Category Archives: Family

Decorating

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It’s a good long while since I prepared Duncan’s old bedroom for decorating. That’s the bit which I’ve always hated in the past. Stripping wallpaper is a horrible job and no matter how careful I am at tidying up as I go I somehow always end up with wee bits of wallpaper being dragged all over the house by my feet.

Somehow I just couldn’t summon up the enthusiasm to get on and do the decorating so I more or less shut the door on the room and forgot about it, until today. No, I still don’t feel like wallpapering but it just had to be done, so today I’ve been up to my elbows in wallpaper paste. Gordon, our youngest son wrote his name and the date on the plaster of one of the walls when he was just six years old, as other folks have done in the past. It adds a bit of history for future owners of the house, but it has been papered over again today. It used to be Gordon’s room but for some reason they did a room swap years ago.

People always seem to think that cottage style houses are so cute looking with their sloping ceilings upstairs but coomb ceilings are literally a pain in the neck when it comes to wallpapering. It wouldn’t be so bad if I was doing something which I really admired because it’s great when you see a new room emerging bit by bit with each strip of wallpaper which is put up. But it’s desperately boring when you’re only pasting heavy duty lining paper which is just going to be painted with magnolia paint eventually.

I’m taking a tip from the so-called experts and keeping everything really bland and inoffensive so that when we come to put the house up for sale, hopefully next year, we won’t frighten off any possible purchasers. In the past we’ve had a lovely Chinese yellow hall and staircase and jade green walls in the dining-room but for now I’m just going to have to put up with magnolia.

So that’s how exciting my life is at the moment. Duncan’s room is almost completely papered now and after that is finished it’s time to turn my attention to Gordon’s old bedroom. Maybe when they are both finished they won’t seem so much like ghost rooms. It still feels very strange not to have them inhabited by boys.

I hope you are managing to do something more interesting than I am at the moment!

Spring – today anyway

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It has been lovely the last few days with bright sunshine and a warmish wind. So I’ve been busy making the most of it, just in case we get snow again at Easter, it wouldn’t be the first time.

I’ve been hard at it in the garden and I’ve even managed to get around to painting the woodwork in Duncan’s old room which I’ve been putting off for ages. The paint tin boasts that it is one coat, quick dry gloss paint. Well, it isn’t and I’ve had to give it two coats, which took forever to dry out.

And you know what it’s like, as soon as you spruce up one part of a house it immediately makes everything else look shabby. The downside of the sun actually shining is that it makes the place seem – I have to admit it – manky!

So I’ve also been washing windows, inside and out. What an exciting life I lead. It should all help to keep me fit anyway. I did take some more garden photos though and I hope to have a garden blogpost tomorrow.

Christmas Day

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I hope everybody had a great time at Christmas. Here we are in our very congested dining-room, we were lucky enough to have the family with us. A goose was cooked but it isn’t on show.

I’m on the left and by that time I was shattered and far too hot, in fact we all look quite miserable I think but a good time was had by all. Both ‘boys’ weren’t feeling all that great, there are so many bugs going about at the moment.

We will probably be moving from this house in a year or two so the photographs are really a sort of family posterity thing because we don’t have many digital photos of the house.

This is the sitting-room which we used to decorate with a massive real christmas tree but this year as it’s so cold we decided not to bother because we probably wouldn’t be in that room much. The fire in the living-room is much warmer.

I just decorated the mantelpiece. This photograph was taken with the flash.

And this quite scary looking photograph was taken without the flash.

So now that Christmas is over we just have Hogmanay to look forward to – and more hours spent in the kitchen!

Busy, busy.

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I’ve been up to my ears in it for the past few days. My husband decided to pop into the world on the 24th of December, quite a lot of moons (decades) ago.

So I’ve been cooking a special birthday meal today, after all it’s still his birthday even if it is the day before Christmas. We have both of our ‘boys’ and Laura here for the next few days, which is great because we couldn’t wish for anything more at this time of the year.

We’re lucky that they live fairly close to us. I wish it could be the same for all families.

