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.