Projetc 60 Number 36 - Gelled nails.

This is a bit of a compromise one. I originally intended to get nail extensions which my sister used to get done all the time. When I made enquiries at a local salon though I got told that 'no-body really does nail extensions anymore, they're bad for your real nails, people get gelled instead'. So I signed up to get 'gelled', and today was the day.

I opted for a sparkly gel, but as it wasn't quite dark enough once it was on the nails  had to have an extra darker top coat, which means they're not quite as sparkly as I might have liked.

Here's a picture. Or two.

 

 

I quite like them. It wasn't as exciting as I like my Project 60 things to be perhaps, and they would look better if I could grow my nails longer; sadly they have a tendency to break or split which means keeping them short.

Can You Believe This?

 

 

This is the OH yesterday, about to eat his first ever toffee apple!

I warned him they were 'orrible, and not good for people like himself with a currently dodgy tooth but he wouldn't listen. 

He claims he really enjoyed it and I'm not going to argue, but personally I've always fond them the oddest of combinations and after suffering several as gifts from well meaning adults in my childhood I know I'd have to be starving to try and eat one now.

Oops!

The car, it is poorly-sick. As it turns out it has been ailing for a while but, bad car parents that we are, we thought it was the tyres...

We got some new tyres a few months back. They weren't our usual brand and almost since they were put on the OH has been driving me bananas with his constant moaning about how noisy  they were. Now, not being a driver I tend not to listen to noises made by the car. Recently though even I started to notice the noise, and the fact that it was getting louder. And more sinisterly, that it was less loud on left hand bends.  The OH Googled the symptoms and decided we had a wheel bearing that was 'going' That's 'going' in the bad sense of ceasing to function rather than 'going' as in doing its job and keeping the wheels on the road.(What on earth did we do before Google by the way? I can't remember)

 

Of course, the universe decrees that when you need the man in the local garage he will be away on holiday, which is fine, he is as entitled to holidays as much as anyone else, it was just bad luck that he has chosen to be away now. So it was a phone call and a trip into Kirkwall to get the diagnosis confirmed. Amazingly, and it just goes to show the universe hasn't turned its back on us totally, the local factors actually had the part in stock - how likely is that? - so the car is booked in to be made all better on Monday morning early.

 

Mechanic's parting shot yesterday was 'I wouldn't drive too far in that until the new bearing is in' which is sort of funny because those tyres took us all the way to York and back in the summer and have done so many return trips to Glasgow since being fitted that I have lost count. And now of course we're terrified to use the car, so it's just as well we don't really need it between now and Monday. Ignorance is bliss! but apparently in this case could also have been dangerous.  Sighs of relief that we didn't end up upside down in a ditch somewhere between here and the Central Belt.

Project 60 Number 35 - A Pleasure and a Privelege

So, for reasons with which, as so often, I will not bore you, we were recently invited to attend a Scottish Opera rehearsal. Not one of those 'not really a rehearsal' rehearsal that opera companies put on for their Friends organisation where you can pay to go and sit in the stalls and watch what amounts to a proper performance except that some of the singers might be only marking, but a real honest-to-goodness rehearsal, still in the production studios and with the Director still making changes.

 

Such excitement! Well it was for us anyway.We sat like quiet mice just behind and to the right of the Director's table (the Director in this case being Thomas Allen who was doing a revival of his marriage of Figaro ) and watched and listened, surrounded by serious people who were doing things we didn't understand, plus a few whose purpose was obvious or pointed out to us. You really appreciate how powerful a singer's voice is, in those circumstances. What amazed me most, although I'm not sure why unless it is that I read far too many grisly operatic biographies twenty years ago, was the support all the singers, chorus and soloists, gave to one another, applauding good solos and making suggestions about stage business.

 

We managed a brief chat with TA when they broke for lunch; we have met him before and he did a very good job of seeming to remember us - he's a lovely man! and we came away when the singers came back for notes, which seemed the right thing to do. I wouldn't want a perfect stranger hanging about watching while I had a work appraisal, would you?

 

No photos as taking them didn't seem appropriate. We did however get to see a performance in Glasgow earlier this week (because yes, as well as being put off writing for a week, we also went away for a few days). I thought the performance took a little while to warm up and was distinctly underwhelmed by Act 1 but everybody seemed to get going after that and it turned out to be a lovely evening. And here's a photo of that , just to enliven the post.

