A Couple of Days in London

 and this is the only picture I have  from then

The garden at the V & A. 

We've wanted to visit the V and A for ages, and in fact have made two previous attempts; on both those occasions it was closed. This time the museum was open but several of the galleries  we might have liked to see were closed. So no textiles, then. 

We did look at mosaics, some C19 stuff and the jewellery gallery. The items were overwhelming but the museum as a whole was underwhelming, which seems counter intuitive, but basically there were too many things to look at but not enough of the sort of thing I wanted to see. However the garden was lovely and the coffee and breakfast pain au raisin were acceptable especially as the sun was shining. 

The next day the sun was not shining and we had decided to got to the revamped National Portrait Gallery. This was almost as crowded as the Musee d'Orsay was earlier in the year, and not so well signposted. The signage for Sir Walter Scott and the person whose portrait was next to him were the wrong way round so if you wanted to know what WS looked like and relied on the NPG you wouldn't know. Also the tube was riddled with problems that day, which meant packed trains, packed or closed  stations, long waits and longer than anticipated walks in the rain. None of this did anything for my mood. 

When we'd thought about it before we went away two days in London at the end of the Finnish trip sounded like an excellent idea, since otherwise it's a place we never get to,.  In the event it was a bad, and expensive,  one. But we've learned, and we won't do it again. 

Finland Day 4

 

OK the pictures are in backwards again ... why does it do that? And why only some of the time? Sigh!

Here's the day in the right order, and you can play match the photo to the paragraph.

It was our last full day and I remembered to take  a picture of the table case. Scandinavians seem to have a talent for small lovely things, usually related to nature, and these table vases at breakfast were a prime example. 

Ir was an earlier than usual coach time in the afternoon so we had decided to spend a relaxing morning on the terrace outside the dining room with our books. Unfortunately another member of our group had decided to descend upon an unsuspecting family of Swedes and proclaim her wonderfulness in all walks of life at what sounded like the top of her voice for the whole morning. Defeated we took our books back to our room and went for a walk in the surrounding countryside. 

There were funghi, there was a lake and there was an interesting piece of fallen bark. I swear I did not pose that picture. It looks like I put a small log on a piece of bark that resembles an old book, but that is exactly how I came across it, all I did was get out the phone and take the photo. The hotel grounds also contain some left over trenches from the Winter War. 

One of the reasons the coach was early was because several of the group weren't fit enough to walk into Kerimaki but still wanted to see the biggest wooden church in Europe/The World, so we stopped there for half an hour on our way to the opera.  This gave the OH and me time to go and sample the cake in the lovely cafe opposite the church; when we'd walked into the town ourselves we hadn't been hungry enough to have a cake, being still stuffed from breakfast and anticipating lunch. 

The opera was The Magic Flute. Regular readers will know this is not one of my favourites, but I liked this production from several points of view, not least that the Queen of the Night was more sympathetic than usual and Pamina was shown as being more conflicted in the choice between her parents.

 [And actually, if it came to it, which would you choose; a parent who was worried enough to send a handsome young prince to rescue you from imprisonment, or the one who kidnapped you in the first place and knowingly put you into the hands of a sadistic pervert? I mean, is it even a choice? Well Mozart thought so, and then made her make the wrong one, but you know, her dad had had the pervert flogged within an inch of his life (and that's such a recommendation!) so perhaps it is a happy ending after all.] 

The dragon was splendid, and actually breathed real fire, which is more than Elfin Safety would put up with in Britain I suspect. There were lots of small children playing the woodland animals and they were all totally charming, especially the little boy who played the hedgehog. 

The set was minimal but effective, and the opera was sung in Finnish (and oh how that annoyed most of the rest of our group. The very idea. Sung in Finnish, in Finland with a Finish cast. How dare they. Given that it was originally written in German I can only assume from the fuss they made they were all fluent German speakers and were lamenting the loss of opportunity to follow the performance in that language. Ha! Anyway there were English subtitles if you wanted them. 

