Can you see the rabbit?

So  I was waiting for R to turn up last Thursday afternoon and OH walked past me muttering something about feeding a newly returned cat and the next thing I knew he was calling out to me to shut the living room door because there was a rabbit in there.

'A rabbit?' I said, in an incredulous tone. 'What do you mean, a rabbit?'

 

'Small furry thing, long ears, white bobbly tail. That's what I mean'.

 

'What, a live one?'

'Yes, a live one. That's why I want you to close the door!'

 

You may feel my question as to the state of the rabbit was a foolish one but in fact the cats have been known to drag in dead rabbits that they have caught now and again, although not usually this early in the year. Honestly anyone would think we didn't feed them.

 

Be that as it may this was a live, albeit very small, bunny which OH managed to catch eventually. Apparently it was quite lively. He, R and I all had a bit of a coo and a stroke and I took this picture before OH took it back onto the land and let it go in the vicinity of the Rabbit Underground. We kept the cats in for half an hour to prevent a recurrence, and we hope that Baby Bunny found his Mum and his burrow safely.

Vitriolic about Vettriano

 

I've been reading Duncan Macmillan's monumental history of Scottish Art  1460 - 2000. I have to say it's a good read, if you like that sort of thing, which I do and I admire Macmillan greatly for his knowledge, his scholarship and the way that he has rehabilitated Scottish Art and placed it in a European Context, rather than letting it languish as an unregarded and unappreciated cousin of the art produced south of the border.

[It's a failing I find, generally, amongst English scholars, that they ignore any cultural production that pre-dates the Union of the Parliaments and dismiss most of the Scottish work that came afterwards by the effective device of ignoring almost all of it. Art, literature, and music have all suffered in this way. Economists, scientists and engineers have generally just been annexed: how many people educated in England for example would know that Adam Smith was a Scot?]

But hey-ho, it's not cultural colonialism that concerns me here but Macmillan's attitude to Jack Vettriano, a dislike which borders on the splenetic and which is shared by much of the art establishment in Britain as a whole.

Now don't get me wrong. I like  Vettriano's work, but I make no claims for him as a great artist. I long ago realised that my response to art was largely a response to colour which explains my liking for the Flemish Primitives, the Nabis and both waves of the Pre-Raphaelites.  It doesn't make me a critic; in fact it rather debars me from trying.

But what I don't understand is why the critics have to get so worked up about Vettriano. Just let him be, for goodness sake.  You don't like his stuff, ignore it.  Macmillan calls Vettriano's success 'extraordinary', a manifestation of 'consumer art' [obviously a dirty concept], a man who 'peddles nostalgia in paintings that are vaguely erotic'. They are 'blankly executed with cardboard cut out drawing' and yet they 'sell like hot cakes'.

 

To be honest the whole page reads like an  angry distorted and jealous snobbery. It seems Macmillan's main problem with Vettriano is that he sells. His work has nothing to say to Macmillan and his ilk, and so they're angry that the public like it enough to buy it. It doesn't challenge public taste or public perception about art or anything else and therefore it shouldn't be successful, especially since the sort of art they admire doesn't sell by the bucket load.

 

But critical and public taste are often not in sync. Despise people all you like Mr Macmillan but they will buy what they like and hang it on their walls and enjoy it. And for all your pontificating about the purposes of art, is not one of those purposes to enhance the life of an individual? To give them pleasure and/or to help them see the world in a slightly different way? You can't tell people what to like and , if millions of them find that sort of pleasure and enhancement in a picture of Vettriano's, who really are you to say them nay?

 

 

 

 

It's Windy

Possibly the most boring blog post title ever, and sad to say it may well be heading up the most boring post to date!

While the rest of the country either drowns or gets stuck in snowdrifts we have neither torrential rain nor constant snow.  What we do have is continual, loud and powerful winds. I think, if you have never lived anywhere where the wind howls for days in a row you cannot really  appreciate quite how much of an effect it can have, both physically and emotionally. We also had a power cut today; the third day in a row when we've been without power. I'm not going to moan about that though because although it was inconvenient there are lots of people down in the south west of Scotland who have been without power for a day and a night. So  half an hour a day doesn't seem so bad.

 

Friday is the day when we normally go into town for the routine of banking, shopping and filling up the car, but we couldn't face it today. So fingers crossed that by  tomorrow the wind has dropped because we cannot go another day without buying food!

