Just because I like it ....

When we had our quick trip to Leeds last month I took this off the shelf and put it in my bag to read.

It's not something recommended by anyone else, it wasn't on my bedside pile and it certainly doesn't feature on the 100 books to read poster. But every now and again I find, I need to reach for an old favourite.

I've loved Nicholas Stuart Gray's books since I fell across The AppleStone in my school library when I was 12. I subsequently read as many of his books as I could lay my hands on, and as he was still alive at the time, bought his later ones as they came out. Over many many years I finally managed to collect all his novels and short story collections; it took time and patience and a haunting of e-bay, but I did it in the end. It seemed harder than it should have been given that he wasn't hugely prolific.

Obviously these are books for children, but then I am quite 'into' children's literature and in fact my M Litt thesis a few years ago was on Stuart Gray, examining the use he makes of the Gaelic Otherworld in his work. (Quite a lot). Because although he lived in Devon for the latter part of his life, he was a Scot and Scottish and Gaelic themes underlie a lot of his stories. 

I've done a lot of reading in my time but only two authors have ever made me cry. Stuart Gray is one of them - and  he did it twice! Once was in this book - Over the Hills to Fabylon - and yes, despite being prepared, I cried at exactly the same place this time around as I originally did when I was a hard and cynical 19 year old and as I have every time I have read the book since.

In another part of the forest my eye seems to be healing nicely. I still can't use shampoo, wear make up, go swimming, bend down or lift heavy objects and I have another 3 plus weeks of nasty stinging eye drops. But as a price to pay for being able to see - I'll take all that and more. 

'M Back

Op is over and seems to have been successful. I can see, without glasses! which is very weird, and although I could see little but bright light when I first came out of the hospital the last two days have seen incremental improvements in my vision and I can now read book print (which was the last thing to fall in) and obviously I can also type again and see screens .

I'm not jumping up and down and opening the champagne because I had surgery for a detaching retina many years ago and although at first that seemed to have been a huge success in fact after about six weeks things went to hell in a handcart and I was left with only peripheral vision in that eye as a result of the op.  So I am taking nothing for granted.

However I am cautiously optimistic. I'm even going to try a bit of knitting this evening. More, and more interesting stuff, in a couple of days. 

Oh, and

tomorrow is my eye op day. Feeling a bit trepidatious, and wish it was over, but it soon will be and I'm reminding myself of all the amazing things I will be able to do again once it's behind me. I may be missing from here for a few days, as I have no idea how long it will be before I can read/look at screens again. But I will be back asap.

Mate, when I say I don't like something ....

..it's because I really really don't.

So the other Sunday after we'd been to the Open Day at the Dig we went somewhere for lunch. It's somewhere that has recently been re-opened after almost two decades and someone else had told us it was very good so we thought we'd go and check it out. 

The OH ordered soup and a toastie, and I had a scone. The scone was good, and here's the soup

and I'm told it was very nice. With it the OH was offered a choice of a cheese scone or some sour dough bread. (As an aside I don't see the point of this if you're about the eat a sandwich as well, but there you go) Anyway he refused both politely, saying he wasn't keen on scones and actually didn't; like sour dough bread. He doesn't. Nor do I. Plenty of people do. We know that and it's fine. We don't go round trying to convert them to not liking it. If only sour dough aficionados were as tolerant.  as we are.

We were not very far into our refreshments when the chef came and took up position sitting at a table across the aisle from us, and opened a conversation that was so one sided as not to merit the designation 'conversation' at all.  He told us we did like sour dough bread. He was sure of it. The reason he was sure about it was that the only reason we could possibly have for saying we didn't like it was that we had yet to taste his,. He had gone into sourdough bead making at some length. Studied it, you might say. He had is own secret. It was all in the fermentation. He fermented his bread for longer than anyone else he knew.*   That was what made his special. Once we had tasted his sour dough bread we would never again say we didn't like it. 

*I caught the prase 'for two days'. I'm not sure whether that was how long in total, or how much longer than everyone else he left his bread mix to bubble, but since it is the nasty fermented taste that I particularly object to in sourdough bread, the point was moot in any case.

