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. 

More Socks

Another ball of wool from the Devon/Glasgow haul in May bites the dust, or at least gets knitted up as socks for the OH. Not keen on them myself, but hey! I just knitted them, I don't have to wear them. And of course he loves them, which is all that matters. 

The Flower Festival - watch out for the rant!

So today we went to the Flower Festival as planned. I thought that there weren't quite as many arrangements this year as there have been in the past, but as the theme this year was celebrating the flower arranging club's 60th year maybe a few of the members have become inactive in one way or another recently. 

So generally there were all the themes you'd expect for celebrating and a few outliers. Here's part of the one for a new home

Nice I thought

There was a wedding one and a retirement one and one for passing your driving test and, rather unusually I thought for a flower festival in a Church of Scotland church, one celebrating Gay Pride. Here it is

I am quite proud of the fact that it was there, as I can think of churches where to say it wouldn't be welcome would be to put it mildly.

There was a wedding one which I didn't take a photograph of but which had to my mind an unusual feature. It was based on the flower arrangers own wedding back in 1968. Included in the display were the hats worn to the ceremony by the mothers of the bride and groom. Now is it me? or who does keep a hat for 51 years? 

This was one dedicated to the Venice Carnival. It reminded me that, because of the OH's general reluctance ever to cross the border into Italy again after our first visit in 1980, we have never been to the Venice Carnival, even though our elder son has. And I'd quite like to go. Mind you I can't lay that all at the feet of the OH. He's quite happy to go to Spain but we've never made it to Seville for Semana Santa and we'd both like to do that. I wasn't quite sure how the Venice Carnival really fitted the theme but the arrangement was fun

Now I'm going to rant. This is the one for a new baby.

See the blue side, all big and strong and eye catchingly tall? And the pink bit sheltering beside it on a lower level and much less noticeable. I don't even need to rant do I? In any case, why do blue and pink at all? Just do lemon or apricot or green, none of which would cause people to be cross about the gender stereotyping implicit in the arrangement. 

Bur because I do not wish to end on a sour note here's a photo of our favourite this year

Guy Fawkes. I should have taken the photo straight on, but what can I tell you? There was a cruise liner in town today (there again, what day in summer is there not?) and the Cathedral was packed. So it was tricky to take photos. This does not do the Guy Fawkes arrangement much justice, but you can see the guy, the flames and a couple of the fireworks. 

And flower festival wise, that's it for another year. It's fun and one of the few things here I make a particular point of going to each time and I always enjoy it. So that's something to celebrate, isn't it? 

Sixes and Sevens

Yes, sixes and sevens is where we're at just now. The OH's mother died at the weekend and we're currently in that dreadful limbo where there's a lot to be done, but most of it can't be started without a piece of paper. For now the needful piece of paper is the Death Certificate, but the OH has also to go and get his identity certified by our  solicitors here to send off to his mother's solicitors down there, before they can officially talk to him. This is a piece of utter bureaucratic nonsense, since it's not five minutes (in legal time so to speak) since  he had to do the identity thing with them for the Power of Attorney applications, and I cannot believe they really need to go through the whole rigmarole again. 

On the bright side the solicitor here can do that tomorrow, and we were planning to go into town tomorrow anyway because - ta-dah! it's the opening day of the St Magnus Flower Festival, and as long term readers know, we always go to that.  Don't usually get to it on opening day though. 

As for me I am still ploughing through the post viva corrections, which seem to be taking almost as long as writing the thing in the first place. Although I know they're not. And light can be (very) dimly discerned at the end of the tunnel. Hooray!

Buns!

 I have a friend coming round for coffee and a chat this afternoon. That's the second time I've 'entertained' this week, as I make the effort to pick up the threads of my social life, even while I plough my way through the requested corrections.

In honour of her coming I made these

I hope she likes cinnamon buns! Although no hardship for the OH and I to work our way through them if she doesn't. Bit detrimental to the waistline though. 

Gaskell Society Conference 2019 (1)

I'm never quite sure how the GS Conference will go. Sometimes its just a huge pleasure from beginning to end; sometimes, more usually in fact, it's a bit of a mixed bag.

Part of the problem with organising something like this is finding a venue with enough space for the delegates to stay, which also has public rooms for talks,  coffee breaks and dining,  at a reasonable price and accessible by public transport as well as by car. I gather from various committee members that this was perhaps their greatest headache of all this time around. They had wanted to go to Wales, so that the Conference could be built around the novel Ruth, but there was nothing available that didn't charge sky high pries. They next considered the Peak District but there was nothing large enough. So we ended up in South Yorkshire, between Sheffield and Barnsley, at the Tankersley Manor Hotel. 

Quite often in the past I have found that either the accommodation for the Conference was good but the food was not, or vice versa, but the TMH managed both. True, the rooms were a bit tired when you looked closely but they were a good size, the beds were extremely comfortable and there was plenty of hot water whatever the time of day. The food was beautiful and varied and served to our large group on time every time. In fact the whole thing worked like clockwork. (except for breakfast on Day 1 for me. I took advantage of the fact that for  small service charge I could have breakfast in my room and it didn't arrive on the first day without a prompt. But the next two days it arrived on time, and for me this service is worth every penny as I find it stressful to have breakfast in the company of people who are just a step up from strangers.) So almost full marks to the TM; the only slight fly in the ointment was that the reception staff tended to the offhand; they weren't rude or unpleasant, just generally not interested in the guests.

It being the 200th anniversary of Peterloo (and hotels in North Wales being too expensive) the novel the conference was based on was Mary Barton. Not a favourite with me, but the talks we had were generally very interesting; there was one on Peterloo itself, one on working class political activity,   and another on workers living conditions, in the Manchester of the time, and one on Methodism in the novels. Plus a round up of Peak District literary connections. Since off my own bat I could only come up with Pemberley from 'Pride and Prejudice' for that subject it was nice to discover they were a bit more widespread than that. We had a literary quiz after dinner on  Saturday which was  great fun - apart from the Picture Round which was impossible. 

I met some old acquaintances and made some new ones and all in all it was very enjoyable and I shall definitely go again in 2021. And there were two trips out, of which more anon. With pictures.