M I A and July Book Review

 

I am still not over my tooth extraction whihc sounds wimpish but it wasn't until yesterday that I managed a full day without a painkiller . Today the pain is at a low level so I am hopeful that it will be totally gone in a couple of days. The gum is closing up nicely and the stitches have gone so that's all progress. 

So, July books. Somehow no J D Kirk! how can this be? but Mick Herron made three appearances. This was because The Catch and Slow Horses were my falling asleep to books in July and I suspect a  re-listen of the whole series is on the cards for the next few months. I also read a physical copy of Clown Town because the quality of the audio book was abysmal and I was sure I had missed things when (trying to) listen. 

Rounding off the crime books this time was the Crime Fiction group choice; The Sting in Her Tale by Mark Ezra. This was generally enjoyed by everyone, including me,  as a 'light summer read' but coincidences and unlikely escapes stretch credulity which is always a bit of a no-no for me. I don't regret the time reading it, especially as it didn't take long , but I won't be bothering with the next in the series. 

I met someone at the Gaskell Society Conference who is doing a Ph D on the uses of fairy tale and the fantastic in other genres, and I mentioned Nicholas Stuart Gray to her. This led to me sending her more info and to a re-read  of The Seventh Swan. It's the story of the seventh brother in the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale; the one whose shirt wasn't quite finished in time and who was therefore left with a swan's wing. It's not my favourite of his but I still love it and I took the opportunity of it being down from the shelf to re-read it. 

I took advantage of 2 x 99p deals on Kindle in July and bought and read Written on the Dark by Guy Gavriel Kay and The Cromarty Library Circle by Shona Maclean. Written on the Dark was standard GG Kay fare; his writing is quite mannered and I find certain of his stylistic tics irritating but the plots are good and the characterisation done with more subtlety than might normally be expected in books like this. It was fun to read of an alternative medieval Europe in which the English lost Agincourt and Joan of Arc was saved from burning. The Cromarty Library Circle, an historical novel set (where else?) in the small Scottish town of Cromarty in the 1830s was really interesting; a slow burn but a very satisfying one. 

And finally  a whole bunch of people  recommended A Small Bomb at Dimperley by Lissa Evans to me. I didn't think I had heard of her before but I find she wrote the book on which the film 'Their finest' was based, and which I did see and enjoy years ago.  It seems a lot of her books are set in or just after World War 2. This one is a 'Just After' one and I loved it. What there is of plot is quite gentle but the characters, while being based in some cases on recognisable types, are finely and sympathetically drawn. It's not at all sentimental though as Evans can be quite caustic in her descriptions, but it's very honest and all her people are understandable and most of them you feel some empathy for. I'm not generally fond of small children in grown up novels but there is one here who is a triumph; instantly recognisable by anyone who has had experience of a toddler. Wholeheartedly recomnended by me and I plan to read some more. 

A New Jigsaw

 I know, what excitement (slightly sarcastic sigh!) 

This is another from the 'Dinner With ..  an artist ' series; obviously this one is Van Gogh. I'd had it on my Amazon wishlist for several years and no-one had bought it, so recently, when I was looking for something to take me over the limit for free postage I treated myself. 

Like all of these puzzles it's lovely when finished. They're generally just challenging enough; I have to say this one was perhaps the hardest of the ones I've done,because the sky was a pain, but I persevered and overall I really enjoyed doing it. Definitely a keeper but I must get around to doing some more that are destined for the charity shop soon. 

It also kept my mind off how rubbish I was feeling after my dental surgery. That was on Thursday and it wasn't until last night (Saturday) that I started feeling anything like my usual self, and that was a usual self operating at about 50%. Just another reminder that the older you get the longer you take to recover I suppose. Feeling even better today so I suppose it's onwards and upwards from now. Hope so anyway. 

Happy Birthday - from me to me.

 I'm not five, so I'm not going to do a list of 'wot I got for my birfday' , but  since it was a milestone one  I did treat myself, and bought a one day weaving workshop from Radical Weavers in Stirling. They do several different ones, but this one promised me that I would bring home a three coloured scarf so that was the one I went for. Most of August was booked up when I looked, but they had one space left on 1st August, just before my birthday, so I booked it. 

It was an early start, I had to be in Stirling and ready to go by 9.30 which is  a bit of an ask, depending on how ready you are to take a risk on the train that gets you somewhere just in time not being cancelled - that's not a risk I'm particularly willing to take when I've shelled out a significant amount of money for an all day activity. 

I've wanted to try weaving for a long time - hence the purchase of the tiny weaving kit while on holiday and which excited me enough to spur me into looking for a local workshop. There was someone in Orkney who taught weaving, but it was in six week blocks and we were never in Orkney for six consecutive weeks when she was doing the lessons. And then, when I had decided I would make sure that we were there, by dint of not booking anything until the dates for the weaving classes went up, they stopped appearing and when I messaged to enquire I got ghosted. Turns out the teacher and her husband were all caught up in building themselves a new house and she had no time for teaching,  but I can't help feeling that she could have found two minutes to message me with that information. 

Leaving that aside, now I've had a grumpy rant about it, I did finish the Stirling workshop and I did come away with a three coloured scarf and I am more or less happy with  it.. Here's a photo. 

If you've been paying attention at the back you'll realise I used the same inspiration photo for this as I did for my dyeing at Lay Family Yarn in June. Same picture, totally different effect. I'm not happy with the edges which, despite my best efforts, are a bit iffy but I know that's mainly because it was my first go and therefore a learning experience and that if I were to continue weaving they would get better. 