 

We're also planning a few days away next week [which is quite amazing in itself; how did I get OH to agree to that I wonder?] But he's now starting to stress about whether the ferry will run and what sort of state the roads will be in on mainland Scotland. Too soon to know, so too soon to worry is my attitude, but it doesn't stop him rehearsing disaster scenarios in his head.

 

Made to feel an idiot - by a machine

The other day I thought the tumble dryer had broken. It kept switching itself to pause, and every time I switched it back to On, it moved sluggishly around for about a minute and then started sulking again. This was not a good thing. I love my tumble dryer almost as much as I love my dishwasher and I love my dishwasher a lot. I did not want it to be poorly -although more for my sake than its, it must be said.

 

I called for OH and tried to explain what was happening, a process made somewhat difficult by the fact that as I was talking he was walking out of the room. He stood by the offending machine and then said in superior tones 'Yes I thought so'. He then fell silent in that irritating way that they have, and as he obviously wasn't going to explain further without me begging, I obligingly said 'What? What did you think?'

 

Well it seemed there was a little graphic on the display bit that was all lit up or underlined or something and it meant that the water drawer was full so the machine had sensibly turned itself off rather than cause a flood in the kitchen.

 

I was mortified! I always but always clean the filters and empty that drawer when I use the dryer. Only last time obviously I didn't. I felt such a fool.

Bumper Day for parcels....

In addition to bringing me my ID card postie also left two parcels while we were out having lunch.

We don't often go out for lunch [tbh we don't go out for anything much]  but this was OH's way of ensuring that I had a hot meal today.  He'll be out this evening at a committee meeting for the Orkney Archaeology Society, and as he is standing in for the Secretary this month he seems to think he needs to be there 90 minutes before anyone else. This means he'll be going out at about 4.30, and goodness knows when he'll be back . It depends how many of the rabbiting-on persuasion turn up. He normally cooks our evening meal and he knows that left to myself I'd probably prepare a plate of cheese and biscuits, hence the lunch out.

 

Anyway before we went a courier turned up with a battery charger [yawn] but when we got home there were two parcels of wool for me to open and drool over. One was four skeins of Malabrigo Worsted, a yarn I am ridiculously addicted too, from the extremely obliging and helpful Rachel at

Tangled Yarn. And the other was the latest instalment of the sock yarn club from The Knitting Goddess .

 

Sadly I haven't yet managed to finish last months sock club instalment, which I am knitting up for my sister, but maybe the arrival of the new edition will motivate me to get those finished. The Malabrigo is for a special project that I cannot start as yet, so that can just get put safely away. Along with all my other wool. Sigh.

All is now explained

Postie brought me my ID card today. And now I know why it came from Aberdeen. It's because it's a University of Aberdeen ID card.

UHI is very new and cannot yet award its own research degrees, so I knew that in about five years time when I got to wear a floppy hat and the right to call myself Doctor that the bit of paper that came with that would say University of Aberdeen. Because they're the awarding institution for now, and they have a lot of input into quality assurance issues and the like.

I knew that, and I knew that all the admin is more or less doubled because you have to fill things in for Aberdeen and UHI. Somehow it never occurred to me [possibly because I have more exciting things to think about] that the ID card would identify me as a student of the University of Aberdeen. Nor that it would say 'Valid until 2018' which seems a long way off.

 

Baby steps, baby steps but all progress.

Yee-ha!

and other exclamations of joy!

E-mail this morning confirming my Ph D registration, links to scarily long documents about research procedures and regulations about thesis submission, a progress monitoring chart and other stuff that I'm sure I will need to consult over the next 5 years.

And my ID card having finally reached Oban [sigh], it is now on its way to Orkney.

The only bad news was when I looked at the required word length and discovered to my horror that you have to include the words in footnotes towards the overall word count. What?? I've always struggled in the past to keep to maximum length, and one of my little tricks for dealing with the restriction has been to bung into footnotes points which I wanted to make but which could be extracted from the main text, therefore reducing the overall word count.

Still with 100,000 words to play with, I may not have need of such stratagems. W can only hope.

Why am I making a patchwork quilt?

