Something a bit more cheerful today.....

but not Florence yet because that's going to take me more days than we were actually there I suspect, and I can't face even starting it yet as that means making decisions about photographs which I can't  cope with just now.  I'll start tomorrow. Probably. 

Meanwhile on Sunday we went back to the Abbey at Cambuskenneth to climb the bell tower. Historic Environment Scotland, who own it, allow it to be opened on one day a year and the local civic archaeologist, Murray Cook, conducts tours. Numbers are strictly limited and there are only six tours so, despite the fact that we would only just be back the night before, we had booked to do it while we had the chance. 

We were on the one o' clock tour which was lucky because it had been foggy earlier,  but by the  time we got there to do ours the sun had come out and it was a beautiful September day. 

I think I've mentioned recently that spiral staircases are no longer my thing, and that I am also no longer able to cope with heights like I could when I was younger. But I was keen to see the ancient log boat which has been dumped  stored on the first floor so I told myself it wouldn't be that bad and gritted my teeth for the ascent. 

In the event most of the log boat was hidden under  a sheet, but I did at least see the pointy front bit and there were some miscellaneous bits of stonework too, of which this was the nicest

Possibly somethign commissioned by James IV. Possibly not. Anyway after that it was time to climb onto the roof. Which I did, although I will admit to feeling very trembly once I was out there. You do get some smashing views though. 

I was proud of myself for doing the climb and walking out onto the parapet and walking around a little way but I did come down a while before almost  everyone else. 

Once back on - I wanted to say 'dry land' there, such is the power of predictive thought! - I just meant the ground, we wandered over to the ruins of the abbot's house and looked over the ford - the river was very low and you can see why it was historically such an important location, as it's the only place to ford the Forth for miles.

Scottish Opera - No More Posts

Rather a surprising title, and not something I ever thought I would write, but there you go. 

For context you might like to scroll down all the way to - oh, look, my previous post! - and (re) acquaint yourself with the paragraph that describes our visit to the recent Scottish Opera Study Day. 

I don't know what your reaction to that was. Maybe it was 'oh my days, she's banging on about opera again'. Maybe it was 'that seems a bit lukewarm compared to how she usually writes about SO, but there again she did say she wasn't feeling too well and that that might have jaundiced her view about it'. Maybe it was something totally different. Whatever it was, I would bet the farm that it wasn't 'Oh my word, that blog post is going to bring the wrath of Scottish Opera right down on her unsuspecting little head'.

But it did. 

On the second of my precious three days in Florence I had a very upsetting e-mail from someone in the fundraising department of Scottish Opera. So upsetting that it ruined our morning and hung over the rest of the trip like a bad smell. And it was all about that blog post.

I'm not going to reproduce it in full, but it began like this. 

Our Press Manager sent me your recent blogpost with the review of our Study Day, which was picked up in our daily Press Cuttings

and the rest of it was basically a thinly disguised 'request' not to write negative stuff about the company on my blog. 

A couple of  things occurred to me when I had calmed down sufficiently to think about this. The first was, why on earth is Scottish Opera including one of my blog posts in a collection of Press Cuttings? What do they think they are dealing with here? I'm not the weekend culture section of a national newspaper. This isn't Tik-Tok. This is a small blog, with a readership that is numbered in the tens. I mean, now that I've looked  I can literally count on the fingers of one hand the number of posts that have reached 100 views in the last six months, and I was  astonished that any were that high. Many of the people who read this are personal friends. Most of the rest have come via my Ravelry profile where this is linked and are only here for the knitting.  My numbers are so small I don't even look at them, unless provoked, like now. 

The second thing that occurred to me was this. How come none of my previous posts about Scottish Opera, which are overwhelmingly positive and enthusiastic,  have ever been brought to the attention of the Press Manager resulting in an e-mail from the fundraising department thanking me for being so  positive and spreading the word about how wonderful the company is. Because you know, sauce for goose, sauce for gander. No-one, and I mean no-one, could read my blog regularly without becoming aware of how much joy and delight we have taken in our relationship with Scottish Opera, both on and off the stage, which has been  built up over the past decade or so. 

As I say I'm not going to reproduce the whole e-mail but it left me very shaken and angry. As the current phrase goes, I felt seen. Only not in a good way. I felt not so much seen as monitored. And I felt I was being asked to self censor. Which is many things, chief amongst them,  inappropriate. 

I can't write honestly about this sort of thing  if I feel that someone is going to be reading it and judging it and possibly following it up with another critical response. I don't want to be writing reviews of things we've seen if I feel that I have to be looking over my shoulder all the time worrying about how someone else is going to react,  and tempering my written  opinion accordingly. This is my space where I express  my personal opinions and quite honestly I'm amazed that any big organisation would give a tinkers cuss  about them, let alone try to meddle. 

