Sopot

Did I say that the conference actually took place in a small seaside town called Sopot, rather than in Gdansk itself? Courtesy of the lack of fights at sensible times back to the UK on Sundays from Gdansk airport, a friend and I had decided to stay on after the conference finished on Saturday night and the idea was that we would take the train into Gdansk and have  a look around. However when the day came we were both far too tired to contemplate it, so we contented ourselves with a gentle walk around Sopt, taking in the beach, the pier, and some bits of the town we hadn't had time to see previously.

Under her influence I may have overdone the photos of architectural detailing and I won't upload them all here. But her are some pictures that will give you a visual taste of the place.

I could label them all...

 

but you know they're all a bit self evident...

 

 

and you really don't need me to write out...

 

 

 

The Grand Hotel, the beach and pier,

 

 

 

a church, a garden and balconies, now do you?

 

 

And because I see I haven't posted any before here are a couple to prove that we were

there to work.

I have a funny story about the big man in the middle of the bottom picture which I will save for another day!

 



It may have been a dark and stormy night

but we still went out on Monday evening.

Regular readers will now be saying to themselves, well of course they went out, Monday night is her yoga night, and this is true but it wasn't Yoga I went to.

In fact yoga has been more honoured in the breach then the observance lately. I did four weeks, then there were two weeks off for half term, following which I was away in Glasgow for one week, the OH was away ferrying Son No 2 about one week, then we had an AGM one week. And this week there was a talk at the library.

 

Now there are often talks and groups and all manner of exciting things going on at the library, most of which I avoid like the plague because I can't be doing with people talking about books in a way that's calculated to show everyone else how clever they are/or talking about what they've done lately to show off what an exciting life they lead. I may have mentioned before that I do not 'do' pretension in any shape or form and have learned that, whatever the temptation, it is better to keep away from things like book groups, knitting groups or indeed any sort of group based around an activity which I enjoy because the other people there, however nice, will just irritate me. Obviously there is some fault here on my side, because no-one else seems to be affected in this way, and I daresay that I have missed out on friendships and opportunities by not taking part in such things. But discretion being the better part of valour I know it is better for me simply to Stay Away.

 

However I got a bit carried away by local enthusiasm last week and bought tickets for Arne Dahl's gig at Kirkwall Library. I'm not really sure what came over me to be honest. I watched the first AD series on TV and found it a bit dull, bought the book on which it was based and found that a bit dull too. We're currently 'watching' the second series by which I mean it is on and I divide my attention almost equally between it and my knitting. And guess what - it's fairly dull as well. But you know it's not often we get internationally successful crime writers coming to Orkney and it was less than a fiver for two tickets so I bought them and we went.

 

Mr Dahl, like his book and his TV series, was dull. Pedestrian may be the mot juste. I wanted him to be understated and funny like so many Scandinavians are, but although he just about scraped through on the understated front, he failed miserably when it came to the funny. I probably realised this very early on when he declared Paul Hjelm to be his alter ego in his books. Paul Hjelm is the dullest most uncharismatic, featureless non-personality in Dahl's police squad....nuff said.

 

As a side story the woman who sat in front of us had just come back from the weekend Shetland Noir crime writing festival, an experience she related in some detail to the lady on the OH's right. It had featured AD (so why on earth she had shelled out to come and hear him again in Orkney is totally beyond me ) but the most exciting thing that had happened the whole weekend was that Douglas Henshall (known, as regular readers here will again recall, in this household as The Woodentop) had been a surprise guest, courtesy of his TV role as Jimmy Perez - and don't get me started on how bad a fit that is- and she had had her photo taken with him.

 

Now here's a thing. Going back to what I said at the start about finding it difficult to cope with people who wanted to trumpet their exciting lives, here s a prime example. What specifically is so exciting about meeting a total stranger, a middle aged man known mainly for his attempts to pretend to be someone else, and getting some other random stranger to take a photo of the two of you together? I genuinely don't get it. Why is that so exciting that a) you do it and b) tell other people about it? I could just about understand it if she herself  had taken a photo of DH when he was on a panel, as something to remind her of the occasion, but having her photo taken with someone who would have forgotten all about it in two minutes? Is that really squeak worthily exciting? Well maybe it is. But I wouldn't find it so.

Carmen

One of the things we fitted in along with the trip to Huddersfield for the dyeing course was a performance of Scottish Opera's Carmen at the Eden Court Theatre in Inverness.

Now I love Carmen, and we are huge supporters of Scottish Opera, but it has to be said that this Carmen was problematic.