Buried somewhere in the side bar All About Me, that I so blithely wrote last October, is a passing reference to an intention to join a patchwork/quilting group  that was starting up in the village in the winter. And indeed I did join it, albeit a bit after most other people. It didn't get going until after Christmas by which time, as regular readers will know, I was laid up with a broken ankle, and it's once a month, so I think it was Session 3 before I got there. And discovered we were all making ourselves quilts.

 

This where I need one of those little emoticon things, showing a dropped jaw.

 

Now when I related this to one of my friends she said what else were you expecting, and I can sort of see where she's coming from, given that it's called a quilting group. Although as I didn't say to her, you can quilt things without them being quilts, if you see what I mean. I did say I thought that we would be starting with something smaller. Like a cushion cover. A  table centre. Napkins and table mats. Almost anything in fact smaller than the top of double bed.

 

Well I have put in quite a lot of effort, and even more money and I'm machining up a lot of fabric strips. I'm not even the furthest behind of the group. But I don't feel that patchwork and quilting are destined to become one of my passions. Or even that I will ever, ever do any patchwork or quilting again. I will finish this quilt though. And post a picture to prove it.

 

 Just one word of caution. Don't hold your collective breaths!

Emergency Dash to Vet

This story has a happy ending but if you're squeamish in a way that makes you not like reading about cats being sick I suggest you give it a miss!

 

 

We have three cats, which is at least one too many for one household, but is at least an advance of sorts on last year when we had four. There are good historical reasons for us having more cats in the house than humans, but I doubt they're of great interest to anyone but us. Or even us, really. So I shan't bother rehearsing them here.

What I will say is that OH has been twitchy about the cats ever since we had to have poor little Flossie put to sleep last December. He is forever worrying that they are too sleepy/not sleepy enough/drinking too much/ not drinking enough etc etc.

Recently his anxieties have focussed on Domingo, so christened by us when he took up residence* because we had never seen a gentler, less fussy cat in our lives. He was really placid, hence [Placido] Domingo. Since coming to Orkney though good old Mr Placid has a) taken to spending a lot of time outdoors b) defending his territory against all comers [not quite so placid as all that in the event then] and c) catching and eating a lot of rodents, some of which he can digest and some of which he can't.

 

*all of our cats, bar the one we got from the Orkney Cats Protection branch, have just appeared and taken up residence. We do not go round looking for cats, although I suspect that some cats go round looking for suckers, and find us.

 

This morning he started making a lot of noise. Loud single yowls of pain and distress. Not like him. Of course I then had to listen to OH re-hashing all the stuff about how Domingo hadn't been out much the week before last, and hadn't been eating much last week, which I largely ignored, not because I am in the habit of ignoring OH that much, but simply because, as I say,  he does stress about them overly much these days.

 

I did however have a look and a listen and was sufficiently concerned myself to let him ring up the vet and ask them to squeeze us in this morning. About half way to Kirkwall there were some very loud and distressing noises from the back seat coupled with an overwhelming smell of cat vomit, and I was quite pleased to be dropped off in town to go to the bank. By the time I  got out of there - Friday morning queue with two cashiers busy with customers who had apparently insoluble problems - and into the vets, all was well. The cat had indeed sicked up what the vet confidently asserted was the cause of the trouble. It was apparently unidentifiable but 'had had an awful lot of fur'. She had given him an  anti emetic and steroid which should stop him being sick and make him feel much better, and the old jumper that had been lining the cat carrier was now safely deposited in her hazardous waste bin.

 

He seems fine now, just a bit sleepy. He'd probably have got over whatever it was at home in time which would have saved us a Vets Bill. On the other hand he would probably have been sick on our light coloured living room carpet which wouldn't have been funny. Or indeed, cheaper to have cleaned than paying the vet was.

En Passant....

 

 

I just wanted to say that I enjoyed the BBC version of Shetland that was finally broadcast this week. I've no intention of writing at length because to be honest I'm a bit fed up with hearing/reading about it. Half the people who comment are moaning because the accents weren't authentically Shetland, and half were moaning about how they couldn't understand what was being said because the actors mumbled and used Scottish accents. And then there are the purists who whine about how it wasn't exactly like the book.

Shetland doesn't really have an accent. It has a dialect. I know that people argue about which it is until the cows come home and fall asleep in the barn, but to me it's a dialect. It's full of words that are particular to Shetland or which bear only a passing resemblance to their English equivalent. Cleeves very sensibly didn't use dialect in her Shetland Quartet books and it was a wise decision not to use it on the television either.