I won't be giving up going to the opera. But I am giving up on writing about going to Scottish Opera.

 As Yoda might say 'Themselves in foot shot they have'. 

Another Busy weekend

 We took son no 2 back to Glasgow on Friday which fitted in well as we had a Scottish Opera event in Glasgow on Saturday which had a ridiculously early start. OK it was 9.00 am and I appreciate most people get to work by 9.00 but we're retired, it was a Saturday and my body reacts badly to early mornings. On that front I have some bad news for it....*

The event itself was a Study Day for the first half of the new season, so looking at Boheme in the morning and the double bill of a Ravel and a Walton in the afternoon. The speaker in the morning was someone called Michael Downes who is a very well respected whatever, not that I'd heard of him before, but you know, that means nothing. I didn't think he could tell us much about Boheme that we didn't already know but he was interesting actually, especially on the musical structure about which we had previously known less than nought, so there you go. There was a buffet lunch, which was rather more acceptable than the woman sitting opposite us thought, although nothing to write home about. The afternoon session took the form of a Q and A, where someone from the fund raising team asked a lot of prepared questions of the lovely Lea (Shaw) who takes the main role in the Ravel ( L'heure espagnol) and is covering the main part in the Walton - The Bear. Some of the questions had already been answered by the time the questioner got to them, and she didn't have the nous to just not ask them. I dunno, I wasn't feeling all that bright during the first morning session so I'm possibly jaundiced. I didn't feel I got a lot out of it for the money and I wouldn't rush back. 

That said it was held in the Scottish Opera HQ in Elmbank Street and we saw rather more of it than we have before. It's beautiful, lots of lovely architectural details, including many stained glass windows of which this was the best example that we saw.

And this was Michael Downes OBE taking to a member of the audience afterwards

photograph removed at the behest of Scottish Opera

Yesterday we went to The Assembly Rooms in Edinburgh. I had never been there before so I was unaware of the fact that they are in fact original Georgian Assembly Rooms - very Georgette Heyer/Jane Austen. I'm sure they must have been restored/ refurbished several times since they were first built in the 1780s. Obviously I had to look that date up, I didn't have it floating around in my head.  Anyway here are a couple of pictures of (updated) Georgian splendour.

And here's the reason we were there;  to hear this woman

who was doing a show to promote this book 

quite successfully, as I bought it! despite having it on Audible already

The show was very good; Haynes is a great communicator and very, very funny,as anyone who has listened to her series on Radio 4 will know. And, as the icing on the cake, we spotted a TV presenter, of whom the OH is a big fan, a few rows in front of us, so that made his evening. I exchanged a few words with her and she was every bit as lovely as she seems on the television. 

We were very late back because we had gone by train but the show was so good it was definitely worth the money and the late night! 

Tomorrow we are off to Florence (hooray!) *flying quite early,  so that's comparatively bad news, and  the blog will of course go quiet for a wee while. By the time we come back I suspect my phone  will be groaning under the weight of all the photographs I have  taken,  so there should be lots of interesting stuff to post once I've recovered from what I suspect may be  serious sensory overload. 

The Wallace Monument

 This morning we finally visited the Wallace Monument. I'm not sure how we have avoided it this long to be honest, as it has to be the most famous thing in/near Stirling after the castle and you certainly can't miss it when you're driving round the area. It's visible for miles. To be fair we did try going a few weeks ago but it was Sunday, it was still the school holidays ,and it was a fine day. Small wonder then that the car park was full and, like Wallace's enemies, we were forced to retreat. 

We were luckier this morning. The place was still busy and there weren't lots of spaces in the car park, but there were some. We spurned the shuttle bus which takes you from the car park up to the monument itself, opting instead to walk. It. Was. Steep. I am however quite proud of myself because I only stopped to rest once and I didn't moan. It's not an easy walk though. 

Once we were up at the top we opted not to go into the monument itself as this has a 246 step spiral staircase leading up to the very top. Apart from being quite worn out by the path up Abbey Crag it was very blustery just at the top of that; the thought of what the wind must be like at the top of the tower itself didn't bear thinking about. We will go another time and take the shuttle bus up so that we have the energy for the spiral stairs. 

There are lots of lovely wood carvings on the path; not sure if they are to encourage you to keep going. here's my favourite - Scotland's invaders

Even at the base of the monument the views are spectacular

and here's The Door We Did Not Enter

The OH was feeling a bit off by this point, presumably due to lowering blood sugar levels, so we hopped on the shuttle bus to go back down to the car park where we had a cup of coffee and a biscuit. Son No 2 had a banoffee tart

but was rather discombobulated by having to share it some of the time with a wasp. Fun morning. 

