I’m going to be really busy with family, house, garden and travelling now that summer is on the horizon, so I’ve decided to take a break from blogging for a while.
Have fun, I intend to!
Blog Sabbatical
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Category Archives: Personal
Happy New Year!
Happy New Year to you all. I hope that 2025 will be a good one for everyone.
My 2024 reading statistics
I write down the books that I’ve read as I finish them – in an old school jotter. With notes in the margins as to what sort of book they are, so I’ve totted up my stats and here they are.
I’ve read 122 books in 2024, I’ve reviewed most of them.
I’ve only read 11 non fiction books – I must do better, although I have also dipped in and out of quite a lot – as you do.
I’ve only read 10 vintage crime books. I thought it would have been more than that.
I seem to have only read 2 contemporary crime novels – how did that happen?
I read 36 books by Scottish authors.
I read 39 contemporary novels.
I read 20 children’s (YA) books
I read 19 historical fiction books, I thought it would have been more.
Only 13 classics, although I am notoriously strict (or picky) about what I deem to be a classic.
Only three books in translation.
It has been quite a good reading year for me. I’ve found more than a few new to me authors that I plan to read more of – or have already done so, particularly C.J. Sansom.
In 2025 I intend to take a very relaxed attitude to my reading so I almost certainly won’t commit myself to joining in with any challenges. I’m going to ‘dree my ain weird’ as we say in Scotland, in other words I’ll do my own thing and go my own way, depending on how I feel, with no pressure whatsoever. I’ll be visiting the library a lot, so many have been closed down completely in Fife over the past ten or so years and I hate to think that they might be going to have another cull of them, but with the state of local council finances it’s a distinct possibility in the future I think. I want to keep their borrowing statistics healthy.
I hope to do more gardening, craft and cookery posts in 2025 – well that’s the plan anyway, but 2024 was a very poor year for gardening. The only decent weather that we had in Scotland during the summer happened to be the almost three weeks when we were in the Netherlands. It was so annoying watching the BBC news while there (they’ve always been able to see the BBC as the signal is so strong) and seeing that the weather was so good back home, especially as we didn’t have very good weather where we were on holiday. To make matters worse as soon as we got back to Scotland the rain started and didn’t stop, if it wasn’t too wet to garden, it was too windy. Such is life.
So that was 2024 – blogwise anyway.
Warkworth Castle, Northumberland
So here we are back at Warkworth Castle in Northumberland, it’s a great place to visit but isn’t so accessible for disabled people like many of these places. It’s owned/run by English Heritage, it was owned by the Percy family in Tudor times. You can see my previous post here.
Parts of it are covered but others are open to the elements. I must say that the stonework looks in really good shape.
Below is quite a grand staircase.
But the stairs below aren’t for the faint hearted.
Below is a really lovely part of the castle which is roofed, it’s a sort of ante room and I can imagine people millling about in it chatting, and sitting on the window seats.
I really admire vaulted rooms although I’m always a wee bit nervous of them, I have to remind myself they’ve been good for centuries so are unlikely to fall on me!
I spotted this teeny wee iron lion rampant badge from the bottom of a flight of stairs, it seems to have been set above what looks like a stone sink, but it might have been a cupboard. The lion rampant was the Percy family’s emblem/badge, but is of course better known as Scotland’s emblem.
Below is a view of Warkworth village taken from just outside the castle. It’s a lovely wee place with plenty of eateries, but we were on our way further south so didn’t have much time to spend exploring the place, we spent so much time in the castle.
https://flic.kr/p/2qxgUgQ
Blackwell, an Arts and Crafts house, Lake District
When we were in the Lake District a few weeks ago one of the places on our list to visit was Blackwell, an Arts and Crafts house. I must admit that I hadn’t even heard of it until quite recently. It’s an absolute jewel.
Blackwell has always been a holiday home which is really sad, it would have made a wonderful family home although I suppose the winters in the Lake District can be quite grim. The house was designed by Mackay Hugh Baillie Scott. It’s not far from Bowness on Windermere.
The photos above and below are of the Hall. The stained glass design of tulips and blue birds looks much better in reality.
The hall is a large room, you could easily hold a dance in it. The copper lighting is original as is the peacock frieze at the top of the walls. This is actually wallpaper which has been recently refurbished. As you can just see on the left there’s another cosy seating area.
We joined in a guided tour which was interesting. Some of the designs are very reminiscent of Charles Rennie Mackintosh, he and Baillie Scott were designing at around the same time and were often competing for the same commissions. Of course Baillie Scott was also of Scottish descent.
The hall is a bit of a mixture of Tudor style, with its oak panelling and early 20th century styling. The guide thought that the fireplace was a nod towards Art Deco although the house is a bit early for that, the Dutch Delft tiles around the fireplace seemed a bit incongruous in the setting, but they are attractive. Every house should have at least one window seat I think, and this house has a few. They are perfect for reading in but the scenery outside might be a bit too distracting.
