Luvvies

Apparently it's ten years since the Laurence Olivier Awards (the Larrys)  were broadcast on TV and having sat through about 30 minutes of tonight's broadcast I can only hope that it will be another ten years before they do it again. It was grim. Where else in the world, with the possible exception of a conference of successful insurance salesmen, could you come across such a large crowd of self-congratulatory, self -aggrandising and  self - satisfied people? The only good thing as far as I was concerned was when I glanced up during the quick 'other awards given earlier this evening included...' section and saw that Nicola Walker had won an award as best supporting actress. I think Nicola Walker is a great actress and it pleased me to see that recognised. Other than that it was a rare waste of time.

And for those amongst you muttering darkly about how, if I didn't like it I could have switched the television off or over, you are quite correct. Except that it was only background noise while I was knitting and as I was concentrating on counting stitches and the remote control was half a room away it would have been too much of an interruption to my work. As it is I blame someone called ?Sheridan Smith for the error in line10 which meant I had to pull out two whole rows of my work. Still with only 68 stitches to the row it wasn't a huge setback.

More from Masterchef

In the final part of the semi final Dale and Larkin both redeemed themselves and Sarai had a nightmare time, messing up all three of the courses she put in front of a room full of food critics, so she was the one to go. This despite the fact that Larkin had a messed up soufflé that he couldn't clean up in time and it seemed to us that rather than try, and send it late, or send it out messy, he pretended to drop it accidentally thereby rendering the question of what to do with it redundant.  

 

I say it seemed to us advisedly; we could have had a totally false impression. It may really have been accidental. It's just that it looked deliberate from where we were sat. And anyway why was there not a spare?

I Ache!

So the painting at the flat is done, if you ignore the fact that we didn't after all have time to do the second bedroom, which will now have to wait until the end of the season. Kitchen and hall are both done though, the new furniture and curtains from IKEA are assembled and in place, the whole place, bar the outside of the windows, is sparkly clean, and I can hardly move a muscle today. This despite following the wisdom of ages and falling into a warm shower the moment we got back last night.

 

One thing we were really pleased about was getting the sign put back up outside the door, so folk know they've arrived; imagine then how chastened I was this morning to get an e-mail from one of the neighbours to say it had fallen down and she has rescued it and put it in her shed. Off now to impart the good news to the OH, he'll be thrilled.

 

Pictures forthcoming in the What I Did in April post at the end of the month, if only because it would look pretty bare if I didn't include the painting.

If tomorrow is Saturday, I must be painting

We've been decorating in our holiday flat. I feel as though I've been painting every weekend since Christmas, although we have in fact only painted for three days out of the past fourteen. And tomorrow promises a bit of a change. We have only a little bit of touching up to do on the painting front, which is the good news. The bad news is that we then need to do a spring clean. Including washing windows, inside and out.

 

Still what we've done so far looks nice. And the season is shaping up to being a good one.

Bang, bang!

So, the day got off to an explosive start. OH got up, switched on his computer and there was a flash, a puff of smoke, and a bang. He reported this to me and then went to have a shower. As though it was normal for one of the most expensive pieces of equipment in the house to begin the day by exploding.

He's now had a closer look, and it appears the power supply in the machine has died, so let's hope that a) we can find a new one in town this morning without too much trouble and b) the power cut out before affecting any of the data on the computer.

He hastened to assure me that he would still be able to deal with the new membership packs for the O. A. S. (Orkney Archaeology Society) as those details are backed up on the OAS laptop. And do you know I murmured something about that being a good thing, while screaming inside that I couldn't really care less about the OAS membership, I was more concerned that the information he needs to earn us a living hadn't gone up in smoke alongside the power supply. I get seriously worried sometimes about that man's priorities.

Masterchef with Marcus

As I may have mentioned previously I am not someone with a great interest in food. I could live for the rest of my life on nothing but bread, butter and  cheese, with a couple of squares of  chocolate thrown in for good behaviour on a Sunday,  and not get bored with it. I am therefore an unlikely candidate for viewing Masterchef. Despite this, we watch it religiously.

