You can’t go to South Queensferry and not take some photos of the Forth Bridge, so here they are!

The Hawes Inn appears in Robert Louis Stevenson’s book Kidnapped. As you can see the approach to the bridge is more or less straight above the inn but of course the bridge wasn’t there at the time that Robert Louis Stevenson was writing about.

The photo below is of the main street in South Queensferry, I think it’s quite unusual to have a two tiered street with a pavement and houses being situated over the top of the shops.

This vintage car came tootling along just as I was taking the photos, it was like something that Toad out of The Wind in the Willows might have driven. They must have been freezing! I wouldn’t mind going for a drive in it on a hot day though.

As you can see, they have some olde worlde streetlamps in South Queensferry which fit in nicely with the age of the buildings. Even although it was a cold day it was still busy with locals and day trippers, there are quite a few eateries in the town and I think it’s a favourite place for people living in Edinburgh to visit.

Some of the buildings are really quite ancient, as you can see the date on this pub is 1683.

This photo below is of Jack (husband) eyeing up one of the boats which has been lifted out of the harbour but I don’t think he’ll be taking up sailing.

This is one end of the town from the harbour. It’s a nice wee place to have a bit of a stroll around.

It was reading Margaret of Books Please review of a Catriona McPherson book which is set there which made me think it was about time we had another look at South Queensferry. The last time we were there was during the summer when we took a trip on one of the boats which sails regularly to the island of Inchcolm. It’s a good day out, when the weather’s fair. You really wouldn’t want to be stuck out on an island in the middle of the Forth if there was the chance of a howling gale and rain blowing up. You can have a look at my Inchcolm post here.

I read The Pirate as part of the November’s Autumn classic challenge.
All the nice girls love a sailor, so THEY say – but what sort of girls like a pirate? My sort of course, I’ve always had a bit of a yen for the pirate type, in fiction anyway, which is why I opted to read this book. I can’t even read the word pirate without saying – aarrr Jim lad to myself, that’s Long John Silver of Treasure Island fame of course.

As I said previously this book was a very slow starter and I kept wondering when there would ever be some pirate action. It didn’t come until about two thirds of the way through the book. I was reminded of a heart monitor because The Pirate is very wordy and Scott does quite a lot of rambling for no good reason really, so it sort of flatlines and then there’s the odd spike of interest or excitement. But those bits are good and in the end I was glad that I hadn’t given up on it.

The action is set on Zetland, which is what we call Shetland nowadays, a group of islands off the north coast of Scotland. Mordaunt Mertoun is a young man who has never known his mother and has been brought up by a very cold and unloving father. When Mordaunt sees a ship being wrecked on the rocks near his home he has to save a sailor who is in danger of drowning, despite the fact that the Zetlanders don’t approve of such actions. In a harsh landscape where scavenging for goods from wrecked ships helps the islanders to survive, so they don’t want the complications which shipwreck survivors bring.

The survivor is a young man called Clement Cleveland and as predicted by the Zetlanders he brings no good to Mordaunt, in fact Cleveland turns Mordaunt’s friends and neighbours against him, particularly the sisters Brenda and Minna.

It’s a long book and I’m not going to say much more about the storyline but I have to say that although it dragged along slowly at times I did enjoy the atmosphere and descriptions of Shetland and later Orkney. The story is set not all that long after Shetland became part of Scotland, you might not know that up until the 15th century Shetland was part of Norway but it was given to Scotland as part of a dowry payment from King Christian of Norway on his daughter’s marriage. So there was a big Scandinavian influence and at the time The Pirate is set the islanders see the Scots as foreigners.

Walter Scott has woven Norse mythological tales into the storyline with the result that I want to read more about them, so that’s a plus point I think. I especially liked the character of Norna of Fitful Head who is a sort of white witch/soothsayer and makes a good living selling fair winds to fishermen and sailors, what a great idea! The population is generally wary of her and wants to keep in her good books.

Fitful Head is an actual place and you can see some wonderful images of it here and here.

