Northward Ho!

After a really lovely week of family visitors, culminating in the warmest Halloween on record in the UK, we’re suddenly being reminded that it’s November after all. DD and her family are safely home again and here in Wales the temperature has dropped drastically during the day, the wind is getting up and the rain has started to lash the windows.

It’s the kind of weather that usually  turns one’s mind to thoughts of semi-hibernation, but not in our case. Instead, as we recover from a busy week of talking and laughing and eating and playing board games, DH and I are simultaneously making preparations to head off on Monday on our autumn migration to the north coast of Scotland.

DD and I bonding over my fiendish birthday jigsaw

It will be a shorter visit than usual, but we’re really looking forward to the journey through such glorious scenery and to seeing our friends again. While DH is busy with the database project he’s working on for a local group, I’ll be settling down to knit and natter with the best of them, getting on with a sadly-delayed pair of socks for him, while catching up on all the news. I’ll also have lots of time to make up for my recent shameful neglect of your blogs and find out what you’ve been doing with yourselves whilst I’ve been otherwise engaged.

The very small campervan won’t be transporting us this time. Instead, for both speed and comfort, we’re travelling in the extremely small car. This means that I’m packing with great care and selectivity and DH is reconciling himself to not taking almost all his tools with him, as he usually tries to.

It will be wonderful to see the North-West Highlands again, knowing that when we return, it will be to the new house, which already feels as though we’ve lived here for much longer than three weeks. Who said retirement is boring?

Starting all over again

Towards the end of January the nice nurse who discharged me from hospital after my emergency hernia operation issued dire warnings of what might happen if I didn't avoid all strain to my newly-repaired stomach muscles for the next six weeks. Being a biddable sort of person when it really matters, I've obeyed her instructions, despite chafing at the restriction, so this is how I've been filling my time apart from blogging.

Rather too much of this

And quite a lot of these

A pair of these for me

And another for DD

Some of this - sermons and Lent talk

Now, finally, the six weeks are up and I’m looking forward to my new-found freedom. OK, it comes with some disadvantages, such as no longer having any excuse for not giving the vacuum cleaner its accustomed exercise, but it does mean I can finally get back into the swing of things and do something more physically demanding than knitting or desk work.

One of the casualties of this enforced period of rest has, of course, been clarinet practice. Playing a clarinet is very hard on the stomach muscles, which means that, after only a month of learning, I've had six weeks when I've not been allowed to blow a note. This afternoon I waved DH off for another visit to his mother, so this weekend I can practise to my heart’s content. What’s the betting that when I dust the cobwebs off the clarinet tomorrow, I’ll be back to my initial squeaks and odd notes? Ah well, I'd better take a lesson from Fred and Ginger...

Some images via Google

New Year, new challenge

I’m just passing through after a quiet, but deeply enjoyable, Christmas visit to DD and her family, to be followed tomorrow by a New Year visit to DS for Grandson#3’s tenth birthday on Epiphany. I've spent the past couple of days doing the laundry, and yet more baking to take with us, and also getting to grips with my new challenge to myself.

To mark a new year and my 200^th blog post, I've finally done something I’ve had in the back of my mind for a long time and started to learn to play the clarinet! Grandson#2 has kindly lent me his spare clarinet to be going on with and he and DD patiently demonstrated the basics to get me going until I’m mobile again and can find myself a teacher locally.

So far I’ve mastered the first five notes of the scale and can fairly reliably get a proper note rather than a squeak or, even worse, silence, and have even managed to play a couple of very simple tunes. At the age of 67 I've reminded myself what it feels like to be a complete beginner at something and I’m enjoying myself enormously.

DH is still rolling his eyes a little at the prospect of my practising all over the house, but is, I think, starting to realise that I do mean to continue as far as I can go, though I will never reach anywhere near the artistry in this slow movement from Mozart’s clarinet concerto. This is one of my very favourite pieces of music, which many years ago sowed the seed of my love of the clarinet’s versatility and wonderfully mellow sound.

I wish you all a very happy New Year. In return, please wish me luck…. 

