More Christmas Baking

This was going to be a rant about virtue signalling non Christmas card senders, but I thought better of it because I don't want to unwittingly offend anyone. That said, giving money to charity and sending Christmas cards are not mutually exclusive activities. Are they? No. 

And I'll leave that one there and turn to the topic of Christmas baking. Although if you  looked at the title and thought Great, that must be the Christmas wreath you are doomed to (temporary) disappointment.

Because what we actually made was our first ever Gingerbread House. It came as a kit from my Baking Subscription  people; not part of the monthly offering but an extra that they sell at Christmas time. And since we've never done one I thought it might be fun to have a go. 

I say we since it was a joint effort between the OH and myself. I baked the bits and he did the construction and the decoration. My icing piping skills being nothing to write home about, except in a mocking and derogatory manner, I designated the fiddly bits to him. Et voilà

Here it is under construction

and various views of the finished article. 

I was quite proud of the stained glass windows which are made with crushed boiled sweets. I have seen people do this on Bake Off and thought it must be ever so fiddly to do but actually it's easy peasy. I used some cookie cutters to make some extra bits and thought it was truly inspired of him to take the two candy cane pieces and make them into a sleigh for one of the snowmen. 

So OK its garish and full of sugar but isn't that what gingerbread houses are supposed to be like? 

I tried a bit today - one of the shooting stars from the roof - and regret to report that it was a bit soft and not very gingery. But I suspect it will get eaten for all that. And it was a fun, and new, thing to do. 

It's Christmas!

And in a startling contrast to last year I have been organised enough to bake and marzipan the cake in very good time. The OH once again stepped up to do the white icing/decorating and here it is

I'll be blogging again in a few days - meanwhile a Very Happy Christmas to Us All!

A Pre-Christmas Treat

Let's ignore the fact that I already have too much wool (a point reinforced yeterday when I decided to have a 'sort through' some of the oldest bits of my collection, some of it dating back to before we even moved to Orkney in 2005.) This tam kit was launched on Friday, to raise funds for the dig at the Ness of Brodgar. Proceeds from the pattern (downloadable sometime in the new year) will go to the  Dig. The pattern has been locally commissioned and designed, and the wool comes from sheep kept by the pattern commissioner here in Orkney and spun for her in Shetland. The designs are based on art work found on pottery and elsewhere at The Ness. It's a very lovely thing and I'd like to think I will find the time to knit it before winter is out. I am not holding my breath. Especially since it rather ominously begins 'the recommended cast on for this is the long tail German twisted cast on'. Yup right. I'm guessing that has less than nothing in common with my normal loop the wool twice round my thumb then ... I feel the call of a you tube tutorial - but not just yet.

If you popped by expecting a picture of a chocolate and hazelnut wreath - sorry. I felt so awful on Saturday that not only did I not make the wreath, I cancelled the friend's visit in favour of a series of two hour naps throughout the day. The wreath will get made, just not sure when. Rest assured, when the day arrives, there wll be a picture of it here. 

Baking Subscription er, April

Yes, I finally got around to doing the April baking box. It was a Bakewell tart, and it tastes OK. The pastry is not brilliant but it's edible. Rather than faff about piping rosettes of icing around the edge as per the box instructions I made enough to cover the whole top. I then decided to get  a bit fancy and feather it. However creative I tried to be with the camera angle there is no denying that the feathering is uneven because the pink lines were not evenly spaced. On the upside I bought 'writing icing' and I am absolutely amazed that I managed to 'write' straight lines with it. So that's a plus. 

I still have August's box to do - custard creams anyone? and December's which is a chocolate and hazelnut Christmas wreath. Since I have a friend coming for coffee tomorrow afternoon I am planning to do the wreath in the morning. It needs to prove twice and is also quite complicated in-between the provings so I'll need to be up early. It does say it's best served warm though, which is what R might be getting! 

In other news I finished my present shopping today and also gave out the local presents so, apart from some wrapping, and writing a shopping list for the OH so that he gets the right ingredients for the Christmas Day trifle, I'm done. And this year - no pre-Christmas melt down. That has to be progress!

The Nutcracker - and other adventures in motion pictures

So yesterday evening the OH and I went to see The Nutcracker at the cinema. It wasn't a simulcast, but a screening of a film made of the ROH's 2016 production. We've never been big ballet fans but we're slowly getting drawn in, and it being Christmas and The Nutcracker being a Christmassy sort of ballet off we went. 

We enjoyed it immensely. I assume the dancers were good otherwise they wouldn't have ben there but I'm not knowledgeable enough to comment further on that. They certainly looked very  poised and confident, and their footwork was very very fast. Amazing stuff. The costumes were gorgeous - not all to my taste, but amazing just the same. And it was very clear what was going on, which hasn't always been my experience at the ballet it has to be said. 

Son No 2, who came back with us to Orkney when we returned from EuroDisney, and the OH, are going back to the cinema this evening. They are going to see a Star Wars Triple Bill, with the third film being the newly released whatever it's called - The Rise of Skywalker? - starting at 00.01. I think we can safely say I will be in bed long before they get home, and possibly up long before either of them in the morning. It's not my sort of thing, but it is theirs, and I hope they enjoy it. 

