Foot Woes - Feeling Old and Crabby

When we came back from our latest trip to Stockholm back in the summer, my right foot had a little tender spot on the inside edge a bit below the base of my big toe. .  I put this down to my shoes having rubbed it a bit, as we had  walked a lot while we were there as we always do, it's a very walkable place,  and assumed it would just get better on its own. It didn't, so I spent a shoeless week hoping that would help. It didn't. I was then struck by An Awful Thought and looked up 'bunion' on the Interwebthing. And then thought 'oh dear', and 'why me', and 'for goodness sake I never wore high heels', and then I looked at the bit that said 'medical attention should be sought as soon as possible' to correct the condition otherwise it only gets worse. 

So I went to the doctor and he pussyfooted round it a bit and tried to be kind by looking up the Latin name for bunion, but I said that was a waste of time, just call it like it is and what will we do about it. 

He sent me for an X-ray in case there was a fracture and that came back with a report saying no fracture, but I had a bit of arthritis in my big toe, which I have had for decades and knew about, and Freiberg's disease which I have also had for decades but  without knowing about it, since it is largely asymptomatic and has something to do with the head of the bone on your middle toe not fitting into something else properly. You can tell how closely I was attending.  Apparently it's prone to developing in teenage girls. Since it doesn't bother anyone or have any particular effect I rather wonder why Freiberg bothered to give it a name, but perhaps he wanted the immortality that comes with discovering a minor not-quite-problematic medical thing and calling it after yourself. 

And the other thing the doctor said to do was  refer myself to the podiatry unit at the hospital which I duly did, although it wasn't quite as simple to do as he thought it would be  and it involved a waiting list which is why, having started to notice the problem in md-August, and consulting the doctor about it in October, I have only just seen the podiatrist today. 

It wasn't the most constructive of meetings. It seems I am flat footed and it probably runs in the family. (Really?) I should have been wearing shoes with arch supports in the since the year dot. My problem will not get any better as there isn't much they can do, and it may well get worse, and I am headed for a nightmare with arthritic toes anyway. Thanks for that. 

That said there are things I can do, accent very much on the I.  I can buy my own witch hazel for the pain  and I can buy my own bunion protector with a wedge attached to keep my big toe away from the others on the foot. I cam also buy wide fitting shoes with arch support and no overstitching on the foot although when pressed as to where these could be sourced the answer forthcoming from the podiatrist was  basically 'not anywhere in Orkney, look on the Internet' 

She is going to order me some 'off the shelf insoles' and they'll let me know when they arrive and I can try them for a couple of weeks and then they'll review it but I should be aware that 'they don't suit everybody'.

Painful foot from here to eternity then.

Bedside Books Numbers 5 and 6

So number 5 would be this one

This is part three of  trilogy called The Fionavar Tapestry by the Canadian author Guy Gavriel Kay. I put all three of them on my Amazon wish list back in July and have now been given them all for birthday/Christmas gifts. And re-read them, having first encountered them decades ago via the Leeds Library. 

It was the act of a completist really. I'm a bit of a fan of his later work, but the Fionavar Tapestry was his first venture into fiction. Previously he'd been helping Christopher Tolkien edit the manuscripts his father left unfinished at his death and prepare them for publication. The influence shows and it's not a happy one. Tolkien got away with a lot in his writing because he was the first to produce that sort of epic fantasy, and also because he had spent years working on the world it described. Helped of course by an audience with no expectations or tradition of reading that sort of thing. Writers who came afterwards and who produce a sort of sub-Tolkien world are rarely so successful This trilogy is derivative, stiff, and in places both ponderous and unintentionally funny. 

Don't let that put you off the writer completely though. After the FT Kay found his own voice and his own method of telling stories; he sets them in a human world and in a human history that is like our own but just a bit different. Almost an alternative history, or the same history with different characters. So his The Lions of Al-Rassan is 'about' the expulsion of the Moors from Spain, A Song for Arbonne is set within the troubadour culture of medieval Provence, Sailing to Sarantium is about the late Roman Empire in the Eastern Mediterranean. This method of writing suits Kay much better than the total fantasy of the FT. It gives him a structure and a background against which he can tell  a good story. smoothly and well, peopled with credible characters. some of whom the reader really cares about, and not all of whom achieve a happy ending. 

There is another GGK on the bedside book pile so we will be returning to him in due course. 

Meanwhile Number 6 is this 

and this one hasn't been read but put away on the shelves. Tis is not because I don't want to read it, because I do. However, I can't just at the moment. The rules for my study suspension, which after all is for a medical reason , which is that basically I just can't study efficiently at present, state that no work can be undertaken relevant to the thesis while the suspension is on going. There is a small chance that Ezra Pound may get a passing mention in the section of my thesis that deals with GCH at war, when his poetry took an uncharacteristic, and brief,  modernist turn, and what with Pound being the father of modernism and all that, the book is currently a No-No. 

