Socks and Sample Cakes

 So back in February I blogged here about buying some wool and I'm pleased to report that with the finishing yesterday of these 

the Glasgow purchases have all been used. These are for me. The wool didn't knit up quite as anticipated but it's still a nice effect. I did the shadow wrap heel but I cannot comment on whether it really is a huge improvement fit wise over a heel flap and gusset as I haven't actually tried them on yet! I have leftovers from all three balls and doubtless they will get used up somehow someday, but meanwhile I can tick them off as basically used. In fact of the five lots in that post the only ones unknitted are the two orange/rust/cream ones from Madeira and the reason I haven't used those is that I can't decide whether to use them for fingerless mitts or socks. The blue/purple ones made lovely socks but I love the colours of the other set so much I'm loth to make something from them that will never be seen. 

I know there hasn't been much knitting content here recently but that's down to two things. One is the time it is taking to make the OH's Finnish jumper, although that edges ever onwards. I am now about half way up the yoke and the decrease rounds have started so the end is in sight, although I'm not looking forward to the underarm grafting. However it does look lovely even if I say so myself. I have also knitted four other things which I cannot put on the blog until after Christmas as they are for presents/ advent swaps and therefore under blog wraps so no surprises are spoilt. 

The sample cakes we bought the other day have proved a deep disappointment being dry and a bit crumbly so we'll be reverting to Tesco for our Christmas cake again this year. Next year I may even go back to  making my own  but we'll see. 

Happy to report that we got to the coffee morning in aid of Papyrus UK yesterday,   despite the best efforts of the weather and the coffee was good and there was some nice cake. We bought raffle tickets, of course - this is Orkney! - and didn't win a prize, but that's OK as winning a prize isn't the point really. We also delivered a birthday present to a friend for today, as the car went to  the car hospital this morning  and the weather forecast was definitely saying that today would not be a day for walking to a friend's to deliver anything.  

Talking of hospitals The Cat Lorenzo had an emergency trip to the vet last week and we honestly thought he wasn't going to be coming back with us, but he did and a change in his medication has made all the difference. We're still awaiting one set of blood results but he's so much improved we're hoping that's more of a formality than anything else. 

It's beginning to look a lot like Chr....shhh!

So, I've blogged before about the  Christmas department that our local independent grocer has every year, and I've probably also commented in the last couple of years about how disappointing it has been. Partly Covid supply issues I suspect, partly post Brexit issues and to a certain extent us not going there particularly promptly after opening.

Well this year's opened today. I could moan about how, not only have we not got past Bonfire Night, we haven't actually got past Halloween, but I won't ... because we went and it was lovely and we even bought stuff. A birthday present, two half Christmas presents, some stuff for Son no 2's Christmas sock, a Christmas biscuit icing set,  and two small sample cakes to see if we want to by either as a full size Christmas cake. The displays were really good and we enjoyed ourselves very much.  And to add to the excitement we're going to be 'out' two days in a row, since tomorrow we're off to another charity coffee morning (weather permitting) Report in due course,  meanwhile, pictures of today's 'outing'. 

The Joys of Island Life

 

We had a storm last week. We weren't alone in that, most of Britain seemed to be suffering with Storm Babet, but most of Britain isn't dependent on sea crossings for grocery supplies. We are. 

There were no ferries for days. Then on Friday a ferry arrived. So we ventured to the supermarket (which would have been a waste of time for several days before that) thinking we could buy some food. 

And that there is a photograph of the fruit and veg aisle in Tesco when we arrived. Whatever had been on the ferry it obviously hadn't included a supermarket delivery vehicle. One bag of apples, half a dozen aged and wizened pumpkins and a bag of garlic cloves. 

If I was ever cut out for island life, I am no longer! 

This is more like it

 

This is the jigsaw puzzle I bought in Yorkshire. I did it last week and it was so much fun to do, a great improvement on the awful Paris cafe scene which has now been added to the stock in our local library.l 

This one is called Dinner with Monet. There are several more in the same series; Dinner with Dali, Matisse and, annoyingly, Frida rather than Kahlo.  I daresay they will find their way into the house over time. 

For anyone interested, that's Monet on the left, the woman at the front is Berthe Morisot and the man walking in with an easel under his arm is Van Gogh. At the table are Degas with a teeny ballerina n his shoulder and Manet in the brown suit. In the adjoining room is Monet's second wife, Alice. 

The Last of Yorkshire (in a manner of speaking)

 

On Friday we had the great pleasure of lunching with two of my fellow alumni from the Leeds Trinity Victorian Studies M.A.; and that's going back a long way. We went to Piccolino's in Ilkley where I met up with them a couple of years ago, when I made my first post Covid trip to Yorkshire. I have to say the food and service was not as good this time as last, but we were all there for the company and so we didn't complain. A friendly waiter offered to take a photo of us all, and we must have been enjoying ourselves as we were the last to leave from the lunch service. 