Happy Mail and August Wool stats

Well the August wool stats don't make for happy reading. In was 200g, which was the two months from the Yarn Unique Artist club, and out was only 70g because August was another month when the only completed project was a pair of socks. Here they are;

They're nice and accounted for the other self striping skein I got at my Lay Family Yarn retreat. No playing yarn chicken here as they were for me but there were only very  little bits left over. I do love them though. 

What I don't love is that August was another month when there was more wool in than out, reducing my decrease for the year to 5476g. However I am consoled by the thought that September will look better. 

Meanwhile here is the Happy Mail, the next instalment of the Yarn Unique club. This time it's Hokusai and his The Great Wave. 

Love the colours of the wool  and the pin and the stickers. I'm tempted by the  thought of a double loop brioche cowl for the wool, but I've had disasters trying brioche before so we'll see.  

Well that was a busy weekend ....

 ...because it was Bloody Scotland, Stirling's annual and amazing crime fiction festival. 

It amazes me, because I have read a lot of crime fiction since I started at age nine, and these days read little else, how very many authors there are of  whom I have never heard  and who pop up at Stirling and obviously have legions of devoted fans. I generally limit myself to how much I go to, partly because it's impossible to go to everything, and partly because it's easy to get overwhelmed by things like this if you do too much in a short space of time. But mainly because it could get very expensive very quickly. But I still pick up new names and occasionally of course  a favourite writer will be appearing with someone else and that leads you sometimes to exploring their work too.

Anyway this year the OH and I turned up in time to see the Friday evening parade arriving. I didn't manage any particularly good photos of that but fwiw here's the best one I got. Ian Rankin was a guest programmer this year, hence the voodoo type effigy thing. 

Like at the cinema there's a lot of on screen advertising between features, this is the one before the Friday night panel which was all about Rebus. Ian Rankin himself, plus Gray O' Brien who had been playing Rebus on stage, and James Macpherson who apparently does the Rebus audio books but who I remember mainly as DI Mike Jardine in Taggart. I don't remember O'Brien in anything, mainly it would seem because I don't watch Coronation Street or Casualty. I used to watch both but gave up on them when Corrie got a bit too shouty and Casualty got just too soap-y. As always when listening to Rankin I find myself sorry that I don't enjoy his books more, or at all even, because the man himself is clever and funny and comes across as very down to earth and likeable. 

I went to the Rebus panel with the OH and two good friends and that was Friday night. Saturday morning we reconvened, bar the OH, for Mick Herron and Nick Harkaway. NH is the son of John le Carre and writes new  Smiley books. I have never read any and now that I have encountered Mr Harkaway think it's unlikely that I'll bother. The photo shows Mick Herron reading from his new Slough House book Clown Town. He was as charming and funny and self deprecating as ever. 

(On a related note I have just finished listening to Clown Town. The quality of the audio on Audible is appalling .It's not just me, almost every review currently on Audible mentions this, and in future I'll be buying hard copies.  As far as the book goes, for me it didn't eclipse the last proper Slough House book, Bad Actors, which remains my favourite of the series by a long way. But it was still very good; very tense and very funny and at one point I got some dust in my eye.... )

The last one I went with was a case of 'and then there were two' as it was me and one remaining friend and we went to see Elly Griffiths and Belinda Bauer.  (That's EG on the left if you don't know). I'd never previously heard of Belinda Bauer but I borrowed one of her books from the  library in preparation. She doesn't write the sort of books that appeal to me particularly, judging from the flap blurbs, but the one I read was excellent. It was called The Facts of Life and Death, and told mainly from the point of view of a 10 year old girl. She captured what it's like to be a 10 year old girl exactly ( or what it was like for me at ten anyway). Beautifully written and with a real sense of place, I found that it didn't really matter that I knew from page 1 who the Bad Person was.  I would read more I think although I wouldn't buy them, just borrow them from the library. 

This was a midday event and once it was over the friend and I drove out to a local farmshop/cafe and met up with the OH and we all had a delicious lunch before a quick scoot around the shop and then home, exhausted but having had a very enjoyable weekend. 

Some books I've enjoyed lately

 According to my reading journal* I have read fifty four books this year. That seems like not enough and I cant help feeling that some of the ones I have read just never got recorded, because I was too tired, or took them back to the library and forgot to write them down, or they didn't count because I didn't/have yet to finish them. 