I am totally bemused by this and also a bit flummoxed about what we were supposed to do. We are polite pleasant people who don't make scenes or even like to contradict other people in public. There again obviously this young man doesn't feel the same restraint. But why not? We were customers. We were in his café (or café bistro as they call it) to enjoy a leisurely lunch. We were not there to be harangued and told that we didn't know what we liked or didn't like, and that after we had tasted his version we would change our minds. How is it that other people think they have the right to come and tell you what your personal likes and dislikes are when they have never seen you before (and in this case will certainly never to see you again, since that is how I respond. I'm too timid to say anything but I vote with my feet) 

Maybe we are naff, or peasants, or have unrestructured palates, or whatever it is you are suspected of when you own up to not liking sour dough bead. It doesn't give anyone the right to tell us that we don't know what we like. Or dislike, as in this case. He should have stayed in is kitchen, cooking, And then he might have had himself a returning customer. 

The Ness of Brodgar Dig - Open Day 2018

Bit of a misnomer n the title there as the Ness of Brodgar dig has tow open days, one at the beginning of the season and one at the end. The first ne was last Sunday and we pootled over to have  a look.

The dig hasn't been gong long this year yet but there was still lots to see and learn about.

A general view of part of the site. Only about 10% of it has been uncovered as yet. Some of it is below the loch, and some will never be dug because houses have been built on top, but even so, as one of the guides said, there are archaeologists not yet born who will retire from this site before it is fully explored. 

a nice neat trench!

replicas of  stone pots found here - different sorts from different places, a sign of trade, or that the Ness was a gathering point for people from all over Orkney. 

Trench T, new this year. The mound it is in was totally ma made in the Neolithic.

In Trench T they discovered these strange pits which were totally empty. No-one knows what they were for. 

and the walls in there  - Trench T is uncovering part of a huge structure - had drains, just visible in this picture. 

Part of the fun for us was seeing one or two people we know for the first time this year. I also paid a visit to the Dig shop where I knew they had some nice knitting patterns , based on art work found n some of the excavated stones here, for sale. And who knows, maybe one day I'll actually knit them up! 

The OH is digging here for a couple of weeks later in the summer so I'll find out a lot more about what they find. Meanwhile for anyone interested the dig has an excellent website here

New Things 2018 Number 3 - Paul Simon The Farewell Tour Live

I was going to title this New Things Gong to a Gig whiich I didn't; think I had done but the OH persuaded me that the time I saw Fairport Convention at University counted as going to a gig. I disagreed but in case the world at large took his side I thought I'd call it Gong to a Gig with my husband, and that was fine until I remembered that way back in the mid-1980s we had gone together to see the Alan Price Set  at Leeds Civic Hall. So Paul Simon it is. 

And who would have thought, back in my teenage years when I listened to Simon and Garfunkel singing about Scarborough Fair, or The Sound of Silence that one day I would actually see one of them live on stage. Certainly not me. Seeing famous musicians in concert just  wasn't part of my frame of reference in those days; it was many years before I actually took on board that 'people like me' whatever that means, could actually buy tickets for this sort of thing. 

We booked the tickets for this months ago, when they first went on sale. It was the week after the dishwasher broke down and we bought a new one and I remember this because when the OH tried to book the tickets he got one of those heart stopping messages that come up sometimes advising you to contact your credit card security team, so that was worrying. It transpired that it was flagged up because he had two large and uncharacteristic purchases attempted in the space of three days. That tells you that the tickets were expensive - although not quite as expensive as the new dishwasher, and it tells me that the fraud team flagger is a bit of a chump* because there is nothing at all uncharacteristic about us buying domestic appliances, That said, and however worrying it is at the time, I would always rather they checked than that they let some lowlife make free with one of our credit card numbers so I'm not complaining. 

*I do know it's a computer algorithm and not a real person. 

So how was it? It was great. He sang some old stuff that I knew and loved (some of which sounded a bot odd without Garfunkel joining in) and some newer stuff that I knew and liked and a whole load of other newer stuff that I didn't know, much of which I didn't like much as it was a bit too 'jazzy'. A new one on me that I particularly took to was 'Rene and Georgette Magritte with their dog after the war'. 

As a general rule I feel that singers, even singer/songwriters are probably best saving their energy for their music and not mouthing vague political platitudes from the stage, but there wasn't much of it and I'm sure he meant well. I won't, as he suggested, be Googling E O Wilson, but don't let me stop you giving it a go.  

He can still sing, the voice has hardly changed, and he was surrounded by some very skilful musicians, the audience was large and  good natured and had a great time, as did we. Really glad we went. 

