2016 - Fiddling While Rome Burned?

I'm in a  reflective mood, which I suppose is understandable on New Year's Eve, and contemplating the fact that while I had a good year personally all around me the world seemed to be going to hell in a handcart. Regular readers will know that this blog is more or less a politics free zone, but I was as surprised and shocked as anyone else at the results of the Brexit vote and the American Presidential election. I don't do Doomsday Scenarios, because if there's one thing that life has taught me it's that whatever happens the world keeps turning and people keep carrying on, dealing with whatever the politicians and financiers throw at them. The struggle to carry on is sometimes easier, sometimes harder, and I mention it as a tribute to the power of the human spirit rather than because I think governments should have an agenda, such as an austerity, that actually hits the poor of society a damn sight harder than it hits the rich. When I was younger I thought politicians were grown ups who knew what they were doing and were in control.  I'm no longer that naïve.

 

That said, I can't help but celebrate the year that I've had.  I moan about how much we've been away, and I did get very sick of the sight of the A9, but mostly our trips south this year were undertaken for pleasant purposes. And we had great holidays. Oz was fantastic, it was wonderful to go to Canada and meet our second grandson for the first time, and brief visits to York, Sussex and Stockholm (twice) were all good. We had no major work done on the house (which was good for the nerves and the bank account) bar the redecorating of the living room, for which I was away, so even that had only a positive impact on me. Project 60 saw me accomplish no fewer than twenty two new things, which varied from the huge and amazing, like travelling on The Ghan, to the everyday and mundane, like baking bread and buying boots. Our elder son managed to move to Toronto and the family are enjoying life there much more than they did down in the south west of Ontario, where our daughter in law had been studying. Our younger son is feeling his way towards what he should be doing next. which is a positive thing. We saw the Canadian family not once but twice this year and I saw my sister twice as well. I met some new friends,  and strengthened ties with some old ones. We saw some fabulous opera.  We were and are all healthy, something which I am aware cannot be said for all my friends and their families sadly.

 

There were some lowlights of course. Hitting 60. Alan Rickman dying before I had a chance to see him on stage. Deteriorating relationship with my Ph D supervisor. Becoming a casualty of NHS rationing ( eyes again ). Not managing to lose half my body weight!

 

But overall - a good year. Tomorrow I shall look forward to what 2017 might bring; meanwhile - Happy Hogmanay!

And now it can be told ...

Way back in July 2014 I blogged about going to the First World Congress of Scottish Literatures in Glasgow. This was always intended to become a triennial event, so no surprise that the next one is next year. It was rumoured in Glasgow that the next one would be in Canada and I had rather hoped this would give me an opportunity to visit Canada's Maritime Provinces, because obviously if you're going to have a World Congress of Scottish Literatures in Canada then it's going to be in Nova Scotia, right?

Wrong.  It's going to be in Vancouver.

Now I'm sure Vancouver is a lovely place, it just wasn't what I was expecting and it made me rather less keen to go than I had been. In the interval since attending the first one and now, I had memory majored more on the negatives than the positives so whenever anyone asked me if I was intending to go  I havered. Long way to go, especially if it turned out to be all about Walter Scott and Robert Burns again I thought. Our one long haul holiday next year and do I really want it to be to Canada I thought. (The OH maintains that Canada is not long, but medium, haul. While I am willing to give him the benefit of that one if you're talking Toronto, as far as I'm concerned Vancouver, which is roughly 10 hours in flight time from London, is long haul).

 

Well to cut a long story short I was getting a bit bored one day last spring while toiling my way through the first draft of my thesis' middle chapter so as a piece of displacement activity, since the Call for Papers for Vancouver had just gone out, I cobbled together a proposal for a paper on a Canadian writer called Alastair MacLeod and sent it off. Told myself that if it was accepted then I would go, and if it wasn't, I wouldn't.

 

I was lying to myself because I knew it didn't have a snowflake's chance of being accepted and all I was doing was putting off making my own decision. But then back in November I got The E-Mail. They had accepted the paper.

 

To say I was astonished would be to put it politely as I was absolutely gobsmacked. Pleased obviously. But gobsmacked none the less. I told no-one for a few days. Then I told my husband and sons and then a while after that I mentioned it in a small and secret group of friends on Facebook. And then I shut up. Because I needed to tell my supervisors but I didn't want another accusation of 'showing off' being flung my way.

