Project 60 - Number NIne

 

 

I can't help feeling that if I don't get a move on I won't ever get to sixty, but here we are anyway at Number Nine. And that was getting my colours done.

When I first heard about this, many years ago, I thought it sounded a wonderful thing, but not anything I would ever do. It was too frivolous, too self absorbed and to be perfectly honest, for much of my life, too expensive. I'd resigned myself to never doing it really, one of those things in life which you think would have been great but are for other people.

 

And then recently someone in Orkney started offering the service. It's someone I know, and like, and in that Orcadian way the OH knows her mother from two different directions as it were, so I knew I could trust her, and I've got stuff coming up this year and suddenly, what with Project 60 being on the go and being all about things you want to do but never have, I thought Why Not? and made an appointment.

 

I went on Wednesday and it was such fun. I wish I could go twice a year! I was looked at and talked to and draped over, and we may just have had some coffee and cake in there, and I came out with a folder full of little fabric swatches; 30 basic colours and 12 secondary ones, and in theory I should never buy anything that doesn't suit me again. Well we'll see.

 

I haven't done the make-up bit yet, mainly because we spent so much time yakking over the fabric, we ran out of time to do that. Coming up soon though....

 

Tomorrow I will be too busy to blog because we have a friend from Leeds up in Orkney for a week's holiday and tomorrow we are spending the day with her. We all know what Monday is of course, but assuming I come out of that as something less than a gibbering wreck, who knows, on Monday evening you might get a photo of some ice cream.

 

 

 

Oral Woes

No, I don't need a trip to the dentist. Well I do but my dentist has left the practice, and has yet to be replaced and don't start me on why I am therefore paying a monthly fee to them, because I don't know especially since I am due a hygiene appointment, and probably by now a check up, not to mention that the pinned filling has crumbled once again -

But this is not what I came here to talk about. What I came here to talk about was next Monday, because next Monday sees the oral assessment for Part 1 of my Gaelic course and I am terrified.

 

I have always had problems with oral exams, because I belong to a personality type that a) hates getting things wrong and b) hates being observed while doing stuff, especially if getting it wrong. This largely accounts, I think,  for my failure ever to pass a driving test, despite many lessons, several attempts and being told by my instructor that I was a perfectly good driver.

 

It wasn't too bad at school, because we were drilled relentlessly before our O and A level oral exams; what to expect, what to try and get in to impress, and in any case they were done by strangers who you would never see again. There was no emotional investment, other than the immediate desire for them to give you a  good mark, in the people conducting the test. And additionally I knew that as far as French and German went my accent was good. So I was nervous, but not more so than anyone else. Not more so than was reasonable.

 

The rot set in at University where oral exams were conducted by people who taught you the rest of the time, and who you really really wanted to please.  My Russian accent was not particularly good, nor was I confident in my grammar or vocabulary. The format was different, in that you had to not only hold your own in a conversation, where you might be asked a question you didn't understand, at which point, obviously the world would end, but you also had to read a previously unseen piece of Russian, where naturally they didn't mark the stresses on unfamiliar words, and do a short presentation. Given that a presentation is basically a spoken essay and given that my Russian essays generally lacked something; accuracy mostly, I was never confident of that part either. Oral exams made me ill, literally. By my final year I was allowed always to go first, rather than in my correct alphabetic order, which would normally have seen me not examined until the afternoon, and I was also allowed, in defiance of the general No Food or Drink regulation, to take a large glass of milk into the examination with me. Milk was the one thing known to stop me vomiting over the examiners shoes.

 

After graduation oral exams became a thing of the past, except for a little mild role play when I was learning Norwegian which had to be recorded for 'quality control purposes'. But now the dreaded oral is once again looming large. I am dreading it because:-

 

I am not very confident of my accent/ability to understand the questions put to me/ ability to ask questions back (for which you get extra marks)

 

I am straight after the class star and will doubtless suffer by comparison with her confidence and fluency.

 

I will be preparing as thoroughly as I can, but I have at the same time to prepare new material for the normal class on Monday morning. We have a visitor who we will be taking out all day Sunday, and the first chapter of my Ph D thesis is due in around about now, and a) its not quite finished and b) I haven't yet done any of the referencing.  This is not to say that I haven't been working hard on it. The recent trips south were all about research in the National Library, and they were enjoyable and useful and everything that research at its best is. But they exhausted me which put a bit of a brake on stuff and really trying to do that and keep up with the Gaelic and keep on top of the laundry and make the occasional attempt to keep the house clean and tidy, it's all been a bit much. 

 

Light and tunnel though; the chapter is almost finished, at least next Monday gets the oral out of the way, the course itself finishes in the second week of June and then we're going away. Not the blackest of black nights then, but I'll be a happier bunny come three o' clock next Monday when it will all be over.

 

Habit Forming?

On a recent trip south I met up again one evening with my friend Lydia and we treated ourselves to this.

 

 

 

Pretty, isn't it? And no, it's not some strangely coloured oriental tea, although you could be forgiven for thinking so, since there's a great big tea pot in the picture. No, that, my friends is a cocktail, called The Orient Express. I forget what was in it, and if you had seen the list of ingredients, that truly would not surprise you. I remember Grapefruit Bitters. And the thing that looks like a fraying cigar is lemon grass. Beyond that, I have no memory.

