Project 60 Number 37 - Quite boring, but useful.

This is something I'm almost ashamed to say I have never done before, given that it's 2016 and all that,  but it's putting together a PowerPoint.

It is not the most exciting PowerPoint presentation in the history of the world , since it only has six slides, and one of those is a 'title page', but there again it's accompanying a three minute talk so it seems to me it will be quite good going to fit six slides in. 

 

The talk is at the UHI Staff and PostGrad Conference next week which is being held in the evilly  inclined beautiful city of Inverness and I'm sort of looking forward to it, although I suspect I am going to have to Share a Room, which I will not enjoy one bit. However it's only for two nights so I daresay I will cope.

 

Since I have no idea how to copy a slide from there into here you will have to make do with the title, which is The Lost Boy or Lessons from Letters.

 

I have two versions of the talk, one lasts six minutes and one lasts three. The six minute version is much better, but we are supposed to confine ourselves to three. Which one I deliver on the day will largely depend on how many other people have over run before me and how naffed off I am about it.

A Few Days in Sussex

So, as I am about to wend my way south back to Glasgow, and then Inverness for a few days (leaving as per horribly normal , on the crack of dawn ferry on Wednesday) I thought I should get a move on chronicling our recent trip to Sussex. For those worried in retrospect about how far away it is and the effect this might  have had on the wheel bearing, it was an organised trip and we flew from Glasgow.

 

I cannot tell you what we did in the right order. This is partly because we did something as soon as we got off the plane, more or less, and I didn't have my camera with me. I am still waiting for the OH to upload his pictures of Penshurst Place from his phone and then e-mail them to me. It is also partly because the reason for doing the trip in the first place was an opera related Project 60 thing which will have its own post.

 

Never mind. We will jump straight to Day Two and Great Dixter. Of course I have photos, since I had by this time unpacked my camera but there are none of the inside of the house because photography is not permitted in there. I am not sure why. You're encouraged to look at stuff really closely - and I mean close enough to breathe on it, and touch stuff (well some of it) but photography inside the house is not allowed. Our first guide told us that. Our second guide, seeing someone looking around with a phone in hand, screamed it at us. NO PHOTOGRAPHY INSIDE THE HOUSE. Okay, we get it.

 

In a way this sums up the problem I had with the interior of Great Dixter, which is that the guides are a lot more precious about the place, and the people who lived there, than I suspect Christopher Lloyd, and his family before him , ever were about themselves. I don't generally do hero-worship (and I bet that surprises a lot of you out there, eh?) and I don't find it attractive in others.  I do respect people for what they achieve, and GD is an achievement, but it doesn't make me think the Lloyd family were just a little lower than the angels or to be talked about in  hushed tones and as though they never made a mistake, aesthetic or otherwise.

 

This whole attitude reached a peak when the more junior of the guides, referring to a swiss cheese plant that was running riot  over swathes of the Hall told us, in the hearing of the senior guide that it had been a present from Christopher Lloyd to Someone-or Other at which point the senior guide corrected her in front of us all by saying it had actually been a present from someone-or-other to Christopher.

 

Like it matters.

 

After the house we were taken on a guided tour of the garden by a young German man who had been a student at Great Dixter and then been fortunate enough to be given a job there. I am not a great one for national stereotypes, but you know the one about Germans being methodical and thorough.... we were ages!

 

Pictures

 

 

The House - obvs

 

 View of small garden just outside the house. One of the few places to have a bit of colour - October isn't necessarily the best time to visit great gardens

 

 

The Woodshed. The estate has quite a lot of woodland, which it coppices. 

The garden is designed on a 'lots of small rooms' idea. We could do that with ours - not that we ever will!

 

Clematis and Dahlias

 

Cactii!

 

Not a clue, but they were a bonny colour!

 

View over countryside at the bottom of the drive. I have to say the Sussex countryside is stunning.

 

Projetc 60 Number 36 - Gelled nails.

This is a bit of a compromise one. I originally intended to get nail extensions which my sister used to get done all the time. When I made enquiries at a local salon though I got told that 'no-body really does nail extensions anymore, they're bad for your real nails, people get gelled instead'. So I signed up to get 'gelled', and today was the day.

I opted for a sparkly gel, but as it wasn't quite dark enough once it was on the nails  had to have an extra darker top coat, which means they're not quite as sparkly as I might have liked.

Here's a picture. Or two.

 

 

I quite like them. It wasn't as exciting as I like my Project 60 things to be perhaps, and they would look better if I could grow my nails longer; sadly they have a tendency to break or split which means keeping them short.

Can You Believe This?

 

 

This is the OH yesterday, about to eat his first ever toffee apple!

I warned him they were 'orrible, and not good for people like himself with a currently dodgy tooth but he wouldn't listen. 

He claims he really enjoyed it and I'm not going to argue, but personally I've always fond them the oddest of combinations and after suffering several as gifts from well meaning adults in my childhood I know I'd have to be starving to try and eat one now.

Oops!

The car, it is poorly-sick. As it turns out it has been ailing for a while but, bad car parents that we are, we thought it was the tyres...

