100 Books to Read Poster Number 4

And it was Bad Science by Ben Goldacre

I'm in two minds about this one really. It was educational, informative and vey entertaining all at the same time, so a Good Read as the BBC would have it.

I was truly appalled and shocked by some of the stories he had to tell and if I had ever had a mind to give credence to health scare stories in the Daily Mail (which I hadn't) I think this book would have put paid to that fair and square. 

It is I think slightly mistitled since it is actually about bad science (and mainly medical) journalism, but I suppose Bad Science Reporting isn't quite as eye catching as a title. I gather it's also the title of the  column Goldacre has or had in The Guardian so it ties in with that. 

On the downside, I think his dismissal of the  'liberal arts graduates' some of whom disseminate this stuff as lazy, because they can't be bothered to understand the real science behind the research, and as people who sneer at science as being somehow beneath them, really misses the mark. I have been sneered at countless times by scientists because my studies, which have over the years covered language, history and literature,  are 'useless' and which can be done by 'anyone in their spare time'. Also, science IS difficult for some of us to understand, and whether that is because we were badly taught, or our brains can't cope or a mixture of the two, it does mean we are in need of an intermediary to explain things to us. (Just as,  I might venture, a scientist attending a conference in Japan for example, might well need an intermediary from the 'useless' discipline of Japanese Studies to help him not make a prat of himself/ badly offend his hosts by his behaviour at it.) And in addition to all that, statistics is a minefield of a subject, and only someone well versed in sophisticated statistical techniques can be expected to understand the statistical import of some research studies. 

Also, for someone who is keen to encourage readers  not to take things on trust and to test things for themselves ,(known incidentally in his despised humanities subjects as Critical Analysis, and something which undergraduates are expected to master at an early stage) he makes an awful lot of sweeping assertions of his own  which he presumably expects the reader to go along with. That strikes me as somewhat ironic. 

Despite the caveats though the verdict on Bad Science is - A Hit. 

How did that happen?

The title is a disingenuous,  specious and rhetorical question, because I know perfectly well how it happened. I foolishly checked some of the For Sale posts in the UK Ravelry group, saw these and bought them. I shouldn't have done it, because I have more than enough wool to keep me knitting for many years already, not to mention that I am currently on  a determined drive to knit up as much wool as I already have as quickly as possible while I am not studying. It was therefore extremely stupid of me to buy this  and I am cross with myself for doing it , just like I'm cross with myself when I eat chocolate.

It is a small (very small) consolation that I do at least know what I plan to do with most of it.

A Lovely Surprise

Since I am on the road to recovery, and since the OH is showing signs of becoming wheezy and developing a sore throat, I thought it behoved me to go with him when he went to the supermarket this morning. 

When we got back I found these in the sunroom

from a bunch of virtual friends, hoping that I get better soon. 

They are gorgeous and include three lilac carnations, something I've never even seen before. And although I know lilies aren't to everyone's taste, I love 'em. 

It quite cheered up my day. I intend to spend the rest of it sitting in front of the fire (Orkney is horribly grey and foggy today) listening to my latest Audible download and knitting a hat for the OH from the other skein of Jo Thomson hand dyed Shetland wool. That sounds like a plan. 

Baking Subscription May

The lurgy is at long last losing the struggle thank goodness, and yesterday I even summoned up the energy to do this month's baking subscription.

It was carrot cake cookies. 

You will see from the picture that I am rubbish at icing using a piping bag. To be fair it was my first ever try. It wasn't so much icing either as cream cheese frosting. The OH and I agreed that it didn't actually bring much to the party. There seems to be a fashion for icing stuff these days that a previous generation would happily have eaten 'plain;.

These were OK. They're too big and I don't think I would bother with them again as it is far too much faff to grate the carrot (even when your OH does it in the food processor for you) which you then never actually see or taste.  Which is roughly how I feel about carrot cake itself really. On the upside I never bake cookies or biscuits off my own bat, so it's nice to be made to try now and again. 

Today my returning energy levels meant I tidied the living room. Just as satisfying in its own way. 

100 Books to Read Poster Number 3

which was The Colour Purple by Alice Walker. 

See this book exemplifies exactly why I embarked on this project. Of course I have heard of Alice Walker. Of course I have heard of this book. Of course what I heard about it was all good. Did this mean I had ever rushed off to read it? No it doesn't. 