It would have been a totally joyous evening had it not been for the behaviour (previously mentioned) of a fellow traveller who harangued the Finnish lady behind her in the interval for 'constantly rustling sweet papers'. and 'thoughtlessly ruining her enjoyment of the evening'. Since we were next to the irate Englishwoman and had heard nothing it can't have been that loud; not, as it transpired, could it have been constant. When I spoke to the lady concerned afterwards she explained she had been releasing medication from a packet, tablets she had to take to a very strict timetable, and so had had to take it out during the performance. The haranguer spent a lot of the next day loudly proclaiming that 'it had been the worst performance of The Magic Flute she had ever seen, which led me to wonder if she had actually ever seen it before at all. I've never seen a performance of the Flute which gave Ingmar Bergman's magical film of the opera such a close run for its money. My word, she was toxic. I never heard her say a single positive thing about anything all the time we were there. I realise this probably means she's a very unhappy person, but even that reflection leaves me cold and without sympathy. Because you can be unhappy but courteous at the same time. 

So that was a bit of a blot but otherwise it was wonderful. Our experience of the Opera Festival was very positive and we are hoping to go back next year but under our own steam. Apart from anything else I want another crack at the raspberry and liquorice ice cream. 

The Flower Festival

 Regular readers will be aware that we usually go to the annual flower festival organised by the Kirkwall Flower Arrangers and  held in the Cathedral every August. That said we somehow missed it last year, but I didn't want to do that again. When I looked it up last Friday I discovered it was this week. Eek! Lucky timing! 

We went today which was the first day of opening. It's good to go in the early days; the displays are there until after the service on Sunday morning but honestly if you wait util Saturday then they are looking very much past their best. There is no official entry fee but  I would have gladly chucked a donation into the relevant receptacle had  the people on duty at the table not all been far too busy chatting amongst themselves to acknowledge us, or give us the little handout describing the exhibits.  

I have to say our enjoyment was somewhat marred by the Cathedral being rammed, not only with people wanting to see the flowers but a boat load of cruise ship passengers who wanted to see the Cathedral. Cruise ships are a mixed blessing at the best of times, but when you actually want to go into your local town and do something specific there is no part of them that is a blessing, mixed or otherwise, they are a curse. 

So maybe my mood coloured my perception of the displays or maybe they really weren't as good as they have been in the past. It certainly didn't take us very long to get round them. The theme this year was annual celebrations, which is very reminiscent of one they have had before,  and I took a few photos, but not nearly as many as I have in the past. 

Still FWIW 

Bonfire Night

I can't remember which display these were from but I took a picture of them because, having leaned over them to look more closely at the colour, I discovered they were made of paper. Yes , Paper Roses. You can thank me for the ear-worm in the comments! 

This one is the sailing regattas that several parishes hold each year. I was impressed with the way the flowers were placed to represent sails. 

And this was our favourite, although it references Shetland rather than Orkney and is Up Helly Aa. Loved the boat, the axe, and just everything else about it. 

Wonder if we'll bother going again next year? I'm tempted to say yes, but we'll go on a day when there isn't  a cruise ship in. even while I know the concept of a day in August without at least one cruise ship in Orkney is just alien these days. 

No, it really isn't the yarn fumes.

You sometimes hear knitters say 'The yarn fumes went to my head'. It's a stupid sentence designed to explain or excuse the fact that they have yet again bought more yarn that they don't need but was just too appealing for them to resist. It's often heard in the aftermath of yarn shows. It's not true, it's just one of those daft knitter sayings like 'Sock yarn doesn't count towards stash' and 'Blankets don't count as works in progress'. Well,  yes it does and yes they do, and it would be a lot better for us all if we were honest, stopped making stupid excuses and said 'I am a weak willed person and I couldn't say no to buying this yarn, or casting on this blanket even though I already have a gazillion skeins of hand dyed sock yarn in my cupboards and have already cast on seven ever so slightly different blankets that I don't have time to finish.' When it comes to  knitters, 'ooh look, a shiny thing' might be the motto for many.