A Tale of Two Trees

On our way to EuroDisney we had some time in Glasgow and we helped Son No 2 put up the tree we bought for the flat the first year we had it.

That's the OH and son no 2 busy putting stuff on it ...

... and this is the finished article. 

And yesterday now that we were well and truly back in Orkney , and the cards you may remember were all done, we put up our own tree. 

 Son no 2 giving a helping hand again. 

 And here's the finished tree

There's such a difference between them. I had longed for a tree decorated in one colour only for  many years ( probably through having seen them in shops and glossy magazines) so when we bought the flat tree we bought one box full of baubles to go on it; in black and gold only, with garlands of golden beads.It's not quite monochrome but  it's as near as makes no difference, and  I love it. 

The family tree is a whole other story. Every decoration on there has a story attached to it. We have one or two that the boys made at school; battered and bowed, but still usable. There are some I cross stitched many years ago; I did two for everyone with their names on and some generic un-named ones as well. Son No 1 has taken the ones with his name on to Canada of course, to become part of his own family's traditions, but that is how it should be. There are a few that we have bought on holidays or trips away, which is why somewhere on there, there are wooden ornaments sporting kangaroos and koalas. And a pohutakawa fairy rom New Zealand, and a string angel from Amish Country and all sorts. There are beautiful blown glass ornaments from eastern Europe which we bought here in the Christmas shop in Stromness, and artisan made ones from sea glass by local craft people,  and others from abroad, bought or hand made by friends made through pen palling or Ravelry. In one way it's an unco-ordinated mess, but in another way it's the story of our marriage and our family and all our Christmases and that makes it less aesthetic than the one in the flat but much more meaningful. Every year we say, we have too many tree decorations, we mustn't buy any more, we have no space,  and by and large we don't. But we did get a new one this year, a random  gift from my sister. Meet Maisie Mouse:

And if you look quite hard at the picture of the finished tree, you'll see she found a place on it! 

Bin Away - And Now We're Back.

We have just got back from a 3 day break in EuroDisney which necessitated gong away for a week. The blog got very neglected beforehand as I was determined to get all my Christmas cards, bar the Orkney ones, into the post. This made my card posting early, even for me, but I felt it would help me feel I had 'got somewhere' with Christmas and could therefore allow myself for a few days of enjoyment. (I know, ridiculous: but a Calvinist outlook deeply engendered in childhood  is difficult to throw off.)  

Since we returned to the UK on Thursday evening we didn't quite manage to miss all the punditry and horror around the unfolding election result, although I went to bed at 10.30 and refused to fall asleep to Radio 4 as is my wont, since it was given over to an Election Night special. I felt the bad news could wait until morning. It was certainly there, waiting for me the moment I woke up, but 10 minutes of a Tory fawning Today program was more than enough and the radio was suppressed for the rest of the day.

I can't be disappointed with the results in Scotland, except for noting in passing that the appalling Alistair Carmichael did in the end hang on to Orkney and Shetland for the Lib-Dems once again. Of course after his fall from grace (which in the end, the moral compasses of most political parties in Britain being where they are, actually wasn't all that far) he said he would not stand for election again, but that turned out to be just another of his lies. Hands up if that surprises you. 

The thing, or one of the things anyway, is that even if this does herald the end of the union, and Scotland finally becomes independent once more, that will leave a sad and sour taste if it's on the back of those in England who don't want, don't deserve and didn't vote for five more years of  Tory rule. Especially with the unspeakable Johnson in Downing Street and the even more loathsome Rees-Mogg allowed to slither out of the purdah into which Tory Central Office wisely confined him during the election campaign, to take up some high government office and make even more mountains of money. 

There is something deeply wrong with the world. 

Coming soon, I hope, a more cheerful and optimistic post, not to mention frame of mind. 

New Stuff - Reiki and Reflexology

Late on Monday evening I was called by a friend. Did I fancy coming along to her house the next day and having a session with a therapist; she did reflexology, massage, reiki etc. I could have 90 minutes and chose my own treatment. In the spirit of trying out new things I said yes. 

I duly turned up and answered a lot of questions about medication and general health, trying not to give away anything which the therapist could subsequently use to talk about blocked energies and so on. (Guess what, I'm a sceptic). 

I opted for reflexology and a reiki head massage. I enjoyed the reflexology. Who doesn't love to have their feet massaged? The reiki was a different story.  I found it deeply uncomfortable to have someone hold my head. I found it even more uncomfortable when their fingertips, instead of staying still,  crept inexorably forward. 

Afterwards she said a lot of stuff about blocked energies, constrictions on the chest that signified emotional trauma going back a long time that hadn't been dealt with, and a high degree of tension in my neck and shoulders. Well, I'll let her have the shoulder tension. Since about age 8. I'm not a relaxed person. 