 

However, having talked myself into the position that the paper had probably only been accepted because they hadn't had sufficient submissions and were desperately taking anything they could get their hands on to fill up conference time  I did manage to tell both my Director of Studies and the Supervisor in Glasgow in the run up to Christmas. And since I've told them, which I felt I should do before I told anyone else, I can now report it here.

 

I should also say that when I got The E-Mail I dug up the proposal I'd sent off and was rather dismayed to find it so jargon ridden it was incomprehensible to me. However I'm sure what I was planning to say will come back to me sometime between now and June!

And now they can be shown ....

Yes, it's the Christmas socks. The plan was to make a pair each for grown up family.

Son no 1 got these.

 

That's West Yorkshire Spinners sock wool in Bullfinch

 

these were for the daughter in law

 

Araucania Ranco.

 

These were for Son no 2

 

and I forget what the wool for those was

 

the next pair were meant for the OH, and he loved them ....

 

sadly they did not fit so they are being modelled below by Son No 2 who they did fit and who therefore ended up with two new pairs of knitted socks.  

 

I will make another pair for the OH in a much bigger size, but as I bought the wool in the Yarn Cake in Glasgow and it certainly isn't anything you can get here (Drops Karisma) it won't be any time soon. But hopefully before next Christmas.

 

Having checked back it seems it's quite a while since I actually put up any knitting pictures so lets get up to date

 

Socks for me from the Fairytale Sock Club from the Knitting Goddess 2014. These ones all used two colours of yarn. I like these.

 

Found something to do with the leftovers from that pair of green socks I did way back in the year ...

 

I don't  like boucle wool. I can never think of anything to do with it.  Which is why I've ben a bit stumped about how to use up the boucle skeins I bought back in Canada a while since. I made this scarf with one of the skeins. It's very long and for obvious reasons I call it the Bagpuss scarf.

 

Another 2014 sock club instalment gets knitted up -  yay!!

 

A quick and very basic scarf to use up a skein of Knitting Goddess yarn in the colour 'Octarine'. Have to say I've never thought Octarine had anything to do with blue or purple, but whatever! It was pretty and I  knitted it up.

 

I bought some Schoppelwolle when I visited the Yarn Cake with my sister and used some of it to make these fingerless mitts. They didn't make much of a dent in the ball sadly, but they're lovely to wear and I'm quite proud of them because I took a basic pattern and modified it quite a lot to make them what they are. I wear them a lot!

 

I have been keeping track of my yarn use this year because the idea was that I wanted to use up lots of my stash. The good news is that I did use up 25 skeins of yarn this year. The bad news is that, as I also bought some yarn, the overall stash size didn't come down by much.

 

For 2017 the goal is to knit up some of the kits I have lying about, either never started or part finished, and also to finish some of the half done projects that I also have quite a few of. Since most of these things are large or fiddly or both, I'm not expecting to get them done at, say, the rate of one a month. But I'd like to think that by this time next year half a dozen of them might have been transferred from the part done to the completely finished list.

 

I'll keep you posted!

 

And here they are .... well some of them

 

The OH's favourites, wolverines

 

not the one that did for King Robert (popular culture reference there!) but a scary beast none the less

 

this would be my favourite ...

 

 

... just ahead of this one, which of course is especially for Heather!

P60 - No 40 Part 2

So this is the other Christmas market that we went to in Stockholm, which takes place in Skansen on the island of Djurgarden. Our hotel was  a two minute walk from the ferry stop and the ferry ride was less than five minutes so we were very well placed. And here's something so wonderful about 'commuting' by ferry! Skansen was the word's first museum of the sort where you buy up old buildings all over the country, dismantle them then re-erect them all in one place to give a picture of the historical geographical and social history of the country.

 

Anyway this was much more what we had been expecting from a Christmas market.

 

 

choirs singing

 

people dancing

 

stalls with Christmas related handcrafted merchandise

 

a firepit to keep your toes toasty

a bit of general 'swedishness'

 



 

and something totally random - which by definition we weren't expecting.