So as I said before, reading The Pirate was a bit like wading through porridge at times, without the benefit of sugar or syrup but on balance it was worth it, if only to find out about Fitful Head, it might be added to our places to visit list!

This is the third book I’ve read by Linda Gillard and although I’m not much of a romance fan, I must admit that I do enjoy her romances. The reason I usually steer clear of romance is I find them too predictable but the same can’t be said of her books. She manages to get as many twists and turns into the storyline as you would expect in a crime/mystery novel.

Star Gazing is set in Scotland, mainly in Edinburgh but the action moves to the Isle of Skye for a while. Marianne Fraser is a young widow whose husband Harvey died in the Piper Alpha disaster on the 6th July 1988. If you aren’t of a certain age you might not know that that was the world’s worst offshore disaster, causing the death of 167 men on an oil platform in the North Sea 120 miles north of Aberdeen.

Marianne who has been blind since birth subsequently miscarried her baby which everyone tells her was maybe for the best, and a baby would only have made life complicated. Music has become her passion in life but over time she has developed a coping strategy to protect herself from life and people, but during one of her frequent walks in the Edinburgh Botanic Gardens she meets Keir.

Keir goes out of his way to describe experiences which the sighted population take for granted but Marianne can’t even imagine, like cathedrals and stars. Marianne is thrilled but she still has an urge to protect herself from men and Keir is damaged goods too. It all adds up to an entertaining and cleverly written book. As usual I’m just giving you the bare bones of the story, I don’t like to spoil it for people.

One thing that I did think was a bit strange though – the sense of smell plays quite a big part in Star Gazing, as you would expect from something about a blind person, but the smell of snow was never mentioned. I can see reasonably well but I’ve always been able to smell snow. I know when it has snowed overnight, even before I open my eyes, and I can smell it on the wind when it’s coming, so I would have thought that Marianne would have been able to smell the snow on Skye. What about you, can you smell snow?

Peggy, maybe you could ask your brother Donald if he can smell snow?

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.

I don’t know if it’s a good idea really as I don’t think I would feel that I had actually read a book by Sir Walter Scott if it has been gutted. I read The Pirate and I chose that one because I thought it would be a hard subject to make boring. I have to admit though that there were times when it was like wading through thick porridge with not a morsel of sugar or syrup to sustain me along the way.

I read it for the November’s Autumn classic challenge so I’ll be reviewing it on the 4th of February, but I will say that I felt a real sense of achievment when I got to the last page with no skipping or dodging of the slow bits. However I am truly thankful that I didn’t have to read Scott when I was at school!

If you look carefully at the above photo you’ll see some squirrels too, there’s one on the grass to the left of the trees and one on the bark of a tree. Sadly they’re just the common, thuggish grey ones. You have to travel further north or over to the west to see the lovely wee native red squirrels.

The seagulls in the photo below are actually standing on thin ice in the middle of the boating pond. I was surpised it was cold enough for the ice to form. Some folks like seagulls but these ones are an absolute menace, especially if they nest on your roof. They’re just a pain in general. Poor Laura got mugged by one last year as she was eating her lunch ‘on the hoof’ on her way to work. A huge seagull came up behind her and she knew nothing about it until she felt a weight on her shoulder, the next thing her sandwich had been snatched from her hand. It can feel like you’re in Daphne du Maurier’s Birds sometimes as they eye you up and they’re the size of a dog!

I was amazed to see a cherry/almond tree blossoming in January, at the same time as there’s ice on the pond. It’s usually another couple of months before these trees are in flower, the poor thing looked so cold. It’s been such a weird stop-start sort of winter. I’ve had some pelargonium/geranium plants in my garden which have been flowering all through the winter, albeit very bedraggled and straggly looking. It’ll be an even stranger spring at this rate.

Sadly quite a few of the really old trees in the park just couldn’t withstand the force of the wind of the second hurricane/gale which we had recently. Some of them had obviously been there since the park was first planned over 100 years ago.