As for plot changes, I learned long ago that you go with the flow or you just don't watch. As an avid reader of Jane Austen, the low point came when I saw a version of Persuasion in which Anne Elliott not only went out into the streets of Bath on her own, but  ran through the pouring rain and ended up kissing Wentworth in the street. Obviously this would never have happened. Gently bred late Georgian girls didn't do that. That one thing destroyed a whole ethos of storytelling and gave the lie to what the book is really about. For me a bit of plot tinkering with a detective novel isn't really on a par. Would I have liked to see the inclusion of the sub plot about the Heritage Centre and the fraudulent claiming of grant money? Definitely yes. Would I actually have preferred the killer to be the same in the book and the TV version of it? Not quite so definitely but probably yes. Did either of these changes actually affect my enjoyment of the program? No.

You pays your money, as the old saying goes, and takes your choice.

 

What is wrong with this picture?

 

 

 

This is a map that was published in the TV Times, a television listing magazine here in the UK. The intention was to show readers the location of the BBC's new crime drama Shetland.

 

Sadly the islands circled are not Shetland but Orkney. Even more sadly Shetland does not actually appear on this map at all.

 

Red faces all round in the TV Times offices I hope.

Needle Felting

I've made one or two mentions of Needle Felting recently because rather to my surprise I find myself in a group that does it once a fortnight.

Now you might think that you can't really find yourself in a regular group and be surprised,  but you can because what happened was this -

Some people in the village go to a U3A craft group, elsewhere in Orkney, and they had had a go at Needle felting one week. R quite fancied trying it  and I said I wouldn't  mind being shown how to do it, so she arranged that the two of us  should go to J's house one afternoon for a bit of a go. Come the day, and all of a sudden there are 8 of us going and it's too many for J's house so the Village Hall has been booked and  they've decided to book it on a fortnightly basis.

 

Of course I wouldn't have to keep going if I didn't want to, but in fact I'm quite enjoying it so far. I suspect that at the end of the day there may be limits to what you can do with it, but I'm happy to carry on exploring it for a bit longer. Pictures forthcoming, if anything is worth taking a picture of.

Spontaneous Outing

I'd been planning to take things fairly easy this week, as far as I could. Last week was busy by my standards and my constitution isn't built for it. I was proud of myself though because of the ten things on the calendar  I managed nine, dropping out only of one of the two things pencilled in for Wednesday.

I thought that this coming week would be a lot easier before I remembered that we are scheduled to go to two parties [two! and I can't remember the last time we went to one], but that's at the end of the week, so I'm not even thinking about it yet.

 

Meanwhile today was the first day in ages when there wasn't anywhere I was supposed to be and the plan was to settle down with BBC catch up [Mayday] and wrestle with my sister's birthday socks.  But I was finding Mayday incredibly slow and the pattern on the socks fairly intransigent so I was only too pleased to break off and  talk to my friend R when she rang. Turned out she was after the phone number for The Woolshed as she was planning to go and buy some fleece for needlefelting, if they would open up for her. And they would so I invited myself along.

 

The Woolshed is in Evie and it's a beautiful drive from Burray, especially when it's a sunny day like it was today [don't get jealous, it was freezing cold as well!] We had a good look around when we got there, were shown a peg loom, and got a brief description of the difference between Shetland and North Ronaldsay fleeces. And we both bought a couple of bags of fleece of different colours so that we could do some mix and match.

 

So although I was looking forward to a slouch on the couch I went out instead and thoroughly enjoyed myself, probably because it was a totally spontaneous thing that I didn't have to think about too much beforehand.

 

Now of course I need to think about what to do with the fleece, although I have some ideas...

In the interest of fairness

I must point out that since late last week I have been an officially enrolled Ph D student at UHI. Since I have moaned at great length both here and elsewhere about how long the whole process has taken, it's only right I should record the fact that we have at last got that far.

Also in the interests of fairness I should probably point out that this is only as the result of hassling someone in Oban, who then pointed me in the direction of the on-line enrolment form which I proceeded to complete. Sadly she was unable to give me an update on the whereabouts of my ID card, but One Thing at a Time as the old song almost says.