I had a long and very enjoyable chat with my friend afterwards who I hadn't seen for far too long and then walked home. She would have given me a lift if her car hadn't been in the local garage, and I blithely assured her that, rather than summon the OH, I would walk. I had remembered that the street lights stop about half way between her house and mine. I hadn't remembered how dark that makes it. Or how difficult it is to walk in a straight line when you have no visual reference points. Fortunately I do still recognise the feel of damp grass, rather than tarmac, under my feet and was able to avoid ending up in a drainage ditch, but I suspect it was closer than I'd like to think. After that I scrabbled about and found my phone which provided me with a very small amount of light to hep me recognise where our drive turns off the road. So I made it home safely.

I had thought that if, as promised, the reiki gave me a good night's sleep it would all have been worth it, but in the event I had one of the most disturbed nights I've had in ages, so it's not an experience I'm likely to repeat. 

A Good Week Away

I need to blog about the fab time I had in Glasgow before I forget all about it. Sadly, although I dragged my camera all the way there I neglected to take any photos so this will be  picturless post.

Of course before I ever got to Glasgow the OH and I were in Inverness for the Scottish Opera Tosca which I have to report was every bit as good as all the 5* reviews said it was. It's an old production, but not one we've seen before so we were happy to catch it.I did remark, later in the week upon the number of welsh singers there were on stage but as someone said 'they do make good singers in Wales'. Which can't be denied. 

Sunday morning after Tosca we went our separate ways; the OH came back to his island paradise and I caught a train to Glasgow where I was met by son no 2 and we decamped to the Gourmet Burger Company where we ate and I had, for the second time this year, one of their glorious vodka elderflower cocktails. I was not quite in so much need of it as I was when I had one earlier in the summer, but it still went down a treat. 

I'd arranged to do one thing a day while I was in the city, which sounds perhaps a bit restrictive but  I know of old that that is really all I can manage. So Monday I went to a talk given by an American academic about the reasons why Outlander might be so popular in the US. Quite interesting, especially as diaspora culture is a bit of an interest of mine. 

Tuesday I met up with the man from Glasgow University who edited the complete poems of GCH, published back in 2000; without the work he did on that I could never have attempted my own thesis and he has taken a helpful interest in that since the very beginning. I had discovered, on the way to my talk on Monday night, a churros and ice cream café on the Great Western Road, so we met up there and had a lovely long chat. He also gave me a very precious gift of which more later, possibly sometime next year. 

Wednesday I went to the Yarn Cake to meet my Ravelry friend A; it's been a while since we managed to meet up as she hasn't been at all well. In fact she wasn't 100% that week either and I'm very grateful to her for making the effort to come out and see me. Amazingly enough I bought no yarn there at all, but possibly because it was busy and so difficult to get to the shelves.

Thursday I met up with my Stirling/Edinburgh based friends, but they came over to Glasgow and we started off proceedings by going to Oran Mor for one of their  famous A Play, A Pie and A Pint series, which is exactly what it says on the tin. You pay £15, and in exchange you get a pint of beer, cider or a soft drink, a pie or a slice of quiche, and a ticket for a play of about 45/50 minutes in length. None of us had ever been before, although I am forever telling son no. 2 that he should go there regularly and 'network'. The play we saw was by Alan Bissett, and was an interesting take on the nature of prejudice and expectation, although I thought it took too melodramatic a turn towards the end. Never mind, it was good and the acting was of a very high standard. I'd go again, and it would be easier having been once before. Oran Mor has some fantastic murals painted by the Scottish artist and writer Alasdair Gray but sadly access to them was not available the  day we were there. I should go back and look at them another time. In fact I should find out more about Alasdair Gray full stop. After the play we took ourselves off to a very nice café on Byres Road for tea and cake before rounding off the day with our customary trawl through  a few charity shops. 

And finishing the week on Friday I was entertained at Scottish Opera HQ as well as browsing round a few shops in the city centre without buying anything much. A Christmas shopping opportunity squandered, but I couldn't drum up the enthusiasm, especially as I was going to have to carry anything I bought back with me. On the upside I walked for miles that day, and in fact most others, and I also expanded my knowledge of the Glasgow bus service and both these were Good Things to do. 

On Saturday I returned to Orkney which was the usual long and tedious trip; got up at 8 am, left flat at 9 am, caught two trains and a ferry and got back to Orkney, exhausted,  at 11pm. I had planned to break up the ferry trip by buying a ticket for the on-board cinema but the choice of films was Downton or Toy Story 4. Since neither of these appealed I just had to read my Kindle, but there is no disguising that it is a very very tedious trip and possibly another time I should just bite the expensive bullet that is the price of a flight and get back here in 4 hours rather than 14. It's something to think about. 

Baking Subscription November

The November box was waiting for me when I got back from a busy and very enjoyable week in Glasgow and I made it yesterday. Not yet tasted, but it looks very scrummy.

Sticky toffee ginger loaf. I'm looking forward to trying it our later today. 

The muticoloured fragments beside it are part of a jigsaw puzzle, and not decorations that have fallen off the cake! I may even put up a photo of that when it's finished. 

