Project 60 - Number 33

Gold star and a coconut to anyone who knows what this is.

 

 

For those not now trying to work out the best way to open a coconut and not spill the milk, that there is home made candied orange and lemon peel.

 

I don't suppose anyone wants an extra coconut but you can have another gold star if you tell me what the point of making your own candied peel is? I certainly can't work it out. Other than to add to the Project 60 list.

 

You may be idly wondering why I bothered and it was to go on this

 

 



That is Lee's St Clements drizzle cake from last weeks Great British Bake Off. I decided that this year it might be fun to try making one thing from each episode, as the BBC put up a selection of the recipes on the web page. For the opening week I chose this. It was a mistake. In retrospect it might have been better to choose a recipe from someone other than the week's eliminated contestant.

 

Like the cake, I'm a bit bitter. The ingredients cost a bomb (14 eggs for starters) and I had to buy some new cake tins as 9" sponges have not previously featured on the family tea table. There were five elements to this cake and all had something wrong with them.

 

Cake. Dry, dense, flavourless.

Drizzle. Too much of it and far too sharp.

Orange curd. Filled the kitchen with that revolting smell of hot fresh orange juice, was lovely when it came out of the pan, but developed a nasty bitter aftertaste when cooled.

Icing. Possibly the most successful of the five (which isn't saying much) but again too sharp.

Candied peel. See above.

 

Respect to the bakers in the tent though. The drizzle cake was just morning  one of their Bake Off experience. They had to go on and make Jaffa Cakes in the afternoon and a showstopper cake with a mirror glaze the day after. It took me two days (on and off) to do this one cake and by the end I was on my knees. I don't know how they do it.

 

This week is biscuit week and I'm not much of a hand at  making biscuits at the best of times but I'll give it a go. I will try to make a better recipe selection this time around though.

Project 60 - Number 32 - An Opera at Drottningholm

Drottningholm (literally Queen's Island, but let that pass) is the name of what was originally the summer palace of the Swedish Royal family and is the official residence of the King and Queen on a year round basis. Several of the guides we had on holiday made a point of telling us that the royal family has, between its members, no fewer than eleven official residences, maintained by the Swedish taxpayer, and I have to say the vibe I got was that they personally weren't all that happy about paying to keep several roofs over the head of the King's offspring when accommodation is not the cheapest thing to find in Sweden  for your average Joe.

However that may be, if you're an opera lover the word Drottningholm means only one thing - the theatre. Built in the eighteenth century like the rest of the palace the theatre was locked up one day and slowly forgotten about - until 1921 when someone opened  up the building and discovered this little gem of a theatre still with the original scenery and stage machinery all intact.

 

This link will take you to one of the most boring looking web pages ever but there are photos and some information about the theatre's origins. I first read about it in my early twenties and I've wanted to see a performance there ever since. Life and family and lack of the disposable got in the way, but finally, finally we got to see an opera there.

You're not allowed to take pictures of the inside but here's what the outside looks like

 

Operas are given here in a summer festival, not year round and they tend to specialise in Mozart and his contemporaries, which is understandable as they are contemporary with the theatre. Last year they started a cycle of the Mozart/Da Ponte operas, and we got Don Giovanni, which is probably my least favourite of the three, but that's not to say I don't enjoy it. The downside was that the director for this cycle has abjured the use of the C18 paraphernalia which was a bit of a shame (for which read extremely annoying ) since that really is The Point of going and now we will have to try and organise to go again sometime, but not next year as it will still be Not C18 Man in charge. As an aside obviously we paid for this trip as a whole package which is why, when we were handed out our tickets for Drottningholm, I felt faint. Never in my life have I paid that much for an opera ticket, never.  Not for Sydney, not for San Francisco, not for Covent Garden (even).

 

The performance was fine, full of some very energetic young singers - perhaps too young in the case of Don Giovanni himself, who didn't convince as a rake with a list of conquests as long as a giant's arm. The Ottavio was by far and away the best singer, which is perhaps not what you want to come out of a performance of Don G saying, but they were all good - you don't get to sing at Drottningholm if you're not, the orchestra was fantastic and it would have been a 5* evening had it not been for the original C18 seats which were the most uncomfortable things I have ever sat on. Benches with a very narrow cushion and precious little back support. I'm not looking forward to sitting on them again!



 

Project 60 Number 31 - Growing Strawberries

So this one is a really serendipitous thing. We certainly never set out to grow strawberries. A while back we went to a cream tea/open day event for a local community garden, which was very nice and this being Orkney we bought some raffle tickets. I did my usual crack about how I didn't know why we bothered because we never won anything.