I note this is not all knitters. Some knitters buy wool for a project, they cast it on, they finish it, and they then buy wool for the next ting that they want to knit having thought long and deeply about what that might be and researched appropriate patterns before coming to a logical and well thought out decision. I envy and admire  those knitters. I aspire to be one of them. Not made it quite yet though. 

I have never actually used the yarn fume excuse, and I don't think I've ever said that blankets don't count as works in progress either, but I have ben guilty of uttering the sock yarn doesn't count lie, although I haven't for quite  a long time. Like I say I have aspirations towards being a more honest and more organised knitter. 

With this all in mind I had absolutely no intention of buying any wool in Finland. I may have looked to see if there were any yarn shops in Savonlinna before we went but there weren't, which was fine by me and I wasn't going to go looking. In a way then, it's a pity  that the wonderful design shop /tourist trap we sought out looking for a present for a friend's baby had a whole section at the back dedicated to wool. 

Now here's the thing. A long time ago, in the days before I checked my tension I made a sweater for the OH in North Ronaldsay wool. It had a lot of textured stitches on it, it was gansey inspired and he chose the pattern and he chose the wool and I made it and then he couldn't really wear it much because it was far too big, Since those days I have learned how important it is to check tension if you want jumpers to fit and so nowadays I do. And he's been making noises for a while about me perhaps reknitting the sweater and I said I would but not in North Ronaldsay yarn because I find it itchy to knit with, let alone wear, and the colours are not very enticing and it isn't cheap. So it struck me that when we saw this wool in the shop in Savonlinna and he went into raptures over some of the colours that perhaps this would be my opportunity to buy some wool to reknit his jumper. I did lots of calculations  on bits of paper the first evening we had been in the shop and went back the next day armed with details of how much I would need. 

And that was when I hit a problem because North Ronaldsay yarn is aran weight and aran weight  appears to be something that Finish knitters know not of. But the OH was looking at the wool like a lost puppy and saying what a shame it was that the beautiful sweater kits were so very expensive ( spoiler - I didn't buy an expensive sweater kit) and these colours were all gorgeous and somehow I found myself saying 'well if you don't have the wool for my pattern, have you got a pattern for your wool'. And of course they had loads, and of course the OH fell in love with one, and we picked colours and bought the wool and he was all excited about getting home and having me cast on, and in all the excitement neither of us thought until we'd got the stuff back to the hotel about what language the pattern would be in, because if it wasn't the yarn fumes that turned us daft, we had fallen victim to that awful anglo-centric way of looking at the world that annoys me so much in other people who expect everythign to be in English, and of course it turned out that the pattern was in Finnish. 

Well of course it was. It was a pattern being sold in  a Finnish wool shop designed with a particular brand of Finnish wool in mind, and what other language was it going to be in for goodness sake? Photographic proof. 

 In the circs. it's unfortunate that Finnish is one of the northern languages that I don't have even a smattering of, it being so difficult to learn and all. However help was at hand in the shape of a multi-lingual glossary of knitting terms on the Drops yarn website, which includes Finnish (hooray!). It wasn't all that easy, even with that and decades of knitting experience but I manged to translate the instructions to a certain point. At which I swapped the translating for casting on. 

This is a photo of what we hope the sweater will turn out like

and this is my progress so far. 

Amazingly it looks quite good.And still a fair bit of soothing forest green round and round to do before I need to start trying to work out what comes next. 

Finland Day Three

Oh this was a good one! However, since I've just spent ages uploading  the photographs and my laptop has decided to post them here in reverse order, you're going to get the day backwards. I haven't learned how to reorder them, without deleting them all and uploading them all over again. And I had enough trouble getting them off my phone and on to the laptop in the first place. 

So the evening's performance was The Barber of Seville. It's not a favourite of ours to begin with and the Figaro in this blended into the background too much. He should be the prime mover of all the action, you shouldn't be able to take your eyes off him while he's on stage - and this one was all too overlook-able. I have many pictures of the curtain calls but most of them are out of focus, I picked this one since it shows the conductor and the orchestra as well as the main singers. I think I've already said that the orchestra was excellent all three evenings we were there. 