 

Since it is less than a month since I ventured into the world of the cocktail I am rather worried that I have followed the first one up so quickly and am on the way to developing a cocktail habit. On the other hand, looked at another way, I have about 30 years of cocktail drinking to catch up on. So that's alright then.

 

It was a good evening. As we are both putting ourselves through the hell that is the self funded Ph D , and at the same branch of the same institution, we necessarily had a bitch about that. But we did cheerful life stuff as well.

 

I know I have been more than a little dismissive here at times about the Facile wisdom of Facebook and its ilk. But I do honestly sometimes think that Lydia has been sent into my life to counter my excessive cynicism with a dose of shining optimism and the belief that the world is a beautiful and exciting place. If that is so, quite what I have been sent into Lydia's life to do is a mystery to me. I hope it's not for anything horrid!! 

Knitted gifts for Marcus

Naturally we sent gifts to the new Canadian grandson. And naturally some of them I had knitted. Despite having little or no time to actually knit these days.

I have no photographic record of the outfit we bought and sent [ I mean really, why would I want to take a photo of that?!] although I do remember it was tiger themed.

But I made him a blanket

this is done in what is one of my personal yarns from hell, to wit Sirdar Snowflake Chunky which is fine to work with as long as you never make a mistake and do not need to take any of it out. Don't ask me how I know, some things are better left forgotten!

You might then say, why pray do you use it, which is of course a perfectly reasonable question and one to which the answer is, I don't often but it is soft and squishy and cuddly and just the sort of thing, when knitted up, that you would long to wrap a baby in. And as it happens I didn't need to take any of it out, and although it is made in strips I even managed to sew them together and match up the corners. For which I gave myself a gold star.  

 

I also made a little kimono type jacket. It is too big for him at present, because the pattern only comes in one size, but I made one for his brother before he was born so thought it only right to make one for him too. Connor's was sort of multi-coloured IIRC but Marcus' is blue. And here it is.

 

 

 

I don't normally say how wonderful my knitting is, but I will say about this, that I love the effect of the variegated yarn on the sleeves. I feel I can say that because it was totally accidental!

 

Anyway they got sent off as soon as we heard he was born more or less and I may just have another little thing on the needles. It's so hot in Canada right now that woolly stuff is definitely not required, but as the Starks say Winter is Coming!

 

Hurrah for sjuttende mai!

The 17th May is Norwegian Constitution Day, when the Norwegians remember gaining their independence from Denmark. It's celebrated all over Norway, and in Orkney. Orkney, perhaps even more than Shetland, is proud of its Viking heritage and links with Norway are long lasting and close.

 

We get a lot of Norwegian visitors for Constitution Day, some of whom sail over in their own boats and then take part in the Constitution Parade, known as the Tog, many of them in traditional dress. It's a colourful thing to see. We missed it this year because it was on a Sunday, and therefore took place before the Cathedral Service and really it takes us all our time to turn up for that on time on a normal Sunday let alone an hour early to watch the Tog.

 

Never mind, I did take a picture of the Norwegian Flag flying from our Town Hall. I can assure you it really is the Norwegian flag  although it's not very clear. I should have zoomed, as it were.

 

 

Not Alice's Sister's Book

I have been away and I have been poorly (they overlapped) and now I am rushed off my feet, which has led to the blog not being updated for a wee while. And I'm doing it now while I generously give myself a lunch break.

There was another reason that I didn't update and that was that I didn't have any photos to share. I have read over and over again that a successful blog needs pictures and lots of them, and although I am not sure that I agree 100%, who am I to go against the joint wisdom of the blogosphere?

 

And we must recall the cautionary words near the beginning of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland when Alice tries to read her sister's book but gives up 'because it had no pictures or conversations in it'.

 

'And really' thought Alice, 'what is the good of a book without pictures or conversations in it?'

 

For many years (remembering that I read Alice first when I was seven) I tried to work out what sort of book could possibly exist which didn't have either pictures or conversations. Of course when I later studied the period in which Alice was written I realised that there were quite a few, some of which Carroll was himself mocking in this text.

 

I wonder if perhaps Alice's sister was 'entertaining' herself by reading one of the works of the redoubtable Sarah Stickney Ellis, a woman who wrote an amazingly successful series of books addressed to the women of England in their capacities as simply Women, then more particularly as Daughters, Wives and Mothers. (As an aside I note  there's none of this nonsense about Britain).

 

To give you a brief taste, because more than a brief taste is more  than even mildly feminist flesh and blood can stand, Mrs Ellis cautions mothers that girls are 'more liable than boys to receive impressions from surrounding things, more easily diverted from a straightforward course, less fortified by moral courage, and consequently more tempted to have recourse to artifice if not to falsehood in order to escape what they dread....' but then without missing a beat two pages later she is pointing out that girls are of inestimable use in the family for giving a moral lead to brothers when they come home from school in the holiday having gained 'mere academic knowledge'.

 

How did she not see the contradiction? Who knows. The Victorian era is full of this sort of baffling double speak - it's one of the things that makes it so fascinating, and yet so frustrating, to study.

 

Anyway, I now have pictures on my camera and as soon as I have them on my computer I'll be putting up posts more in keeping with the  'plenty of pictures' guideline.