Monthly Archives: July 2014

The Irresistible Blueberry Bakeshop & Cafe by Mary Simses

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I feel that as we are now living in a small town with a teeny library which is only open nine hours a week that I really must borrow books from it, just so that the ‘high heid yins’ can’t say that nobody uses the place and decide to shut it down completely. But it’s slim pickings most times I visit and the last time I was getting sort of desperate when I saw this book The Irresistible Blueberry Bakeshop & Cafe.

Anyway, the book is the first one by Mary Simses who grew up in Darien, Connecticut. It’s not my usual sort of reading, I’m not a big reader of romances as I find them too predictable but this one does feature a bit of a mystery and it was nice to be in coastal Maine for a while.

Ellen is a high-flying lawyer and her beloved gran asks her to deliver a last letter to an old flame of hers, with her dying breath. Ellen feels she has to carry out her gran’s last wish, so she leaves Manhattan where she and her fiance live and sets off for Beacon, Maine. Beacon is the small coastal town where her gran grew up and it’s a bit like stepping back in time compared with life in Manhattan.

Ellen’s also a keen photographer and as soon as she reaches Beacon a mishap whilst framing a shot turns her into a bit of a local talking point, much to her embarassment. Out of her comfort zone she turns into a bit of a nincompoop.

It’s all light hearted reading, good for travelling or a summer beach read, not that I ever read on a beach, never having sunbathed in my life – but you know what I mean.

I still prefer vintage crime for comfort reading but this was a nice wee change, and I got to live in Maine for a while too. There is so much mention of food in this book that it put me in mind of one of those books which were written during World War II in Britain when rationing was still ongoing, and authors indulged themselves writing about all of the food which couldn’t be obtained for years. I think a few actual recipes at the end of the book might have been a good idea, well a blueberry muffin recipe anyway. But I might just be thinking along those lines because I’ve recently finished reading the Clarissa Dickson Wright book which had a recipe at the end of every chapter. I still have not tasted blueberries, I must give them a go soon.

The blurb on the front says: ‘If you liked the Nicholas Sparks novels, you will devour this book’ James Patterson. I’ve never read anything by Nicholas Sparks or James Patterson for that matter.

Pittenweem Arts Festival and The Forth Bridges Festival

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Have you ever been to the Pittenweem Arts Festival? It’s very unusual because the many artists who live in the fishing village open their homes up to the public to give everyone interested a good look at their artwork. At first it seems a bit weird to be walking through someone’s kitchen to see their work but you get used to it and it’s all very enjoyable.

As a gardener I love being able to see people’s back gardens as much as their artwork. The festival runs for a week and the village seems always to be full of people trailing from house to house to view the wares. It isn’t all paintings but includes embroidery, weaving and knitting, sculpture and all sorts.

There are even courses which you can attend on things like knotting, taught by fishermen and folk music evenings. You can read about it here.

The festival runs from August the 2nd to the 10th. You can read more about it and see some photos of Pittenweem here.

There’s also a Forth Bridges Festival this year, it’s a new one and you can read about it here. It runs from 3rd September to the 13th September.

Scotland’s Commonwealth Games Outfits

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Tell me honestly – what do you think of this design? It’s the outfit which our poor athletes are going to have to wear at the parade at the beginning of the Commonwealth Games which kick off in Glasgow on the 23rd of July.

Commonwealth Games outfit

I think it’s truly horrible, from the turquoise shirt to the tan – yes TAN socks. I really feel sorry for anyone having to don this combination. What is the tan colour referencing I wonder – the inside of a Tunnocks Caramel Wafer?!

I often think that we in Scotland shoot ourselves in the foot a bit because so often we do everything to avoid any sort of tartan, distancing ourselves as far as possible from the old fashioned shortbread tin tartanry and tat. Tartan is hardly to be seen anywhere in Scotland- unless it’s a wedding when it seems almost to be obligatory for the men to wear kilts. In fact if you go to Northern Ireland or even France it’s really surprising how much tartan you see in their streets compared with Scotland.

Let’s face it some tartans are pretty garish but I’ve never seen one as ghastly as the mixture which has been thought up by the designer. I’m presuming that she canvassed opinions on the colours from various high heidyins involved in the planning of the games, so why was nobody brave enough to say – no that’s not a pleasing colour combination, in fact none of it ‘goes’ and the colours really are not what you think of when you think of Scotland.

