Scottish Words.

30 November 2009 23:37

Bidey-in.

In Scotland if you are – as my mother would have put it – living in sin with someone, then they are described as being your bidey-in. I really like this wee phrase as it describes the relationship perfectly and it is the same whether it is a man or a woman. They are the person that you stay in with, rather than just someone that you go out with.

I don’t like this modern thing nowadays where everyone is described as someone’s ‘partner’. I’ve even heard the ‘p’ word being used to describe wives and husbands, which I really can’t understand. I wouldn’t be at all chuffed to be described in that way, seeing that we went to the bother of actually getting married and paying £7.50 for the marriage licence.

We had a family meal out last night and our youngest son and his lovely ‘bidey-in’ managed to come through from Dundee for it, but I’ve got a horrible feeling that they describe themselves as partners on Facebook.

It would be great if everyone would adopt that lovely non-sexist term of bidey-in. It just sounds so homely to me.

I’m scunnered by partners. They should all have their bahoukies skelped, and become bidey-ins.

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Categories: Scottish words

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The Country House by John Galsworthy

27 November 2009 21:43

The only other Galsworthy books which I have read have been The Forsyte Saga series so I was interested to see what one of his more obscure books was like. Previously I have found his books to be very enjoyable and well written and I wasn’t disappointed with this one.

I galloped through it at a good pace because I found it to be so straightforward and clear, which isn’t always the way with Victorian novels. Strictly speaking, I suppose that The Country House is Edwardian as it was first published in 1907. However the action takes place in 1891. The themes are similar to those of The Forsyte Saga – family, marriage and infidelity.

Chapter 1 starts with guests arriving for a house party at Worsted Skeynes, it is the first shooting party of the season. At first I felt that there were rather a lot of characters being thrown at me and everyone seemed to be described minutely. I was a bit worried that it would all be a bit too much for bedtime reading but they all just seemed to fall into place without any complications.

The estate is owned by Horace Pendyce and has been in his family for generations but although it is farmed on model lines, it still runs on a slight loss. He is married to Margery and they have grown up children, 2 boys and 2 girls.

The eldest son, George owns a racehorse and has developed a secret gambling habit whilst living in town. A relationship develops between him and Helen Bellew, who is the estranged wife of a neighbour. She has left her husband, supposedly because he has a drink problem, however as she is a bit of a man-eater, there is always the possibility that she drove him to drink. They are regarded as both being at fault in the break up of the marriage, but when Jasper Bellew serves divorce papers to George, his parents are horrified to discover that he isn’t the sort of character that they had thought him to be.

The thought of such a scandal in his family is almost more than the squire can bear and there is a meeting to discuss the situation with the local rector Mr. Barter, the family solicitor and a cousin. George refuses to attend.

The rest of the book is about George’s parents reaction to his behaviour and how it affects their lives and the lives of those around them.

The book deals with the hypocrisy of the divorce laws, as they were then. Actually they didn’t change until fairly recently, it was much the same in the 1970s.

I don’t want to give too much away and spoil things for any would-be readers. Suffice to say that I’m glad that I read the book, although I wouldn’t read it again.

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Categories: Books

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Knitting

25 November 2009 23:46

I was taught to knit by my mum when I was about 5 years old using teeny wee needles. Then at about the age of 7 we had to knit a tea cosy at school, a truly hideous thing. The boys did raffia work while the girls knitted.

In the 1970s there was quite a resurgence in craft work, it was all a bit hippy-ish I suppose. So knitting really took off again and I got right into the pointy sticks and became quite proficient at it.

My pride and joy was the Fair Isle jumper which I knitted for my husband around 1980 and it is still going strong after all these years of careful washing.

Fair Isle Jumper

So as you can see I wasn’t bad at knitting and the wool wasn’t too expensive then so I did quite a lot of it even although we were pretty skint (poor) back then.

Later on in the 80′s, the boys arrived with just 19 months in between them and as you can imagine there was quite a fair amount of cot blanket, bootees and matinee jacket knitting going on. Certainly for the first baby anyway – then a strange thing happened and my brain seemed to be – well I can only describe it as being ‘hijacked’, and suddenly I couldn’t concentrate on anything much beyond feeds and nappies. Our first boy hardly slept at all which didn’t help matters.

So boy number 2 hardly got anything knitted for him and the matinee jacket which I did manage is a very much plainer effort than his brother’s.

After that I just gave up for a long time and have only recently picked up the needles again, but I was really shocked to see how much knitting wool had gone up in price. I can understand that there are a lot of processes that a sheep fleece has to go through before you get to a ball of wool, but I know for a fact that the sheep farmers are getting pennies for the fleeces. It seems such a shame when they have all the hard work and worry of the sheep. In fact the farmers are being fleeced.

So what with me trying to tidy things up in the house and get rid of stuff or use it up in some way, I decided to knit with the left over bits of wool which have accumulated in various work baskets over the years. And as I’m trying to knit my way back up to Fair Isle and Aran standard again I decided to start back at the beginning with squares with a slight difference, just to make them a bit more interesting.