While we were away we had had a cry for help from son no. 2 as the handle on the front door of the Glasgow flat had given up the ghost and he didn't know how to fix it. So we had to rejig our plans for Saturday somewhat, and set off really early. This was so that, as previously arranged, we could see my cousin who lives on the coast in Northumberland, take a side trip to Glasgow to fix the door handle and still get to our Inverness hotel at a reasonable hour.

It was therefore a packed day ( and an expensive one as, in addition to buying a hack saw and a handle it turned out we needed a drill as well). I say we, but you know, I never go near a power tool, it was all down to the OH. It was lovely to see my cousin and her husband, last encountered at my mother's funeral in 2004, and honestly it was like it had only been yesterday. The handle got replaced, I got some time with son no 2, and we got to Inverness in good time.

The following day we'd arranged to have lunch in Dornoch with a friend from the M Litt I did at UHI, which is more recent than the Victorian Studies MA but still a while ago. She has just started a new job as head of humanities at a large secondary school near her home and some of the stories she had to tell about school life made my hair curl. She was looking well on it though and it was, as always, a delight to see her. 

And after lunch we made our leisurely way up to the north coast and caught a ferry back to Orkney. We'll be here now until the first week of December, and I'm already crossing my fingers very very hard that we will get away because the weather has  caused huge disruption to the ferry services over the past few weeks and we're only just into autumn. Both companies have been cancelling services left right and centre; today is Thursday and they're already saying there will be no service from today until at least Saturday and the weekend is looking doubtful...maybe the end of  November will be dead calm? 

Books to Read Poster No 52

 

Yup, Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami. Referring to The Beatles song, rather than a Nordic forest. Murakami must be fashionable these days as I am forever seeing references to him on newspaper book pages and there is another of his books on the poster, and I have to say I'm not in a hurry to read it.

This was a weird one. There's a certain compulsion to the prose, and the descriptions of the natural world are really good, but once you've said that the positives are over as far as I'm concerned. I'm sure I lost a lot because I don't understand Japanese culture and I daresay a lot else got 'lost in translation', so allowances must be made. It's also told as a first person narration, and the narrator is a young (19/20) male Japanese student in the 1960s, so you know, not a lot in common there. The men are all selfish thoughtless boors (including the narrator) and the women are all strange. Two of the four women who appear kill themselves, two of them spend an extended period in a strange sanatorium in the mountains, and one of the others should imo, be sent to join them. 

It would be interesting to read the story from the point of view of the women and get some idea about what is actually going in their heads, as the narrator has absolutely no idea - I suppose that's partly the point. I'm not terribly interested in what's going on in the head of the narrator, who is one of the most tedious storytellers I've ever encountered and a boring non-personality to boot. How three sensible women come to get so fascinated by him is a total mystery to me, and I can only assume it's some sort of autobiographical wish fulfilment on Murakami's part. I could of course be totally off beam there. 

Ah well, onwards and upwards. 

As an antidote to the general awful worthiness of the poster books I splashed out recently on an extra three audible credits (which as a member you can occasionally buy at a slight discount) since there were a lot of books coming out this month that I fancied reading. Four series from the BBC of Simon Brett';s Charles Paris books, Mick Herron's latest The Secret Hours, and J K Rowling's new Strike book, The Running Grave were what I treated myself to, plus my normal monthly credit went on Natalie Haynes' latest non-fiction book about the Greek goddesses, Divine Might. All very much more worth reading/listening to for me  than Norwegian Wood. Although the Herron was a teeny bit disappointing, and I'm only half way through the Rowling as it is very very very very long and she needs an editor. 

A Yorkshire Wednesday and Thursday

and I have no pictures. Not sure why not. just forgot to take them. Although they would haven mainly been of people that would mean nothing to anyone but me. 

Wednesday we spent time with the my Dorothy Dunnet reading friends - not that many of us read DD much any more. We had lunch in a very nice pub on the outskirts of Harrogate, although we had a bit of trouble finding it! as the sat nav took us into the precincts of some scientific research establishment and then insisted we had arrived at our destination, The Pine Marten. Close but no coconut as the saying goes. After lunch we decamped to the nearby home of one of the group for coffee and chat and general catch up, and then the OH and I drove one of the group home and returned to our cottage. Some of the group I have known since Son No 23 was in vitro, and he's 33 next month, so that's a long time to stay connected. Others came along slightly later, but not by much. The latest one to join up was just after we moved to Orkney so that even she has been around for 15 plus  years. 

Thursday was just mad. We had coffee with a friend from my Leeds church in the morning, in the cafe at Golden Acre Park, much improved and expanded since our day. This was followed by a very quick trip into Leeds City Centre where I needed to return a shirt I had bought the previous day in the Harrogate branch of M and S, and a very short diversion into Waterstones where I found the next in the series of the St Mary's Chronicles so that was a bit of a result. Then on to tea and cake with a friend from the Russian Department / Brotherton Library Special Collections staff, now retired but working just as hard as he ever did before as a volunteer as far as I could see. And then we set off in what we thought was plenty of time to have an evening meal in Halifax with some friends from a Facebook group I'm in. 