So the pile is now down to only three! 

Baking Club Box Two

And this was granola topped blueberry muffins and they look like this

 

well that's half of them, and they taste delicious. 

Once they were in the oven I checked the recipe for  what it said  the preparation time would be and laughed like a drain when I saw it said 20 Minutes. 20 minutes in whose universe? It took me half of that time to 'finely chop the pecan nuts' and that was with a specially sharpened knife that went through them like butter. 

Since my standard muffin tin only takes 12 and the mixture makes 18 I was obliged to use my silicon muffin 'tin' as well. I have yet to try and decant the muffin from this, but foresee a fair mess of spilt granola topping. I may be wrong .... 

And now a whole four weeks before the next box arrives .... 

Glasgow, Bad Weather and a Domestic Disaster. Also - Yarn

We are back from our opera related break in Glasgow.  Opera related  since we didn't actually see an opera but we certainly had a lot of interaction with singers and Scottish Opera. 

So remember when I wrote about how we were flying down so that we didn't have to worry about cancelled ferries and the state of the roads? And we thought we had been so sensible - right up until they cancelled our flight to Glasgow and bundled us on to the Edinburgh flight instead!To be fair to the airline (Loganair) they did pay for a taxi all the way to Glasgow from Edinburgh, and the nice taxi driver who was told to take us to Glasgow Airport agreed to take us straight to the flat instead. That was a win-win, because he had less far to go and got a generous tip, and we were spared the hassle and expense and time involved in getting  a taxi from Glasgow airport to the flat, so it could have been worse. The irony was that the ferries were running normally and the A9 was clear so we could have gone by sea and road as per usual without a problem. That said, the road was not so clear the day we came home, so it's not as cut and dried as all that. We did a lot of walking while we were away which was fine, and the OH coped better than anticipated with the lack of the car. Although he would rather have had it, and so would I. It was cold. Not as cold as it was here in Orkney, and not as cold as it is in Glasgow now (or indeed Orkney either come to that) but cold enough that I'd rather have been in a car than on the footpath.  

We got back just ahead of the predicted snowfalls for the northern isles and although they weren't quite as awful as forecast they were bad enough. We managed to crawl into town on Tuesday so that I could make it to my hair appointment but rather than the full works I opted for a quick dry cut so that we could get back before the next snowfall. It was pretty at first, as snow always is, but it has now reached the mucky slushy stage which hides the slippery bits and makes normal life just about achievable but only by putting in ten times the normal effort. I am impatient for it all to be gone. 

The dishwasher behaved impeccably the day we came back, but by the next day had obviously decided that it had been taken for granted for Far Too  Long and made its general usefulness to life very clear by refusing, without any warning at all, to work. As I write there is A Man who has been sent to fix it working in the kitchen, and I hope he finds the fault and puts it right because this is  not the time of year to be either without a working dishwasher or  to have to fork out for a new one. Although by the time we've paid his call out charge from Stromness and for the putative repair itself, buying a new one might not seem such a bad option. We'll see. 

And the yarn, purchased as intended for Grandson No 2's Christmas jumper (and hat) 2018, is here 

It's a Nordic pattern and should look really nice. I did a tension square/gauge swatch earlier this afternoon, as is now my habit, and much to my surprise I was spot on with the recommended needle size. Since the last time I checked, for the ganseys, I had to go down 3 sizes, and the time before that for the OH's jumper I had to go up two I am a bit flummoxed by the whole tension/gauge thing, but I have decided to roll with it since I do like to produce clothing that fits! It's knitted from the top down, a technique I have previously used only on  (sadly) small burial gowns  and cardigans for premature babies so I'll be interested to see how this goes. 

Also in the yarn world I have done something A Bit Rash, but more of that later I'm sure!

Side zips

Are they still a thing? Or are they a thing again? When we were down in Glasgow and I bought myself some new trousers if never occurred to me to check where the zips on them were. I needed new black trousers, I picked a pair off the black trouser rack in my size, brought them home and hung them up until needed. They were needed last week and I took them off the hanger to put them on.Which was when I discovered that the zip, rather than being at the front, as per nowadays normal, was on the left hand side. 

You might not think this would be much of an issue but it was, because I couldn't do it up! Not because the trousers were too small, but because of the logistics of leaning over my front, stabilising the zip at both ends, and pulling it up. Not possible, not funny.

The upside is that I can actually put them on and take them off again without needing to undo the zip, which is a relief. But next time, I'll make sure before I buy that I have had have a good look to see where the zip is. And if it's at the side I think the trousers will be staying in the shop. 