And this is because of a thing which parents who are reading this will surely recognise. As your children grow up, they get interested in things, and because your children are interested in them you get drawn into them, willy nilly. Then the children grow out of stuff and get bored by it, but there you are, the ensnared parent, beached like a whale after the tide has gone out and still entranced by whatever it was that their flibbertygibbet minds have now abandoned. It is for this reason that we switch on the television for every Grand Prix of the F1 season. No matter that Son No 1, who first got us interested, left the parental home many years ago, and had actually lost most of his interest in racing cars several years before that. No matter that we can no longer be bothered to keep up with who the new drivers are and who Mark Webber eg is driving for this season. No matter even that the one and only racing driver I ever had any time for, the talented yet unassuming two time world champion Mikka Hakkinen retired years and years ago. We still switch it on and spend our Sunday afternoons listening to the constant drone of very fast cars going round and round a bendy track, while a couple of 'experts' tell us what is going on, as though we couldn't see it with our own eyes. At least I no longer have to put up with the  biased screeching of the exciteable  Murray Walker, a man whom I grew to loathe as passionately as you can loathe someone you have never met.

 

 

Mikka Hakkinen with former Maclaren team boss Ron Dennis, a man so brave he happily let it be known that his favourite colour is grey.

 

 

But this is to digress. It was however Son No 1, during one of his extended stays in Orkney, who also drew us into the culinary cauldron that is Masterchef and we've stayed with it; OH because he is quite interested in food and me because I  like watching competitions that involve people who are quite good at something to start with improving as the weeks go on. Plus of course the rather more common pleasure of rooting for whoever becomes your favourite, and howling with  laughter at some of the more - shall we be kind and say - amazing dishes.

 

We'd been looking forward to tonight's offering because clips had shown that not only were the last 4 competitors to be judged by the bullet headed greengrocer and the Antipodean restaurateur, but also by the humourless cooking Nazi that is Marcus Wareing. We knew it would be harsh; I don't think we realised quite how harsh it would be.

 

Would you dare cook for this man? Me neither!

 

 

Of the four semi-finalists we've  had Larkin down for a while as a dead cert for winning the title eventually. Sarai [spelling?]  lost me when she served up a dish recently in paper bags. We are too far through the competition for paper bags to impress. Nor has she yet cooked anything successfully that wasn't curry. However her first name may be  spelled, her middle name is not versatility. We are divided on Natalie, as the OH finds her bossy and loud, while I think of her as someone who has taken the opportunity afforded her by the competition and has done some serious learning, with grace, humour and some really hard work. The fourth semi-finalist is Dale who has made little impression on us, except that we sort of vaguely remember he has cooked some nice food, although we would be hard pushed to call to mind any particular dish.

 

Natalie was a star. MW liked and praised both her dishes and she almost melted with pleasure and pride. I expect John and Greg said some kind things about her food too. When MW is commenting why should you care what anyone else is saying? Sarai had put the paper bag thing behind her and served up a rather nice looking soup. Presentation has previously been one of Sarai's blind spots so it was good to see that she was improving on that front. Her dessert was a massive pastry thing which looked very dry, but also quite pretty. She didn't do as well as Natalie but she still did OK.

 

And then we got to the boys and entered the territory of car crash TV. They both cooked razor clams, with disastrous results. When he tasted Dale's, MW asked for a glass of water. Dale hadn't cooked razor clams before and had only the vaguest idea of how to do it before getting stuck in. He now knows how not to do it, but it does all rather beg the question  why, at such a crucial stage in the competition, you would suddenly decide to cook something you've never cooked before? I forget what his dessert was, which is par for the course with Dale. It may have been a lemon tart. There again it may not have been.The comments reduced poor Dale to tears.  He obviously felt that he had come bottom of the class by a long way. Even Marcus felt the need to say something consoling, which almost had me falling off my chair. But in fact it was the previously seemingly unassailable Larkin who was left to plumb the depths. He proffered razor clams with some dumplings which MW apostrophised as 'appalling - horrible'. His dessert, which had been meant to be a white chocolate mousse, served in a mango, looked disgusting. Even the bullet headed greengrocer, who as everyone knows is a total pudding junkie, said it was just two piles of sludge on a plate. Wareing refused even to try it, and Torode said if Larkin messed up like this again he would get sent home.

 

In the end I didn't know who to feel most sorry for: Dale, for the indignity of being reduced to tears in front of the whole nation (or as much of it as watched Masterchef anyway), Wareing, who presumably was expecting to meet some talented amateur chefs at the top of their game and to sample some good food, or John Torode who one supposes  had asked MW to come in the expectation of  being able to show off some vibrant new talent, and had the embarrassing experience of seeing at least two of them serve up food which would have disgraced a GCSE cookery course.

 

 

M I A

So now I know why people recommend doctoral students should write blogs. It's because some days you don't feel like writing  even though you know you should. Writing a blog should get you into the habit of  regular writing, however you feel.