*I say Reading Journal, but that gives it more dignity  than it deserves.  It's a spiral bound A5 notebook that I started using to record my reading in May 2024. I struggled to keep up with it, because as well as recording the title and author I was giving stars out of five and recording brief impressions but that must have become too much like hard work because I abandoned it in September.  In January this year I changed tack and now it's basically just a list of the books I've read, decorated with a few stickers when I can be bothered. I note I am currently three pages behind on the sticker front. 

Anyway not everything I read is good or enjoyable and it would be very tedious to record all the ones I think are dull, badly written,  overhyped or whatever so I thought I would just occasionally write up a few of the ones that I've enjoyed. I may also, if I'm having a bad day, occasionally have a rant about one of the bad ones. 

I'm starting off with two series. Nicola Upson's Josephine Tey books were recommended to me by a loyal blog reader and good friend and I'm happy to report that I have enjoyed them. I did make the mistake of reading too many of them one after the other so I'm taking a break just now. I don't always like the conceit of taking  a real person and making him or her a detective in their 'real' lives, but Upson manages it well. It's helpful I think that Josephine Tey was a pen name and a totally constructed persona for the real writer Elizabeth Mackintosh who led somethign of a - not exactly a double life, as that implies deceit - but certainly two separate lives, as dutiful Inverness daughter and celebrated London author and playwright. The plots are good, the research spot on and the backgrounds varied and intriguing - the one I've used for illustration is set in Portmeirion. My one quibble is to do with JT's posited gay relationship; not the relationship itself but the long  dreary circular conversations she and her  lover to be  have which take up too much space in several of the novels I have read. The lover  herself comes off to me as a manipulative emotional bully especially as she is already in a relationship with someone else.  I note for balance that I am currently wading my way through Robert Galbraith's latest Cormoran Strike novel and a similar thing applies there; in this case it's not conversation but a tedious recital of all the things the two people concerned want to say to one another and all the reasons they then run through in their heads about why they're not going to say it. Over and over and over again! No wonder it's over 900 pages long. 

I have previously shunned Clare Mackintosh as she writes thrillers and I'm not a thriller fan but she has also recently written a police procedural trilogy. I came across the first one when I bought it in a two for One offer on Audible and had to take three goes to get through it i.e. I started it twice but only on my third go got all the way through. In the end I enjoyed it so much I put the next one on my Amazon wish list and someone duly coughed it up on my birthday. A Game of Lies is then the second one; the first is The Last Party. I've enjoyed them both and will read the final one Other People's Houses in due course. I'm not going to get it on Audible as there is too much going backward and forward in time, an both stories are told from multiple viewpoints and I couldn't cope with that when I was listening; it's so much easier just to flip back in a physical book and remind yourself who was where when. The Last Party had multiple twists towards the end, all of them clever, plausible and unforeseen by me so that was satisfying. 

Two giant horse heads

 is an accurate but very reductive way to describe The Kelpies. We've visited several times and were surprised to discover that son No 2 had never seen them, so a couple of days ago off we went. 

I am quite proud of that photo.

close up of the steel work (DK strikes again!) 

Baby horse heads by the Visitor Centre with my baby between them. 

After we had marvelled at the big ones we took a walk along the canal path where we saw a swan family - a Mum and 5 half grown cygnets. They were paddling in a flotilla but I didn't manage a good photo of that sadly. Here's a photo of one of the cygnets though with a bit of fancy water reflection. 

Part of the canal path has been designated the Charlotte  Dundas Heritage   Trail. Hands up if you want that to say Charlotte Rhodes and out yourself as a former Onedin Line fan. Apparently the Charlotte Dundas  was the first genuine powered canal boat. 

We're forever finding this sort of seat, there are loads in Alva, it must be a local thing,. They're obviously all made by the  same local firm/person. This one commemorates the Carron Iron Works which I am coming to realise was a real driver of the Industrial Revolution in this part of Scotland; in fact Scotland as a whole. 

And, as we walked along the tow path many reminders that autumn is coming, if not in fact already here. 

For anyone interested, more info about the Kelpies, the Carron Iron Works and the Charlotte Dundas can be found via these links below

https://www.thehelix.co.uk/

https://www.undiscoveredscotland.co.uk/falkirk/carroncompany/index.html

https://charlottedundas.com/

I Tried These So You Don't have To

 

Many years ago when I was baking for a get together at my home whihc included a friend who had spent many years in Australia I made some of the classic Ozzie teatime treat, i.e. Lamingtons,  using a recipe in a baking book I had. Her verdict was that they were nice, but 'nothing like a real Lamington' although I forget in quite what way(s) they were lacking. They were certainly square, vanilla sponge and iced with a chocolate icing and then rolled in desiccated coconut, so they should have passed muster.  But they obviously fell short and I never made them again. 

