Feeling Harassed

I am feeling ever so slightly on edge, mainly because for the second time in two weeks I have had problems trying to do something very basic which is buy a computer game. It's from a site that I have used before without problem but suddenly it seems not to be working properly. The first time it happened I was assured that it was 'just one of those things that happen' which wasn't exactly a proper explanation but it was obviously all I was going to get. And glitches do occur on the web, I know that. So today I thought I would try again, with much the same (non) result.

 

So I have sent off yet another e-mail to customer support and we'll see what happens. Probably not much.

 

Meanwhile it put me in such a bad mood that I looked up the Facebook page of a well known coach tour operator here in the UK and left a complaint about two of their coach drivers. We got stuck behind them, along with a dozen other cars, for the whole trip to Kirkwall yesterday, approximately 15 miles, during which they resolutely drove at 30 mph, except when they went past the distillery at which point they slowed down which I wouldn't have thought was even possible for them to do without stalling, and showed no inclination to pull into one of the many places where they could have stopped for a few moments to let us all past. It was annoying and frustrating and one of the worst examples of discourteous thoughtless driving I have seen in a long while. Not to mention that it made us late for where we were going. So as I was feeling sour after my tussle with the website I made my feelings known. Facebook makes it so much easier to complain - almost too easy really. Although it will be interesting to see if I get a response.

Do blondes have more fun?

I went blonde over the summer. This wasn't the result of a fright, or even a conscious decision, it came about because of a misunderstanding with a hairdresser, obviously not my usual one who is  the lovely Kay at Verdandi in Kirkwall.

No, this was a Welsh hairdresser, although I doubt that her nationality had anything to do with things, except that it alerts readers to the fact that this must have happened while I was in Cardiff, right at the beginning of my almost 6 week trip away from Orkney and sort of explains why, once it had happened, I wasn't in much of a position to do anything about it for quite some time.

 

Now I have no objection to playing with my hair colour. In the normal way of things I get it coloured two or maybe three times a year. It keeps me from turning an unflattering pepper and salt colour as my hair succumbs to the passage of time and does its best to turn grey. Or possibly silver, which would be preferable, but as I don't generally let it get to the stage where you can make that sort of subtle differentiation, who knows?

 

So I go a bit redder in the winter when things need cheering up, and a bit fairer in the summer or when I'm going to Australia. I do not go guinea bright blonde. I don't suit it; not with my complexion not with my figure, not with my personality, so I stay away from it. Sadly it seemed to be the only colour the Welsh hairdresser knew how to apply -  or possibly the only colour she had. It was certainly the colour she had on her own hair.

 

I was, to put it mildly, startled by how it looked. I was even more startled by the way in which it turned my extremely pale foundation into something that looked like it had come straight off an Essex sunbed. Startled and a little bit cross.

 

But there was nothing to be done except live with it so I soldiered on through the summer, trying my best to convince myself that every time I washed it, it got a little bit less bright. And then I went to a conference in Stirling.

 

Now I am not a stranger to the academic conference. I could not in all honesty say that I have been to more academic conferences than I've had hot dinners: but if I changed the phrase to  more than I've had hot dinners that I have cooked myself, we might not be so far off the mark. And never, in all the years I have been attending these things,  never have I had so many middle aged men come up to me, introduce themselves and engage me in conversation. And since it can't have been for my outstanding academic contribution, as I was attending as an observer, not a participant, it must all be down to the newly blonde hair.

 

So do  blondes have more fun? It all depends on where you stand, doesn't it? From my experience I'd say  they probably just get more hassle! but if I were younger who knows what my take on it would be?

Project 60 - Number 11 - Afternoon Tea

This was a  while ago and something that I shared with my sister while I was staying with her back in June.

Obviously it wasn't just any afternoon tea, or it would hardly qualify. It's not as though I'm a stranger to the concept of going out for afternoon tea. No, what made this special was the location. 

Many years ago, when I was 'untimely ripp'd' from the place of my birth and the whole family decamped to Gloucestershire from County Durham we had a stream of family visitors and soon established a sort of Best of the Cotswolds Tour Versions 1 and 2 which they were all taken on.

 

Very early on, when we were visiting the beautiful, of somewhat touristy, village of Broadway we went past The Lygon Arms, where a board advertised afternoon tea at £5 a head. (Bear in mind that this was in the late 1960s). My mother was horrified. Where someone else might think 'That must be really special, I wonder how good it is?' her reaction was 'Who in their right mind would pay £5 for afternoon tea?' and it has to be said that in those days £5 was a lot of money.

 

For a long time now I've wondered how much The Lygon Arms was currently charging for afternoon tea and how good it would be, so when I made my plans to spend some time with my sister, who still lives nearby, a trip to try it out was popped onto the Project 60 list.

 

We had a lovely afternoon wandering round Broadway and rootling in some of the extremely nice shops that are to be found there before repairing to The Lygon Arms for tea. The answers to my questions turned out to be £20 and not as good as all that.