In other news, we leave tomorrow for a flying trip, in both senses of the word, to Glasgow. We don't normally go off island in January, but there's some Scottish Opera stuff we didn't want to miss, so we're taking the plane down rather than stress over ferry cancellations and road conditions. I suspect being in the city without a car will stress out the OH in a major way in any case, but we'll see how we go. SO events account for three of the four days we're there, and on the fourth I'll be going to the Yarn Cake to buy some wool for one of the 2018 Christmas projects. Nothing like getting off to an early start (aka get it knitted before you lose the mag with the pattern in it!) I might add that going to Glasgow without the prospect of having to see the DLUG while there is a joyful and liberating thing. 

Kniting

Anyone looking at the blog could be forgiven for thinking that I have given up knitting as it is s ong since I put up any pictures, apart from the bunting of course, but  I haven'/t.

There were Christmas projects - socks for  the OH and Son No 1

and ganseys for the grandsons knitted on teensy weensy needles

I wanted to do a different pattern for each of them but the one I started doing for the older one was coming out far too big so I made them both the same in the end  and the one I was about a third of the way through I can finish for next year. I love this pattern incidentally, even though I found a couple of mistakes in it (sigh) And given the current temps in Toronto they are doubtless coming in very useful.

There was some 'I don't know what I'm going to do with it but it uses up stash' knitting 

 Don't ask about the wool for this! I bought it in Sweden at a Christmas Market last year and all I can say is it looked much much nicer in the skein...

Then there were a few bits and pieces for a friend's daughter who gives out warming things to the homeless in Glasgow. Planning to do some more of this as its a good way to use wool; knits down the yarn collection and does someone some good too. 

I made myself a hat from a pattern I've been meaning to do for ages; thought I didn't have enough yarn for it so bought an extra skein of it at Edinburgh Yarn Festival last spring. In the event one skein was more than sufficient for the hat (sigh again) ...

 

...so I made some fingerless mitts to go with it. 

And considering the problems I had finding all these photos,  in 2018  I need to

a) organise my pictures better  on the laptop and

b) post stuff here as its finished.

both those things would make my life a lot easier.

Recommended Reading December/Bedside Books Number Four

Yes I'm double dipping. For various reasons I couldn't read the book recommended by my friend L in December and for related ones I won't be able to read it in January either, but I'm hoping to get to it in February. For the curious it was The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt. 

What I ended up reading was this

Way back in the summer when I got the ferry back from Aberdeen  one  of my friends from the village was on it too, and she spent some of the time reading this book which she said was a real page turner and that she couldn't drag herself away from. A few days later she popped round and she gave it to me to read which is how it ended up on the bedside books pile. Looking for something light to zap through around the preparations for Christmas I took this from the pile and ...

Well, it's never a good sign is it, if the only way you can finish a book is to say 'to finish this by the end of the month I need to read 30 pages a day ' and then force yourself to do the 30 pages, constantly checking to see how many more of the days allocation are left and wondering if you can cheat and only do, say,  25 because after 25 you have got to a chapter end. 

From which it can be intuited I think that I did not enjoy this book. 

VH is well reviewed and my friend on the ferry was not the first person to say that I must try her books. The question that I have is 'what am I missing?'.  I must be missing something because I found this absolutely dire. I mean really really mind numbingly bad. 

To call the characters one dimensional is to understate the case. They aren't even characters. They are just names. Some  have a characteristic associated with them. The heroine for example is a talented embroiderer. I cannot tell you anything else about her as a person because there is nothing else to tell. That's it; that's your lot. Equally the hero's father. A businessman. Again, that's your lot. We see nothing of anyone's inner life, it's all totally external. Tell, not show. Disaster. 

And all told in the flattest prose it has been my misfortune to come across since - well, Janet and John would be stretching it, but not by much. 

They say VH  really does her research. She certainly does and then she ladles it into your lap in great unbroken slabs. There is no attempt to weave things into the story. If she knows what the reduced tonnage going through Thessalonica harbour after the post war earthquake is, and she does, she just tells you. Random fact, randomly placed, nothing to do with plot development, just something she found out and tells the reader because there is a 'character' looking out at the harbour.

I was really annoyed by two further aspects of this novel which I appreciate wouldn't bother some  other readers. One is the over-simplification of the historical and political background to the inter-war relationship of Greece and Turkey and in particular to the Greek Civil War which was much more violent, nuanced and complicated than Hislop shows it to be. I appreciate such background  might be thought too complex for a novel of this sort, in which case my advice would be to set it somewhere or somewhen else. Don't short change the real people who had to negotiate this extremely tricky time and place by trivialising their experience this way. 

And talk of trivialising experience brings me to my second major personal gripe. Don't use the holocaust as a good way to get rid of half your people or obtain cheap sympathy/pathos points in  your book. There are stories to tell about the holocaust, but it really really annoys me when something so awful and so important becomes nothing but a sideshow in an airport novel. VH is not alone, but it's the nastiest example I've come across in a long time. 

Definitely not recommended. Even if the only alternative is watching paint dry. 

Oh and Happy New Year!