You can’t go far wrong with a white shirt teamed with a kilt and when you think of Scotland’s landscape and the Saltire flag then it’s blues and purples which are the natural choices to go with. It looks like the designer has decided to use colours just to look different, but it’s a mistake to go with something just because it’s a shock to the senses. The colour choices make the kilts look cheap and nasty and it’s really difficult to make wool look cheap! I’m assuming they used Scottish wool in the making.

I signed a petition online complaining about the outfits, it’s obviously too late to change things now and knowing the price of one kilt I dread to think how much these monstrosities cost, but I felt I just had to register my feelings on the subject.

The designer Jilli Blackwood is apparently internationally renowned but she seems to have just gone for the shock horror value and forgotten that our athletes are representing Scotland, they look more like an advert for dolly mixtures or liquorice allsorts in that pink and blue tartan. The women’s outfits just look so old fashioned and not in a good way.

I’m all for zany fun but there’s a time and a place for it.

The powers that be should have had a competition between schoolchildren to design the outfits, the kids would have come up with something far more enhancing I’m sure, after all it was a kid who designed Clyde, the Glasgow Commonwealth Games mascot, obviously in the shape of a thistle, and that’s a beezer!

Clyde

Rifling through my Drawers by Clarissa Dickson Wright

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Rifling Drawers cover

I bought this book a good wee while ago at a library book sale and as often happens with my own books I just didn’t get around to reading it. It was only when poor old Clarissa’s death was reported in the news that I remembered about it. When I did get around to reading it I was left wishing that I had read her previous book Spilling the Beans first, I’ll have to look out for that one as this one was quite a hoot, she was a wonderful eccentric. Her full name was Clarissa Theresa Philomena Aileen Mary Josephine Agnes Elsie Trilby Louise Esmerelda Dickson Wright, so I think that her parents must have been fairly eccentric too!

The book was first published in 2009 and is really a year in her life as it’s split up into the months of the year with each month having a recipe at the end of it.

It’s one of those books that you can’t help stopping reading every now and again and sharing some of the contents with whoever happens to be nearby. That can be a bit annoying I’m sure for the person that you’re reading the excerpts out to but I must say that Jack appreciated all the interruptions. Clarissa had such a good sense of humour and really didn’t give a damn about what people thought of her, a great combination. I thought I went off at a tangent when I was having conversations but I think that she was even worse than me for that, but it all makes for an interesting and enjoyable read on subjects which you would expect, like food and alcohol (she had been an alcoholic) to euthanasia, bees, politics, and the scandal featuring Margaret (Duchess of Argyll.) You have to be a certain age to remember that one and I must say that the quality of sex scandals hasn’t half gone down in recent years! And I’m just scratching the surface of topics.

She was delightfully un-politically correct which is so refreshing nowadays, even although I didn’t always agree with her points of view. She was a big supporter of the Countryside Alliance and of hunting, shooting and fishing which didn’t endear her to the many pressure groups who are against such things. In fact she was on a death list as those anti-hunt people seem to always be very violent themselves. I did go into her Edinburgh Grassmarket bookshop some years ago but sadly she wasn’t holding court at the time. You can read her Guardian obituary here.

Ram, Uther, Rose and Midnight Sky

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a ram

A few weeks ago we were in the East Lothian village of Tyninghame and decided to go for a walk around the countryside there, well it was a necessity really. We came across a field full of rams, they aren’t something that you see often, especially these very prehistoric looking curly horned ones. The chappie above posed perfectly between these two trees to have his photo taken.

Uther

Above is Uther, he’s named after King Arthur’s father of course and he was the very reason we were going on the walk, he is a red and white Irish setter and was going stir crazy indoors on such a lovely day. He’s just full of energy and this was him after the long walk, when he was a bit more biddable, but as you can see he still had to be tethered to a tree, otherwise he would have been over the hills and far away in a trice. He is a gorgeous dog though.

white rose

The above rose is one which was planted just last month in my new garden. It’s a lovely plant but sadly it doesn’t seem to have much in the way of fragrance, but it only cost me £1 from the pound shop so I shouldn’t really complain. I have no idea what its name is either as it was called ‘white rose’ on the package it came in. It’s doing very well though and the leaves are really healthy which is more than can be said for the named pink one which I bought at much greater expense, its leaves are covered in the dreaded blackspot.

sky at midnight

Some people don’t realise how long our summer days are in these northern climes of Scotland. You can easily read a book outside after 10.30 in Scotland in the summer. This is a photo which I took from my garden just after midnight on the 22nd of June, so just after the summer solstice. The camera was facing north. As you can see there is still light in the sky but it’s not moonlight. You don’t have to wait long before we are back to full daylight again.