Wool Squares

These knitted shapes are actually described as “shells” and I found the pattern instructions in a 1940s knitting book called Modern Knitting Illustrated, which has patterns for everything that the well dressed war time person needed. Including knitted knickers (very itchy I imagine).

Use a size of needles which suits the left-over wool which you have and cast on 41 stitches and knit about 8 rows in garter stitch. Still working in garter stitch, knit 2 stitches together each side of the middle stitch, which you should mark to make life easier for you. I slip a safety pin onto the middle stitch which you can pull on to help you decide when you should be knitting 2 together. Knit the next row straight and continue in this way, decreasing in the middle of each alternate row until 3 stitches remain. Knit these 3 stitches together and fasten off.

The shells can then be sewn together to form a pattern or just randomly and it is more decorative than just plain squares.

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Categories: Crafts, Fashion, Knitting, Make do and mend, Nostalgia

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The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins

23 November 2009 22:47

I’ve been trailing our copy of The Moonstone around for over 33 years and six house moves and over 500 miles then back again. So it was definitely overdue for some real attention.

The book was a school prize which my husband won for first place in science in 1967 but he claims that he has never read it.

It is basically a mystery story which was first published in 1868. There was a bit of a boom in detective stories around about the end of the First World War and at that time the genre began to be seriously discussed.

One well known novelist had the opinion that The Moonstone was probably the finest detective novel ever written. As you can imagine that gave Wilkie Collins’s books a great boost. Until then he had been seen as nothing special and quite overlooked.

Apparently Collins didn’t regard it as a mystery novel – he said “The attempt made, here, is to trace the influence of character on circumstances. The conduct pursued, under a sudden emergency, by a young girl supplies the foundation on which I have built this book.”

There is quite a lot of humour in the book which I must admit I hadn’t been expecting so that was a nice surprise.

At one point I asked my husband if he was sure that he had never read the book as a youngster, he denied that he ever had but I have my doubts.

When Mr. Betteredge decided to get married to his housekeeper it was because it would be more economical for him. As a housekeeper he had to pay her so much each week, but as a wife she had to give him her services for nothing.

That attitude fairly well matches my husband’s – or is that just the way with all men.

Most of the comedy is provided by Miss Clack who is a very enthusiastic Christian who spends a lot of her time trying to get people to read the tracts which she scatters liberally around the place. She reminded me very much of born again Christians who used to live next door to us.

All in all, I quite enjoyed The Moonstone although it isn’t a book which I would want to read again. Too many books to try to get through anyway and I’m looking forward to The Woman in White, of which I have heard good reports.

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Categories: Books

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Scottish Words

22 November 2009 23:37

I had intended only doing one Scottish word each week but this week it will have to be two as they go together like fish and chips.

Skelp.
A skelp is the Scots word for a good old fashioned smack. I know that it is all terribly unPC and such but who cares. There are times when small children just have to be skelped because they are too young to reason with.
Nothing works better than a quick skelp, especially when you have just about had a heart attack as you have caught the wee darling doing something completely mental like sticking a screwdriver into an electric socket. And don’t say that the sockets should have had safety covers over them. We tried that and the kids could remove them in a second, in fact their dad had to ask them to remove the safety covers for him when he wanted to use a socket as his big fingers couldn’t get a grip on the covers to prise them off.
The word which skelped is usually followed with is the lovely word,

Bahoukie.
I think that it will be obvious what this word means. It’s a bottom or bum of course – or a backside if you prefer.
So the phrase – If you don’t watch it you’ll get a skelped bahoukie was probably one of the most used threats when I was growing up and I’m pleased to say that it hasn’t quite died out yet.

You have to be careful though as there is a cut off age – after which the threat might be used but not actually administered, especially if you have boys. After all, you don’t want them to grow up paying some “lady” to skelp their bahoukies for them.

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Categories: Scottish words

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Some good news.

19 November 2009 23:22

The firstborn son got the job that he really wanted yesterday. He will be starting as the website editor of a very old university soon. This has been a long time coming as he graduated over a year ago and there has been absolutely nothing coming up in the jobs market for graduates.

So, we are all thrilled to bits. I’m hoping that things are looking up for everybody else now as this recession is getting beyond a joke. It is so depressing, especially for young people who have spent years studying only to find nothing for them at the end of it all.

I wish that everyone who is arguing over how much student tuition fees should be would just remember that they got their education for free and they had student grants too.

The younger generation is going to have a hard enough time ahead of them what with paying for the mess that the irresponsible bankers have got us all into. And they probably won’t even have any sort of old age pension to look forward to at all.

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Categories: Current Affairs

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Favourite Books

18 November 2009 22:31

I’ve nearly finished reading The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins which I am enjoying. I had been thinking of doing a blog post about favourite books as I often find that people have one particular book which they go back to time and time again at times of stress or just to cheer themselves up. Sort of comfort blanket books. By coincidence the character of Mr. Betteredge in the The Moonstone has a comfort book and his is Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe.