Felt (3)

Just finishing off the felt posts; this was what the felt that I made was for.

little felt houses.

A friend of ours is doing an Art Ph D and the felt houses are prototypes for an installation she is planning as part of it. Her work is about the Cillini; Irish burial grounds  for unbaptised and still born children. There's a link to her work on this project  here

Glimpses to be had in the photo of the now not-so-new craft room which of course I had intended to do a full blog post on earlier ithe year. As a record of what I do with myself, i.e. a diary with pictures, which is what it was originally intended to be, this blog falls very short at times. 

I'm off south again tomorrow. The OH and I are going to see Tosca in Inverness and he's coming back on Sunday and I'm carrying on south to Glasgow where I'm staying for 6 days and catching up with friends and doing the sort of things  you can do in a Big City that you can't do here. 

I'm a bit worried about the Tosca to be honest. We've seen Scottish Opera stuff in Inverness twice before, the gloomy dated Carmen, and the Onegin-with-a-gimmick (the horse). Still, let's hope it's a case of third time lucky. 

Heavens to Betsy - Three out of Three

So on Sunday

A stranger came a driving
A stranger came a driving
A strange came a driving
Up to our new front door.

(Apologies to Alfred Noyes there ....)

We had indeed won a prize in the Marengo Centre Raffle and the stranger came to deliver it; this is the third time in a row we've done that, which is surprising as we're not generally lucky with that sort of thing. Anyway here is a picture of what we won

which was great as I burn a lot of scented candles in the winter time so this will be used rather than recycled. 

Ballet and Books (mainly)

So the Bourne Romeo and Juliet was amazing, and as emotional and powerful as we had been told it would be. I was in awe of the young dancers for their stamina and their agility, it was simply breathtaking. Not a conventional production of course; I may not know much about ballet but I do know that you don't go to see Bourne for tutus and tiaras, but a stunning re-telling of the story.

 

It was Saturday Slaughters today aka the crime fiction book club at the library. This month's book was Black Wolf by G D Absom. It is set in contemporary St Petersburg and was wearingly, persistently depressing. The plot was clunky, there were inconsistencies with the treatment of Russian names and the resolution of the plot had very little to do with at least 80% of what had gone before. The upsides were that the protagonist was a woman and quite well drawn, and that you could really feel the cold of a Petersburg winter. It was the second of a projected series; I won't be going back to catch up with Book One. The next SS book is by Ian Rankin, and my heart sort of sank when he said that because I have never really 'got' Rankin, but who knows, this may be the one where the light dawns. 

When returning Black Wolf I took the opportunity to also return Giles Kristian's Lancelot.  I hadn't finished it, despite renewing it three times, so I decided to read the writing on the wall which said basically that I didn't care about the book and I would never finish it so I was better off with its space than its company. 

Before heading into town for that we went down to The Hope for a fundraising soup and sandwich lunch at the Old People's Community Centre. They usually do a strawberry tea in the summer and I was only saying to the OH a few weeks ago that they mustn't have held it this year, and then I saw the sign for this; I suppose they were wanting to ring the changes a bit. Anyway the soup was delicious as were the home bakes, and we bought some raffle tickets, of course, so we might even win a prize. More soup tomorrow as the winter season of monthly soup lunches at the Cathedral starts up again then.  

In other news, if there is a more difficult instrument to hold still in order to play than the lute I'd like to know what it is. 

Baking Subscription October

So this month it was chocolate and orange marble cake - as so:-

I ignored the decorating instructions which waned me to make two separate icings, orange and chocolate, pipe alternate rosettes of them in the middle of the cake, and put a ring of them alternating around the top and then sprinkle with the chocolate curls. 

I'm afraid my reaction to that was along the lines of 'Blow that for a game of football, life is too short for me to bodge piping rosettes inside a cake'. So I made one lot of chocolate orange icing and spread it in the middle and all over the top. There was still loads left over; the OH tells me he is going to use it to sandwich some Paterson's shortbread fingers together. (I think that will be fairly horrible, but I suppose he might enjoy it). 

Also on the cake front we wet out on Saturday to try out a tea room new to us over on West Mainland, quite near the ferry terminal for Rousay. It' at the Fern Valley Wildlife Centre, which is fairly new on the Orkney scene. You can go to the tearoom without having to pay a small fortune to go and gawp at meerkats which is what we did. Here's what we had 

OH's chocolate cake on the left, and mine on the right was lemon, blueberry and white chocolate. We had lattes to drink and when the girl brought them over she asked us if 'we wanted any milk with those'. We did not laugh in her face, which was quite restrained of us we thought. As so often I would rather pay less and have a smaller slice, but it was a lovely cake. And the tearoom is nicely decorated in clam colours, has fantastic views over Eynhallow sound and the staff were very pleasant, even if they thought lattes needed extra milk! we would go again, which is always a good thing to be able to say. 

We will hardly know ourselves tomorrow as we are going out again - yes twice in four days!!!- to see the filmed version of Matthew Bourne's version of Romeo and Juliet. We don't know much about ballet but this is very highly recommended by People Who Do Know, as well as many friends, so we're looking forward to it. 