 

The building itself is old and quaint and lovely, although we were rather startled by the fact that water started to drip down loudly into the fireplace from three separate spots while we were eating. I was surprised that the only choice we were given regarding what we drank was tea or coffee; I'd anticipated being given a choice of various teas. One of my sandwiches still retained some of the crust and they were made from ordinary sliced loaves. But the scones were nice and as you can see above there was plenty of choice when it came to the cakes.

 

Overall then,  I was slightly underwhelmed. But it was never the case that everything on the list had to be brilliant. And this wasn't, but I'm still glad we did it.

A Sad Day, and an Odd Resolution.

 

 

 

 

Monday was the day we buried my friend Margaret. The funeral was in Lancashire and it's a long way from Orkney but she had been a friend for over twenty years and we couldn't not go. It was a rather more upsetting experience than I had bargained for to be honest, but I was still pleased I went.

 

All the way through the service I could smell something beautiful, without knowing what it was, but when I turned around at the last, I saw this vase of sweet peas right behind me and realised it must have been them.

 

Difficult though the day was it would have been much worse without the support of others in the same situation. Here's a picture of the small group of friends, of which Margaret was such an integral part, minus one who sadly couldn't attend We're putting on smiles because we're altogether and who knows when that will happen again, but we were all conscious of the fact that one of us has gone and is never coming back.

 

 

As for the resolution, it's not to be buried in a wicker coffin. Margaret had one, which is all of a piece with the sort of caring thoughtful person that she was. I'd never actually seen one before Monday, and thought they were a good idea until then. I'm afraid they look rather too much like picnic baskets for me to be comfortable about ending up in one. I know I'll end up as food for worms, but I feel I don't actually have to be delivered up to  them in  a hamper. 

People say the strangest things

I know this fact cannot come as a surprise to anyone who walks around with even one ear open but still....here's the latest one I heard.

The OH and I are hooked on an Australian cooking show called My Kitchen Rules, which is shown in the UK on Sky Living. The new series has just started and that's always quite interesting as you size up the contestants, for both personality and cooking ability. Obviously most of them have a persona which they want to come across on the small screen and sometimes that can lead to them looking a bit odd.

 

Of the current crop one insisted on how she was 'a little bit creative, a little bit quirky', and it's a funny thing but I reckon that anyone who has to proclaim from the rooftops that they are quirky is generally no such thing.

 

I still don't think this girl is quirky, but it did stop me in my tracks when she said 'Pink's sort of a bit of a hobby for me'.

 

What? Say that again? Pink is 'a bit of a hobby'? What's green then - sort of a job?

 

People. Definitely odd.

A Windows 10 Whinge

Like millions of others we 'qualified' for a free upgrade to Windows 10. The OH installed his first and then he had a whinge because it was all so stable and problem free. I assume that this means that previous incarnations weren't quite so well behaved when they first came out. It's not the sort of memory I retain.

 

To be honest I never really liked Windows 8 much, but we got along in a ' if you behave yourself and don't crash, I will not scream in frustration when you do something inexplicable' basis. But oh! how I dislike Windows 10.

 

I'm not quite sure exactly what irritates me the most about it, but high on the list is the fact that it interfered with my Blog settings. Hence the brief appearance of a post earlier this month which was only left justified. Not only could I not tidy up the appearance of the writing, it proved impossible to upload photographs successfully as well.

 

Then there was the fact that VLC media player no longer launched automatically when you put a CD in the disc drive, and then refused to let me click through the tracks. This was quite a downer, since we recently got rid of all our old hi-fi components on the grounds that we could get headphones for our computers that were far superior and less space consuming than our old wall mounted ones (which were state of the art and v expensive when we bought them er- astonishingly, now I work it out - about 26 years ago.)

 

I also got mired in something called Microsoft Edge and was constantly offered the services of Bing! Does anyone actually use/like Bing!? I seem to have spent months and years avoiding it, or clearing it off my machine when I have inadvertently clicked on it and it has installed itself. Like puppies and toddlers with your legs, Bing! displayed a remarkable ability to place itself right under the tip of your cursor just as you were about to click.

 

Anyway the OH has sorted out my issues with Windows 10, not by educating me in its mysteries and even, for all I know its myriad advantages, but by re-setting my defaults. So normal service has been resumed, as far as I know. I have yet to try uploading photographs from my camera and then sorting them properly. I know that people involved in IT generally trumpet how superbly intuitive all their new programs and apps are; possibly they are to other IT people, but - breaking news! for some of us humble users they are not intuitive at all.

More from Scarborough

Scarborough is a small-ish seaside town in Yorkshire, I've always preferred its larger and older neighbour Whitby myself but Scarborough is pleasant enough. The major reason for our outing to Scarborough during the Gaskell Society Conference was to visit the grave of Anne Bronte. Anne died in Scarborough and her sister Charlotte, who was with her, arranged to have her buried there almost immediately. Charlotte said this was because Anne had loved Scarborough but I have always thought that it was probably just because Charlotte couldn't be bothered to make the arrangements to take Anne's body back to Haworth where she could have been buried with  the rest of the family.