But this long-ago baking failure meant I was interested  when my Google headline thing threw up a Guardian taste test for the new M and S Lamingtons, sampled by some ex-pat Australians and so I clicked on it to read. Generally they were not impressed , mainly because, instead of the standard vanilla they were made of chocolate sponge! Heresy. 

We were at Hobbycraft yesterday ( I know!) and the shopping centre where it is includes the non-pharmacy hosting Boots, the Tesco-with-a-pharmacy and an M & S Food,  so we took the opportunity to buy a box of each flavour to try. 

They have now been in the house for a little over 27 hours. There are three of us here currently as son no 2 has come to stay for  a few days adn we all have a sweet tooth. There are currently one half of the standard chocolate and coconut lamingtons and one and  a half of the non-canon caramelised biscuit ones sitting uneaten in the kitchen. I think that tells its own tale. 

Leaving aside that the texture of a bought cake is never as nice as home baked, these are still awful. Dry, over decorated, and the caramel one has a distinct chemical tang. 

Obviously I'm not going to order people not to buy them. But if you do and you don't like them, don't say you weren't warned. 

Forty Five Years - how did that happen?

Yes, last Saturday it was forty five years since the OH and I got married. Not quite sure where all that time went, it doesn't feel that long. Mostly! There again what does forty five years feel like? Time is relative after all.

To celebrate we visited Branklyn Garden. This is a hillside garden near Perth, developed in the 1920s and largely using plants collected by Scottish plant hunters in the far east, and now belonging to the  National Trust for Scotland. It's not huge, just under two acres but it's very well laid out and has interest almost all year round. We're already planning another visit in spring to see the blue poppies. 

It was  a bit of a grey day and eventually it started to rain, but as it was about time for our pre- booked celebratory afternoon tea by then that didn't bother us; we just took ourselves off to the tearoom. 

A few more photos

Let me put it on record that I did not eat my whole 'half' of the tea stand, but somehow it was empty by the time we left. 

I should also say that all the staff, both in the small shop and the tearoom, were delightful; they could not have been more pleasant or helpful. It was a very lovely afternoon, despite the rain. 

Belated Birthday Experience

 So even those with short memories might remember me moaning on my birthday about how we had changed our plans several times only to have the final version  scuppered by Storm Floris. We had had tickets for the JamesVI/I Exhibition at the Portrait Gallery. I'd  wanted to see it since it was first announced and had worried that it would close before we got moved; in the event, since it goes on until 15th of this month we were covered on that front, although we had been so busy with other things it might have passed us by. 

Having had to cancel on 4th I was told they could reissue my tickets for whenever really and I'd put it off until after the grandsons visit. then we heard that a friend from Verona was in Edinburgh working at the National Library and she contacted me to say could we meet up before she went back to Italy so we arranged to meet her for coffee in the Portrait Gallery in the afternoon and we rebooked the exhibition tickets for just after lunch. 

It was a good day. We went up by train and the Portrait Gallery is only a 10 minute walk from the station. The exhibition was interesting and I'm glad I managed to see it although it was quite wordy. Also a lot of the labels had things saying 'Scan this QR code to find out more'. I'm old fashioned enough to think that the 'more' should be in the exhibition if it's important, not that I should be asked to faff about with my phone to access it. I didn't take many photographs although I couldn't resist these two of the front and back of a contemporary embroidered bodice.

It slightly moved my impression of James VI to something a bit more positive than previously, and there were some great pictures. There was also a reconstituted court scent which was interesting to sniff; it smelled overwhelmingly of lavender and rose so nothing startling. 

The main halls of the buildings are incredibly ornate in a very C19 way. I took some photos; here's one of part of the frieze . The frieze shows Great Scots, starting with  Thomas Carlyle  and then going backwards in  time. I don't know that I personally would count Thomas Carlyle as a Great Scot, but there again he was very involved with the establishing of the portrait gallery so I suppose for the artist he was a slam dunk. I have a postcard of the frieze and a quick glance shows only 4 women; a saint, a princess, a queen and Grisel Beaton. I know of Grisel Beaton from the novels of Dorothy Dunnett, but have absolutely no idea what qualifies her as a Great Scot. 

After we'd finished with the  exhibition we had time to look in the Modern Scot gallery which has some interesting portraits,  many of them of painters it has to be said.... we saw three that have resulted from Portrait Artist of the Year; Alan Cumming,Nicola Benedetti and the latest one which is  Lorraine Kelly. These were Interesting, Lovely and Trash respectively. 

Time then for coffee with our friend and a good chat to catch up on what we'd been doing since we last saw her and then home. A Good Day.