Reading Fiction Again!

I didn't give up reading fiction entirely for the duration of my studies but it would be true to say that of all my interests reading fiction was the one that suffered most from my lack of time to enjoy it, especially over the past couple of years, and especially when the situation was complicated by the problems I had with my vision. 

But now I can both see again and no longer need to feel guilt if I open a book that is unrelated to what I'm studying,  I'm venturing back into fiction. I did of course join the Saturday Slaughters crime fiction book club at the library, but there were only two meetings before the summer break and then I had to miss the first one of the new session as it was the day after graduation and a) I hadn't been able to get hold of the book and b)  our son was over from Toronto and you know it would have sounded a bit off to say 'lovely to have you here, but I'm off to listen to a bunch of people who are mainly still strangers to me discuss a book I haven't actually read'. Or is that just me? 

Anyway we went instead to Geri's Ice Cream Parlour 

where the OH had his usual chocolate mint concoction and Son No 1 had a peach based thing, and because it was almost the end of the season and Geri had no coconut ice cream in stock I couldn't have the Raspberry Ruffle, so I went for my default Hot Fudge instead. Although the marshmallows on that are generally only pink and white; I think the neon ones here are also a function of end of season-ness.

But I digress. 

I wasn't sure where to start with my first forays back into fiction, as I couldn't really work up any enthusiasm for trailing round the library looking for books from the poster - although I will return to that in due course. Meanwhile I thought a good place to start might be with historical fiction, which I used to love and so I decided to look at the books on the Long List for the Historia Fiction Prize. Helped by the  fact that I vaguely know the editor of the magazine.

Well, like all such lists when I went to the library half of the books they didn't have, and of the ones they did have most were out. I did however manage to get hold of four. Two hits, a miss and an undecided seems like quite a good result to me. 

Let's do the miss first (because that's always the most fun after all). Dark Water by Elizabeth Lowry. Should be right up my street since the central character is a psychiatrist in mid 19 century Boston and a large part of the book is taken up with his attempts to find better ways to treat psychiatric patients. However there is a central puzzle relating to one of the patients, a man the narrator encountered once before on an American Naval Vessel and who had been previously lauded as a hero for saving the officers and some of the crew set adrift in the South Atlantic alter a mutiny on board the ship on which he was serving at the time. If you haven't spotted the answer to the puxzzle before page 50 you must be reading the book while asleep, and it's written in such a slow and overwrought style that I totally lost patience with it. None of the characters are likeable and their interactions, while presumably meant to be deep and meaningful and coded in a 19 century way are actually just incomprehensible. The best thing about the book was its description of Nantucket Island and that took up about three pages. Feel free to read the book and disagree, I must be missing something since it did after all end up on a list of the twelve best historical novels of the year. 

The one I'm undecided about is Lancelot by Giles Kristian. I must be undecided as I am still reading it, rather than having returned it to the library. But really why do historical novels in general have to be so long - and correspondingly heavy?  The style here is much more straightforward and readable than Lowry's and the story, which begins with Lancelot and his family being harried from their small kingdom in France, is interesting enough. It also gives Lancelot and Guinevere a back story as they both spend a lot of their adolescence together on Mount St Michael before Guinevere is taken away to marry Arthur. It's not compulsive reading but it's not heavy going and the conversations and character relationships are much easier to grasp than the ones written in Lowry's faux elliptical and obfuscatory prose. 

The first hit was Once Upon A River by Diane Setterfield. This is the story of a mysterious child who is rescued from drowning somewhere along a rural stretch of the Thames near Oxford; of the three people who claim her as their own and of the stories they tell to justify their claims. Another 19th century setting, very well done, authentic but with the research very lightly placed. The prose is lyrical and beautiful but not pretentious or showy - a difficult trick it seems, from the number of people who fail to pull it off. Highly recommended. 

The other hit was Smoke and Ashes by Abir Mukherjee. As this was the third of a series and I chose to read the first two first I'll make the series to date the subject of a separate post in due course, just mentioning here that it's an excellent example of the historically set detective story. 

Chick-chick

In an attempt to work my way up to the huge Lego set I had for Christmas last year I've done another Lego head. Bought at the Lego shop in Glasgow when we were south recently. 

They are great fun to make, and I think I only went wrong twice with this one which is encouraging. Tomorrow I'm hoping to manage a longer post about recent reading; the good, the bad and the downright waste of time!

Yes, we really did

buy a lute.

And here's the picture to prove it.

I bought it when I was down in Yorkshire in September for a few days - it came from the Early Music Shop in Bradford. Officially it is our Christmas present to ourselves, but I daresay come Christmas there will be other presents on the pile. No matter ....

It arrived the week after I'd bought it and in less than three hours the OH had snapped a string trying to tune it. As the days went by the same string snapped several more times. This is not uncommon apparently with the top string on a lute. Well, so says the Interweb anyway. There was also a slightly rough patch on the bridge which the OH sanded gently but the string just kept on snapping. 