The plenty of time was not in fact plenty of time at all. In fact if we'd left 90 minutes earlier we might still have been only just on time. We were supposed to be meeting at 6.30 and lots of frantic messaging and much frustration over traffic and closed roads later, we finally arrived an hour late. At least the others had ordered and were well through their starters and I have to say the food and company were all lovely but we weren't very relaxed - we both hate being late for anything. Things weren't improved as we tried to get back to the cottage, I was beginning to think we would never get back as the saga of closed roads continued. I think the great takeaway from that day was that we were very glad we didn't live in Leeds anymore. 

I'd thought that Thursday would stress me out because of all the socialising but it didn't which was pleasing. It was just lovely to see everyone. And just a shame I didn't take photos just for myself. Ah well.   

And Have I Stopped

baking, after cancelling the subscription  is another questions which may have occurred. Again the answer is no, but generally when I 've made anything recently I've just done cupcakes - not the huge American ones smothered in buttercream but what as a child I called fairy cakes, and although they're very nice and get eaten up very quickly, they're not worth putting on the blog every time I do them. 

However I recently received a baking book in a swap parcel called 500 Cakes to Bake. Now it's not actually  500 different cake recipes, it's a selection of basic recipes with variations and I thought it might be fun to do the  basic recipes and then work through the variations.

I started off with a basic layer cake (again when I was a child these were called sandwich cakes, but whatever .... )

 I halved the amount of buttercream the recipe suggested! 

Then I moved on to the chocolate version. Rather than the buttercream suggested I put a layer of jam through the  middle and topped it with melted chocolate. 

When we got back from Yorkshire I took two days to make and decorate the lemon one as I felt so 'off'; this time I did do buttercream and it was delicious, very lemon-y. 

and finally this week I did the almond version although again just with jam through the middle and a dusting of icing sugar on the top. 

Things I learned; next time put a lot more ground almond in the almond version or the OH will think it's plain cake, and I don't really like chocolate cake. Not sure whether I used to and have gone off it, I have certainly eaten plenty of the stuff over the past few decades, but I'm definitely not keen now.  

There were supposedly two more variations; strawberry and blackcurrant but really that just related to the flavour of jam you used so I'll pass on that. Next up is something called cherry and marzipan loaf cake, but I won't be tackling that for a few days. The almond one is not all eaten up and I am determined to clear and clean my baking cupboard before I do any more baking. I think that's tomorrow's job, but it will depend on when/if there is any gymnastic coverage on the television. Whenever I get it done though, you can place your bets now on the oldest thing I throw away. I discovered this week I had two bottles of almond essence; the one that said 'best before end 2013' went in the bin. 

Have I stopped -

doing jigsaw puzzles I hear you ask, and the answer is No, although the latest one almost drove me to it. 

Here it is in all its finished glory. 

I thought when I bought it that it would make a nice memento of my trip to Paris earlier in the year, but it wasn't. It was really hard going and I had to resort to doing it by shape rather than colour rather earlier than expected. The only thing that kept me going was my determination not to be defeated by 1000 small pieces of cardboard.  Now that it's done, the only feeling it engenders in me is one of deep loathing. 

Unsurprisingly it is destined for the library as I certainly never want to do the thing again.

I did buy myself a puzzle while I was away so that may be the next one I do, but I'm leaving this one up for a couple of days just so that I can hiss 'I beat you in the end' at it every time I pass the kitchen table. 
 

Tuesday was Whitby

 where I was meeting up with a former work colleague for morning coffee. The weather was horrible but we met up at the station and the place we were going wasn't far. We had a great two hours chatting over two cups of coffee and a toasted teacake (me) and a cup of tea followed by a hot chocolate with cake (her). She told me about her running and her long distance walking and her long yearned for trip to India last year and I told her about Finland and Paris and we swapped stories about our families and reminisced about colleagues, good and bad, and even after two hours we weren't properly caught up but it was still lovely to see her. 

After that the OH and I walked up the main street in Whitby. It had been quiet when we arrived but by the  time my coffee date was over the sun had decided to come our and had brought hordes of trippers with it. We got as far as the bottom of the Abbey steps then decided discretion was the better part of valour and turned round to make out way back to the car park. I was tempted by a rather beautiful Goth bangle in one of the shops but managed to stop myself asking the price. We did however bag a birthday present in the shape of a black t-shirt with a very apt quote for our eldest grandson who will be 13 (13!!) in November. 

I took no photos in Whitby but, after arming ourselves with the makings of a picnic we drove over to Grosmont for a look at the NYM Railway where we managed to find another present, and as luck would have it the OH saw an engine he's wanted to see for years. 

 

Not ever having been fans of Heartbeat, we didn't go to Goathland! (although I have been there before)