Armchair Travelling and Winnie the Pooh

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This armchair travelling malarkey can be very surprising. A few nights ago I was innocently roaming the internet when I suddenly found myself in Philadelphia of all places – well at least half of me seemed to be there anyway, through the wonders of google chat. It was Joan of Planet Joan on the other end of course and when during our chat she found that she was a wee bit peckish she happened to mention that she had taken ME down to her basement via her Ipad or some such gadget, so that she could get a snack.

I’ve never had a house with a basement and I find the idea quite alarming, so I wanted to know if there was a wee window which you (I) could get out by in case of being somehow locked in there. Joan assured me there was a wee window, then of course I wondered exactly how wee, because I’m not quite as skelf-like as I used to be!

Immediately Winnie the Pooh came to mind, would I be like him and be stuck half-way through the window, or in his case Rabbit’s door. I just love E.H. Shepard’s illustrations

Where is all this silliness leading to I hear you ask?!

Winnie the Pooh was of course written by A.A. Milne and although he was born in England he was brought up in the very strict Scottish Presbyterian tradition, his grandfather was a Scottish Presbyterian minister. So I count A.A. Milne as a Scottish author, if you haven’t already read Winnie the Pooh you might want to do so now and count it towards the Read Scotland 2014 Challenge.

An Unsuitable Attachment by Barbara Pym

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It’s a while since I finished reading An Unsuitable Attachment. Judith, Reader in the Wilderness and I were going to have a bit of a readalong originally but I’m not sure if she ever got around to it, due to her work commitments.

If you want to read about Barbara Pym’s career you’ll find this Telegraph article by Philip Hensher interesting.

An Unsuitable Attachment was first published in 1982, after Pym’s death. It had been turned down by her publisher in 1963, deemed to be too old fashioned for the times and thought to be unlikely to sell well. It isn’t one of my favourites but it’s still worthwhile reading.

The setting is London and there’s the usual cast of characters, a vicar and his wife, some librarians, neighbours, church parishioners and of course I can’t miss out the cat called Faustina. The book does seem quite dated, for instance ‘shillings’ are mentioned and of course by the time the book was eventually published the UK had embraced decimalisation and shillings didn’t exist any more.

There is a foreword by the poet Philip Larkin who was a friend of Barbara Pym’s and he said: ‘She has a unique eye and ear for the small poignancies and comedies of everyday life.’

I must just mention that I was perusing a blog a while ago and came across a post about Barbara Pym in which the writer claimed that Pym’s career had been successful because of readers who had sort of passed the word around about her. I had to laugh as that seems like teenagers who always think that THEY are the ones who discovered sex.

Barbara Pym’s career in writing was at a standstill for years after An Unsuitable Attachment, her seventh novel was rejected by her publisher. It wasn’t until Lord David Cecil and Philip Larkin wrote praising her work in the Times Literary Supplement in 1977 that her career was kick started again and her books have all been in print since then. I know this because I was one of the many people who started reading her books then, well as a Jane Austen fan I had to compare the two, as Pym was being hailed as a modern day Austen.

It does help to have friends in high places, it’s a shame that all deserving authors don’t have the same luck.

Voices in Summer by Rosamunde Pilcher

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Voices in Summer was first published in 1984, which seems like yesterday to me but I had to remind myself that it is actually 30 years ago – amazingly. A few times in the book there is reference to a character looking for a telephone box to call someone and things like that really date it. I don’t know about you but any mention of a phone box and I can smell one, not a pleasant memory I’m sure you’ll agree. I can imagine that some younger people will be reading Pilcher’s books for the charmingly nostalgic atmosphere, the way my generation reads books like Angela Thirkell’s, harking back to a gentler society – even in wartime!

Voices in Summer is set in Cornwall, which is where the author was born and grew up but she married a Scot and after that she lived in the Dundee area I believe. She certainly lived most of her life in Scotland and is generally regarded as a Scottish author.

This one is a light read, good for beach reading or when you’re travelling and don’t want to concentrate on much. It’s a bit of a romance with some mystery thrown in for good measure.