This is the castle of Olavinlinna where the festival is held; an amazing place to stage opera. 

This is one of those up and down fountains, I seem to have caught it in a 'down' phase. 

And this is part of the audience making its way to the pontoon bridge to access the castle. 

A couple of views of the town of Savonlinna where the OH and I spent the afternoon. Most of the group had gone back to the hotel but we wanted to do some walking around by he lake, have a proper look at the craft market, and revisit the shop where we had found the nice Finnish yarn the previous day. So we arranged to stay behind after the morning's steam boat cruise and reconnect with them after the performance.  

One of the things we wanted to do was have an ice cream. The tub with the Finnish version of M and Ms is the OHs. The cone is mine. I think the bottom scoop is vanilla. I know the top scoop is raspberry and licorice because I was desperate to try it as soon as I saw it on the menu, and I am here to tell you it was absolutely one of the best flavours of ice cream ever. 

And then three pictures form the steamboat cruise itself. The view of the castle from the lake shows the 'tenting' that they put over the courtyard where the opera is performed; it's a fairly recent innovation and keeps the punters dry. 

I know I was very upfront about the group in a previous post but some of them were likeable. We shared a table with a very pleasant couple on the cruise and she offered to take a photo of us. Naturally we reciprocated. 

and here's a candidate for possibly the worst ever photo of a Lake Saimaa steamboat. I had to snap it as we were going aboard as we (the group) had arrived a trifle late and the skipper was not amused. I've also had to crop it to take out various random people and even more random limbs.  But you know, you can see it was a boat. 

We left to go into town as soon as we got off so we did not see the accident which befell one of our group just after she disembarked.  She was apparently watching a small child instead of her feet, possibly to make a remark about its behaviour, and fell or tripped over something on the jetty. Maybe  that rope that you can see in the photo. I'm not saying that falling over isn't horrible, because it is as I know from unfortunate personal experience, and it does leave you very shaken and she was a lone traveller so that makes it worse. Even allowing for all that I felt she did play it up a bit for the next couple of days, and quite honestly if they take you to the hospital, which they did, have you seen by doctors who check you over and give you painkillers and instructions on how to take them, which they did, and you then take only half the prescribed dose of painkiller because 'you don't know what it is' then perhaps you should expect to continue in pain for a few days.  Goodness knows, I'm always very reluctant to take painkillers and it's rare I self medicate with paracetamol, but when the doctors  tell me to take stuff and give me directions about how many and how often, even I fall into line. 

But let's not end on a negative. We had a lovely day; the cruise was breezy but not too chill, the sun shone all day, the craft and food market was really interesting, the ice cream was very very good, the shopping was enjoyable and the opera too. Almost perfect. 

Happy Birthday to Me

 

It was Friday, not today.  There was no home made cake from the OH this year, not sure how that didn't happen, as he usually does do me one, but we treated ourselves to some mango and passionfruit fondant fancies from Betty's. And given their price structure 'treated' is right. On the upside, given the vagaries of the post just now and their anticipated delivery date as per their e-mail, they did in fact defy all expectation and arrive on the day itself. 

I wasn't really in a birthday mood to be honest. Most years I can just enjoy the day and all that comes with it and not get depressed about my advancing age but, paraphrasing Film-Aragorn as we so often do,  This Year was not one of Those Years. 

I did get lots of lovely cards and some lovely presents and lots of Happy Birthday messages on Facebook, which I did appreciate very much, but somehow it was all a bit flat. 

Happy to report that I seem to be cheering up a bit now. 

Finland Day 2

It was a 'free day' until we were bussed into Savonlinna late in the afternoon so the OH and I walked into the local small town of Kerimaki, whose main claim to fame is that it plays host to the biggest wooden church in Europe. It may be the biggest wooden church in the world, but I'm not 100% sure, so I'm sticking with Europe which is firmer ground. Either way it is impressive. 