Or you could sit in the window below, the light should be good anyway.
This part of the house is quite dark, it was deliberate, to contrast with the bright light of the rest of the downstairs, but I’ll leave that for another post.
Blackwell stands above Lake Windermere, below is a view from the driveway towards the lake.
https://flic.kr/p/2qhQmMe
Niebert Windmill, Netherlands
The Niebert Windmill is still used for grinding flour, and you can watch it being ground, then buy some of it for your baking.
This is a very tall windmill, I think there are six staircases inside it and we went up them all. In the Netherlands most stairs resemble ladders, they are incredibly steep, even within private homes, often it feels safer to go down them backwards as then you can hold on to the step as well as the handrail.
The windmill is part working mill and part museum. You can watch flour being ground in some Scottish mills too, but ours are run by water power so don’t feature sails.
It was incredibly windy up there and although I’m not usually bothered by heights, this was scary as the fence is very small and it felt too easy to get blown over it. I didn’t stay there long! Somehow in the photo it doesn’t look at all high but six ‘ladders’ can’t lie! The flag is the Groningen state flag.
https://flic.kr/p/2qdV53e
Sloten, Friesland, Netherlands
Sloten is another of the eleven ‘cities’ of Friesland, where they have ice skating races on the canals when they freeze hard enough.
The photo below is just so Dutch, boats moored outside your house, a canal, a lovely hump-back bridge and a windmill – what more can you ask for?
Well, another bridge with Jack standing on it is all I have of Sloten, it’s a very quiet but scenic small town. Even smaller than I thought when we were there, apparently it only has about 700 inhabitants. It’s the smallest Elfsteden in Friesland, the smallest of the ‘eleven cities’ five of which we have visited. Hopefully we’ll be able to visit the others some time in the future.
Hindeloopen, Netherlands
Hindeloopen is another one of the eleven ‘cities’ of Friesland, in north east Netherlands. I’ve always fancied being able to moor a small boat by my house so that I could just pootle about on a river, you can actually do that in the Netherlands, well their canals look just like rivers.
How scenic is the photo below, it almost looked like something from a children’s story book.
There are plenty of bridges and locks.
But Hindeloopen is very popular with sailors. I thought it would be similar to the coastal villages in Fife, but it was very different. There wasn’t much in the way of shops at all, just eateries, and there were millions of midges. You might think that coming from Scotland I would be well used to midges but I had never see anything like it, and it was a really windy day. I would hate to be there on a still day – if they have them.
There were lots more yachts than can be seen in the photos.
Beyond the harbour is the IJsselmeer. This used to be the Zuiderzee but in 1932 they constructed a dyke to close it off from the open sea, and now it is a freshwater lake.
It is very different from the North Sea in coastal Fife.
Dokkum, Friesland
When we were in the Netherlands recently we visited Dokkum which is a fortified town in the north-east municipality of Noardeast-Fryslan in the province of Friesland. It’s a very scenic town.
Of course there are canals all over the Netherlands, but Dokkum is at the end of the road so to speak. During really cold winters when the canals freeze over enough they have ice skating races on the canals in eleven towns in Friesland, and this is the last one.
Small canals lead into a bigger one. In some places people have their boat moored in front of their house, much better than a car!
I think this a laburnum tree by the side of the canal in the photo below although it’s difficult to say as the flowers weren’t properly open yet.
This is a lovely town, well worth visiting if you are in the vicinity, but we were there on a Monday and not all of the shops were open, this is quite common in Friesland.
Windmill House and Garden, Sebaldeburen, Netherlands
In my recent post about the windmill at Sebaldeburen I mentioned that the job of windmill keeper comes with a house, a typically Dutch house but no two houses seem to be the same. The man who looks after the windmill took no credit for the garden though as he said that was his wife’s department!
The garden was all very lush, they had had as much rain as we had in the previous month or so, I think in another week it would have been much more colourful.
You can see that there are some veggies coming up in the photo below, amazingly they haven’t been chomped by slugs, which is what happened to my brother’s salad crops. They have been terrible this year due to all the rain. As you can see there’s even a large fruit cage in this garden, although if I had been lucky enough to have one of those I would have filled it full with berry bushes of all sorts, it looks a bit empty to me, but I suppose they are growing just what they can cope with, I still have some raspberry jam left over from last year despite giving a lot of it away.
If you look closely at the photos above and below you can see that someone (presumably the windmill keeper) has made a sort of mock up of a paddle steamer riverboat, using two big wheels as the paddles. If you zoom in on either end of the photos to see the detail you will see that there are a couple of stylish bird boxes attached to the ends. It’s quite a feature.
The windmill keeper spoke very good English and said that he had worked all over the world, incuding in England, Australia and New Zealand, but we didn’t ask him what he worked at, maybe it was windmills. The photo below shows a wooden model cutaway of the internal workings of a windmill.
It amazes me how someone came up with the idea as they’re so complicated looking.