 

 

And Silence Fell....

for which I must apologise. I got a bit crippled when it came to writing anything in the public domain, because my Ph D supervisor, revisiting an old piece of work for some reason unbeknown to man and beast, accused me of putting a sentence in it which was nothing but academic show offery. He followed this up by stating that the only reason for the sentence to be there at all was so that I ''could draw my reader's attention to how clever I thought myself' and I wasn't being clever anyway because 'this is something everyone knows'.^

Some of you will be aware, either through personal knowledge or from reading this blog, that I deplore showing off in all its forms but particularly in an academic context. To be told that I was one of the despised tribe of show offs therefore came as something of a shock. In fact I'm not sure that I said anything for the rest of the forty minutes he so graciously spared me.

Of course he may have believed sincerely that that was what I was doing, and thought he was doing me a favour by nipping a nasty tendency in the bud. If so he could have found a more constructive way of raising the point, and also had the courtesy to listen to my somewhat strangled denials. But he didn't.

It took me a long time to get over this and while I was recovering I couldn't write anything - not a comment on Facebook, not a blog post, not an e-mail. Because once you start thinking about it everything you say could be taken, if someone were determined to do so, as showing off. Where lies the line between sharing exciting things with friends and showing off what a wonderful life you have? Suddenly everything I wrote was suspect, and I started to worry that everyone who read anything I wrote thought I was a nasty little show off.

And of course I couldn't go back to writing my thesis, because every word I chose,  every turn of phrase, every idea put forward, every unusual but pertinent comparison - what are they but showing off? I daresay the guy never gave what he was saying a second thought, but perhaps he should. Last time I looked supervisors were supposed to help and encourage, not turn you into a trembling wreck who daren't put pen to paper.

^ and excuse me for trying to get myself off the hook, but actually I suspect the vast majority of people don't know that classic Gaelic poetry occasionally  takes a circular form.

Bake Off Blues

And no I'm not about to moan and whimper about how the BBC has lost the rights to show The Great British Bake-Off. There are several reasons for this.

 

1 - The program, judging by the current series, has totally lost the plot, and I'm not sure that I would have bothered watching another year, whoever broadcast it.

2 - Unlike what seems to be half the viewing public of Britain I do not worship Mary Berry as a god, Paul Hollywood I can take or leave and  I am not a fan of the presenting style of Mel'n'Sue. I especially dislike their constant use of the seaside humour pun, which almost everyone else in the world seems to think is central to the success of the program. All I can say to that claim is Not for Me.

3 - The BBC have moaned and whimpered and whinged enough about this on their own behalf.

 

4-- There are more important things  to worry about. Really people! with the world as it is should this actually be a front page story in newspapers who claim to be serious?

No, the bake off blues under consideration here are my own personal ones. Regular readers may recall that I was planning to take a recipe from each week's program and try it out myself. In theory this is a great idea, but how has it worked out in practice?

 

Not well, has to be the answer. First off was Lee's St Clement's drizzle which, again as regular readers will recall,  was not a success.  Next up I made these from biscuit week

These are Benjamina's Iced Chocolate and Orange Zest biscuits. They don't look like hers, because she made hers in the shape of a bunch of flowers and iced them appropriately, but I don't have a cutter shaped like a bunch of flowers and it did say in the recipe that a 6cm round cutter would do just as well.

 

I can't call these a total failure because texture wise they were, rather surprisingly , spot on. They had that 'snap' that Paul and Mary look for in a biscuit and they were nice and crumbly when you bit into them. But gentles  there's the rub, as Shakespeare didn't quite say, because the fact is they didn't taste very nice, due to having far too much cocoa in them and therefore being more than a little bitter. I hasten to add that they had in them the exact amount of cocoa as per the recipe, but for our taste that was just too much.

 

Well by this stage  I was starting to wonder if perhaps there was something wrong with our taste buds and perhaps this bake a Bake-Off thing a week wasn't such a good idea, a suspicion confirmed by the universe over the next few weeks of the program.

 

After biscuits it was bread week. The bakers started off having to produce a chocolate loaf, which was a non starter for me because I have long held the view that bread dough and chocolate do not go together and I have recently given up eating chocolate anyway for health reasons. The technical challenge was something previously unheard of, a sort of German steamed bun which looked anaemic and horrible and which I would never dream of cooking, and the showstopper task was to make a plaited loaf using three different sorts of dough. A non-starter of a week.