Well lo and behold! two days later up the drive comes a lady a=in a car bearing our raffle prizes! Yes, we had won not one, but two. One was a glasses case and I'm not too sure where that is, but the other one was a  tray of strawberry plants.

This involved us in the purchase of a strawberry planter, which you may have spotted a few posts back when I put up a picture of the little terrace by the back door.

So convinced am I that we have what is colloquially known as Black Thumb that I was delighted when the plants got flowers! You can imagine how even more delighted I was when we got back from Sweden and the OH harvested our first ever strawberry.

 

No, you're not imagining things, it IS totally tiny. But it is indisputably a strawberry. And look, there are more to come! If the birds don't get there first.

 

 

Project 60 - Number 30 An Opera Holiday

It won't have escaped your notice that we have been away again, if only because the blog fell uncharacteristically silent for over a week. We've been to Sweden on an Opera Holiday.

 

These days we are not big fans of travelling in groups, and if we had been the nightmare that was the Greek trip would have cured us of it for ever and a day, but it has to be said that holidays arranged around an activity that it I difficult or impossible to arrange for yourself have to be an exception to the rule that 'We Travel Alone'. And this was the case here, since the opportunity arose to go on a holiday with other opera enthusiasts to Sweden, including a performance at the world famous^ Drottningholm Court Theatre. We booked.

 

^ Just in case the fame has not yet reached your particular part of the world - do not worry. There will be much more to come on Drottningholm in a later post.

 

It was a fairly packed break it must be said. We landed at Arlanda airport last Thursday (it was raining, which I took as a personal affront, since in my universe Sweden in August is supposed to be warm and sunny) and were whisked straight away to a small town called Sigtuna, which fights against a little competition for the title of Sweden's oldest town. However old its origins may be, it's very pretty

 

 

Heather - that tapestry photo is especially for you. It was hanging in the church. The guide had no idea about who had made it, or when or why. Naughty guide!!

 

The next day we had a guided tour of Stockholm. The OH and I have been to Stockholm before but the tour included some places we hadn't visited so we tagged along. It took hours and as my sister once famously said at the age of three when asked about a walk we had just been taken on ' our legs were worn off all the way up to our knees'. I know much much more about the presentation of Nobel Prizes than I ever wanted or needed, but on the upside in a few more days it will all have melted from my mind leaving room for other stuff. I could have passed on the Changing of he Guard, and indeed we did pass on the Royal Palace because although our guide promised us she could get us round in an hour we knew she was lying. She was nice, she was good, but she was not fast, or economical with information.

 

More photos -

 

This was near our hotel - an C18 residence and garden for a titled family originally, but now belonging to some sort of financial concern.

 

One of many many photos I have of the beautiful Stockholm skyline, from this trip and several others.

There was some sort of Summer Festival on that we caught the end of - booths and odd activities popping up everywhere. Here's a man with a lute doing a comic turn with someone else dressed up as a Circus Ringmaster.

 

Inner courtyard of the Radhuset (City Hall) where they dish out the Nobel prizes

 

It's a city of flowers in summertime, everywhere you look

 

and here is the very nice place we found for a late lunch - a most unprepossessing frontage, but once you got past that you went down about four sets of uneven stairs to a huge former beer cellar. It was cool and quiet and, for Stockholm, reasonably priced too.

That evening was the first of three opera performances that we were to see, and it was the Drottningholm one. I'll give that a proper write up tomorrow.

 

Project 60 No. 29 - well I didn't see that one coming!

I would never have seen it in a million years since it is being featured in a national newspaper.

Someone gave details of the crowd funder to The National and I was rung up out of the blue by a reporter on Friday and asked questions, some of which were easy to answer of the cuff and some of which weren't.

 

There was a write up in the paper on Saturday. Fortunately the photograph of me which was sent to them was not used, much to my relief.

 

It brought in a little flurry of donations over the weekend, so was worth it, but it was still quite mortifying.

 

In an irony not lost on me it features my quote about wanting to do this 'without bells and whistles, no trumpets no fanfares'

 

Ah well, another step closer to the sixty I suppose.

 

 

The Other Pair

So a normal sized pair of socks in the same pattern as the Really Ugly Pair but in a yarn with just very subtle colour variations. Nice, yes? I am slightly reconciled to the pattern but it won't become a staple.

Having suffered nightmares about the possibility of running out of wool before I finished the others, I am rather surprised to discover that I still have about half a skein (41g) of this left one left after knitting this pair. Of course they are much much smaller. I will have to think of something to do with the extra, that's too much to put into the leftovers drawer for the scrap blanket I am going to make for the cats 'one day'.

Are these the ugliest hand knitted socks ever?