Image via Google

A wonderful excuse

After yesterday’s snowfall DH and I find ourselves confined to barracks for the next few days. The drifts in our lane aren't deep, but we have no pressing appointments and thus feel no urgent need to dig ourselves out. Instead we’re using our enforced isolation to catch up with things or simply indulge ourselves with our favourite occupations.

This afternoon, while DH has been watching snooker on TV, I've revelled in the humour and humanity of the Call The Midwife Christmas special which DS downloaded onto my laptop during our Christmas visit. The new series starts tomorrow evening and I have to be up-to-date, don’t I? In addition I've almost finished the first of the new pair of socks for DH, but most of all I've been reading, and not just blogs either.

For Christmas Santa bought me three books and I've been reading them alongside each other ever since. The first is The Grand Designer by Rosemary Hannah, a fascinating and beautifully illustrated biography of the immensely rich Third Marquis of Bute, who was one of the most lavish patrons of the arts in nineteenth-century Britain. The second is the hugely enjoyable Letters and Diaries of Kathleen Ferrier, edited by Christopher Fifield, which reveals this wonderful singer’s warm and engaging personality and her acute and often wicked sense of humour. In complete contrast the third is Simon’s Cat by Simon Tofield,  a great collection of cartoons, perfect to dip into whenever I want a quick chuckle.

But, I hear you all cry, none of these is fiction and we all know Perpetua reads a lot of fiction. Indeed I do, but I borrow most of it from our local county library service or otherwise the Transit household would soon be stony broke. At the moment there are two very different  authors I’m thoroughly enjoying. 

The first is Barbara Nadel and I am indebted to Ayak for my introduction to this splendid writer of crime fiction. I have written before of my liking for the Venice mysteries  of Donna Leon and her wonderful creation, Commissario Guido Brunetti. In the same vein, but with the even more exotic setting of Istanbul, are Barbara Nadel’s deeply humane novels about her unlikely hero, Inspector Çetin İkmen. Sympathetically characterised and beautifully written, I find each grips me from the first page to the last and I’m left wanting more.

In complete contrast are the light, frothy, but very enjoyable Daisy Dalrymple mysteries by Carola Dunn. Set in the Britain of the early 1920’s, these novels are pure escapism and none the worse for that. Well-plotted, fast-moving and often funny, they are the literary equivalent of a foaming cappuccino, complete with chocolate sprinkles, rather than the strong, dark, Turkish coffee of Barbara Nadel’s books.

With companions like these to keep me entertained, you can understand why I’m in no great hurry to see the snow disappear.....

Settling in

I must be getting old. Even though we enjoy the journey north very much indeed, it does seem to take us longer to get over it each time. Still, we've caught up on our sleep, got the stiffness out of our knees and are starting to pick up the reins of life in the chilly north.

Now the rain has stopped and we can get outside without getting soaked, DH is happily occupied filling his new shed with all his ‘stuff’. I on the other hand have been to my first Knit and Natter of this visit, where I finished yet another pair of socks for him. I’m also tackling the garden, as our few shrubs have grown wildly since our last visit. When we arrived, late on Sunday, we almost had to hack our way through the enormous buddleia outside the kitchen window to get to the door.

A view to wake up to - the Kyle of Tongue from the bedroom window

The weather today has been cold, but brilliantly sunny, and the landscape is looking breathtakingly beautiful. It’s definitely soup weather, so I tried a new recipe today and am feeling wonderfully replete.  Small, inconsequential details of a very quiet life, but oh, so satisfying. 

Socks - for Rubye J 

A day in the life….

…of a Grandma of visiting grandsons.

• Breakfast on yet another grey and rainy morning - cereal, juice and lots of chatter.

• A trip into town to Grandma’s sister’s house for some piano practice. Grandsons are both due to play in their teacher’s pupil concert next week and Grandma and Grandpa don’t have a piano.

• An early lunch because Grandma is due to take a service for the local Mothers’ Union branch 8 miles away at 1.30pm., leaving Grandpa to supervise half-term homework and play pool, snooker and various other indoor games with grandsons.

