I’m Sure I Should Be Doing Something

2 February 2012 00:16

For a few days I’ve been thinking that I’ve forgotten something crucial. I had a horrible feeling that something was happening at the beginning of February, but what?

I scrutinized my lovely Klimt calendar – no it’s BLANK. It can’t be a dental appointment because I was there recently. It’s nobody’s birthday that I can think of.

Then it dawned on me. February, 2nd is Pining for the West’s blogiversary! Phew, nothing important to worry about then, it has been three years, I can hardly believe it. How time flies when you’re having fun. My thanks to everyone who drops by, especially those who take the time to comment.

Burns Supper

25 January 2012 23:20

Did you go out to a Burns Supper or did you have a quiet one at home? It’s absolutely donkey’s years since we went to a real Burns Supper but I always have haggis, neeps and tatties on January the 25th. So feast your eyes. If you can see it through the steam!

Haggis for Burns Night

Well, maybe not. Haggis is not the most appetising of foods and it doesn’t do to dwell too much on the ingredients, but this haggis is a vegetarian one, much more pleasant all round and it tastes much the same as the real thing.

So we had a quiet night in. What about you, were you addressing the haggis – or just eating it?

Kodak no more?!

24 January 2012 23:25

Like a lot of people my age I’ve had the sad task of clearing out elderly relatives’ homes and in each of them there have been boxes of old photos and albums to look through. Hearing about the demise of Kodak on the news the other day got me thinking about my inadvertent collection of unknown folks from the past. Annoyingly very few of the photos have any information on the back but they’re still fascinating glimpses into history. I even like the Kodak wallets they came in.

I do know the story of the people in the photos below – meet Jack and his wife Weeanna. Jack was my husband’s great uncle and he was a Clydeside engineer, working in one of the many shipyards on the Clyde in the early 1900s. Unfortunately he had a bit of a fiery temper which led to him punching another chap who just happened to be the shipyard owner’s son. This led to Jack being dismissed but worse than that he was blacklisted which meant that none of the other yards would give him work. So, reluctantly he left home for America and ended up working in Ford’s Motor Company, in Detroit I suppose as he lived in Michigan. Presumably he helped build cars, a bit of a come-down from building beautiful ships.


He made the best of it though and met his wife in the US, for years the family thought her name was (wee) Anna but it was Weeanna and I have no idea where she came from. I love these photos they sent home. Jack is obviously saying – Look Mum and Dad, I’m a success now. I have my wife and children.

Here we are again with our car this time with Weeanna, our daughter and the newest addition to the family in the back of it.

This is our house with Weeanna in the doorway, haven’t I done well! It has all worked out for the best.

And we still have these images, thanks to Kodak. It’s all we do have now as Jack and his wife are long dead and even the children are probably gone too, they didn’t keep in contact after their parents’ death.

Now it looks like the end of Kodak, for photos anyway. I’m glad that I have loads of albums of my own boys when they were wee, but photos seem to be a thing of the past. It’s a bit of a shame really.

Edinburgh with Evee

12 January 2012 23:19

What a great day Evee and I had for our first ever get together in Edinburgh, a blue sky and shiny bright sunshine – what more can you ask for! Well I suppose we could have done with out that wind which cuts through your bones – but it would hardly be Edinburgh without that.

I think Evee looks great in this one I took with Edinburgh Castle in the background. It’s nothing to do with my photography ability I can assure you and I know that in the photo she took of me I will look like a complete dingbat, because I always do in photos, and that will be no slur on Evee’s photography abilities!

Evee

The only thing missing was all the other bloggers and commentors and yes – even you lurkers, you know who you are! Mind you we would have needed more than one day for us all to get to know one another, and that transporter from Star Trek, if not Samantha’s nose from Bewitched.

The photo below was taken from the top of Nelson’s Monument on Calton Hill. On the left you can see Holyrood Palace, it’s that building with all the spires and turrets like a fairy tale castle. The Scottish Parliament building is in there too, in the middle rear, with Dynamic Earth the white spiky one at the right. We still haven’t found time to walk up Arthur’s Seat, the hill in the background.

Holyrood Palace

I took the one below from Calton Hill too and it’s of Waterloo Place with Princes Street beyond and Edinburgh Castle in the background.

Princes Street, Edinburgh

We both took loads of photos but it’s a short blogpost tonight because all that rushing about early in the morning and walking around Auld Reekie has tired me out so these are just a couple of wee tasters to be getting on with. More soon.

Happy New Year 2012

1 January 2012 00:00

Scottish celebration

If you had been here for Hogmanay this is what you would have been getting to eat. Cherry cake, Madeira cake and of course shortbread which as you can see isn’t home made but was a very welcome Christmas present. The whole thing is a sort of Scottish cliche, shortbread tin and all but this year it’s a tartan free zone.