The Early Music Shop were very good and sent a free replacement and we also bought another one, but the problem persisted and so, when the OH went south recently, the lute went with him for the EMS' 'lute man' to have a look. He adjusted the peg slightly, gave the OH a handful of free gut strings and also a nylon one for 'if all else fails'. Happily whatever he did seems to have cured the snapping problem so now we can turn our attention to learning to play the thing.

I have had a go at holding it and came to the conclusion that for a woman with a full front playing a lute might line up with yoga and archery in the Not to be Recommended section of the paddock. But I do want to learn to play it so I will just have to find a comfortable position and get on with it. It has been rather monopolised by the OH since they came back but tomorrow I start seriously trying to learn. Wish me luck! 

Baking Subscription September

There is one more Felt post still to come but I thought I'd mix it up a little bit, mainly because I've yet to take the photo for it. I do however have a photo for the September baking subscription.

I know, they look a bit of a mess. Blueberry and cashew buns. I made them when son no. 1 was here, he read out the recipe for me. I like this, as it gives me company in the kitchen while I'm baking. They tasted delicious, although as so often, if I were doing them again  would leave out the cashew nuts. I assume they are there for texture but there was a crunchy top on the buns anyway so not really needed. 

No, April's box is still not done and nor is August's. I've sort of left August's as it is for custard cream biscuits and if I were asked to list the top ten things I didn't want to bake I suspect that custard cream biscuits would be on it, and quite high up. Although possibly home made custard creams are nicer than the bought variety. 

Felt (2)

I bought a couple of small Trim-It kits when we were down in Glasgow recently. They were to give away really, but I ended up making the toucan one myself. I have to say there was a lot glueing as well as stitching in this. I really liked it, which is why I bought it and I enjoyed making it, but the reason I got round to doing it so quickly was that I gave it to Son No 1 while he was here. He is taking his family on holiday to Costa Rica so I thought he could hang this on his Christmas tree and talk to his boys bout how they would be seeing toucans when they went . Hopefully they will also see sloths, but I don't think there is a Trim-It kit for that. 

Felt (1)

It's not quite project 60 all over again but I did something new a little while ago and that was make some felt. Voila!

I didn't do this on a whim, it was to work on something for a friend's Ph D project, of which more later. 

I was pleased with how it turned out but I don't expect to be doing a lot of it, because miles and miles of stocking or  garter stitch to get the knitted fabric you need to felt is quite boring. I'm sure it would be less tedious on a machine, but I don't have one. So, I'm glad I did it, probably won't do it again. And that is an echo of so much of Project 60, as it turned out!

Celebrations!

So just to round up the graduation day posts -

in the evening we went out to dinner at The Foveran. The Foveran is a highly thought of restaurant in Orkney, a special occasion sort of a place and every year I ask the OH to take me there for my birthday and every year he manages not to. There was no excuse though for not going there for my graduation. 

It was good. We took Gillian, my friend from south, and she bought bubbles

The food was nice although not outstanding and my dish of lamb ended up rather sweet as it was servedwith a redcurrant and red wine sauce, red cabbage and pumpkin. The OH had the steak and Gillan roast cod, and we all agreed that it was all very nicely cooked. 

For dessert Gillian and the OH had lemon meringue cheesecake 

and Son No1 and I ad profiteroles with orange Chantilly cream and chocolate sauce. And they were delicious

It was a lovely evening but to be honest the food was underwhelming, there wasn't even a starter that I would have liked to have and all in all I think the OH is now safe from being asked to take me to The Foveran for my birthday in future years. However we could perhaps give The Lynnfield a go ....

Graduation

It was a very lovely and important day but I'm aware that no-one but me is really interested in a blow by blow so here are a few pictures that capture the major moments.

Yay, it's finally official. I am a Dr. (I know - my tights were totally the wrong colour!)

The OH, Son No 1 and me. Yes I'm a midget. Remember I'm only 155 high in kermers!!

Me, the friend who came from Well Away to support me, and in the middle my Director of Studies. We all look disgustingly pleased with ourselves. 

Incidentally, the girl at Ede and Ravenscroft told me categorically that 'there was no hat for an Aberdeen Ph.D. In this she appears to have been incorrect, because when I moaned to the lady dishing up the gowns at college about there not being one she said, 'Hats? I've got hats! Do you want a hat?'Since I have been saying for six years that the only reason I ever did a Ph D in the first place was to have a day wandering about in a floppy hat I naturally said yes. That said this was a John Knox cap and not the lovely medieval velvet bonnets you get at English Universities. But it was, indubitably, a hat. 

Gown HIre

OK, we'll try again with the graduation, but split it over a few days.

I rang Ede and Ravenscroft to hire my gown. I think, or hope, I got the girl on work experience. Most times I asked a question the response was 'I'll have to check that with a senior colleague'. Then there was this exchange;

Her: What height are you?
Me: 5 foot 6.
Her: I need that in kermers.

It honestly took me a few moments to realise she meant centimetres!