 

It was great. I'd definitely go there again, but maybe not next year (although you never know).  I also found some Swedish yarn - at long last, and we wandered up into the Nordic Zoo part of the park which is what gives the island its name and looked at the Nordic animals.

 

Sadly Blogger appears to have decided not to allow me to upload pictures of fierce foreign animals just now and my tea is ready; I will try again later, because after all who doesn't want to see a photograph of a cuddly lynx?

 

 

Eeny Meeny

went back to the library today, and I remarked to the librarian that it possibly wasn't one to recommend to the squeamish'.  They do seem to get asked for recommendations here a lot and really I feel you need to have a strong stomach and no imagination to cope with this one. I thought Stuart McBride, who I gave up on as too gory many years ago, was as bad as it got, but things have moved on it seems.

 

I replaced it, because I am constitutionally incapable of entering the library and coming out empty handed, with Lousie Penny's The Beautiful Mystery and Yrsa Sigurdardottur's My Soul to Take. I've read quite a few of Penny's Inspector Gamache series. I'm not sure why exactly as I find Gamache an irritating character, but the plots are well done and they're generally very well written. Two things that you would think would be a given in a crime novel but sadly so often aren't. Sigudardottur I have only read one of previously but it was OK; an easy read and the insights into Icelandic life were interesting.

 

All this reading material, anyone would think I was battening down for an approaching  storm or something. Oh,  wait - !

Festive Cheer

Well we almost had the Pre-Christmas meltdown on Monday , although I somehow managed, in te face of great provocation to stay just about polite and only snappy rather than shouty, but it was a close run thing. Equanimity was restored by a trip to the library where for once I saw loads of books that I wanted to read and I came home with the following Festive Fare.

 

Bad Blood by Aline Templeton. A young woman returns to the home of her youth from where her mother inexplicably disappeared some years previously, only to discover that her mother had been notorious for murdering  a child there while only a child herself.

 

Cold Rain by Craig Smith in which an Eng Lit professor is accused of sexually harassing two of  his students after which, according to the blurb, he finds himself 'sucked into a vortex of conspiracy, betrayal, jealousy and murder'. The 'sucked into a vortex' almost made me put it back on the shelf, but the betrayal and murder kept me hanging on to it.

 

The Other Mrs Walker by Mary Paulson Ellis which sounds a cheerful little tale centring, as it does, on a young woman who escapes from a train wreck of a life in London only to get a job in Edinburgh tidying up after the deaths of sad people who lived alone.

 

Eeny Meeny by M J Arlidge This was a real charmer, a story of the police hunt for a lunatic who kidnaps people in pairs, and shuts them up with no hope of escape, a gun and a text message on a locked phone saying that when one of them shoots the other, the shooter will be released. Just as a grace note the policewoman in charge of the investigation pays regular visits to a bondage specialist to get whipped. This one is not for the squeamish and indeed I would rather steer people away from it than towards it, especially f you have no desire to know what starvation and dehydration do to the human body. As, in retrospect, I didn't.

 

I upped the intellectual quotient by topping this all off with a critical appreciation of the works of J R R Tolkien, which I suspect will be a great deal more fun than Eeny Meeny to be honest.

#asifIdidn'thaveenoughtodo....

Following a 'fizzy drink related incident', which was nothing to do with me, I have found myself having to take the covers off our sofas and wash them.

In a way this was a Good Thing as they have never been taken off and washed before so they probably due for it,  although they have been shampooed in situ a few times. That's unavoidable if you have cats that shed hair, or bring you presents, or eat unsuitable things and suffer the consequences. So just if you have cats then really.

I didn't know whether it would work. I thought they might shrink or the dye might leak out and  had visions of having to go into our local furniture store and say 'Billy, we need two new two seater sofas and they have to be dark red and we have to have them for Christmas' and him saying 'Sorry it can't  be done'. Which, let's face it, at this time of year would have been a perfectly reasonable response, even though I can't honestly say I would have been quite that philosophical had it come to it.

 

But there you go. It did work. The covers for the seats are now all done and back on the sofas and even as I type the ones from the back cushions are tumbling in the dryer. They've come up really nicely and, apart from the fact that my nails are ruined, ruined I tell you!!, from taking the seat covers off and more pertinently trying to get them back on, I'm really quite pleased that I did it.

