Prague (1)

 It will take me several days to cover my trip to Prague, but here's a start. 

I flew out on Ryanair from Edinburgh with a friend. The flight was delayed, but I couldn't fault it otherwise and the friend had booked a car to collect us and I had booked the hotel. The car was there waiting which was good and he more or less found the hotel OK. Well he missed the turn twice , but hey! he got us there in the end. 

The hotel was in some ways a disappointment although this was not immediately obvious.  I have yet to book into another hotel which expected you to pay upon arrival. Before you arrive, yes. When you leave, yes. When you arrive and want to check in and have a shower - not so much. 

Anyway we checked in and got shown to our rooms. Mine was in the eaves which meant it had charm by the bucket load and life threatening low beams. As in 

The other end of the room looked like this

There was an en-suite as well but I didn't take a photo of that. 

Downstairs there was a nice seating area, with lovely hydrangeas in glass vases on the tables. 

Also on the tables were drinks menus and I offered to buy my friend and me a cocktail. Sadly there was no way a cocktail was to be had because the cocktail mixer wasn't in the building. Judging by some of the things that happened later I suspect that the cocktail mixer was a myth ad the menus had been bought as decor. Because there wasn't a bar in the hotel, so it's difficult to see where he could have plied his trade. We didn't know that at the time, we were just a bit disappointed that we were in need of a good stiff and cool drink and couldn't get one. 

We wandered out to search for somewhere to eat and found a nice place fairly close. (That's a pattern in Prague; as long as you have some money you will never starve). I didn't take a photo of the food that evening either but we did manage to order wine for my friend, and an elderberry lemonade for me. It was very welcome. 

I'm Back, and I'm tired

 but here's a photo of Prague to be going on with

more to come.

I Know - AWOL

That's  because I've been busy doing nothing very blogworthy. Manly knitting a t-shirt shaped top which I was desperate to get finished for my trip to Prague. Since a lot of it was just boring in the round stocking stitch it was a case of 'just keep grinding it out' and the non-boring features had my heart in my mouth a lot of the time. More on that later, but it wasn't blogworthy as a process.

Meanwhile this week I've been feeling like Eva Peron in that song Rainbow High, as I've been getting titivated for Prague. I now look a hundred times more presentable than I did on Monday. I've had my hair cut and coloured, my nails done and today I had an eyelash tint. I haven't had that last one done for years as it tends just to be a pre-holiday thing and I suddenly wondered when I turned up today if the girl would say she didn't want to do it because of my not so lovely and very near the eye scar, but she said it was fine. 

I was very excited about the nails as they are specially themed for Prague, which is the where the 3rd World Congress of Scottish Literature is being held next week. Voila

Appropriate and fun I thought. I haven't put these up on Facebook yet as some FB friends will be in Prague and I want to surprise them.

I am massively massively stressed about the trip, despite now being able to see properly and going somewhere I have long wanted to visit. I think after the lockdowns just going anywhere is a bit overwhelming and not quite the joy it was. But I daresay I'l get used to it again and I'm sure Prague itself will more than live up to my expectations. 

Not Quite Such Scrappy Socks

 

Someone gave me this self patterning wool recently and it probably wasn't quite enough to do a whole pair of socks, so I teamed it with some left over red West Yorkshire Spinners Signature sock wool for cuffs, heels and toes and produced these for the OH. He loves them and I have to say, given that they were basically concocted from left overs, I'm very pleased with them too. 

I Did A Jigsaw!

 I know, I used to do them all the time. But after Christmas I was really struggling; I tried with three different puzzles and finally came to the reluctant conclusion that my sight was such that I just couldn't manage them any more. 

But this week I did one; from start to finish. Hooray! It was this one

It was not nearly as much fun to do as I anticipated; possibly because the colours were a bit dull, possibly because half the books on there I had never heard of, possibly because the pieces didn't fit together as smoothly as they do with a Ravensburger or a Schmitt puzzle. 

But the great thing was that I managed to finish it. which was such a joyous thing. The puzzle itself is now destined for the library; what could be a more suitable library puzzle than one which features 40 classic book covers?

Books to Read Poster No 38

 

Well, no prizes for looking at the picture and then guessing that this was The Lord of the Rings. I've been ploughing through this on Audible for several months. I had of course read it before, but only in the one volume edited edition, whereas this was the original full monty. So there was extra stuff. 

Some of the extra stuff was interesting but most of it wasn't. I don't think anyone who reads only the 'edited' edition is missing anything very much, unless they really really wat to know piles more about the Barrow Wights and listen to even more tedious songs from Tom Bombadil. Although the extended version of the scouring of the shire after the hobbits return home, something which Peter Jackson excised completely from his film version - perhaps he didn't have the time or space for it (insert knowing hysterical laughter at this point) -, was good and added some weight and extra detail thata the edited version suffered from not including. 

I did however have two huge problems with the book, which I have looked back  on with fond memories until now.  The first was the narrative style, which is pretentious, tedious and probably many other pejorative adjectives ending in -ous. The world building is detailed and through and the story itself, although there are certain structural weaknesses, is excellent. But the way the story is told is now for me a total and utter turn off. 

The second problem is Frodo. I've always found him an arrogant,  self absorbed, self pitying and entitled annoyance and this reading of the book just strengthened my feelings in that regard. Congratulations to the reader though for a magnificent effort, including singing all the songs. I rejected the new Andy Serkis version, since I do not warm to Andy Serkis, in favour of an older one by someone called Brian Inglis. He was very good. 

Sadly though, this was a miss. 

A New Walk

 There are only a limited number of walks on Orkney, all of which appear and re-appear, with the occasional tweak in all the Walking on Orkney books. We're even more limited because even before I took my recent spectacular and painful fall, I had a hearty dislike of struggling over uneven terrain, especially clumpy grass which more often than not hides a layer of stones from a fallen down house. So we tend to do the same old ones over and over. But last week we did a new one.

For  a couple of months one of the options in the Tesco 'support a local charity with your blue token vote' boxes was a group trying to improve the facilities for the walk around St Mary's Loch, which is just outside he village of St Mary which confusingly is more often referred to as Holm village and which, just to put the icing on the cake, is pronounced Ham. Coming home from town recently I saw new lengths of board walk and a new bird hide there so obviously the money had been put to good use and so last week we went over there to try it out. 

It was mostly lovely. We've never waked around St Mary's loch before because really it was just a wet mess with no proper path , but things are much improved. We visited the new bird hide which would have been better had the windows had glass in them rather than being an empty void, open, once you had raised the shutters to let in light, to the wind, but it was clean and new and had a bird book and a white board for writing sightings on. Which appeared mostly to have been bees in the preceding three days. which isn't quite the point, but you know, whatever,..

We carried on past the hide and came across a picnic table and then some recently planted woodland and it was all tickety boo and we were thinking what a great place it would be to bring the grandchildren when they visit later this year and then the path petered out, the ground started to tilt at 45 degrees across where it had been and the lovely walk became a bit of a nightmare. The OH , lovely though he is, is never a help in these situations as he doesn't understand my lack of confidence, but then he's never broken one ankle let alone two. I managed to shuffle back to the road , and it was a bit of a shuffle!, and decided it would still be a lovely place to bring the boys but I would turn back the way we'd come after we'd had tea and biscuits on the picnic table while the others marched on round to complete the circuit. 

I didn't have my camera with me but the OH had his phone and so we have some photos. I can't imagine why I didn't have mine with me now that I can see well enough to take photographs again, but anyway I pointed out a few views that I 'would have taken' and he duly took them for me.