Remember the other day when I was proudly showing off my lovely Tacit fingerless mitts that I had made and I mentioned that I was knitting something really loathsome? Here they are

For me these are wrong on so may levels.

The pattern is one I've wanted to use for a long time. It's called Hermione's Every Day socks. Not too complicated but just enough to keep you alert. The wool too was one I've had for a while and wanted to use - Blue Moon Fibre Arts Socks That Rock in a special colourway they dyed to raise funds for Medecins Sans Frontiers. So it should have been a wonderful project but it wasn't.

I'm normally very wary of using textured patterns with variegated yarn because the one tends to get lost in the other. However on Ravelry quite a lot of people had posted photos of this pattern done in a variegated yarn and they all looked fine or fine-ish. Some of the colours weren't my cup of tea, but then that always happens when you look at popular projects on Ravelry, because one man's 'delightful little red' is another man's 'mouthful of vinegar', but I thought that overall it should be an OK pattern for a variegated yarn. I was wrong. It might have been better had the yarn not had those quite substantial white areas in it, because the other coloured bits were lovely

 

See? Really nice colour mix.

 

Not only did I not like the way the pattern got lost in the colour, I didn't like the size. These socks were supposed to be for me but they are far too big. I should have known when the first line of the pattern said Cast On 64, because I never cast on 64 stitches for a pair of socks for myself, I cast on 56. But you know I have had the thing where you cast on the normal number of stitches for a patterned sock and then they end up too tight in the leg because the pattern draws the fabric in. Also I knit a lot of socks by a designer called Rachel Coopey and quite often they start with 72 stitches and they fit perfectly well. So although doubtful about the 64 I wasn't so confidently doubtful as to reduce the cast on numbers. Which, as it turned out, was a mistake.

 

Fortunately the OH said he liked both the pattern and the wool and he said it convincingly enough for me to allow him to have the socks when it turned out they fitted him - there was a time when I thought they'd be too big for him too.

 

There was also a small mistake in the pattern which I wasn't amused about, although at least I was wide enough awake to spot it and make the appropriate adjustments.

 

And just to make matters worse I was fairly convinced most of the way through the second sock that I was going to run out of wool. In the event I finished it with about four inches spare, but it was a damn close run thing and I stayed up far too late last night to finish because I couldn't go to bed without knowing whether I would have enough or not.

 

One thing I did like about the pattern was the garter stitch edging on the heel, as here -

 

 

which made picking up stitches after the heel was turned a lot easier than usual.

 

As it happens I am making another pair of socks from this pattern, because I wanted to see what a normal pair would look like in it. These ones are for me and I have cast on 56 stitches and am using an officially solid yarn, although it has a few subtle variations in tone. There's one done already, pic up when the pair is finished.  So far, so good!



Project 60 - Number 28

When I started Project 60 it never occurred to me that I might end up doing something for it which I was really reluctant to do. I imagined that everything would be something I'd vaguely thought it wold be 'good to get around to' or definitely wanted to do, or presented itself as a good idea. I never dreamed I'd ever do anything that I was really uncomfortable doing.

But that has proved to be the case with Number 28, which is setting up a crowd funder. Since I hate asking people for help to do anything, and particularly hate asking people for money, it has been a hard thing to do, but I have done it and it has been/is a continuing experience, even if not a particularly pleasant one.

On the upside people have responded to it, not in their droves, but enough that it's heartening.

 

The project is a very niche one, in that I am trying to raise some money towards putting a Commemorative Stone into The Makar's Court for George Campbell Hay, who is the subject of my Ph D thesis. I was amazed to discover that he wasn't already there, but there again stones are usually placed by family or by the members of a society dedicated to the work of a particular author. GCH has neither of those things, so I have chosen to take it on.

 

To be honest I would like just to be able to write a cheque to cover the cost myself and let the people at The Writers Museum put in the stone without fuss, but it doesn't work that way. There has to be an 'unveiling' with a lot of bells and whistles, which I'm not looking forward to, but that's a way down the track. At present we're waiting for the stonemason to 'come up with a design'. I'm not quite sure how that goes, since as far as I know all the stones simply have the writers name, dates and a quotation from their work, so opportunity for 'design' per se seem limited, but who am I to question. They do this stuff all the time, so they will know better than me.

 

Anyway, we'll see how it goes. If you'd like to look at the campaign, it's here

 

https://www.gofundme.com/2ht4984

 

 

 

 

....and Opera Nights.