 

Next up was batter week. This was trailed as a Bake Off first which is hardly surprising because I know very few bakers who would think of batter as the stuff of baking (except for the use, in North America, of the term batter for a cake or muffin mix). I was amazed, while watching the first round to discover how difficult some people find it to make Yorkshire puddings. Again I contend Yorkshire pudding is not baking, but cooking, although it is one of the few bits of cooking I am deft at, having learned it at my other's knee. The technical challenge was lacy pancakes. Lacy pancakes? What is the point of a lacy pancake? What are you supposed to do with it? The point about pancakes is surely the filling; pray tell me, what sort of filling can you put on a lacy pancake? I say on since obviously to wrap it up and put a filling in would be to defeat the object of producing a heart shaped lacy pancake in the first place. Finally they got to make churros with a dipping sauce; again I say, that is not baking . That is cooking, in my mind. I might stretch to include the churro as a baked good of sorts: I would deny it on the  grounds that it is deep fried, but there again so are doughnuts... However sauces are not baking, sauces are cooking. So of the three things on offer for an amateur baker to give a go to, one I could do, one I thought was pointless and one I thought wasn't really baking. So again I didn't bother.

 

This week was pastry week. It included miniature Danish pastries, and as it happens Danish pastries are on my Project 60 list, but when I do them I'll be using a recipe from my tried and tested M & S Good Home Baking book, since it has never yet led me to bake anything I didn't like the taste of once it was in my mouth - unlike Bake Off which is currently running a 100% record in that direction.

 

Next week incidentally is being trailed as 'Botanical Week' whatever that is - like I said, they appear to have lost the plot.

An Unexpected Bonus - The Marriage of Figaro

After  we had booked our opera holiday way back when, we got a letter saying that the company had managed to source some tickets for The Marriage of Figaro at the Royal Opera House in Stockholm and would we like to buy some. We thought about it briefly, but came to the conclusion that what with Drottningholm and the train trip to the Festival at Skaret we would probably be all opera'd out by the Monday night so we declined. However we were starting to regret this decision quite early on, so when the tour leader came round saying that there were two free tickets going because a couple had had to cancel their holiday altogether and would anyone like them, we bit his hand off as the saying goes. And we're so glad we did.

 

The Roya Opera House in Stockholm is a lovely building inside and out. You're obviously not allowed to take photographs of the performances but here are some pics I managed to grab of the interior before the opera began.

 

 

Quite ornate and not usually the sort of thing that I like - but opera houses are all about swagger and drama.

 

The production of Figaro was quite the oddest I have ever seen. It was set in what appeared to be a Grand Hotel in the 1930s, presumably on the French or Italian Riviera. In some ways this worked quite well, in other ways it was so-so and of course in some ways it was just silly, because the opera isn't actually written to be set in a hotel but on a large private estate and this gives rise to some odd moments in the action. Note, I'm not against up-dating or re-siting opera per se. I saw a fantastic Tosca set in Mussolini's Italy once which really worked, and a 1950s Boheme which was fine and even the infamous ENO scrapyard set Carmen had a certain amount going for it. But you know, you have to be careful.

 

Leaving aside the setting, this Figaro was Open Season for gropers. Everyone was groping everyone else, to the extent that the production was not 'erotic' as heralded in the program but bizarrely and banal-ly (which probably isn't a word) boringly unerotic.  I suppose there's no reason why Cherubino shouldn't be bi-sexual, but Figaro and the Count as well?? Figaro himself was also portrayed as violently sadistic, which again may ( just may, I'm not convinced) be supported by the libretto but it's not something that I've seen before and not something I'm keen to see again in a hurry. This is also the only time I've watched The Marriage of Figaro and wanted to slap Cherubino every time he appeared on stage. However that may be how we're supposed to see him.

 

The sad thing was that many people were so overwhelmed by horror/disgust/annoyance at the production that they couldn't see past it to the excellent singing and acting going on on the stage and the equally excellent work being done by the orchestra in the pit. If your production gets in the way of the singers, that's a pretty cardinal sin in my book. We have just booked to go and see Scottish Opera's Marriage of Figaro at the end of October, a revival of Sir Thomas Allen's recent  production for them, and that I know will be a lot more traditional. You don't want traditional every time, but I'll happily settle for it on this occasion, if only as an antidote!