In this respect my own blog has failed me badly - or I have failed it, depending on your point of view. It's not that I haven't done things or thought things that would make interesting posts (well again that might depend on your point of view!); it's just that I couldn't summon up the energy or the enthusiasm to log in and write. From now on  I must be sterner with myself.

A Few Days in Fife Part 2

Having attended to business ( IKEA shopping and meeting Son No 2's letting agent, the latter not a totally satisfactory experience it must be said ), we turned our minds to some enjoyment. We finally got around to visiting Falkland, where we joined the National Trust for Scotland at Falkland Palace. You're not allowed to take pictures inside the Palace, which is totally understandable but here's one  of outside. I have to say it's not an ideal place to visit if you have an ankle that is still liable to aching and swelling, but I'm glad we went regardless.

 

 

This is a wall carving that caught my eye

 

and this is a small café by the name of The Hayloft. If you're ever in Falkland and looking for somewhere to eat I can highly recommend this. The men had all day breakfasts, which isn't really my cup of tea, but I had some Leek and Tattie soup which was delicious.

 

The next day I had arranged to meet up with a friend in Edinburgh. Our meeting place was one of the cafes in the National Museum of Scotland, also well worth a visit. OH and I had toyed with the idea of visiting the Viking Exhibition that's on there at the moment. However everything that appeared on the publicity posters and leaflets we remembered seeing at the Historisk Museet in Stockholm last May so it didn't seem worth paying the extra £9 a head to see it all again.

 

While V and I set our respective families, and then the world, to rights over coffee and then tea in the Museum , the others  ventured out into a chilly Edinburgh. OH wanted to check out a telescope shop, which sadly had turned into an RSPB outlet for the sale of binoculars and other assorted bird watching sundries which was disappointing for him. The lad however was thrilled to discover that Forbidden Planet was still Forbidden Planet.

 

For readers who don't know Edinburgh here are a few snaps of some of the less famous bits

 

by which I mean they aren't of Princes Street or the Royal Mile.

Apart from the lack of telescopes it was an enjoyable few days away. We'd like to go back at the beginning of next month to catch an Artist's Studio Open Weekend, but it transpires OH may be remotely babysitting some computer processes then so we'll probably have to miss it.

 

 

Doorsteps

When my sister first visited us after we moved to Orkney she said 'Well, I can see why you wanted to move here, but I don't think I could live anywhere that didn't have Marks and Spencer's on the doorstep.

Well I don't have a Marks and Spencer's anywhere near, but here's what is on my doorstep.

 

 

 

I think I get the best of that bargain, but then I would, wouldn't I? As with so much else in life, it's horses for courses.

A Pair of Crocheted Gloves

There's a group at the Cathedral that I go to; it meets once a month, we have a speaker, a cup of tea and a chat and it also raises funds for various projects overseas. Last month one of the members was speaking and she brought with her some of the needlework she and other members of her family have done over the generations.

 

The lady herself was born prematurely during World War 2, and she was born with the last two fingers of each hand fused together. Because it was wartime, and because she wasn't expected to survive, the doctors didn't try to separate her fingers, so she has spent her life with the defect uncorrected.

 

That didn't stop her learning to knit and sew like all the other women in the family and she has produced some beautiful work. But the thing that caught my eye and spoke to me most directly, was a pair of crocheted gloves made for her by her grandmother. She had been asked to be a bridesmaid at a family wedding. It seems to have been a bit of a tradition that her grandmother made gloves for bridesmaids on these occasions and here were hers, adapted so that instead of four fingers on each hand there were only three.

 

I was so moved by this simple act of creation; it speaks volumes about acceptance and  inclusivity, years before these terms became buzz words of the 'socially aware'. And it says a lot too about the skills of  craftswomen in the past; there was no written pattern for the gloves, not even for the non-adapted ones, they were created from a fusion of imagination and experience in the mind and hands of their creator.

 

If I'd seen these in a museum case I'd have given them a glance and walked on; how much more meaningful things become when we know the story behind them.

(Yet) Another Cake Picture

I was sewing last weekend - yes the great Jelly Roll Quilt project staggers on - and this of course left the path to the baking oven open to the OH. With the following result

He's such a show off. On the other hand, it was delicious and at least one of us can be bothered to faff about making ganache!

A Few Days in Fife - Part 1

Our younger son is studying at Adam Smith College and rather than just book him a bus and ferry ticket home for the Easter break we thought it might be nice to go down and stay with him for a few days and then bring him back in the car. Since he is now on his own, in a 2 bedroomed flat which we're paying for, it seems to me that the least we can do in return for all that money is stay in the place now and again! Mean? Moi?