There's also this separate little tower thing; - no, not a clue! 

I'm a sucker for ecclesiastical textiles, also Finnish design, so obviously three was a picture taken of this cloth on the font.

And there were beautiful chandeliers; and yes, it is a wooden church, and yes, those are real candles and yes they do get lit. Only at special services though, like Christmas. Accident waiting to happen? you would think so. 

With my well known predilection for graveyards it's not surprising we visited the one in Kerimaki. These are the markers for the local men who dies in the Winter war. ...

...and this is the memorial to them. 

In the afternoon we were taken into Savonlinna. This was billed as a chance to look round the town and get something to eat. There really was very little time between getting off the bus and needing to make our way to the castle for the evening's performance, also we weren't very hungry as it wasn't that long since lunch. We bought one of these each in a small open air cafe near the market. They're a  local delicacy which I can't spell, but basically it's  a flat doughnut type thing with a filling. They do all sorts of fillings; we had apple. 

We did find time to go to a shop which I'd seen advertised in  a local tourist type brochure.  That's the one that turned out to have the yarn. I bought myself a pair of socks there as I had discovered that in amongst all my carefully selected packing for the trip I seemed to have missed socks off the list, and promised the assistant a return visit the next day. Of which more later. Meanwhile, back on day 2 ....

it was off to the castle for the first performance we were to see. This was Gounod's Romeo and Juliet. We'd never seen it before, and it got off to a slow start, hampered I feel by the director's concept of staging it in early C20 New York amongst Italian immigrant families and setting it in a vaudeville theatre. He should just have gone full Mafia if that was what he wanted rather than this rather half hearted, early versus later immigrant thing he had going. That said, once the singers got warmed up they were very good indeed, and the orchestra was excellent - and remained so all week.  

Set

Curtain Call

Finland Day One

 It was an early start, but not as early as the one earlier in the year for Madeira, thank goodness! and we got to Heathrow in good time for our Finnair flight to Helsinki. It was lovely hearing Finnish again over the plane's communication system.

We had spotted some of our fellow travellers at Heathrow, although done our best to stay clear, as we didn't want to be doing chit chat so early in the morning. Also a  few we recognised from previous trips with the same company and didn't particularly want to engage. 

I'm going to come out here right away and say that we have never travelled with such an obtuse, arrogant, toxic group of Little Englanders and we're taking ourselves off the company mailing list because we neither of us want to run the risk of ever travelling with any of those people ever again. Their behaviour throughout had me at best cringing inwardly and at worst apologising to a lovely Finnish lady for the boorish way in which a member of the group had treated her. 

And while I'm on the downsides, the lovely couple who have preciously accompanied the trips no longer do so; the husband has gone off to work elsewhere and the wife is now just working in the office. The replacements did things in a different more hands-off way, which is probably fine, we were just a bit blind sided because it wasn't what we were expecting. 

But the upsides - oh the upsides, definitely made the trip more than worthwhile. We'd driven from Helsinki to Savonlinna through some beautiful countryside. The vast majority of Finland is trees and lakes and for some people this makes the landscape too monotonous. I suspect I have a thing for monotonous landscapes as I would happily be drive through Finland's lakes and forests or Australia's miles and miles of eucalyptus for hours without getting bored. 

So just a quick word of warning, that the posts about Finland are likely to be very photo heavy! and this one is no exception.

Our hotel was on a lake and we had a lovely view of it from our room. 

After dinner, which many of the group turned up their noses at on the gorunds that they 'didn't know what sort of fish it was and someone had said the meat was reindeer' (sigh! - also it wasn't reindeer, I've had reindeer and this wasn't) but which I thought was delicious, especially considering we had been told we'd be having a cold supper, the OH and I went for a walk along the edge of the lake. 

I think the walk was when we really started to remember how much we loved the place and wonder how on earth it was that we haven't been back for more than 30 years. As people know, the OH loves Orkney and for me it is Australia that feels like 'home', but Finland is a place which makes both our hearts sing.