocolate and cake in the cafe. As I said, a walk that loses us about 18 calories, then we stuff our faces with 256 more. There's a small shop as well, so I picked up my first pack of Christmas cards for this year. 

My packing is just about done although I was fazed by learning that Emirates, with whom we are flying, do not allow women to take  a piece of cabin baggage and a handbag. Every other airline I have ever used allows that, even Easyjet! On the upside at least I checked, rather than pitching up at the airport tomorrow  with an extra bag that wasn't allowed. Other than that it went relatively smoothly which is a good thing as I'm a teeny bit nervous still and didn't need to get stressed over the packing. 

So, a bientot! 

Wool stats and finished projects for September

 yes, I'm getting the standard posts (wool, books) out of the way early this month because the holiday is not far away now and when I come back I don't want to have to face doing those when I could be blogging about the trip. 

Just for info, we go on Wednesday and will be back just in time for the clock change; son no 2 is holding the fort here and cat sitting while we're gone. We are going to Japan; flying to Tokyo for a few days and then doing a cruise which circumnavigates Japan and also includes a stop in South Korea. I've gone through a few reactions since we booked it, settled for months on 'apprehensive' and I'm now slowly tipping over into 'excited'. Hopefully the dial will get to 'very excited ' at some point. I haven't told many people where we're going, but I'm very pleased that I told Heather way back in spring when we first booked it, otherwise she would never have known and she was so excited for us. It's a big holiday but it's a joint celebration of our Big Birthdays and everyone we know who has been there says it's wonderful, so fingers crossed. 

Meanwhile, the wool stats. In was 150g, of which 100g was this month's self striping sock club, currently half knit up (yay!) The other 50g was something I bought to make a present with for Christmas. Since it was Rowan Kidsilk Haze the present isn't growing particularly quickly but it will be ready in time. Out was 600g,  400g of this, which I bought in August,  went into the new top for my holiday, 54g got used up in a hat which is also a  Christmas present, 30g into my long term project and 116g was given away. Net decrease for the month was 450g, and for the year to date is 1942g. All in the right direction. I'd like to have a huge decrease in the next couple of months before the yearn advents arrive in December, but I'm not hopeful.  Especially since I won;t be getting much done on the holiday. Of course I'm taking knitting but probably only socks so we'll see how it goes. 

Meanwhile here's the top - not a great photo but it's very pretty, and it fits! The colour is much nicer than it shows here - a cornflower blue. 

And the hat. Yet again it's the fisherman's cap. I knitted this from stash yarn, with a 4ply and a suri alpaca held together which makes it lovely and warm. It doesn't seem much for a month but I did some cross stitch as well which was fun but it's soooo much slower than knitting. 

There may be one more post before we go but definitely not two, as Tuesday is dedicated to packing!

September Books

 

I read six books in September and started another and for the first time in ages there were more non crime than crime, and I found that very pleasing. 

The DNF, which was more a HES ( hardly even started ) was The Sewing Machine by Natalie Fergie. I got this from Borrowbox late at night and was somehow fooled into thinking it wasn't yet another bloated family saga told over decades of the C20, in which men are men and go off to war and women are downtrodden but find themselves by achieving financial independence in some fairly non-male threatening way. In the event this is exactly what this was. I think I gave it 50 pages before I sent it back. 

So with that out of the way ... the first one I finished was Juliet Barker's The Brontes: A Life in Letters ,which is obviously a re-read. I was rather concerned to find that I was not as annoyed by Charlotte and Emily as I remember being in the past; however I read it partly as preparation for rereading Barker's  monumental joint biography of all four Bronte children and I'm fairly sure that once I embark on that I will find Charlotte, at least, as irritating as ever.   Unless I have mellowed a great deal since I last read it. 

The book club chose a J D Kirk, not at my suggestion I hasten to add. It was his latest, called 'Better the Devil. It went down well which isn't surprising,. Quite a few members were already fans and it was the mixture as before; a bit of a plot, good interaction between team members  and lots of humour, sometimes very dark. 

After that was Robert Harris' Agrippa which had been very well reviewed and which I used an Audible credit for. This was a mistake. Obviously Harris has decided that Agrippa was a fairly stolid, 'follow orders and support the man in charge' military type which presumably works well  on the page. The story is told in the first person and sadly the narrator had decided that he needed to make Agrippa someone with no expression in his voice at all, presumably because he was a fairly stolid military type etc This made for dullness. In fact it made it a very good book to fall asleep to which hadn't at all been the plan. In fairness it straightened out for me a lot of history that I had been confused about before; also taught methat Augustus really wasn't a loud cuddly Brian Blessed type, he was a murdering, power hungry horror (I Claudius reference there for any reader old enough to catch it). I came to the conclusion that overall the book  would have been better as  a read than a listen. 

Next up was Savage her Reply by Deirdre Sullivan which retells the Irish myth of the Children of Lir, who were turned into swans by their stepmother. Sullivan tells the story from the point of view of the stepmother and makes her credible and sympathetic.  I was fascinated by this book and read it over only a few days, helped by the fact that Sullivan writes beautifully. Her prose is poetic without being pretentious and it flows like a river. Highly recommended if   myths and/or lyrical writing are your thing. 

Finally got around to Frankly, the memoir by Nicola Sturgeon of her life in Scottish politics. I won't say it was totally disillusioning, but politics, even when pursued in a good cause, seems to be a dirty business by default. 

