Visiting family

During my recent visit to DerbyshireDaughter and family we enjoyed a seasonal lantern parade round a few streets in Hadfield. This is the bee lantern made by DD and the boys, M & H. When I told Toad about the lantern he expressed scepticism about the appropriateness of a bee lantern in December. I said: "ivy bee". He didn't know about ivy bees, it seems (neither did I until recently). It might not be a good ivy bee portrait but with some artistic licence and the requirements of such lanterns, it was just fine! The parade was fun and there were lots of impressive lanterns.

DD and family are very fond of board games and have some excellent ones old and new. This board is one of the new ones, Photosynthesis.

While in Derbyshire I started a temari. I haven't made one for a while so was relearning a few of the nifty ideas I'd acquired when I made them more often, such as how great circles work in thread. This design, called Phoenix by Diana Vandervoort in her book, Temari Traditions: more techniques for Japanese thread balls, does not work too well on the size of ball I was using. Well, I say 'doesn't work' but the whole ball will work when I've finished my adaptations.

Temari 2018

I thoroughly enjoyed the boys' school rendering of the Nativity play. M's part was that of a cool dude angel with tinsil-edged wings and M was a happy shepherd.

My train journey to the house where I grew up, where my mum and my youngest brother (her carer now she is old and frail) still live, was straightforward. As always the mosses and liverworts on the back garden paths were amazing. The picture shows a small part near the back door.

When I left to come back to Scotland the rising sun was glorious.

sunrise in N Lancs 13 December 2018

Bryophytes and sunlight to punctuate a two day stay during which a highlight was a visit from my eldest brother and his wife. We are a spread out family so it's good to meet up when we can. When middle brother saw the photo below he sent some of recent chill in upstate New York where he lives. See below.

mum, eldest bro, me, youngest bro, sister-in-law

Finally, on my train journey back up north (even norther, I should say) I found myself within uncomfortable hearing distance of an unconscious sniffer 😣. One learns from experience: I now travel with earplugs! In they went. They weren't needed for long as he got off at the first stop. Phew.

Pink porridge

The grandsons and their mum have been experimenting with coloured sugar for reindeer food to sell at their recent school fair. Edible glitter was rejected as not being good for reindeer or other wildlife and so, in the end, was coloured sugar. So I get to have pink porridge at their house.

Outrage about sugar on porridge will be ignored 😜

Hedge hacking continues

I didn't quite fill the bucket with dead rhododendron sticks during this morning's hedge hacking stint. Only two or three metres still to go to get the main stretch down to knee height so that I can trim it with the hedge cutter more easily. Shoulder height is too much of a strain with the weight of the hedge cutter.

Filling the old, leaky mop bucket with small sticks good for kindling and adding bigger branches and fresh cut pieces to the woodpile for future firewood is how it goes. I'm also making piles that are still in leaf do deal with later. So far I've filled a whole coal bag (they seem to drop off the local coal lorries regularly! If I find them I pick them up and bring them home) and started another.

That woodpile pic was taken about a week ago. It's more extensive now.

I also collected, as you see, that tube thingy that Toad had apparently 'planted' (chucked off the roof that he was repairing) below the den 😉. It could be a good plant marker for one of next year's orchids.








Before being driven inside again by rain I topped up my wildflower count for the week. There's a challenge on Twitter to find #thewinter10 for #wildflowerhour (8–9pm Sundays). I've found well over ten during the last three weeks. It will be interesting to see how the count progresses through the winter. Here's a compilation of a few phone pics from this week and my list of seventeen.

Walking home

Yesterday was cold but sunny, perfect for walking, so I did, from the head of the loch to home. It took me two and a half hours, not because it's a long way but because I was clambering up and down the lochside depending on the walkability of the beach. In some places there is very little beach and the banks up to the road are steep and rocky. In some places, such massive trees have fallen down into the loch that it's difficult to get past them. There was one enormous ash tree, its trunk covered in thick old ivy stems, which I couldn't go under or round so over it had to be.

Eight months ago I did the same walk though more on the road that time. One of my finds was the old boat Caol Ila. Yesterday I saw it from the other side. It's definitely a dead boat.

Anchor and rudder below

At one point I needed to climb back up to the road. Luckily there was a rope tied to the trees to help haul myself up. I'd have got rather muddy otherwise!

Took some pics of wild flowers still in flower for #thewinter10 on #wildflowerhour run by some botanists on Twitter...
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 ...and enjoyed a leafy bit of beach as I neared home.


By this time I had much aching of arthritic knees and feet to contend with. Happily painkillers, a large piece of carrot cake, and a nap dealt with the worst of that. The weather is back to cloudy and showery today.

Night baking

I woke in the small hours and couldn't get back to sleep so made a cup of tea and read for a bit. This usually sends me back to the Land of Nod in due course. This morning it didn't so I thought "More tea, and maybe a biscuit" then, realising there were no biscuits worthy of the name for my current requirements–digestives just don't cut it sometimes!–I decided to get up and make some.

Gansey jumper on over the PJs, beanie on head, socks, slippers, and off I went downstairs at 0330. For years I've followed a very good ginger biscuit recipe, by a Mrs Ruth Boyer, which is to be found on page 138 (you can tell that page of my copy has been opened a gazillion times) of Yorkshire TV's Farmhouse Kitchen recipe book published in 1978. This time I decided to modify it by swapping the ginger for ground goriander seed and cinnamon and by adding dried cranberries and white chocolate chips. My favourite supermarket-baked cookies are white choc chip and cranberry ones but shop cookies are never as good as home made ones, even when baked on site, it's just that I've never managed to replicate the chewiness. Tonight was the night to succeed!