 

But I'd rather have done it in June when I wasn't still running round like a blue tipped fly trying to organise Christmas.

Too Much-o Mucha?

 

I was a big fan of Mucha in my twenties. He seemed to be a bit more around in those days; better known perhaps than he is now. Maybe it was a zeitgeist thing. However that might be, I hadn't really thought about him for ages until I saw that Kelvingrove were doing an exhibition of his work and some friends were keen to go so we arranged to meet up and have a look.

 

It was interesting and fun, but there was a terrible sense of a talent neglected and wasted and worn away in a sort of fin de siècle commercialisation. People complain about Vettriano's lack of development as an artist, and I know where they're coming from, except that in his case I think perhaps he can't move on and I still love his work anyway because it all suggests a story.  With Mucha I got the impression that he could have moved on, but stayed where he was for the money. His work is delicate and detailed and actually all very same-y. Big dresses , circles of flowers, stylised backgrounds.

 

There were some sketches which were interesting, and a section on his great work The Slav Epic, a series of canvases depicting the history  of the Slav people, details of which you can see here, but even that is a bit 'stars and flowers' in places, and art had moved on from these monumental historical canvases well before Mucha started on these. There's more than a hint of Soviet realism' in the style at times too, well before Soviet Realism was a thing.

 

Of course I had to see the exhibition twice because the OH wanted to see it too. I can't say I was any more thrilled second time around, although I did try to take the time to examine more of the detail on some of the work.

 

It's not a Kelvingrove exhibition but a travelling one so if you're a fan, keep an eye out as it may be coming to a gallery near you. For myself by far the favourite canvas on show in it was this

 

 

which has nothing to do with Mucha really, but is Edward Burne Jones' The Tower of Brass. Burne Jones - now there was a man who could paint!

 

Project 60 - Number 40 Part 1

I don't know whether to be pleased I am 2/3 of the way through or panic that I might not be able to fit another 20 new things into the next eight months....

Anyway Number 40 is visiting a foreign Christmas market. I have been trying to get the OH to do this for more years than I care to remember. Generally with the result that I got a twisted face and a long list of reasons why he didn't want to go to Germany anywhere/Vienna/Prague etc

 

This year though I hit the jackpot because I mentioned back in August that I thought there might be Christmas markets in Stockholm and five minutes after that he was researching them on the web and ten minutes after that he was sticking his head round my study door and telling me that BA had this great deal and should he book? And naturally I said yes.

 

There are four major Christmas markets in Stockholm and we decided to do the two most central as they were the easiest to get to. The first one was in Gamla Stan.

 

 

I seem only to have the one photo of this but I suppose that's not surprising as it was small and very crowded. Most of the stalls were selling food and drink, although a large proportion of them seemed to be sideshows of the tombola variety which was a bit disappointing. I think if we had known more about Swedish cuisine, and I had known more Swedish and we had been able to get near any of the stalls, we might have enjoyed it more. Or alternately if we had just gone with a Swedish person.

 

Still Gamla Stan is always good for a ramble about. I was hoping to find some Swedish yarn to bring home and found a wool shop and as the owner spoke no English, although she admitted to speaking German, I had perforce to carry on a short conversation in Swedish. She carried no Swedish yarn herself but there was a shop with some a bit further down the street, on the left, past the statue with the dragon (thank heavens for the Ingmar Bergen film of Magic Flute which meant that I knew what the Swedish for dragon is!). We found the shop, but alas although it had yarn from Norway, Iceland and Denmark there was none from Sweden. Which was a bit of a downer, although to be honest I was so thrilled to have followed the directions and actually found the shop, I didn't really mind all that much.

A Weekend in Stockholm

And yes, this post will have pictures!

We went to Stockholm mainly to see the Christmas Markets, and as that was a Project 60 thing it will have a separate post, otherwise I will lose count. But it wasn't all about the markets.

We've been to Stockholm a fair few times over the years but never in winter so this was a new experience for us. I have to say it was cold. Not stay in and moan cold. Not even go out and then look for warm places to visit every 10 minutes cold. Just sort of a cold that felt bright and energising for the first couple of hours and then ever so slowly and almost unnoticed seeped into your bones until all of a sudden you realised you were trying to talk but your facial muscles were so cold they weren't functioning properly and you were producing only gibberish.