We drove to Glasgow on Wednesday, saw the concert on Wednesday evening and drove back yesterday, Thursday, which was a bit of an ask to be honest. Think we might be getting a bit too old for these very short trips south. That said we both had a fantastic night's sleep, so perhaps there is something to be said for them after all. 

100 Books to Read Poster - Number 6

I defy anyone who doesn't already know to guess which book the latest picture refers to - I can think of half a dozen that would be more apposite and specific

 It is in fact Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy by John le Carre.  read, or rather listened to, slightly out of order because Audible had it on sale a couple of weeks ago and it seemed too good an opportunity to miss. We had a large collection of books by le Carre in the house up until two years ago when they all went off to find new homes via the charity shop,  so it was a bit irritating to see this on the poster  and contemplate buying a new copy when I had read and owned it already. 

I found on listening that there were details I'd forgotten and that weren't included in the excellent BBC dramatization of 1979 or the rather less excellent film made much more recently. That was a pleasant surprise. Less pleasant was the constant use of 'English' as either a shorthand for British (something which really really annoys me) or even worse, a careless assumption that England is the only country in the 'Union' that matters. In this I suspect le Carre is simply and subconsciously being true to his class and his upbringing, but in a intelligent man the lack of any sort of interrogation of his inbuilt attitudes, particularly in a book which includes long ruminative passages on the nature of patriotism and  the purpose of the Cold War , it's a frustration to say the least. Leaving aside the question of Britishness a lot of these more reflective passages are in any case simply an interruption; they shed little light on character and hold up the action. 

That said it was, as it has always been, a damn good spy story and it was a pleasure to encounter Lacon, Smiley, Mendel and Guillam once more. A huge plus was that it was narrated by Michael Jayston, who not only played Guillam in the BBC series, but has a voice I love. IMDB assures me that, although now quite elderly, he is still in the land of the living, which was good to know. 

Finally and at last

I have a date for my cataract operation, which is the 25th of this month.

This means I can now move from stressing about the fact that I have no date to starting to worry that something will go wrong. This is progress of a sort. 

It does also mean that the tickets I bought for the 26th, to see son no 2 in Scottish Opera's community Pagliacci, only a few hours before the postman brought the letter with the date, are now unusable - by us anyway.

This is the second time in as many weeks that we have bought tickets for an event that we then weren't able to use. I suppose I could start placing myself by a street drain and throwing tenners down it, which would cut out the hassle of buying the tickets in the first place. 

Life is horribly unsettled just now. On the upside I do now have a definite date and the prospect that in a couple of months I will see better than I ever have in my life before. That's got to be worth a small smile. I'm trying to raise it. 

Bedside Books - Pile 2 Number 2

This was one of  the library pot luck crime books and was Intent to Harm by Stan Washburn.

It's set in  a small California town where the police department is struggling to catch a serial rapist. The lead character,  a fairly rookie policeman,  is engaging and witty and the narrative is good on his fears about the safety of his wife an children with a very clever  rapist loose where they live. 

I had a few problems with it. It's far too long. I know that in real life serial rapists are very difficult to catch and it can take years.  This book covered about ten months and at times I felt that was how long I'd been reading it. Police procedures are slow, thorough and repetitive, and that applied to huge swathes of this book too. 

Upside, I didn't give up on it and I didn't skim read the last 100 pages either so it must  have had something. Downside, the perp was caught in the end by making a stupid mistake of the type we had spent 350 pages learning he didn't make, and by changing his MO in a rather unrealistic way.

According to Amazon, Mr Waterman wrote anther book with the same two main detectives in it, this time chasing a serial child abductor and rapist. Seems to have a bit of a nasty theme developing there , and for that reason, plus the fact that I seriously doubt I would ever have time hanging so heavily on my hands that I couldn't find something better to read, I'll be giving it a miss. 

Baking Subscription June

I have an awful feeling that we're headed for a long string of book posts, because although I read slowly these days I seem to be getting through quite a few books, but for today we're talking baking. The June baking club box was Strawberry and Almond Squares. This involved making a compote, which I suppose I could count as something new I've done in 2018 but I'm not going to because it wasn't a hop, skip and a jump off making jam so I feel it doesn't really count as something 'new'. 

Anyway this is what they looked like, or at least one of them

and I have to say they were delicious. Definitely one to make again.