 

Now as many of you know Anne Bronte is the only one of the family for whom I have much time and as such this was not my first visit to her grave. But here, for what it is worth is a picture of it.

 

 

 

 

The plaque is so legible because it was recently redone by The Bronte Society, who had several of the incorrect details on the original corrected at the same time. I am not sure whether  Charlotte gave the stonemasons the wrong details or whether she gave them the right ones and they got them wrong. The carnation was there when we got there, but I understand that 'we' left a bunch of lilies on the grave, as Gaskell was known as Lily to her family and friends.

 

The dilapidated state into which untended gravestones can fall on this part of the country is amply demonstrated by the one right next to Anne's.

 



Horrible, really.

 

I neglected to take photos at the beautiful hotel where we had a cream tea, but after that we went on to the church where William Wordsworth was married. It seems to me that we can't have a Gaskell Society Conference without reference to WW, which is a niggle because, as in the case of Charlotte Bronte, I am Not a Fan. On the other hand almost everyone who was anyone in Victorian England was, so I suppose it's not surprising that he does keep popping up.

 

Anyway the church and its setting really were an example of English landscape at its best so I took a not very good photo -

 

 

Inside it smelled very damp which was unfortunate given that they had some interesting textiles in there. They also had some rather nice modern stained glass windows.

 

Wordsworth married the best friend of his doting sister, but she - the sister - was famously unequal to the task of attending the wedding and stayed in a nearby house until it was all over and the happy couple came to greet her as husband and wife. This has always struck me as strange. There's something odd and uncontrolled about Dorothy's passion for her brother, but possibly that is a thought best left unpursued.

 

 

The Loss of a Friend

I heard yesterday that my friend Margaret had finally succumbed to her cancer. Long term readers will remember that we went to visit her in March. Although all her friends and family had been told she was terminally ill and very poorly, I was unaware until very recently that when she was given her diagnosis she was told she had about eight weeks to live. In the event she had almost eight months and I suspect those eight months might have been happier had they not been lived under the shadow of expecting to die any day.

 

She wanted to die in her local hospice, where we had visited her, but she was twice admitted and then twice discharged as being too well. So she ended her days in a nursing home, which I understand was lovely, but I find it very sad that she wasn't where she wanted to be at the end. As a society, is it too much to ask that people who are dying should get to choose where they end their lives?

 

But Margaret isn't defined by her death. Her life meant much more. She was a nurse, not a nurse with a degree and an eye on an administrative post, but someone who chose nursing in the days when it was seen as a caring profession, because she was an instinctive carer. She wanted at a really deep level to help people; to make them better, or if that were not possible, to make them comfortable. She was hospitable, intelligent, generous with her time, interested in a variety of things. She taught me a lot about soldiering on under difficulties, about forgiveness, about graciousness to people who perhaps have not always been particularly gracious to you, and that a friendship doesn't have to end simply because your attitudes to the duty of voting are different. She never married, but was reportedly overwhelmed by all the cards, messages and visits she had in her final illness from people whose lives she had touched.

 

I'm sure her funeral will be a true celebration of her life and all it meant, and that's fine. But in the modern rush to use funerals to celebrate the life, perhaps we have forgotten the value of mourning a death. I shall feel more like mourning than celebrating when the day comes. Each man's death diminishes me said the poet, and today I feel a little diminished. I shall miss her.

I'm not a great fan of yarn bombing, but look at this.....

 

 

I thought a day by day, hour by hour description of the Gaskell Society Conference, with which my mega trip south finished about 10 days ago would tire the patience of readers, so decided to do a few 'highlights', illustrated by some of  the photos that I took.

 

 

Elizabeth Gaskell wrote a novel called Sylvia's Lovers (not one of her best in my opinion, but other views are available) set in Whitby and its environs, hence the choice of venue. We were based at a place called Cober Hill, which is situated in a small village called Cloughton, near Scarborough, and we had two 'trips out' one to Scarborough and one to Whitby.

 

The Scarborough outing include a visit to Woodend, the one time home of the Sitwell family, now a gallery space and inside the gallery we found this bike.

 

 

 

It was part of a larger project connected to the opening stages of the Tour de France in 2014 which, for some reason I never quite fathomed, took place in Yorkshire. The various elements on the bike are supposed to represent Scarborough, which is why they include a seagull and a puffin.

 

 

 

I know very little about the Sitwell family, apart from the names Edith, Osbert and Sacheverell, the latter of which I'm still not sure how to pronounce, and the fact that Edith wrote the words to a piece called Façade (William Walton wrote the music)  which is doubtless interesting if you're a Professor of the Social History of Music and is otherwise  tedious beyond belief.

 

 

Interestingly though, we had had a talk on the family on the Friday night at which the (male) speaker declared that the Sitwell parents were 'rather odd, and in the mother the oddness was bordering on insanity'.  I do get very annoyed with men who, without any formal qualifications in psychiatry or psychology take it upon themselves to diagnose women as mad. It is sadly common.

 

Anyway, enjoy the bike!