And finally another crime novel, The Midnight Feast by Lucy Foley. I got this from Borrowbox because her latest book, which is a new Miss Marple novel commissioned by the Agatha Christie estate isn't available for months from the library and I thought this might give me a taste of her writing. It's less a crime novel than a ' who are all these people, how are they connected and what is going to happen next' novel. It was soooooooooooooooo slow. I got so impatient with it. Multiple POVs, and two time periods, and at the end the number of connections between this seemingly random group of people stretched credibility to its borders and beyond. I'm not saying that I don't like loose ends to be tied up in a book because I do. What I'm saying is that not all loose ends need to end up in the same oversized knot. Very disappointing. 

How long have you known me?

 I could make a guess if you told me how surprised you were to hear that last Friday I went with my friend S to the Barbie Exhibition at Kelvingrove in Glasgow. 

If your reaction is ' that sounds like a fun thing to do and I bet you enjoyed it' I've known you for less than ten years and probably more like three. 

If it is 'You? And Barbie? I can't quite believe that' then you've known me a long time and it's probably time we had a catch up. I am not the same as teenage/twenties me. 😄

I was not brought up to appreciate fun, or to feel that it's OK to do fun things just because they are fun,  and also that some things you should never admit to finding fun at all. Barbie would very much fall into the latter category. However I have learned over the past few years, occasionally with great difficulty,  that actually there is nothing wrong with fun; in fact it can add greatly to the enjoyment of life and of course I have also had to learn that it is also not wicked to enjoy life.  So when S and I were wondering what to do on our latest jaunt we thought Barbie, that might be fun, and we went. And it was. 

It was also a bit overwhelming. I had no idea that there had been well over 200 iterations of Barbie, nor that she had followed so many careers ( quite often totally unsuitably dressed) nor that she had owned such an extensive property portfolio. We alternated between 'I remember that' and 'After my time' and 'I don't think they sold that one in the UK.'

I never had a Barbie and I don't think I ever hankered after one, certainly not in the same way that I hankered after Sindy her UK equivalent. But she was there, in the background, in all the toy shops and endlessly advertised on television so a peripheral part of my growing up. I was  astonished by this piece of information recorded in the exhibition

here are a few Barbies - there were cabinets and cabinets of them 

and here are some Kens - I think this is every version of Ken they every made 

Seems like enough!

Bloody Scotland Days 2 and 3 - and an unintended consequence.

I went to two events on Saturday  with my friend D, and they were both a huge improvement on the Friday one, which was a bit of a relief. 

One was this 

I didn't think, going in, that I had read any of these authors but once the event began I realised that I had read a Simon Marks and been distinctly unimpressed. And after listening to him I'm still not going to go and read any more. My friend bought a Sarah Hilary and I bought a Patricia Gibney and once we've each read our own we're going to swap.  Both she and Sarah Hilary were interesting and thoughtful and I think I will enjoy both their books. Report in due course, naturally. Meanwhile D and I were both very taken with Patricia Gibney's plaid jumper and took the time afterwards to tell her so. D later found it on line and it is eye wateringly expensive. As in mother of the bride outfit type expensive. So I won't be buying one, but I still like it. 

The afternoon one was this 

and I was scoring 2 out of 3 here as I used to read James Oswald, and indeed went to an author event with him at Orkney Library which I'm sure must feature on the blog somewhere,  until his police procedurals became more Woo Woo Weird than I am comfortable with my police procedurals being ; in fact make that much more since I'm fairly intolerant of that sort of thing. Apparently it's known as genre blending and is very much a current publishing trend - who knew? Caro Ramsay was excellent; very funny, very down to earth. I assumed I would enjoy listening to her as I enjoy her books and I bought a pre-signed copy of her latest paperback. Nothing sartorial of note here. I didn't take to Mr Andrew James Greig despite his efforts to be self deprecating and funny because neither of those things quite came off ; largely I suspect because at heart he is not a man who feels he should be self deprecating and is doing it under duress. 

I was rather startled to find myself buying three books over the weekend but one of them was part of a Christmas present for someone else, and the other two were both paperbacks so it didn't break the bank. And the last time I bought a new physical book was last September when I treated myself to Natalie Haynes' No Friend to This House, so I'm not exactly on a book buying spree. 

Sunday I was on my own and the first panel I did was Gory Glesga. I thought I hadn't read any of these writers either but in fact I had, since Eve Macrae is aka Lynne Macewen, one of whose books popped up in the August book round up. Frances Crawford was the hero of the hour having managed to carry off both the major prizes of the festival; best debut novel and best crime novel of the year. This was definitely the most enjoyable event I went to, but how could it not be, you put four Glaswegian wordsmiths  on a stage for an hour and you know it's going to be comedy gold. 

And finally I went to this one. I had swithered about this because amongst the murders covered in his book is that of Jamie Bulger which is almost too distressing to contemplate, even now so long after the event, but it also includes Sarah Everard, and her murder and the events after it and the facts that emerged about the Met's so called 'Vetting procedures' made me incandescent with wrath at the time so I decided to go.  I don't watch True Crime programs on TV, nor do I read any True Crime books, so I haven't previously come across Professor Wilson but he's a serious criminologist who has also spent time  in the Prison  Service so he knows what he's talking/writing about.  In fact had I not had a very tight window for catching my train home I would have stayed and bought his book, but as I didn't I can only hope that either Stirling or Alloa library will stock it, if not now then in the future. 

And Bloody Scotland is back next year, and the dates, unsurprisingly,  are already in my calendar. 

The unintended consequence was coming down with a vicious bug which I can only assume I picked up while I was rubbing shoulders with so many people all in one place. It made itself known on Monday, retreated a bit on Tuesday then came crashing back on Wednesday since when I have done very little ( except for a trip to Glasgow which was enabled by a dose of paracetamol,  more on that later.) Today is Sunday and I feel quite a lot better thank goodness but I'm still taking it easy in the hope that proper rest will see the back of it sooner than otherwise. I have at least found the energy to sew up and block the new holiday top though - hooray!