Laura is recently married, to Alec a well off businessman, and their story begins in London where they live. Laura is Alec’s second wife and she feels the presence of her predecessor hanging heavily in the house. Not that the first wife is dead, but she ran off with a younger man and poor Laura is having to live in her house with her choice of furniture and has even inherited the first wife’s friends.

I saw shadows of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca in this one, there are quite a few similarities, not that it comes up to the standard of Rebecca. I’m the sort of reader who enjoys a lot of description in books, especially of landscapes but I do feel that Pilcher takes it all just a wee bit too far and she leaves nothing to the imagination. It’s almost as if she is writing in the stage directions too.

I mention that because I think that there are times when there are just too many words and it all gets in the way of the storyline and I just want to say to her — och get on with the tale!

Never happy – I hear you say. Or pernickety besom!

Of course this is another one which I read for the Read Scotland 2014 Challenge.

New Summerhouse and a Verbal Ramble

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I’ve had a totally inadvertent break from blogging for a few days, due to being busy with house, garden and family, not necessarily in that order and also I must admit a slight aversion to doing anything on the computer at all, which I think happens to a lot of us from time to time. Anyway, the blogposts are backing up even although I’m way behind on my Goodreads challenge, but I’m not worried about that because I’ll catch up during the long days of winter.

summerhouse (gazebo)

We took delivery of our new summerhouse or gazebo as the company we bought it from calls it and in no time they had built it completely. There was a bit of confusion as I thought it was going to be rectangular but it turned out to be hexagonal. I’ve decided that I like it though and we are going to line the inside with tongue and groove wood as we did to our old one which we left at our old garden. It makes a big difference when it’s done, I won’t be moving any furniture or books into it until that is completed.

Whilst I was giving the windows a bit of a clean I heard a chattering and screeching noise coming from next door. It turned out to be an altercation between a crow and a grey squirrel. The crow was obviously taking exception to the squirrel sitting on top of a nearby roof. That squirrel wasn’t for moving though, it was enjoying playing king of the castle too much and it stayed there for ages after the crow had flown off. Amazingly a lovely wee red squirrel ran in front of us one day last week as we were walking in Balbirnie woods so they must be making a comeback, they’re much nicer than the grey ones.

grey squirrel

Otherwise I haven’t been up to much. I watched some of Wimbledon but I was sadly disappointed when Andy Murray was knocked out so early on. I’ve seen some of the World Cup although I’m not a great football fan, I generally just watch the penalty shoot outs. Jack has been fairly glued to the screen and has only missed two of the games I think. I’ve seen hardly anything that I intended to watch on TV but I did catch Montalbano last night, it’s good from an armchair traveller’s point of view, I get to see some of Sicily and there’s some murder and comedy to enjoy too. Have you been watching anything on TV which I should give a go on catchup?

The University Cafe, Glasgow

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The University Cafe situated in Byres Road has an art deco exterior but internally it’s all very Edwardian, by the look of things nothing has changed since it was first opened. Look carefully and you’ll see that Jack took this photo of the front door, I’m standing next to him.

Uni Cafe ext

Cafe culture was a big thing in Glasgow, I think it started way back in the early 20th century when there was a large influx of Italians who came to Britain, escaping from a war or poverty. They stayed and most of them went into business often opening up cafes or fish and chip shops. In fact whenever you meet a person with an Italian surname in Scotland it’s a fair enough question to ask them – fish and chips or ice cream?

In fact my parents met each other in an Italian cafe, but not this one and there were still a lot of cafes around when I was growing up, sadly not many have survived into the 21st century. For some reason they nearly always had the walls lined with massive mirrors, which I’ve always found a bit disconcerting.

Uni Cafe interior

Anyway, it was at Easter when we were in Glasgow that we finally went into this cafe to have an ice cream, we’ve walked past it hundreds, possible thousands of times but never actually sat down in it. The seats are those old tip up wooden ones, like in old cinemas. I couldn’t resist asking the young girl who served us for a McCallum, but sadly she didn’t know what it was – one of the older staff did though. She’ll know the next time someone ancient asks for one! It’s just a vanilla ice with raspberry sauce, and if someone can tell me why they were always called a McCallum in Glasgow, I’d be much obliged!

A McCallum ice cream

The exterior of the cafe – and the chippy next door as well as two other Art Deco buildings nearby – can be seen here.