Jack is on the beer and mine is the Irish cream whiskey – yes Bailey’s. I wish I could offer you some! I hope you all have a great 2012, special good wishes go to everyone who takes the trouble to comment on ‘Pining’ or gets in touch by e-mail.

Do you remember the days when they used to have Stanley Baxter on TV at Hogmanay? Here’s one from the early 1970s I think, he always made me laugh. Can you Parliamo Glasgow?

Christmas Haul

29 December 2011 21:33

We’re nearly at the end of the year and I still haven’t mentioned any of the books I got at Christmas. So here goes:

A God and his Gifts by Ivy Compton-Burnett
The Old Bank House by Angela Thirkell
The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne

All oldies but hopefully goldies.
We don’t really bother much with big Christmas presents for each other but if we buy anything after the October holidays we tend to say to each other ‘just wrap it up for Christmas’ and that way we get what we want and have no nasty surprises. Yes I know it’s not romantic but it is practical. I hate people (Jack) spending money on things that I really don’t want.

I also got some DVDs – Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple in the shape of Margaret Rutherford – and what a shape she was! She’s the Miss Marple of my childhood and they’re real comfort viewing and always have quite a bit of comedy thrown in as well as crime.

Murder Ahoy
Murder Most Foul
Murder at the Gallop and
Murder She Said

I’ve watched two of them already as the TV hasn’t really been worth watching. On that note I must say that I was disappointed with the new version of The Borrowers, not nearly as good as the previous ones. I must admit that I was playing Scrabble whilst watching it so it didn’t have all of my attention but it just didn’t seem to have much ingenuity involved in it.

I also got a set of Cary Grant DVDs

Charade with the beautiful Audrey Hepburn (1963)
Bringing Up Baby with Katharine Hepburn (1938)
That Touch of Mink with Doris Day (1962)
I’m No Angel with Mae West (1933)

So if I get stuck in the house surrounded by snow and ice, like last year, I’ll have something to keep me entertained!

Hunters in the Snow by Pieter Bruegel

27 December 2011 23:22

Pieter Bruegel d. Ä. 106b

I love this painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. I was amazed to discover that it was painted so long ago, 1565 – as it seems quite modern to me, it must be something to do with the clean, crisp quality of it. The original is in Vienna. I first came across Hunters in the Snow about 30 years ago when a friend sent me it as a Christmas card and I managed to find a framed print of it not long afterwards. However it was one of the things which disappeared during our last removal to this house 24 years or so ago. Things always seem to go missing when we move and we moved around the country a lot before we got here.

I haven’t replaced it in all these years but I’ll really have to get around to it, or maybe I should leave it until after we downsize, just in case another removal man takes a fancy to it.

I love just about everything about it. Click on it to enlarge it and you’ll see the smaller details. I love the trees and the snow, mountains, dogs, skaters, curlers, the church in the distance, the birds, the person carrying wood for a fire across the bridge and especially the sign which is on the left hand side and is dangling lop-sided in the wind. I can just about hear it squeaking and creaking and I can almost smell the snow and the fire. I have a very eclectic taste in Art. What about you? Has anything ‘disappeared’ from a removal of yours?’

Christmas Day

27 December 2011 01:04

I’m a day late with this post but I don’t seem to have had much time to myself. As you can see we’ve had the family home for Christmas, our two boys and Laura, Gordon’s girlfriend who is as much like a daughter to us as anyone could be as they’ve been going out with each other since they were just 17 and she stayed a lot with us when they were students as she was an English student, coming from Rochdale but at Uni in Stirling so we were her local base.

We had turkey and ham with lots of roasted veggies and yes sprouts which Jack and I love anyway but this time I used the Jamie Oliver shredded sprout recipe with bacon.
Duncan, Gordon and Laura

How solemn do we all look? We had fun, honestly!

Christmas Day Table

Believe it or not, I had never made a trifle before and I put this one together, not bothering with a recipe. Next time I’ll use more jelly and less custard I think. I used a shop bought Swiss roll for the first layer then topped it with strawberries and jelly then custard and cream with strawberries topped with grated chocolate. Very tasty.

Strawberry trifle

Just so that we had a choice of puddings I also made chocolate cheesecake based on Lorraine Pascale’s recipe which you can see here. I tweaked her recipe slightly. Instead of all chocolate digestives I made a third of them Amaretto biscuits to make a more interesting combination and I did the cheesecake in two layers, the first of which was all mixed in very well and the second layer was just roughly mixed to leave some of the cream cheese unmixed which made the flavour better I think as I like a bit of a surprise in each spoonful. As you can see I had a bit of a disaster with my piping nozzle thingy and ended up scraping the melted chocolate out onto the melted milk chocolate instead of having a beautifully feathered decoration. In future I’m not going to bother faffing about with the melted chocolate on top as the cheesecake is nice enough without it I think.