 

Be that as it may we drove down to Fife last Tuesday. We left behind a calm and sunny Orkney and drove into cold, snow capped mountains in the Highlands - not literally, of course, but it was quite a majestic sight. I don't think that I have ever before been unable to tell where the mountain tops end and the clouds begin, it was awesome.

 

Wednesday we drove round half of Edinburgh to get to IKEA. I don't care what anyone else says I love IKEA. They're thin on the ground in Scotland, although I'm secretly hoping that one day they'll open one in Aberdeen, but until that happens we do without. Or go south.

 

There were two reasons for going to IKEA, one of which I shared with the OH before we went and one I didn't. The one he knew was that we were looking for new bedside cabinets for use in the holiday flat. You may wonder why we needed to go all the way to Edinburgh for that and not just buy them in Orkney but the reason is that there aren't any small enough in Orkney. It sounds mad I know, but it's true. The space between the twin beds in one bedroom is quite narrow, and the Tourist Board like you to have a cabinet/shelf/table on either side of a double bed and again, because we have quite a large sleigh bed in the double room, space on either side is limited. It took ages to decide on which ones we wanted, there was so much choice, but in the end we managed to get the three we needed, plus a faux sheepskin rug, plus new curtains* for the double room plus a box of Swedish biscuits for J who was feeding the cats while we were away.

 

*We had measurements but even so there was long and heated discussion about whether or not these curtains would fit. We'll find out tomorrow when we go over to the flat to await delivery of the new sofa. Meanwhile the outcome of the discussion was that if they don't fit, OH is a dead man.

 

The other reason for visiting was that I was scoping out new furniture for our bedroom which I plan to refurbish next year. I thought it safer not to mention this before we went as it would only have started off another discussion about the furniture we now have and this is a discussion I am bored to snores with already. Like a lot of men, OH doesn't like contemplating change and has a whole range of  tactics to deploy in order to avoid it. I'd already ear-marked a couple of styles I liked the look of on the website but wanted to see them in person. And they were both suitable, so let's hope that IKEA doesn't stop  making them between now and this time next year.

 

Getting to and from IKEA took up most of the day and for quite a lot of the rest of it we cleaned. I'm sure this will come as no surprise to other parents of young men living in their first flats away from home.

 

 

 

What I did in March

First up is the needle felting.

During Lent, in the Cathedral, the top of the Christmas tree was put at the front of the church and each week a cross was added, all different shapes and made of different materials. For the final Sunday of Lent the Minister asked people in the congregation  to make a cross of anything they liked  and bring it along to go on the tree, so I made a felt one. I decorated both sides

 

 

The idea was that one side had the flames which foreshadow Pentecost and the other side had a blossoming plant that represented the new life of the Resurrection. True to form I wasn't totally happy with either side, but tell myself I'm still a beginner at this needle felting stuff.

 

More successful was Bert

 

the  needle felted cactus. I'm quite fond of Bert.

Then there was the knitting. First up a new jumper

 

Sadly the wool is very soft and it's sort of flopped. It's also fallen victim to Large Size Syndrome by which designers test knit patterns in small sizes and then just multiply up for larger ones, with sometimes fairly drastic results. So I have very floppy cuffs and a determination never to use this wool again. On the upside, it's a beautiful colour and its very very cosy.

While we're dealing with the knitting here's the Literary themed KAL effort for March.

Yggdrasil mittens. I can't say I'm all that thrilled with them, probably because knitting them was more of a struggle than it should have been, but at least I got them done in the time.

In case anyone is wondering the Agatha Christie connections are a) the colour, which is sort of a lemon yellow, after Poirot's secretary Miss Lemon, and Yggdrasil itself which Henrietta Savernake used to doodle all over the place in The Hollow. The Hollow was always one of my favourite Christies so I was pleased I found something to connect to it.

The April writer is Lewis Carroll and I have the yarn and I know the pattern so all I need now is the time.  

 

Alert readers from elsewhere will note the lack of finished socks. I have about 15 rounds to go on my sisters birthday socks but couldn't quite finish them in March. They, or at last the not quite complete one, is lying in mute reproach on the coffee table, and I hope it will get picked up and finished during this evenings ER repeat.

 

And that's it for finished stuff, but because it will be a long time coming I couldn't resist putting up a WIP photo of the patchwork [one day to be a] quilt.