• A welcome cup of tea with chocolate biscuits as Grandma and grandsons  resume yesterday’s unfinished game of Killer Bunnies. Grandson#2 is eventually declared the winner, while Grandma is still vainly trying to learn the rules.

• Grandma, having recklessly promised pancakes for supper on their last evening, spends the next hour chained to the stove, feeding Grandpa and grandsons (and occasionally herself) with an endless succession of pancakes with cheese, pancakes with grated chocolate, pancakes with apricot jam, pancakes with the traditional lemon juice and sugar…. In the meantime Grandpa and grandsons are chained to the TV, watching an endless succession of episodes of Star Wars: the Clone Wars. Grandma has no idea who won, but everyone seems happy.

Image via Google

• Finally Grandma, having tucked the grandsons into bed, crawls to her computer, only to find that the router is malfunctioning yet again and she can’t access any of her favourite blogs. She can read them in Google Reader, but can’t then go to them to comment. Grandma hopes her friends will forgive her silence and keep posting. The reading is fun, though the links and the photos don’t always load. Sigh…. Grandma really, really hopes Grandpa will agree that a new router is needed - NOW!

Going to the baths

Serendipity is a wonderful thing. A few posts ago, when I was writing about one of my favourite films, my ageing memory let me down yet again and I had to go online to remind myself of the names of the cinemas of my childhood. As I googled my home-town and the links came up, I was immediately distracted by a reference to the town’s swimming-baths and the memories came flooding back.

Sadly, the link led to a newspaper account of the almost complete demolition of the building I knew so well, to make way for the construction of a multi-million pound leisure centre which opened 2 years ago. Only the central part of the façade, with its pillars and steps, was retained to provide a link with the past.

The impressive facade of the baths

The baths which formed an unforgettable part of my childhood and teenage years were built in the early 1930s, at the height of the Depression, with the majority of manual labour carried out as part of an unemployment scheme, financially assisted by the government (present-day governments take note?)  The style was definitely influenced by Art Deco and the building was among the most noteworthy in our small industrial town. The baths were opened in 1933 by the future King George VI and were intended to be used as swimming facilities in the summer months, and as an assembly and dance hall throughout the winter.

The 'big plunge' drained ready for covering

The large pool (always known to us as the ‘big plunge’) would be drained in the autumn and covered with wooden flooring, providing a very spacious area for dancing and other activities. I still vividly remember the New Year’s Eve dance that I attended with my next sister and how I left early and went home (walking at least half the 4 mile distance in the dark for lack of buses) because I was tired of sitting like a wallflower at the edge of the dance floor. It’s not always fun being a teenager.....

By the end of the 1960s life and leisure had changed so much that the dance-hall became financially unviable and after that the baths offered year-round swimming. But I’m getting ahead of myself, and the memories that really stick in my mind are of swimming there and, above all, of the weekly trips to the baths from my village primary school each summer term for those all-important swimming lessons.

My primary school was a small, two-teacher, Church of England school with about 50 pupils. Only the juniors in the ‘Big Class’ were eligible to go swimming, the infants in the ‘Little Class’ being considered too young. My memory isn’t at its clearest at this point, but I think Wednesday was our swimming afternoon, and as soon as lunch was over we got ready to catch the bus into town, accompanied by our teacher.

Primary school children always used the small pool or ‘plunge’ (I’m not sure I’d even heard the use of the word pool for swimming back then) and we only graduated to the big plunge when we went to senior school and could more or less swim. I freely admit to not having enjoyed the swimming lessons very much, mainly because I’m so short-sighted that without my glasses I couldn’t recognise the children in the pool with me, let alone see the teacher properly. 

There is  something more than a little disconcerting in trying to learn something when the world around you is a blur and when you only get to practice during one term out of three. However I persevered, and though I’m still a poor swimmer, I did manage to swim my ‘breadth’ and get the first certificate and was making good progress towards swimming my ‘length’ by the time I left for senior school in 1957.

The part of the afternoon I remember with most pleasure was after we had dried and dressed ourselves and were waiting for the bus home. We always had at least a quarter of an hour to wait for the bus and so our teacher would take us into the market hall next to the bus station and let us buy broken biscuits at the grocery stall there.