 

And here's a thing about that self same enrolment form. Apart from the nuts and bolts stuff, there are acres and acres of socio-economic data questions to complete. One of them concerns your last completed academic qualification. Now my last one of those was an MA at UHI itself in 2008. But when I tried to enter that fact I got a little message saying 'data invalid'. Several times. So I put in my Leeds MA instead. I hope no-one is making any important decisions based on the data they collect from these forms!

The Glums - Making me Glum

So yesterday, Les Miserables having finally arrived in Orkney, we went off to see it. I was sooooo looking forward to it. I've never managed to see it on stage, although I had a friend in Leeds who went to London every year for a performance she  loved it so much. Son No 2 had the CD of the original cast and I've heard that of course, but it's not the same as seeing  a performance. I've been anxiously checking the cinema listings for what seems like months now, and had even got to the stage where I thought I must have missed it. [Although how I could have done that was a mystery].

 

OH being a bit of a cynic, and having heard tales of people snuffling and crying, and knowing how music can make me cry at the best of times, I had tried to drum up some enthusiasm amongst my female friends for going, as an excuse for not going with Mr Sarcasm Personified. No luck. I got a 'Not my thing', and an 'I want to see it but with my husband'. I said I might go alone. OH gave me his wounded puppy look. So we went together.

 

I bridled a bit at the price of the big bag of Revels we bought for during the performance. Later on I was glad we had them. OH offered me two of the larger smoother ones and suggested I use one in each ear, and really I was so appalled by the singing that I was tempted to try it.

 

This is a film of a musical. It therefore follows, in my mind, that one of the first things you must cast on is singing ability. I mean, why shoot yourself in the foot in advance by using people who can't sing? I genuinely don't understand why anyone would do that.

 

Of the three principals, Hathaway, Crowe and Jackman, none were good. Crowe cannot sing at all. You can tell me until you're blue in the face that he used to have a rock band and all I'll do is ask whether he played the drums. He cannot sing. Nor can he act while trying to sing. I mean, I don't rate Crowe as an actor at the best of times, but lots of people do, and in deference to them I can only say that in this instance he must have been concentrating so hard on the  [truly awful ] singing that he forgot to act. There is a character there in Javert to be found; not an attractive one but a fairly common one, the one who is driven by obedience, duty, a belief that if the law is not followed to the letter then chaos will reign. That's in the words of the songs Javert sings, there's nothing wrong from that point of view. It's all there, but I'm afraid Mr Woodentop couldn't make me believe in it.

Hathaway has about five notes in her mid voice that she can hit and she was fine with those. Sadly her songs meant she was taken well out of that particular range. I will forgive her to a degree because she did manage to channel some really raw emotions through what she did, but a good singer could have conveyed the emotions without making me wince at the ugliness of the sounds coming out of the mouth.

Jackman was a puzzle because I know he has done at least one musical in the West End and I expected that he would be good. But he lacked support and his phrasing was - well, it was all short. There were some nice notes and he was better than Crowe, but that's not really saying very much.

The younger smaller parts were generally much better sung, apart from Amanda Seyfried as Cosette who sounded like a demented flute. And the obligatory urchin, Gavroche, was totally incomprehensible.  Overall I felt if they had transposed quite a lot of the music down many of the actors would have been happier and performed better.

The thing is that duff notes and poor singing act on me in the same way as nails on a blackboard and after twenty minutes I was totally tense and wound up. So it was difficult to keep perspective on the rest of the film. Looking back there were enjoyable things about it. The music is lovely and the end was quite moving. The costumes and make up were excellent and Baren Cohen and Bonham Carter as the Thenadiers were wonderful. There are some holes in the plot you could drive a tank division through of course, but that's down to Hugo and the source material, not the writers of the musical.

I know if I hadn't been looking forward to it quite so much then I wouldn't have felt so let down. So perhaps I ought to limit my expectations. Although to be honest finding people who can sing in a musical film shouldn't, surely, be too much to ask?

Tearing out my Hair

I'm trying to work my way through the list of people we need to let know our new email address. No matter how long I stick at it the list seems to get longer rather than shorter. And I am fast losing my rag.

The problem is with passwords. Now I know that passwords are a good thing and keep our data secure and everything. And I like that. What I don't like is the very many different formats that passwords have to take. Some sites just specify a minimum length. Others insist on at least one numerical character. I've just done one where the specifics were 'at least 8 characters long, at least one upper case character, at least one number'. And then they tell you not to write them down anywhere!