 

Be that as it may, we really enjoyed ourselves. We stayed on the small island of Skeppsholmen, which is difficult to pronounce, but at the risk of sounding like a show off (!)  the Swedes I had to say it to all recognised it, so that was good. The hotel itself was once the barracks for naval cadets, so it's not the most architecturally pleasing of places, but the rooms were a decent size, the bathrooms were fantastic and the heating worked. The breakfasts were OK, I don't eat a lot first thing so I was fine, and they were included in the price. The OH was a bit disappointed in the scrambled eggs which are touted as award winning, although as he rather darkly said, they don't specify what award they won! It's very well situated for a walk into central Stockholm and also in the opposite direction to catch the ferry to Djurgarden, of which more in the next post. The décor was very Scandinavian and very calming, and I liked it very much. Here's the view from the window

 

 

 

Of course where we live we have a view of water from our front windows so in that sense it's not a big deal, but for a city centre hotel I think that's good going. And if you aren't lucky enough to live near water then I think that would be a big plus.

 

My standard picture of Stockholm, usually accompanied by rather more flowers and trees, but this has a certain stark beauty if its own I think.

 

The swan feeding station on Lake Malaren. Stockholm lies between Lake Malaren on one side and the Baltic on the other. I'd read that when it gets really cold Lake Malaren looks green, but it didn't look green while we were there. I think that would be beautiful to see though.

 

Christmas Lights. I have to say Stockholm didn't strike me as being as Christmassy as I had expected but these were cheerful.

 

Gamla Stan  - doorways...

... and other interesting details. Indulge me!

 



 

I'm not quite sure when I started taking pictures of doors and windows and coloured brickwork and door masonry, but I think it was after I read the Insight Guide to Tunisia.

 

If you knew me you would realise that this is almost the  most amazing picture I took in the whole of the time we were in Stockholm. I am a less than adventurous eater even at home, and when abroad tend to look for Italian Restaurants where I know I can order pasta. This however is what I had for lunch one day, Swedish meatballs and lingonberries. Very Swedish, very unlike me to order anything so large (although it was our main meal of the day) and although I only managed half of it I really enjoyed it.

 

My adventurousness didn't carry as far as the dessert selection where I went for the pannacotta. It was a bit of a toss up as they had creme brulee on the menu too - I hate it when restaurants do that!

 





 

M I A

December has been 'full on' as the phrase goes hence the radio silence. We spent the first weekend in Stockholm, then brought an unexpected visitor back to Orkney with us. She left on Saturday, we thought she had just worn us out so did the usual round of church and shopping on Sunday morning while feeling a bit weary and flat after her departure, only to wake up on Monday well and truly lergified.

We have a bug which we picked up from our son in Glasgow, where we stayed on the way to and from Stockholm. It seemed to me initially that it was confining itself to the Central Belt as various friends and acquaintances down that way had suffered with it. However I understand that it is in fact Scotland wide and is currently decimating the population of Orkney.  I learned this from the OH who had to take back an Inter Library Loan book to the college library this morning on my behalf and got chatting to the assistant librarian. According to her it is vile, it keeps coming back and generally seems to knock people out for about 10-14 days. This is sad because although I have only had it properly since Monday I feel as though it has been with me for over a week already and the thought that it will be an unwelcome visitor all the way up to Christmas is daunting.

 

The ILL book incidentally was a faff to get as the librarian located several copies in various libraries around the place, none of which were actually willing to let them go. I have no idea why but eventually she hit on Strathclyde which was sanguine about sending it. I was horrified when I picked it up - I have since measured it, which is a sad thing to do, but it was literally 2 inches thick inside the covers. I knew it was THE book on the subject (Bipolar disorder and Unipolar Depression since you ask) but hadn't really appreciated, and I can't think why not, looking back, that it's basically a text book for practicing psychiatrists. I had been meandering my way through the relevant parts in a gentle sort of a way before we went away, not knowing we were going to have a visitor straight way afterwards, and then not appreciating that it would have to go back to college two days before it was  due back in Strathclyde which is Friday. I spent most of Monday and all of yesterday reading and then precis-ing large swathes of stuff; however it was probably better to do that while anaesthetised by the bug from hell, since it was a slog.

 

Next up - Stockholm.