The reasons for not having read it are numerous, but boil down  to three really.

1) I tend to stay away from Literary Fiction, thinking I will not understand it or it will all be far too beautifully written for me to read comfortably. 

2) I tend not to read books by American authors (although come the end of the poster I won't be able to say that again!)

3) I thought I knew what it was about, and that what it was about, was the sort of thing I don't like. 

It occurs to me that I hold some pretty frightful prejudices when it comes to reading. Twenty years of crime fiction have obviously been far too self- indulgent. 

I read The Colour Purple and except insofar as it was partly about black female experience in the Southern United States, it wasn't at all what I expected. It was beautifully written, with cadences you did have to get your ear attuned to, but that didn't make the prose at all difficult to read. Some of the subject matter was horrifying although dealt with in the matter of fact way that, presumably, those to whom these things really happened, used to cope with it in real life. 

It had a lot to say about colonialism and its absurdities, and about parallels between patriarchy and colonialism, but also as much if not more about looking for the beauty in the world, about the power of love and hope and keeping faith with people, about letting go the past and learning to enjoy the gift of the now. It was hugely life affirming and I loved it. 

Verdict for The Colour Purple - A (massive) Hit. 

Scottish Opera's Evgeny Onegin

I'm only going to say two things about this.

The first is that this  production has garnered many rave reviews ( as in four and five stars) in the National Press.

The second is that I hated it.

That is all.

In other news I am more lergied that before, having spent most of the trip back from Inverness yesterday lying down in the back of the car, alternately dozing and whimpering. Last week's advice from the doctor to 'Rest' is accordingly being taken very much more to heart this week. 

The Down Side of Sociability

is, of course, that by definition you are mixing with Other People and Other People sometimes share more than a smile.

I was out twice last Tuesday, once with a friend to this place which you at remember the OH said he would never go to again. Having given it a Second Chance I am now in total agreement with him,as indeed is the friend I went with this time. In the evening I had a committee meeting. I was not aware on either occasion of anyone around me not being well but ....

on Thursday I woke up with one of those annoying dry tickly coughs that feel as though you have a grain of rice lodged at the back of your throat. It was still there Friday at which point I actually swallowed some 'dry tickly cough' cough mixture. Given that I would generally rather cut off my head than swallow a paracetamol for a headache, this was going some. Saturday I woke up to discover that the sandpaper elves had been having a party in my throat and from then on in the cough just got worse. Although I don't bother the doctor generally, and never with 'just a cough' I broke yesterday morning after a night of constant coughing, very broken sleep and hearing my lungs making funny noises every time I tried to drop off. There is 'not bothering the doctor' and there is being stupidly stubborn and the two are not the same. 

We are fortunate here to be able generally to get appointments the same day we ring up for them, (I feel I should be apologising for this somehow as it is not normally the case in other parts of Britain; there again surely it should be the government which should apologise for underfunding General Practice so appallingly) which is how I was in the surgery fewer than three hours after staggering sleepily to the telephone. I had to laugh as I managed to summon up the energy to change my clothes just before going, having decided that turning up in a  blood stained shirt (knocked scab from my back) a dirty jumper (messy eater) and trousers where  the hem on one leg was falling down (kindly pointed out to me the previous day by a friend - I tend not to notice these things until the trousers are on the ironing board) was perhaps not the best idea, given that I was presenting with a cough and wheezy lungs, not depression. Or indeed Slatternly Tendencies. 

Anyway the news was good. I did not have a chest infection as I had feared, it was merely a viral thing that is 'going round, the worst thing is it knocks the stuffing out of you but  it will get better on its own, stay warm, rest, keep hydrated etc'. The clue apparently was in the sore throat, which is good to know for future reference. I felt very very much better coming away from the surgery than going into it. 

Today I feel rather worse which is sad as we're going away tomorrow - just a quick overnighter to Inverness to see Scottish Opera's Evgeny Onegin. I much prefer seeing opera in Glasgow but Inverness is better than noting and it means we won't be gone long. Hopefully by tomorrow I will be almost back to normal, and also not sounding like a frog whenever I open my mouth! 