So I thought it was about time I got around to this post.

My mother-in-law’s comfort book was Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell. I dread to think how many times she must have read it and for that reason it is a book which I would never read. Not even if it was the only book which I had on a desert island.

While there are books which I re-read every now and then like Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and all of Jane Austen’s, I think the one which fits the bill best as my comfort read is Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier. True it isn’t very comforting and in parts it is positively uncomfortable but there is just something about it and it grabs you in from the very first sentence – “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.”

If you wanted to write a book I would say it would be a good idea to avoid doing what is basically an updated re-write of a classic, as you would think that it would be bound to be a pale shadow of the original. But du Maurier certainly managed to come up with something which is itself worthy of the description of classic.

And if you don’t feel up to reading the book the original film starring Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine is always a treat to watch.

So, if you have some favourite comfort reads, I would be interested to know what they are.

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Categories: Books, Nostalgia

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Early Christmas – a bit of a rant

16 November 2009 23:38

Christmas just seems to get earlier and earlier every year, but I was absolutely amazed to see that someone quite close to where I stay has already got their Christmas tree up.

What on earth are they thinking of? Children can often drive you up the wall by constantly asking you when they can put the tree up, it’s almost as bad as the ubiquitous – Are we nearly there yet? – when you go on a journey. However, I happen to know that the offending house has no children in it, only one woman inhabitant. So she has absolutely no excuse and she must just have something mentally wrong with her.

By the time we get to Christmas the tree will be swathed with dust; lovely.

It’s bad enough having it all kicking off in the shops in August, it goes on for so long that by the time we get to the middle of December I am heartily sick of the whole thing, in fact I am completely scunnered.

Then we have the god botherers who don’t seem to realise that the good old pagans got there long before them and the Christians just hi-jacked the pagan festival which was designed to get us all through the long, dark winter days without cutting our throats.

So this blog is having nothing to do with the C word for at least another month. It is a Christmas free zone.

Long live grumpiness.

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Categories: Rant

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Scottish Words

15 November 2009 23:39

I think that the various countries and regions that make up Britain all have dialect words of their own which are in danger of being lost.

My son’s partner comes from Rochdale and the only word which she knows from that area is ‘crockle’ – which apparently means to go over on your ankle. I really like it, but it isn’t a word which you can use very often, unless you’re unlucky enough to have very weak ankles.

I’ve noticed recently that quite a few Scottish words have found their way into mainstream British vocabulary. The words manky and minging spring to mind and I think that possibly we have Justin and Colin to thank for those ones being taken up by the rest of the country. At first my attitude was — they’re nicking our culture, but I’ve decided that it is a better option than the alternative, which is losing the words altogether.

Scottish dialect words tend to be looked down upon by the so called ‘middle classes’, I think they are seen as being ‘common’, and we can’t have that can we? So quite a lot of words have been in danger of dying out, which would be a real shame.

To combat this I’m starting a series of weekly blog posts featuring one Scottish word each week.

This week’s word is – scunnered.

Scunnered means that you are sick fed up with something or someone, you are totally disgusted to the point of feeling ill.
In the childrens T.V. programme Supergran there was a character called Skunner Campbell, slightly different spelling but he had the name because he was a dastardly character whom Supergran was absolutely scunnered with.

I am scunnered with the government because they seem to be letting the bankers away with everything and won’t step in to stop them from giving themselves massive bonuses.

So you get the general idea of scunnered, I’m sure. Use it – don’t lose it.

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Categories: Nostalgia, Scottish words, Television

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Speedsters

15 November 2009 00:25

Jackie Stewart

Speedsters promo picture

And now for something completely different ….
If you are interested in motor-sport and you happen to be within easy travelling distance of Perth, then you might want to pay a visit to Perth Museum and Art Gallery, 78 George Street, Perth.

At the moment they are having an exhibition of photographs in celebration of Scottish motor sports legends. It’s called Speedsters and there are 47 photographs on show in the upper round gallery of the museum. Here are some of them.

Speedsters

Part of display

They include action shots of Jim Clark and Sir Jackie Stewart. It ends with a portrait shot of Dario Franchitti. The exhibition continues until 11th December and entry is free.

Jackie Stewart was the local hero when I was growing up as he lived just along the road from me and he was the main reason I became interested in F1 racing. This has passed on to the next generation.

Here’s a film of him driving round Brands Hatch.

The museum is a great place to go to as a family because everyone is bound to find something to interest them there.

There are displays of silver, furniture, Scottish pottery and art and a lot of local history objects.

The large natural history section would probably be the favourite part for any youngsters. There are plenty of stuffed animals and geological specimens, including a large meteorite.

So if you find yourself in Perth, don’t just trawl around the shops. Give yourself a rest from consumerism and take the short walk from the High Street to the museum for a spot of something different.

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Categories: Exhibitions, Museums

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