Those were the days when butter, sugar and biscuits were all sold loose and weighed out to order and the inevitable broken biscuits would be put to one side and sold cheaply by the two or four ounces to schoolchildren. As soon as we were given our bags, we would look eagerly to see what this week’s mixture consisted of and feel distinctly disappointed if there were too many rich tea biscuits and not enough custard creams. J

Some years later, in the early 1960s, I found myself behind that same grocery counter, weighing out the loose foodstuffs as I earned extra pocket money by working at a Saturday job. By then I could swim as well as I was ever going to and even enjoyed going swimming out of school, though my surrounding were still a blur.

So many memories conjured up by a single Google link. Serendipity indeed.....

Snatching a quiet moment

Today has been a lull, a rest day, a brief interlude between a very happy and enjoyable Christmas with our daughter’s family and what will be a similarly happy and enjoyable New Year celebration with our son’s.

On the day before Christmas Eve DH and I travelled up to Yorkshire, taking his mother with us. Between then and yesterday, when we drove back down to my mother-in-law’s home, we went to church twice, ate very well but not too much, talked and laughed a great deal, played Grandson #1’s new card game to much hilarity (well, what else would you expect with a game entitled Killer Bunnies and the Quest for the Magic Carrot?) and generally caught up with each other’s lives very satisfyingly.

Beware the Bunnies!

I even found time to knit one and a half socks out of the pair I've been promising DH for ages, often as I listened to DD and her two sons playing their various musical instruments.

Tomorrow, DS will arrive with his wife and Grandson #3 for what promises to be an equally entertaining and hilarious visit. The games will be different and there will be less music, but there will be plenty of talk and laughter and catching-up with all the details that don’t always get across in phone calls and emails. Our offspring lead such busy lives with all their work and family responsibilities and we’re always glad when we can spend more than the occasional day or two with them.

Naturally all this activity means that I’m very behind with my blog-reading, but I promise to catch up once we’re safely back home in Wales next week. In the meantime, I would like to take this opportunity to wish you all a very happy, healthy and peaceful New Year.

Images via Wylio

I have a confession to make

My name is Perpetua and I am a Sudoku addict. It all started so innocently one winter’s evening up in the north of Scotland. I had always resisted the temptation to try my hand at the puzzle which so enthralled some of my friends, but this evening I’d finished my book, we have no TV there, I just wasn’t in the mood to cast on that second sock and so I picked up a pencil and tried my hand at the ‘easy’ Sudoku in that day’s paper.

Let me say at the outset that I don’t have a puzzler’s temperament. I’m useless at crosswords, especially the cryptic kind, and have never had the patience to learn the puzzles which fill the odd corners of the average newspaper. I’ve always been a reader, or a knitter, and so I thought I could just dip my toe into the pool marked Sudoku and take it out again with no harm done.

Little did I know what would follow from that first careless attempt. To my satisfaction I did manage to finish that initial puzzle, but it was several days before I felt like trying another. But gradually the intervals between attempts grew shorter, until I realised that unless we changed our habits and began to buy a paper every day, I’d need to find another source of supply.

I know Sudoku can be played electronically – on the computer or on a little handheld screen, such as Grandson #1 enjoys using, but I’m a paper and pencil girl to my core. Then I discovered that you can buy books of Sudoku puzzles, some of which even include a dinky propelling pencil with a built-in eraser. That was the moment when the attraction became an addiction.

Now while waiting at the airport or the station or even at the dentist's, my bag contains not only my current paperback, but my Sudoku book and pencil. No longer do I groan when the plane, bus or train is delayed, because it gives me time to fit in just one more puzzle. In the mornings I’m as likely to do a puzzle with my morning cup of tea as open a book, since I’d have to put the book down sooner or later, whereas the puzzle will only take a few minutes.

I’m still an avid reader and a keen knitter, but I’m also hooked on the satisfaction I feel when I manage to solve a particularly fiendish puzzle, especially when I can do it with as few written notes as possible. I think of it as exercise for the brain, which, given my advancing years, is as important as exercise for the body, or at least that’s my excuse. Now where did I put that pencil?

Image via Wylio