And then when she took me through the order details to confirm she said

So that's height, X, date X, place X, Ph D gown from Aberdeen. So would that be Mrs or Miss?

And I said

That would be doctor

Damn and Blast

I just spent ages doing a post about graduation day, and when I went to add the final photo it disappeared without trace and Blogger offered me a blank page instead! I don't have time/can't face doing it all again and in any case we are just going out. 

'I'll just do my blog while I wait for Son No 1 to get up and get ready' I thought, which would have been a great plan. Had it worked.

I will redo it soon. Probably not today though.

How Lovely are These?

Flowers from a friend who has come to Orkney for my graduation on Friday We met up today for lunch and a catch up on our news and she presented me with this beautiful congratulatory bouquet of roses and lilies. 

I have taken two photos of these, and neither is satisfactory but for good measure here's my other attempt. 

Maybe I'll have another go tomorrow. Meanwhile my graduation dress has arrived, I bought new (heeled) shoes while I was away, today my hair was turned a beautiful copper beech colour, I have bought some new ear-rings which I am hoping will arrive tomorrow, possibly while I am out having my fingernails given a copper shine. With all the fuss anyone would think it was like a wedding day ...! And maybe it is, just a bit. 

G is for Gift

In the days when I was fundraising for a stone to be laid in memory of George Campbell Hay I was greatly helped by George's friend and sometime publisher, a man called Gordon. I said several times in that year that 'words could never express how grateful I was' to Gordon for his help with that project. And in addition he gave very freely of his time to talk to me about George as he knew him for my thesis. 

Now that the stone and the Ph D are all over and done, it seemed to me that I should mark Gordon's help with a special gift. And so I commissioned this lovely thing from a local botanical artist. (I think the blog does record our trip to her exhibition in Kirkwall quite some time ago now, which is where the idea was born)

Because G may be for gift, but it is also for George and Gordon, and generosity and gratitude, and for gean, the bird cherry illustrated in the picture and which George wrote about often in his poetry. 

Once I had seen it, it  was quite hard to give away to be honest. But I managed.

Look What Postie Brought

while I was away.

Do you know it wasn't nearly as exciting holding it in my hands as I thought it would be? Maybe it's too soon after the event. And I certainly didn't sit down and read it once I got home on Saturday night. In fact I do wonder if I will ever read it again. 

Never mind. It looks quite smart and is proof that I haven't wasted the last six years doing nothing I suppose. Graduation is on Friday and as Son No 1 is coming all the way from Toronto for it, I very much hope I will be feeling some excitement then! 

Why do People Do This?

I was going to title this piece 'No-one likes a smarta*se', but I couldn't quite bring myself to put such a rude word in a blog entry title.

So anyway last Thursday the OH and I went out. This has been a Rare Thing for the past few years, what with my eyes and the thesis and a general disinclination on my part to stir out of the house to mix with people. It was a bit of a last minute decision too. The place where I did my Ph D, the Institute of Northern Studies, holds a series of seminars over the autumn/winter months about various aspects of Nordic and Scottish culture and language, getting in experts from wherever to come and talk. Last week it was a Professor of Music from the Scottish Conservatoire talking about the language of Burns and its interaction with musical settings of his poems. OK it wouldn't float everybody's boat but it popped up on my Facebook feed, we thought it sounded interesting and we went. Incidentally if you don't know already, for the purpose of this blog post you need to know that the Scottish Conservatoire is in Glasgow. 

There weren't many people there when we arrived so there were attempts at conversation which kept away from the 'is this all there is likely to be coming?' and in an effort to keep the conversational ball rolling I asked the speaker if he had come all the way from Glasgow 'just for this'. To which he replied he had had come 'actually all the way from X which is Y miles SW of Edinburgh'.

Now that may be factually correct, but it wasn't the point of the question and he must have known that. The question was whether he had come all the way from the Central Belt to do the talk, and I said Glasgow because that's where he works and could have had no knowledge of where he actually lives. So why he answered in the way he did I have no notion. All it did was make me feel (and presumably  look) stupid, and put my back up. I listened to what he said in his talk and it was very interesting, but I took no further part in the discussions or the Q & A. Even though the discussion strayed to Hugh MacDiarmid and I had something relevant to say I thought why bother? he'll just say something else that will make me feel about five years old, and really I don't need that sort of lordly and public dismissal at my stage of life. 

It won't put me off further INS seminars, but it did put me off going to hear him again!

I am about to travel south tomorrow for ten days so the blog will once again become temporarily  inert, but hopefully lots to blog about when I get back! 

Free at last, free at last!

I think that, apart from the fun bit of dressing up and graduating at the end of the month, I am done with the Ph D. 

I have thought this before. First when I submitted the finished version, but then it was 'prepare for the viva'. Then again, after the viva,, but then I had to see to the minor corrections. Then again when the corrections were signed off, but then there was admin stuff.

Over the last couple of days I have been dealing with the problem of getting an actual physical bound copy (harder than you might think when you live where I do and nobody local does anything but spiral binding which does not cut the mustard) and fiddling with a lot of forms that have to go with the bound copy to the library at Aberdeen University. I've probably been stressing about it all far too much, but you do have to get these little details right.