We got some new tyres a few months back. They weren't our usual brand and almost since they were put on the OH has been driving me bananas with his constant moaning about how noisy  they were. Now, not being a driver I tend not to listen to noises made by the car. Recently though even I started to notice the noise, and the fact that it was getting louder. And more sinisterly, that it was less loud on left hand bends.  The OH Googled the symptoms and decided we had a wheel bearing that was 'going' That's 'going' in the bad sense of ceasing to function rather than 'going' as in doing its job and keeping the wheels on the road.(What on earth did we do before Google by the way? I can't remember)

 

Of course, the universe decrees that when you need the man in the local garage he will be away on holiday, which is fine, he is as entitled to holidays as much as anyone else, it was just bad luck that he has chosen to be away now. So it was a phone call and a trip into Kirkwall to get the diagnosis confirmed. Amazingly, and it just goes to show the universe hasn't turned its back on us totally, the local factors actually had the part in stock - how likely is that? - so the car is booked in to be made all better on Monday morning early.

 

Mechanic's parting shot yesterday was 'I wouldn't drive too far in that until the new bearing is in' which is sort of funny because those tyres took us all the way to York and back in the summer and have done so many return trips to Glasgow since being fitted that I have lost count. And now of course we're terrified to use the car, so it's just as well we don't really need it between now and Monday. Ignorance is bliss! but apparently in this case could also have been dangerous.  Sighs of relief that we didn't end up upside down in a ditch somewhere between here and the Central Belt.

Project 60 Number 35 - A Pleasure and a Privelege

So, for reasons with which, as so often, I will not bore you, we were recently invited to attend a Scottish Opera rehearsal. Not one of those 'not really a rehearsal' rehearsal that opera companies put on for their Friends organisation where you can pay to go and sit in the stalls and watch what amounts to a proper performance except that some of the singers might be only marking, but a real honest-to-goodness rehearsal, still in the production studios and with the Director still making changes.

 

Such excitement! Well it was for us anyway.We sat like quiet mice just behind and to the right of the Director's table (the Director in this case being Thomas Allen who was doing a revival of his marriage of Figaro ) and watched and listened, surrounded by serious people who were doing things we didn't understand, plus a few whose purpose was obvious or pointed out to us. You really appreciate how powerful a singer's voice is, in those circumstances. What amazed me most, although I'm not sure why unless it is that I read far too many grisly operatic biographies twenty years ago, was the support all the singers, chorus and soloists, gave to one another, applauding good solos and making suggestions about stage business.

 

We managed a brief chat with TA when they broke for lunch; we have met him before and he did a very good job of seeming to remember us - he's a lovely man! and we came away when the singers came back for notes, which seemed the right thing to do. I wouldn't want a perfect stranger hanging about watching while I had a work appraisal, would you?

 

No photos as taking them didn't seem appropriate. We did however get to see a performance in Glasgow earlier this week (because yes, as well as being put off writing for a week, we also went away for a few days). I thought the performance took a little while to warm up and was distinctly underwhelmed by Act 1 but everybody seemed to get going after that and it turned out to be a lovely evening. And here's a photo of that , just to enliven the post.

 

 

And Silence Fell....

for which I must apologise. I got a bit crippled when it came to writing anything in the public domain, because my Ph D supervisor, revisiting an old piece of work for some reason unbeknown to man and beast, accused me of putting a sentence in it which was nothing but academic show offery. He followed this up by stating that the only reason for the sentence to be there at all was so that I ''could draw my reader's attention to how clever I thought myself' and I wasn't being clever anyway because 'this is something everyone knows'.^

Some of you will be aware, either through personal knowledge or from reading this blog, that I deplore showing off in all its forms but particularly in an academic context. To be told that I was one of the despised tribe of show offs therefore came as something of a shock. In fact I'm not sure that I said anything for the rest of the forty minutes he so graciously spared me.

Of course he may have believed sincerely that that was what I was doing, and thought he was doing me a favour by nipping a nasty tendency in the bud. If so he could have found a more constructive way of raising the point, and also had the courtesy to listen to my somewhat strangled denials. But he didn't.

It took me a long time to get over this and while I was recovering I couldn't write anything - not a comment on Facebook, not a blog post, not an e-mail. Because once you start thinking about it everything you say could be taken, if someone were determined to do so, as showing off. Where lies the line between sharing exciting things with friends and showing off what a wonderful life you have? Suddenly everything I wrote was suspect, and I started to worry that everyone who read anything I wrote thought I was a nasty little show off.

And of course I couldn't go back to writing my thesis, because every word I chose,  every turn of phrase, every idea put forward, every unusual but pertinent comparison - what are they but showing off? I daresay the guy never gave what he was saying a second thought, but perhaps he should. Last time I looked supervisors were supposed to help and encourage, not turn you into a trembling wreck who daren't put pen to paper.

^ and excuse me for trying to get myself off the hook, but actually I suspect the vast majority of people don't know that classic Gaelic poetry occasionally  takes a circular form.