100 Books to Read Poster - Nunber Two

So, number two was Alice in Wonderland, as you may have gathered from the picture of the Cheshire cat. This was far from my first go at Alice, I read it at six and have  re-visited it several times over the  years, although not recently it has to be said.  

And it was disappointing. There's hardly any structure to it, and it's very repetitive in plot terms. I couldn't believe how many times Alice had to make herself bigger or smaller and really I just wanted to smack her round the head for lack of foresight. 

There were some funny lines in it that still had the power to make me smile, but apart from that I found it odd and dull. I always did prefer Through the Looking Glass, even as a child, but am not tempted to go back to it now in case it disappoints on the same scale. 

At the same time as I was reading it I was struggling with this Alice in Wonderland themed jigsaw puzzle. It was difficult to do, partly I suspect because I wasn't all that fond of the individual pictures that made it up, but also because it was very badly manufactured. I find puzzles very therapeutic generally; there's something very calming about taking 1000 randomly shaped pieces of cardboard and imposing order upon them, but to keep at it does rather depend on some enthusiasm for the image. Anyway this one s off to the charity shop next time we go. 

Verdict for Alice in Wonderland - With regret - A Miss. 

The Woman in White

Well yes, naturally I watched it, the book being a long time favourite; and despite a strong inclination to stop after episode one, I did in fact stay with it.

As adaptations of C19 novels go it wasn't at all bad. They did make Count Fosco (above) thin, young and attractive which in the book he is not, being middle aged, corpulent and reptilian, as well as having a disgusting habit of keeping mice in his clothes. The last time they tackled TWiW the Beeb in its wisdom changed Glyde's secret, making him a child molester which, although it doubtless chimed with the zeitgeist, wasn't what the original story was all about. Possibly at the time the production executives couldn't trust the watching public to appreciate the difficulties that would accrue were Glyde discovered to be illegitimate. Or they couldn't manage/be bothered  to produce a script which explained it. 

What I found really uncomfortable in this was the ease with which Laura was incarcerated in a madhouse by her husband. I am finding it increasingly difficult to watch television or listen to radio which in concerned with the brutal and careless entitlement of the way men treat women. I know it takes more than a large tip to a compliant doctor from a husband to get a wife shut away in an asylum these days, although I suspect that a lot of male doctors ( and policemen and judges and teachers) are still wired to place more belief in a male partner's assertion that a woman is 'mental' than in the woman's assertion that she is not, especially if she has been revoked into retaliatory violence. Conjugation 'I am justifiably angry, you(male) have a bit of a temper, she is dangerously hysterical'. It's an unconscious bias that hangs around from the very time in which Collins was writing books like TWiW;  it angers, appals and distresses me in almost equal measure and I find it difficult to cope with. Especially in this where  the scenes in the asylum were fairly graphic. 

In fact so upsetting did I find it that I started to wonder if my very long love affair with the C19 novel was perhaps over. And  then I thought of what a world without the novels of Elizabeth Gaskell would be like and realised that, fortunately, it wasn't.

Knitting Catch Up - Socks. And the Dull Jumper.

Despite my good intentions I never seem to manage to put up knitting projects on here when they are finished, which I really should do to avoid lengthy catch up posts. I have recently embarked on a project to use up as much of my wool stash as I can while I enjoy my enforced rest from the Ph D. Happily I don't  think I am buying wool faster than I am using it up, so that's progress.

Anyway since Christmas I have knitted, amongst other things, five pairs of socks, all from wool in the stash  and here they are.

 Hated these when they were done. Actually I hated them before they were done because I bought the wool from someone on Ravelry thinking it was just my colours but in real life it turned out it wasn't. . I knitted it up straight away just to be rid of it, and I'm still not sure what to do with the resulting  socks, apart from not put them on my feet.

This wool came from the Knitting Goddess as part of the Discworld Revisited club. I had decided to pair it with a plain cream to make Steven West's Daybreak  shawl, which I thought would look fabulous. However after several false starts I gave up on Daybreak as the edges were just too tight. This seems to have been a common problem with people knitting it and various ways round it were suggested but I wasn't really in a frame of mind to start making alterations to a pattern to make it work when that is surely the job of the designer. I was given the pattern as a gift so I can't grumble about the money, but West sells this pattern and to my mind he should make sure it is knittable in the form in which it is sold, not in a form that has to be cobbled together by knitters trying to make it work. Given that it's a bright yarn, to say the least, it was the work of a moment to repurpose it for socks for the OH. 