The two conifers which fell over at the ornamental fountain are going to be especially missed as they were part of a formal design which is now lop-sided. Such is life – and the death of trees.

The story is mainly set in the small fictional Scottish town of Barbie which is supposed to be somewhere in the east of Scotland, but not Fife – Lothian-ish I think. The town is aptly named as just about all of the words that come out of the townsfolks’ mouths are barbed comments. There’s one kind character in the whole town, the baker.

John Gourlay is a local businessman who has cornered the market in deliveries at a time when everything had to go by horse and cart. He had cut all his competitors out by delivering goods for nothing until they had to give up their businesses. So you can see he was not a nice chap, he was a real cut throat businessman and his only interest in life seems to have been spending money on his house and making it stand out as the best house in the town.

Gourlay’s favourite pastime was to put other people down at the same time as puffing himself up and he never had a kind word for anyone. As you can imagine he was the most disliked man in town because of his nasty personality, but to be fair the other inhabitants of Barbie weren’t far behind Gourlay in the charmless stakes.

That’s the main problem with the book as it’s difficult to really enjoy a book when it’s full of miserably mean characters. It’s also slow to get going and it wasn’t until about page 70 that I really started getting into it. Although I’m a Scot the fact that it’s written in broad and fairly archaic Scots didn’t help, it takes a while to get into the way of the dialogue.

Eventually I was glad that I had read the book. George Douglas Brown seems to have been doing for small town Scotland much the same as Thomas Hardy did for rural England, in other words captured the essence of the time and place, an honest portrayal, warts and all. As with Hardy, it’s a doom laden read. The moral is pride comes before a fall.

Apparently The House with the Green Shutters was the first book by a Scottish author which was a realistic picture of the times. Previous books had been all sentiment and cosiness and nothing like reality at all, they were known as Kailyard books. It was reading this book which pushed Lewis Grassic Gibbon to write his Sunset Song trilogy, set in the harsh landscape of Aberdeenshire. Anyone reading Green Shutters can’t help but notice that all the women characters are kept very much in the background and I’m sure that must have been an inspiration to Gibbon to write his books with stronger women characters.

There is only one good female character in Green Shutters and she’s only there for a couple of pages – if that. Mrs. Wilson comes from the west of Scotland and has a completely different temperament from the population of Barbie. Ahem – I’m saying nothing!

It’s still a mystery to me why anyone should be bothered about the colour of anybody’s hair, but there you go – they are for some reason. People seem to think that his hair might be regarded as being red, and maybe I’m being a wee bit paranoid here, but I don’t think the possibility of him having red hair is being seen as a plus. I think there are still a lot of people out there looking for reasons to dislike him.

So, again for the record – Andy Murray has brown hair, in fact it’s really dark brown hair. Like all Europeans with brown hair the tiny amount of red hairs show up in the sunshine, but that doesn’t mean that their hair is red. It’s the difference between European and Asiatic hair.

Maybe if he did have red hair he would win a tennis major! I certainly regard it as a positive rather than a liability. Discuss!

If you’re looking for holiday/bedtime reading or just something which you don’t have to concentrate on too much then this is the perfect choice. Good light reading and a bit of a laugh now and again. The funniest bits for me were when the characters get all romantic – a la Mills and Boon, it reminded me of when I used to work in a library and to cheer ourselves up in the morning, just before we unlocked the door to let in the public, we used to take turns at opening a Mills and Boon and reading the very last page out loud – in a very plummy voice. Such fun!

In this one Miss Pym, who has had some success as a romantic matchmaker in the past is travelling to Brighton by stage-coach and comes into contact with the 28 year old Lady Beatrice who has recently become a widow, much to her relief. Beatrice had been married off to an older man who was a gambler and boozer, unfortunately it took him 10 years to slowly drink himself to death, by which time he had gone through most of his money.

It wasn’t long before Beatrice’s parents were trying to marry her off again to the ghastly Sir Geoffrey. Can Miss Pym help Beatrice?

Thanks again to Jo at The Book Jotter for pointing me in M.C. Beaton’s direction.

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?