But the files have gone off to the printers, and they get to do all the rest. So there you go.

I. Am. Done.

A Dash to Devon

The OH's mother died on 10th August. It wasn't unexpected as she had been fading for some time; hence our previous uncharacteristic trips to Devon earlier in the year. Her funeral was on Tuesday and obviously we drove south to go to it. 

We picked up Son no 2 in Glasgow where we broke our journey on Saturday night and drove the rest of the way to Exeter on Sunday. It was a remarkably easy drive, enlivened by listening to Ben Stokes almost singlehandedly win the third test match at Headingley. Well done, that man. I'm not a betting woman but I could have wished that I'd found a bookie to put a fiver on an England win. 

We had a free day on Monday and I had arranged to meet good friends from University days, who had a GP practice near Exeter and still live there. It was a very long time since I had seen them and we had a lovely lunch and a very relaxed afternoon; the weather was warm and sunny and we spent time sitting out in their beautiful garden and reminiscing and generally comparing notes on the intervening years and agreeing that you bite your tongue hard when you become a parent-in-law and even harder when you become a grandparent. 

Most of Tuesday was taken up with the funeral; and I can say nothing about it except that it went without incident. It was a melancholy occasion but when are these things not? Lovely reception afterwards in the Exeter Golf and Country Club, and it was good to spend time with the OH's cousins, who we never see except at family funerals. The flowers, pictured above, were going to be taken back to the florists and broken up into smaller arrangements for the care home where my mother-in-law spent her last months; a much better idea than leaving them on display at the Crematorium until they rotted. 

Our trip back was sadly much less smooth than the trip south; a really bad accident closed one of the major roads we should have been on which added over an hour to the journey, and traffic was bad in other places too. That said we made it safely back to Glasgow on Wednesday evening, and back to Orkney on Thursday night. We almost didn't as the OH realised on Thursday morning that he had booked the ferry for the following day, but luckily, the tourist season being almost over he was able to switch the booking without a problem. 

He collected the cats from the cattery yesterday morning and they are duly disgusted with us for abandoning them and, it seems, for causing the rain to fall non-stop ever since. They re mostly sleeping, but when awake, very vocal in their dissatisfaction with the weather. Protestations that we are a) not responsible and b) don't like it either are apparently falling on very deaf cat ears!

Meet Sherbert!

Sherbert is the latest recruit to the serried ranks of bears who live here. Bears and wool have this in common here, that the cry of 'No More' is frequently heard in the house in relation to them but you know, sometimes you just have to Give In. 

Sherbert comes from the very lovely people at  Skate Ruffle Alpacas. We thoroughly enjoyed two visit there last year; sadly they have not been open to visitors this summer but we live in hope of going again next year. Meanwhile I follow them on Facebook and a few days ago they posted a picture of this bear who was off to a local shop to find  a new home.

I looked at it and fell in love, then I showed it to the OH, who is the official bear collector of the family, and he fell in love and the next day we went to the shop to buy her. Sadly she had not yet arrived, or if she had arrived she had yet to be unpacked, they were a bit vague to be honest, but we reserved her and  yesterday we were finally able to pick her up and bring her home. Where to her great joy she discovered that one of her brothers was already here ....

 

Gaskell Society Conference 2019 (2) - Trip 1

Oh yes, two posts in one day! But the sock one was short. 

There are always two trips arranged for the conference; one on Saturday and one on Sunday, and one of them always includes a cream tea, which is a nice touch I think. This year the trips were to Oakwell Hall and the Millennium Gallery in Sheffield. 

I did Oakwell Hall first. It once belonged to some friends of Charlotte Bronte and she visited there several times and used it as the basis for Fieldhead House in Shirley. Shirley is almost CB's most tedious novel (imo, of course, other opinions are available, and given my deep loathing of CB I may be just slightly biased against all her works, not just Shirley). Anyway Oakwell is now in the care of the local authority and a very good job they make of it. It is open to the public and furnished as a Jacobean Manor house, that being the period in which it was built. The gardens are nice and include a very random statue of a sheep. 

Huge Jacobean Fireplace

Yep, a textile. I always take pictures of the textiles.

Exterior with excellent view of Jacobean window

Some of the garden

A carelessly dropped lute. I had to take a photo of this as the OH and I are toying with the idea of buying a lute between us as our Christmas present to each other this year. 

A view from the garden into the Spen valley

                                          No I wasn't kidding about the random sheep statue. 

The person nominally in charge of us on this afternoon kept stressing what an excellent gift shop the place had, and indeed it did. I could have spent an awful lot of money in it, but didn't. I did spend a little bit though. 

After Oakwell we moved on to the Beehive Honeypot for our tea. This was one of a whole set of restored buildings which had their own leaflet and it did all look lovely on a sunny afternoon and the tea and scones were great, but when all was said and done it was  a glorified retail opportunity with a garden centre at its heart. However it gave me a couple of nice pictures. 

And that was trip number one.