However I am not going to continue weaving*. I had not appreciated quite how tiring it is physically. We worked from 9.30 to 5.30 with about 40 minutes for lunch and I was exhausted long before  finishing time. Also I was bored. I know lots of people find weaving meditative and mindful and that's fine, but I didn't. I found  it dull and repetitive and totally unstimulating. I'm obviously not wired to be a weaver. But at least now I know! 

*well except for finishing the kit coaster which I'm 2/3rds of the way through. 

A Very Big Birthday

is what I celebrated earlier this week. I'm not saying quite how big it was, but those who remember Project 60  can easily work it out.

To celebrate the OH and Son No 2 and I all went out for afternoon tea at a posh local hotel. 

The food was delicious , although they could possibly have made some of the sandwiches in brown bread,  and I would have liked the offer of a second pot of tea. But those are my only really tiny niggles. They had taken on board that we didn't want anything fishy and the carrot cake had little chocolate rectangles that said Happy Birthday on them. So full marks for that. 

And I am fairly reconciled to hitting this particular landmark by reflecting that I neither look nor feel my age. That said it's been a bit of a week. 

On Monday I went to the dentist with what I thought was a gum infection which could be cured by either time or antibiotics. One x-ray later and she's recommending that she refer me to an oral surgeon for  a possibly tricky extraction. So guess where I'm going tomorrow? all the way up to that there Embra to get a tooth out. Half the time I think, well it's only having a tooth out, it's not as though you haven't had it done several times before, and the other half of the time I think ' but that's been by a normal dentist, why do I need something different now?'  And then I sway back to 'but if the OS is the expert then that's the best place to go'. And then generally I just do a mental calculation of how in X hours it will all be behind me. In addition to all this I went to see a physiotherapist this morning in an attempt to get my back sorted before our big holiday in October. 

So all in all the Big Birthday was the least of my worries! 

Wool Stats and Finished Projects for June

 Stats are good for the first time in ages. Wool in in July was Nil. Nada. Nuffink. Hooray! Albeit this was partly down to the late arrival of the Madrigal Yarn Sock club, but you know, I'll take that. 

Wool out was 447g. There were three finished projects this month. 

A scarf knitted with some wool that arrived in a swap

The socks from the June club yarn, which are for son no 2

And Freddie the Fox, which was a kit I bought very recently and made more or less straight away. The balance of the wool out went into a long term project.

Net decrease for the year is now 1986g. It's slow work getting it down, but I suppose that's what happens when most of your wool stash is 4-ply! 

A day of Two Halves-ish

 So obviously not the account of the day we both really enjoyed in Wales - that's still to come in due course. Meanwhile  on Wednesday we went up to Birnam. 

Obviously we didn't go there for a woodland walk or we would have needed to go to Dunsinane. We went to see an exhibition by my favourite print make Abbie Lois,  in the Birnam Arts Centre. 

It had a cheerful bear by the door 

and I have to say it is a lovely large bright and airy space. The gallery where the exhibition was is upstirs and this is partly  why I say it was a day of two halves because I was just a wee bit disappointed in it. This was my fault, as I was expecting there to be more new work than there actually was. A lot of the prints I had seen before and although they are lovely I'd been expecting more new things. It's one thing to nip into Stirling to see less than you had expected; another to drive all the way to Birnam for the same experience. 

Since we were in their neck of the woods we'd arranged to see my friend S and her husband for lunch and I'd suggested the cafe at the Arts Centre as on paper it looked fine. On closer in-person inspection not quite as good as anticipated, especially since it was approaching lunchtime and all they had in a savoury line was two rather depressed looking ham and cheddar baps. Even if at least one of us hadn't been a vegetarian that wasn't going to feed four of us. Luckily, as the exhibition hadn't taken as long as anticipated we were able to have a quick stroll  around the village , bits of which are very picturesque,

and we found an alternative venue, which I think was called the Oak Tree cafe and it was just what we were looking for. We managed to intercept the others before they got as far as Birnam Arts and we had an excellent lunch and, just like my previous experience at Meze Meze, we were there for quite a long time after we had  finished eating! It was great to catch up. I know my stay at the Ilkley Hotel earlier this month gave rise to some funny moments but Sharon had just been staying in a hotel in the Highlands which obviously gave it a run for its money. Much laughter around the lunch table. Definitely no lack of enjoyment during this part of the day.

I am out all day tomorrow doing something exciting, of which more anon; next post though  should be wool stats and project news for July and for the first time in a while I'm not dreading totting up the numbers!

The Welsh Mountain Zoo

I have to say not our most successful zoo trip ever. This was partly because it was hot which meant that most of the animals very sensibly stayed in their little houses. In fact during the first half hour the most active animal we saw was a rat running through one of the bird enclosures, and for  a long time I thought that might be the only things we saw moving all day. In the end it wasn't quite that bad. 

Being fairly far up a mountain the place does at least have fabulous views. 

We did catch sight of a few things. 

The brown bear 

Ring tailed lemurs

and of course the ubiquitous meerkats

We did see various other things; some penguins, a red panda, gibbons and a variety of birds but I didn't get any good pictures of any of those. The catering was average, and the entrance fee was very  expensive. Not a value for money day in my opinion. In all fairness, possibly on cooler days when more animals are on show and not cowering in any shelter from the sun they can find, it would be a much more fun day out. 

On the way back we stopped at Bedd Gelert for an ice cream and a stroll by the river where we spent a few enjoyable minutes watching two middle aged walkers take off their boots and socks and gingerly step over some rocks into the river, then gingerly step out again only to realise they had nothing with which to dry their feet. Rather than wait for nature to do the job they put socks and boots back onto wet feet. Ugh! 

This was the coolest picture I took all day - the river at Bedd Gelert

Tomorrow, a day we both really enjoyed!