Chocolate Cheesecake

Boxing Day is always a rest for me as it’s the leftover ham and turkey made into a pie which takes no time to throw together. For some reason the pastry has shrunk away from the edges of my pie dish but it tasted fine.

Turkey and Ham Pie

So that’s it all over for another year. Now for Hogmanay!

New Carpet

24 December 2011 00:16

carpet and  boots

I had wanted to do a before and after photo of the dining-room but it wasn’t to be. So here’s a photo of the new carpet which as you can see is a sort of oatmeal colour and has a slightly textured pattern on it which you can’t really see here. The carpet fitter was absolutely brilliant at his job – how often can you say that – and I’m really pleased with it especially as it won’t show up the crumbs so much! The old carpet was charcoal grey, a big mistake as it showed up every speck.

The boots are new too, I bought them when we were in England recently. My legs are normally covered up, this is a rare outing for them. My Dad always commented that he didn’t know I had legs whenever they got an airing! I’m not a shoe person at all, in fact I view shoes as objects of torture because I’m always bleeding from my heels and blistered so I tend to avoid them and wear clogs and flat boots all the time and then my feet are fine. I couldn’t walk in high heels to save my life. As a kid I dreaded the start of the new school term and new shoes. Those Clarks shoes were agony, I might as well have worn biscuit tins!

I haven’t been able to blog or visit blogs much for the last few days as I’ve been doing so much running around and trying to finish off things in the house before everyone gets here. So tomorrow I just have to bake the birthday boy’s cake and make the birthday meal – and then it’s Christmas! I hope your Christmas plans are on schedule.

I usually do a wee Winter Solstice blogpost, but not this year as I was so busy. The 21st here was indeed the darkest most dismal day and I could’ve been doing with a party then to cheer me up . It was one of those days when you needed a lamp on all the time – positively dreich. I’m so looking forward to having more light soon.

In Scotland we’re being encouraged to dose ourselves up with vitamin D, the easiest way is to take cod liver oil (yeugh). Apparently it’s the lack of sunlight here which gives us the highest rates of MS in the world. I’m going to be making my way to the health food shop soon and on that cheery note – cheerio.

If you’re in need of a bit of a laugh at the moment, give yourself a treat and watch good old Dick Emery. If I wore high heels I would walk like the ‘charming young lady’!

What’s Occurring?!

12 December 2011 23:04

I seem to have been doing quite a lot recently but not really getting anywhere – does that happen to you? Last week was one of those times which are full of small traumas. I had to have two small fillings which wouldn’t normally bother me but our old dentist has moved on so it was a newly qualified dentist, so that was a bit of a worry but I survived.

Then I had a chap in from the electricity company to fit a new isolator switch which had to be done before another sparky could come later this week to do more work. I hate having things like that done in the house, especially when it costs you £152 for ten minutes work.

The de-cluttering is continuing and another very large piece of Victorian furniture has been found a good home, but not before the removal men managed to bump into a dresser full of china and break four pieces, AARGH!

When I realised that we were in for some very heavy winds I thought that it was about time that the huge laurel branch which was towering over the greenhouse had better be cut down before it was blown onto the aforementioned greenhouse. Jack did the cutting last weekend while I hauled on ropes hoping to stop it from collapsing onto the greenhouse or into our neighbour’s garden. Some hope! Everything happened so quickly and the tree was so heavy that I couldn’t pull it nor could I get my hands out of the nylon rope twisted round them. Anyway, the tree collapsed into next door and my hands, particularly my left one were damaged in the process, so painful – especially as my hands were very cold. Our neighbour was very good about the mess in his garden.

So apart from swollen bruised and bloody hands I also managed to mash up my engagement ring, one of those daisy flower type ones which were popular in the 1970s. The flower head is now at a very strange angle and it dug a hole in my finger and the shank is all twisted but it is still in one piece, luckily so is my hand. The swelling has gone and I’m just bruised and scabby now. I don’t know if I should have a go at straightening my ring myself.

I’ve been painting woodwork again and we’re having a new carpet fitted in the dining-room later this week, maybe I’ll be able to think about hauling out the Christmas decorations after it’s done. Everybody else seems to have their trees up already.

I did manage to write the cards and they’ve all been sent off, a minor miracle. I just can’t get in the mood for Christmas this year. How about you?