Tomorrow I’ll probably have some photographs of our Christmas dinner. Any vegans and vegetarians – please avert your eyes. We’ve gone for a traditional Dickensian meal – goose. I did feel a bit guilty about it though as two lovely geese flew low above us on the way to the shop. How did they know?

Almost Empty Nest

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Duncan just got the keys to his flat yesterday, he’s one of the few first time buyers to be able to get a mortgage at the moment, so we just got one son moved out of Dundee a few months ago and now we’re busy moving Duncan into Dundee. It isn’t my favourite place in the world, it seems so remote and far away from what I think of as civilisation, but it’s as close to St Andrews as any normal person can buy a place nowadays and his drive to work won’t be so long now.

It’s going to be really weird having no ‘children’ in the house, after 24 years my husband and I are going to be on our own again. Tonight we had them all around the dinner table though and they’re going to be with us over Christmas and New Year as usual.

So for the next few days I’m going to be running around furniture shops because despite the fact that our house is overflowing with antique furniture, mainly inherited, he wants his place to be new and modern – what a pain!

I just had enough time yesterday to get a quick look at The Guardian G2 section and read this article on Little House on the Prairie and Laura Ingalls Wilder

I watched the tv series as a youngster and although the whole frontier thing really attracted me I seem to remember that I was driven round the bend by the whiney youngest girl. Was her name Amy? As the youngest of 3 girls and with 2 older brothers as well, I was nothing like her at all and she seemed to me to be really spoiled so I don’t think that I ever read any of the books. Did I miss something and are they worth reading as an adult?

Toffee Cake

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This is the cake which I baked for Gordon’s birthday and it’s based on a Marguerite Patten recipe. It was a nice change from a completely chocolate cake. Although the ingredients specify using castor sugar I usually just use normal white sugar. The brown sugar can be any kind from Demerara to dark soft brown sugar depending on how strong you want the toffee flavour to be.

6 oz brown sugar
5 oz butter or marg.
4 tablespoons milk
2 oz castor sugar
2 eggs
8 oz self-raising flour

Put the brown sugar, 1 oz butter and 4 tablespoons of milk into a heavy based pan and stir until the sugar has dissolved. Then allow the mixture to reach the ‘soft ball’ stage.

Cream the remaining butter and sugar together until it’s soft and light then beat in the warm toffee syrup gradually to stop the mixture from curdling. If it does curdle just add some flour.

Beat in the eggs and then the rest of the flour.

Put the cake mixture into an 8 inch cake tin which has been well greased.

Bake for about 50 minutes in a pre-heated oven at 170 C, Gas mark 3 or 325-350 F. Remove from oven and run a knife around the edge of the cake tin, the cake should come out quite easily. Leave to cool on a wire rack.

This cake tastes lovely on its own but I decided to cover it with my own version of buttercream icing. This is quick and easy, no faffing about with butter and cocoa powder required.

Nutella Topping
Place about 3 heaped tablespoons of Nutella into a glass bowl with a sploosh of milk, about a quarter of a cupful, and microwave for about 30 seconds on medium or until the Nutella mixture has melted. It depends on the strength of your microwave.

Stir the mixture until the milk is well incorporated then add about 4 heaped tablespoons of icing sugar into it. Be sure to sift the icing sugar first otherwise the icing will be lumpy.

Mix well and quickly spread it over the cake and down the sides if wished. It sets fairly fast so I couldn’t get the top of my cake as smooth as I wanted and I ended up taking a rolling pin to a bar of Aero to disguise the top. No disaster. Chocolate on top of chocolate isn’t exactly a problem.

We were half way to Stirling before I realised that I had left the birthday candles behind. So we had to improvise with a tealight. Well, he could still make a wish, which is the main thing.

Birthday Boy

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We had a meal out at the Westerton Arms in Bridge of Allan near Stirling a couple of nights ago. It was Gordon’s 23rd birthday, how time flies.

The meal was really lovely, the only thing that was a bit disappointing was the size of the pasta dish which Duncan ordered. He has the biggest appetite but his mushroom ravioli was about half the size of all the other main courses. So if you are really hungry, don’t go for the pasta.