It did however also feature in a pair of socks for me too

This is Ulf, a pattern I made for the OH years ago and I always wanted my own version so the cream and the Salamander Flash from the projected shawl both came into their own here. 

I bought this wool at the first Yarndale Festival so that was in 2013. Five years to knit it up then. In my defence the OH chose this and two other balls of the same type in different colours for socks for himself and the other two balls were knitted up into socks years ago. I'm not quite sure how this one got overlooked to be honest. Anyway on my Ravelry page they project has been christened At Last, because really, it was more than time ....

And finally for the socks, candy cane socks. I've become a bit of a West Yorkshire Spinners (WYS) junkie recently and my last yarn splurge, way back in February was on what you might call a 'fair bit' of their Signature 4 ply. A fair bit translates into six x 100 g balls,but  only five were actually for me. (As though that made it any better). I had missed out on their Christmas special edition, a candy cane stripe, so was pleased to find a last ball of it in a shop, and  bought both coral and green for contrasting toes and heels. First result as above. They are uncharacteristically bright for me but I do wear them. In fact Im wearing them as I type. 

Talking of WYS I have just finished a jumper for the OH in their The Croft Shetland Tweed Aran weight and here he is modelling it,  beside the thing that lets me off feeling guilty about my wool purchases

It is not in fact at all a 'Dull Jumper', but for reasons it would take too long to go into he apostrophised it as such while it was under construction, an action which led to a six week hiatus in its production. However it's finished now and really rather nice, I continued with my new practice of actually knitting a tension square before I started which meant it ended up as a good fit. And despite the 'dull' word having been slung about, he likes it now it is done which is the main thing. 

Move Over Wallis (and Gromit )

because at the weekend the OH and I had A Grand Day Out.

Our busy schedule continues and I'm not sure why I am not flat on the floor whimpering for rest and quiet in a darkened room, but however that may be I am not, so we're just going with the flow. We have recently had dinner with our friend BH who was here in connection with her job with Scottish Ballet, been to a performance by Scottish Ballet., attended a talk by the director of the on-going dig at The Cairns in South Ronaldsay, zapped down to South Ron in person for a re-visit to the Hoxa Tapestry Gallery and a short walk, and on Sunday we had the Grand Day Out. 

Pics from the walk on South Ron, it was such a beautiful day, although wet underfoot as you will see. 

On Sunday, the forecast being good, we decided we would drive over to Birsay and have lunch at the Birsay Bay Tearoom. We've hardly visited either Birsay or the tearoom since we sold the flat we had there which we used to rent out to holidaymakers, and it is an interesting place, not to mention that the tearoom is very good. As it happened we arrived at just the optimum time to walk over to the Brough itself. (This is a tidal island, and you can walk out to it over a causeway if you're there at the right time) We had decided not to try and time our visit for this because otherwise you can end up doing things at weird and wonderful times of day, and it is after all, forty miles away so we hadn't even bothered to look at the tide times.

The Brough has a wonderful hotch-potch of historical remains; Pictish, Viking and medieval, as well as connections to Orkney's 'patron saint',  Magnus You can read more about it here , if interested. We enjoyed a walk in warm sunshine, had a chat to some Australian visitors, reminisced about how the boys used to play Hide and Seek in the remains of the monastery church and then walked back over the causeway and made our way to the Tearoom.

Which was rammed. Not only were all the seats taken, there was a queue of people waiting - not something I have ever seen there before, although I daresay in high summer it's quite common. Not that this is high summer it's only May and the tourist season proper is hardly yet upon us, but obviously lots of other people had had the same idea as us about lunching there. We retreated to the car. 

We tossed various ideas around about where we might go instead and the OH suggested, out of the blue, that we could try the eatery at the Orkney Brewery Visitor Centre, where he had never been and which wasn't, as the crow flies, all that far away. And that turned out to be an excellent decision. While it doesn't have the big windows and panoramic views of the Birsay Bay tearoom, what it had was quiet, space, a more extensive menu, pleasant staff and absolutely delicious food. We will certainly be going there again, although next time I will pass on the Dragonhead cake. 

And some pictures from the Brough