As a plus the female singing was all of a very high standard. Everyone raved about the Carmen herself, perhaps a little over enthusiastically to our mind, but she was very good indeed. The Micaela was excellent. I remember someone once telling me what a thankless part Micaela is - you get a Big Tune in Act 1 then have to go backstage and fill in time until your second Big Tune which isn't until Act 3 and then you're done, but you can't go home early because you have to be there at the end of Act 4 for the curtain calls.....

 

Having said that, well,  the men were a bit lacklustre in the vocal department, except for the tenor who certainly had  a Big Voice. It was not a particularly beautiful voice, but it certainly was Big. Nor, unless you were wanting someone to impersonate middle stump, could he act. Wooden really doesn't cover it.

 

The big problem though was with the production. Minimalist I can do, and let's be honest, no-one expects that when the curtain goes up on Act 1 that the audience will see a meticulous recreation of the old cigarette factory in Seville ( now part of the university and well worth a look, should you be in that neck of the woods) . However given that it is supposedly midday in that most sunny of Spanish cities what you also do not expect to see is a three sided black box. The same three sided box that subsequently does duty for the tavern of Lillas Pastia in Act 2 and the mountain side in Act 3. Admittedly some light was shed in Act 3 by the presence on stage of what looked very much like a real camp fire, but can't have been.

 

It was not an overwhelming evening. For the first time ever I understood what Carmen's original, and highly dissatisfied, audience meant when they wrote the opera off as sordid. It was sordid and uninvolving and actually  a huge disappointment. And it gives me no pleasure to say that.

 

There was a funny moment though. There was a couple to my left and before the performance began the female half was craning her neck and looking all around her. She then turned to her male companion and said 'I was looking for the xs, but I can't see them. Maybe they're sitting in the cheap seats'.

 

Which goes to show that there are still people who can give opera audiences a bad name!

Project 60 Number 16 - Dyeing

I've been wanting to try a new fibre craft for a while now and swithering between spinning, weaving and dyeing.

 

Spinning is one of those things that I feel I will eventually learn to do because it is somehow written in my stars - not that I believe in things being written in the stars to be honest - but it just has a dread sort of inevitability about it. It's not as though I am totally without the opportunity to learn to spin here in Orkney because I'm sure that if I looked hard enough I could find several people who could and would teach me, but I am rather put off by the amount of equipment, the expense, and knowing that in no time at all I would have a collection of fleece and fibre to rival my current wool stash. I am in the process of adding the latter to Ravelry and although it is a useful exercise (who would have thought you could forget about so many beautiful skeins of wool, you have bought or been given) it is also quite depressing in a 'when will I ever have the time to knit this into something useful or lovely or both' kind of way. So I resist spinning as well as I can, even though I know that one day the wall will be breached.

 

Weaving also comes into the 'too much stuff/taking up too much space/ too much expense' category; also I am not convinced I have the patience to do all the setting up properly in order to produce a set of wonky table mats that I wouldn't know what to do with. Again I haven't necessarily written it off for ever, but just now it seems like far too much hassle.

 

So all in all it was fortunate that I saw a notification a while back about dyeing classes being held by the indie dyer known as The Knitting Goddess . So OK they were in Huddersfield which is a long way from Orkney, especially given that they lasted slightly less than four hours, but I would get the chance to try something I've wanted to do for a while, I'd learn something and I might even enjoy it. I booked before I could change my mind.

 

In the event we built a lot of other things round the trip to Huddersfield, of which more over the following days. I was once again led to use the expression 's*dding satnav' as it took us with unerring inaccuracy but excellent timing to the wrong place, some twenty minutes from where I needed to be. I was not amused. I hate being late for things. I'd mostly rather just give up than turn up late. On this occasion however even I could see that not turning up at all rather than turning up twenty minutes late would be childish and self defeating in the extreme so we got back in the car and found where we needed to be.

 

As it turned out I had only missed the boring Health and Safety stuff and so I spent a happy three hours or so painting yarn and watching other people do it too. We had all been asked to take something to inspire us colourwise and it was interesting to see all the different things people had chosen to take.

 

I had worried that I would hate the whole experience and that all it would do would bring back unhappy memories of art lessons at school where my inability to draw even a stick dog made the weekly double period absolute hell. I am so inept at arty stuff, and when people say things like 'just have a little play and see where it leads you', which is a very common thing in crafty circles,  I inevitably find it leads me straight down the road to Brain Freeze Territory.

 

However it turns out that even I can mix colours and then put them on plain undyed yarn with a paintbrush to some effect. As proof of which I offer the following picture of my inspiration, some of the publicity material for the current Scottish Opera production of Carmen whose colours I loved, and the yarn I dyed from it.

 

 

 

 

Given the inspiration I feel I should knit it up into a shawl, so I'm currently looking for the perfect pattern. I'm sure I'll find it one day.