So, with the oven heating up, by 0400 the beanie was pulled off and measuring/mixing was under way. Although the recipe says the biscuits take 20 minutes to bake, in our fan oven they only took 10.  The recipe says it makes 40 biscuits. I made 38. I have scoffed two and drunk another cup of tea. If it were not still dark I'd be outside hedge hacking. By the way, the Boggy Brae midges are still biting! Fortunately there are not many and they seem to be an effete generation so their bites are not causing much itching.

Another by the way, particularly for relations should they be reading this, that red spot beyond the table is a felt leaf patch on a heavy quilt made out of old trousers of mine, with old brushed cotton shirt fabric for backing and a cotton bedspread for wadding. The chair belonged to my maternal grandma. Yesterday I was at the funeral of the grandma of one of Toadlet's school friends so grandma thoughts are rising.

On orange

There was a deep orange stripe in the sky to the east as I walked down the hill at 7 o'clock this morning. Sitting on the bus a little later I noticed the perfectly and naturally arranged orange hair of a young man in front of me around his perfectly placed crown. I have a double crown so my hair is confused!

Later, while hedge hacking, I enjoyed the orange foliage of a large and large-leaved cotoneaster. It is springing up quite a lot here in the last few years, presumably spread by birds who eat the berries. Although I think the shrubs are invasive non-natives, they are also rather handsome at this time of year. The first one is on the lane below the cottage next door and the second is in next-door's garden. There is also one on the field side of our south fence. They cheer up dull days.

The twenty-plumed moth, or one of its relations, is still around. If it is the same one, which apparently it could be, it has now been in the house for over a month. I'm a little bit puzzled by the description in that link. It says the wings are each made up of six 'feathers', but if you actually count the quills there are ten for each wing which, given its name, Twenty-plumed moth, is what you'd expect. Hexadactyla refers to its six insect legs. I guess the fact that the scientific binomial and the English name do not actually 'match' has caused some confusion. Here it is on an orange bit of wall.

Apparently honeysuckle is this moth's foodplant. The BoggyBrae has masses of honeysuckle growing around and up various trees and over stumps. Now I need to find out what the caterpillars look like.

Three grans visit Dundee

One of us set off from South Lanarkshire and got to Dundee by bus from Glasgow. Two of us set off together from East Argyll and got there by car. After we car travellers had attempted to persuade the very modern looking parking meter, all shiny contactless pads and card insertion slots, to behave like a modern parking meter, we gave up and scrabbled in our purses for pound coins. It wasn't just us; a man tried too. We think Dundee City Council has forgotten to switch all the modern looking stuff on. Or maybe they had ambitions bigger than their tech team's current abilities. Teething problems, I suppose.

The plan was for us to visit the new Dundee V&A design museum. We all have birthdays, if we squash in one slight outlier, in the last quarter of the year and, rather than buy presents for each other, we decided this year to make an outing our joint birthday Do. How to start a tradition in one easy lesson!

The outside of the building has a certain shippiness about it, in keeping with Dundee's shipping history. Appropriately it is 'berthed' right next to Discovery. Inside all is shiny and new, as you'd expect.

shop and cafe as you come in

As is usual on these three gran meetups, we headed coffee and scone-rhymes with gone-wards first. My scone was good (large and filling) and, since I can't remember anything about the coffee, it was obviously just fine too. LanarkshireGran and I shared a small pot of jam but there was still a bit left in the wee jar. My elder daughters will remember the glove compartment in my old car, Diggory, which always housed a few little part used jam jars from motorway service stations–plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. This one got put in my pocket though.

We browsed the Scottish Design Relay exhibition. There were some lovely folded and cut paper designs which I don't seem to have photographed and various primitive weavings of beachcombed litter in the relay part. Also some impressive, more sophisticated, 'bruck' designs. Bruck is beachcombed plastic.

The Scottish Design Galleries, an enclosed area which you had to queue to get in so that it didn't get overcrowded, contained historic, more museum-like articles. The bright young things on the doors did have walkie-talkies but I discovered from chatting to one of them that they rarely use the gadgets, they just learn to sense when another bunch of people can be let in. It helps the letter-inner that the exit is visible from where she stands ;). Below are a few of my favourites.

modelled half hull of an ocean liner

The Indian shawls were simply astonishing. They were as big as small blankets for a start. The red one was made of a misture of wool, cotton and silk if I've remembered correctly. The white one is pure wool which, as you might be able to see at the bottom near the fringe, is spun into yarn almost as fine as spider silk. The model of the Edinburgh Scott Monument was what was submitted for the design competition by George Meikle Kemp who won the commission.

I did not stay as long in that exhibition as I would have liked because I was feeling a bit weird–just fighting off a cold virus or something. Hot tea and refreshingly cold water, supplied by LanarkshireGran, soon sorted me out, though later my throat started to make a fuss. A cheeseburger and a strawberry milkshake dealt with that.

That 'later' was when we wandered the city centre streets for a while after leaving the V&A. It is looking a lot smarter than it did in the late 1970s when I lived there as a student. This was nice to see. I took a couple of lamp shots for some Lake District Twitter nutters I follow for entertainment.


And we all enjoyed a meander around the Howff, loving the late roses in particular.


After our burgers LSBgran and I walked back to the dockside against a fierce breeze, saying goodbye to LanarkshireGran on the High Street as she veered off to catch her bus. Driving back westwards the lashing rain increased but we'd had a good day out.