I  am a long way behind chronicling our opera trips this year, but for what it's worth -

First up was Sydney Opera House and an Elijah Moshinsky production of The Barber of Seville. It's not one of my favourites, but it's worth seeing with good singers and a good production. This had both. I'd never seen an EM production before although I had read about his genius for staging opera, and I have to say this was very enjoyable, although very busy. Always something, and usually several somethings, gong on in every part fo the stage, which is fine some of the time, but when you have a big aria, you probably don't want to be distracted from the soloist by six different vignettes of the servants doing funny things in six different places on the set. Still you got o Sydney Opera House as much for the experience of being there, as for the opera itself.

 

 

See what I mean about busy?

 

Next up was Scottish Opera's Rusalka in Glasgow, which was outstanding. Although it would never make  my top ten, I do like it very much and this was an outstanding production with excellent singing and a set that looked as though it came straight out of Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are. The OH was adamant he had never seen it and I was equally adamant that he had, and was dure he wouldn't like it, but it seems I was wrong on both counts. He adored it, and given that, then he cant have  seen it before or he would have remembered it. I know I saw it years ago when Opera North did it in Leeds but I must have gone with somebody else to see it.



And finally for now it was Scottish Opera's Mikado. For me, this struggled under three great difficulties.

1 I'm not a huge fan of Gilbert and Sullivan.
2 We went to see it just after I had suffered the 'you have all the editing and referencing skills of a lobotomised gnat' comment from my supervisor
3 Just after the beginning of Part 2 the fire alarms went off and we all had to troop out nto the steets of Glasgow while the Fire Brigade came and confirmed what we mostly suspected, that there was not a fire in the building.

I know the production got rave reviews but I didn't enjoy it. It couldn't decide whether t wanted to be 'genuinely' Japanese, or some sort of spoof Edwardian end of the pier show and the uncertainty took its toll.

Here are the firemen going away to rousing cheers - cheers for their swift appearance rather than the fact that they were going I think!


And here's a picture of the costume mash-up.

We'll be going abroad for some more opera very soon, and the next SO production we see will be Madam Butterfly, which I am hoping will tend to the Rusalka, rather than the Mikado, end of the scale of personal approval.

Dunnett Days.....

I know I quite often say I won't go to any more Dunnett events, and I don't go to many, but I do make an exception generally for the ones organised by my friend B from Lincoln, as she always puts together a really good program, has excellent speakers and usually arranges them  in interesting places.

 

This year the location was York, and that fitted in well, because the Canadian Contingent were going to England placed, as they had been, under a three line whip to attend the Significant Birthday of my son's mother-in-law at about the same time. So that fell nicely. The OH and I went to the DD event, which was Friday and Saturday, the CC came up that day  from a Centerparc where the in-laws had taken them for a few days, possibly to recover from the birthday party and we spent a week altogether, including Son No 2, in a very large and comfortable self catering flat just outside the city walls.

 

The Friday events took place at Grays Court, a beautiful old hotel whose gardens back onto the city walls. They have a gorgeous garden which some of us explored in our coffee breaks, since the weather was very kind indeed.

 

 

The morning speaker was Tracy Borman, talking about the research for her latest book, The Private Lives of the Tudors' Although there wasn't a lot new in what she said I was interested to hear her comments on Edward VI; it appears England may have had a lucky escape when he died young, as he had a foul temper and once went so far as to tear a live falcon to pieces because he was enraged by something his tutor said to him. And she was a fluent, likeable and well informed speaker.

 

After lunch we were entertained by Dante Ferrara, a musician who specialises in music of the Tudor and Stuart period. We had seen him before, and it was partly to see him again that the OH was so keen to go the event. I have to say that this time he was something of a disappointment, and his program wasn't to our taste. We had been warned that it wasn't for the faint hearted, but possibly the warning wasn't quite strong enough. That said he is still a versatile instrumentalist, here's the 'tree' he bring to hang his instruments on.

 

It's not the best of photos but gives some idea of how many he plays, and plays well.

The next day there was a coach trip to Shandy Hall, the home of Laurence Sterne, Vicar of Coxwold and author of The Life and Times of Tristram Shandy, and then on to Kilburn to visit the workshop and visitor centre devoted to Robert Thompson (The Mouseman)  who became famous for carving a small mouse into all the furniture he made as a trademark. I don't seem to have any photos of the Mouseman visit, but there are plenty of Shandy Hall. Sadly we were not allowed to take photographs inside the house which is understandable but a bit frustrating; there again SH is mostly famous for its gardens and you can take pictures there to your heart's content.

 

Not colourful exactly, but full of twists and turns and unexpected corners, it was a delight. As indeed was the house, which was small and higgledy piggledy but charming.

We were supposed to be dining with the group at Jamie Oliver's Italian Restaurant in York that evening but in the event we were far too tired so cried off. However we did both enjoy ourselves very much and it was lovely to catch up with old Dunnett friends who I generally only ever see on occasions like this.