My husband took the photograph and I was sitting too far back!
The birthday boy is on the right with his lovely ‘bidey in’ Laura opposite him. I’m the nearly invisible red head in the middle, I’m only 5’3 but Laura is tiny and I always feel like a cart-horse beside her. Duncan, our eldest is on my right. A jolly good night was had by all.

I haven’t had a look at the on-line reviews but I’ve been told that one of them complains that the Westerton Arms is pretentious, but it certainly is not, the person who wrote that review must have been used to greasy spoon cafes.

As you can see, we all had puddings and Laura and I chose the hot Black Forest pudding with white chocolate sauce and ice-cream which was a lovely variation of that 1970s-80s staple of Black Forest gateau. But all of the desserts were lovely, for once. Sometimes they look so much better than they taste which leaves you cursing when you realise it must have been about a thousand calories. Not that I’ve ever counted a calorie in my life, I just walk the excess off.

Newest addition

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My brother is 63 and that’s quite a lot older than me, and he and his wife had just about given up hope of being grandparents. But here she is at last, baby Juliette, the latest addition to the extended family.

She weighed in at a healthy 8 lbs 7 oz (3840 grams). Definitely worth waiting for!

Tidying Up

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The school holidays have gone in a flash as usual and I can really hardly believe that this is the last week of them. This is the week when we always realise that we haven’t got around to doing half of the things that we had planned to do. We still have lots of house maintenance things to do but of course the bad weather has held us back again.

Yesterday we tackled one of the attics. The worst thing about having plenty of storage space in a house is that you tend just to hoard things. The more space you have the more rubbish you accumulate, I find.

But we got right down to the end of the attic and came up with bags of baby clothes and all sorts of stuff that we couldn’t think why we wanted to hold on to. The baby clothes were stored away just in case we decided to have a third child. In the end we decided that we couldn’t face all the sleepless nights and nappy washing again. Yes, I was the last person in the western world still to use terry towelling nappies/diapers, but I hear that they are beginning to be used again.
The old nappies were sent off to Rumania years ago.

So we’ve been busy being astonished by how tiny the clothes are and sorting stuff out for recycling and taking to charity shops. There are still some books which I was sure were in there but they haven’t surfaced, which is annoying.

The other attic has a cot, pram and high chair in it. Time has gone so quickly that I’m tempted to hold on to them just in case we ever do have grandchildren at some point in the future.

So one attic is almost empty now, it only has an ancient BBC computer in it, and that is the way that it is going to stay. Don’t ask me why they want to hold on to the computer. I would chuck it out but all the blokes in my family said NO!

Birthday Trip

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First, many thanks for the birthday felicitations, folks. As it was a lovely bright day we prepared a picnic and went for a drive along the coast.

Just before we left our house I had a delivery of roses from Gordon and Laura, very naughty of them as they were just too extravagant. Must remember to skelp their legs when I see them!

We visited the East Neuk fishing villages of Largo, Pittenweem, Anstruther and Crail and then on to the university town of St Andrews. It’s a lovely wee very historical town and the only place that I would like to live in Fife. Unfortunately that’s impossible now as it is so expensive for property, mainly because of all the golf courses in the area. The University of St Andrews is celebrating its 600 birthday this year. Duncan, our eldest is the website editor there.

So after a nice wander around the town and a visit to Fisher and Donaldson the famous bakery, we headed for the bookshops. Then we travelled back to Anstruther as it was getting on for dinner time. We had the birthday meal on Wednesday in Kirkcaldy so dinner was very low key, fish and chips from the famous award winning chippy.

Apparently it was a popular destination for Prince William when he was a student at St Andrews a few years back, and he recommended it to his father, Prince Charles, who took Camilla there for fish and chips recently.

It was good but I don’t think it was the best that we had eaten, we had never sampled it before because the enormous queue had always put us off, but the queue did move fairly quickly. Next time we will try The Wee Chippy which got a very good write up in The Guardian.

Then we just went back home and ate our purchases from the cake shop. We all had strawberry Danish pastries and I couldn’t resist a coffee tower too. Yummy! Jack watched the FIFA World Cup while I had happy birthday ‘phone calls and watched a birthday DVD – One Foot in the Grave. Really funny, I nearly choked at a few points, so a good day was had by all.