 

All in all I'm having a frustrating time of it. I took a break so that I could relax a bit but even the planes in Airport Mania started sighing heavily and chuntering at me. Given that I'm not in the mood to be grumbled at by cartoon planes I gave up on that as well.

 

Oh well, tomorrow is another day. And one day quite soon it will all be done. I hope.

How Did That Happen?

I like my life to be quiet. Day flows into day, week flows into week, nothing much happens. What we don't do today we can do tomorrow, and  I like not to be tied down to doing stuff at all if possible, and failing that, not pinned down too much in advance.

 

So looking at my schedule for  the coming week, how did this happen?

 

Saturday               out during day

Sunday                 out during day

Monday                empty

Tuesday                out in the afternoon

Wednesday           out in the afternoon

Thursday               lit class via Skype in the morning, out in the afternoon, out again in the evening

Friday                    out during the day

 

Someone please tell me again where I'm going to find time for the doctorate?

 

 

Bother!

We've just switched Broadband provider. It was all going swimmingly [by which I mean it really hadn't intruded on my life at all, OH having done all the necessary] But now I discover that I have to have a new email address, which isn't  a problem, and  my old one no longer works, which is. 

Letting all my personal contacts know will be a chore, but no worse than that. But what about all those other places you give contact details to; websites where you shop, places that send out Newletters, businesses that insist you provide an e-mail address...with the best will in the world, it will be months before I remember them all.

 

And computers were going to make our lives easier!

What I did in February

Sadly this is all going to look a lot more sparse than the equivalent January entry. It's not that I haven't been busy with craft type stuff, but not a lot has got over the finishing line.

 

However I did turn January's single Wallace sock into a pair

 

 

 

Then there was my monthly Literary Theme'd KAL. This month was William Shakespeare so I made a beret  called Star Crossed Lovers

 

 

for March the writer is Agatha Christie and I'm not too sure what I'm going to do for that. I'd better get on and make my mind up though.

 

I made some hats for a prem baby charity that I support but I didn't take a photo of them before I sent them away.

 

And that would have been that, if I hadn't been to a needle felting class yesterday at which I produced this

 

 

Mmh, still learning how to do this and sadly haven't got as far as knowing how to delete extra pictures! Anyway given that I am not at all artistic [outside of being able to draw a stick dog badly] and that we didn't have a picture or anything to go on, I was quite pleased with this.  I was particularly taken with the little black faces on the sheep.

 

With luck a lot of the stuff I worked on in February will get finished in March so that there'll be a bumper crop of stuff to report on in a month's time.



 

 

Falcon Revisited

Well, not exactly, but there's been a strange sense of deja vu hanging round this house on Thursday evenings recently.

Jack Taylor, a new drama on Channel 5, based on a set of good books, beautiful setting in Galway, great star in Iain Glen,  should have been enjoyable viewing.

Sadly not. The episodes last about two hours and each time so far I have given up part way through, recorded the second half and watched it the next day.

I suppose I have at least been interested enough to watch the second half each time, but honestly if the best bit in  a thriller series is a running gag about how, having been thrown out of the Garda months ago, the hero hasn't returned his official Garda coat then something has gone fairly badly wrong with the program somewhere.

A Different Sort of Visitor

 

 

Look what's been hanging round in our garden / on our roof for the past few days.

When I say 'garden' I use the term loosely since a lot of the land we have here wouldn't be recognised as such by Alan Titchmarsh, Monty Don, Pippa Greenwood et al.

We have 2.75 acres which I said when we were thinking of buying the house was far too much as we are not gardeners and never have been. But OH was determined to have the house because he loved it, and assured me that he had ideas about what to do with the land. I wasn't really all that reassured but we bought the house anyway.

We did plant trees in a half paddock right at the top of the land so we have a small wood growing, and there's even a little gap in the middle designed for picnics when the trees are big enough for you to feel that you're having a picnic in a wood.

We've had someone come in and make us a rockery too and that looks really nice, although slightly wind blasted just at present. We hope to get a little bit more done each year, but it has to be designed to be low maintenance because we're no keener on gardening than we ever were. Gardens, yes; I can visit other people's gardens until the cows come home, but actually getting out there and doing it - no thank you. It's a lack I know. And I don't  make my own bread either.