Winter Solstice

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No, this blogpost isn’t about the Rosamunde Pilcher book of that name which I still haven’t bought. It is the Winter Solstice today, that is the shortest day of the year, and really I always think that we should be celebrating the event instead of waiting another few days and celebrating Christmas. But if you have kids you have to stick with the Santa Claus stuff. We did tell our kids that Santa was dead now and people just pretended. Honestly it didn’t do them any harm and they enjoyed their Christmas just as much, but I did get nasty looks from other mums at the nursery. Silly them!

In good old Pagan Celtic times this was our winter festival, something to look forward to. Anyway the 21st of December always cheers me up because I hate the dark days of winter, when it begins to get dark at 3 o’clock in the afternoon and it’s dark by 4 o’clock.

After the solstice the daylight begins to get a teeny wee bit longer day by day and even although the worst of the winter weather is probably still ahead of us, (but surely not this year) I’m always able to look forward to the lighter, longer days.

This year the solstice is extra special because there is also a lunar eclipse which you can read about here.

Happy Winter Solstice!

Ian Rankin’s Reichenbach Falls

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Late last night I watched Reichenbach Falls which had apparently been on before but I had missed it. At first I thought this was going to be another Rebus investigation but it was far more convoluted than anything in the Rebus series. I really enjoyed it and it wasn’t just a bog-standard crime investigation. I suppose it is a dark tale, but it also shows the beautiful architecture and scenery around Edinburgh, and the film can be enjoyed for that aspect alone. I think it will be of interest to anyone thinking of going there for a visit.

The film maker has really shown what I think of as the hidden Edinburgh at the Water of Leith and St Bernard’s Well, which I didn’t even know existed until recently. At times it was like an advert for Tourism Scotland and was very easy on the eyes. It did go from ‘the sublime to the cor blimey’ but that’s the old Scottish split personality, Robert Louis Stevenson, Jekyll and Hyde thing.

Rankin threw in plenty of other Scottish writers one way or another and Richard Wilson played the part of Arthur Conan Doyle.

I’m hoping that the above link is available for people outside the UK to view. Otherwise it might be available on Netflix.

A Christmas Tree by Charles Dickens

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This is a short story by Charles Dickens and I must admit that it’s the only thing of his that I’ve ever actually got to the end of. That isn’t saying much because it’s only 40 pages long. It’s a very wee book with quite a lot of illustrations by HM Brock. You can read it here. I first read the story about 20 years ago, I wasn’t feeling at all Christmassy and when I saw this lovely wee book in a second-hand book shop I thought it might help me get into the spirit of it all. Ho Ho Ho! – and all that.

To begin with it did conjure up Victorian images of all the traditional decorations that could be found on a Christmas tree. But Dickens just couldn’t stop himself from adding Christmas ghost stories and dead children! I suppose it might have seemed uplifting to your average Victorian, given the child mortality rate in those days.

I don’t know if my attitude towards reading Dickens has been coloured by the fact that from an early age I knew that he was a bit of a swine to his wife. I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s not a good thing to know a lot about the private lives of authors because it can be really off-putting. Quite a few of them seem to have been bad and dangerous to know – if not actually mad too.

Should I give Dickens another whirl sometime in the future?

Condensing gas boiler

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We had a new condensing gas boiler installed last year at great expense – £3,500 to be precise. We renewed our boiler because the old one was about 40 years old, very noisy and expensive to run. However when we opted for a condensing boiler (actually British Gas didn’t give us any choice) nobody told us that the damn things seize up in the cold. They sense a blockage and shut down.

Last week we were without heating and hot water for a day because the outlet pipe which drains water from the system to the outside froze up. This is what happens in cold weather apparently!

Have you ever heard of anything so daft? So on the very coldest days when you most need central heating it’s very likely that it won’t be working. There are actually people holding hot water bottles to their boiler pipes in an effort to stop them from freezing.

Despite the fact that the heating has been all day, it still froze up as the temperature plummeted even more this evening. We’re thankful that we have a gas fire in the living room and we’re wrapped in blankets sitting in front of it, taking turns on our Netbook.

At some point we’re going to have to brave our ice-box of a bedroom though. I’m tempted to buy an electric blanket or at least hot water bottles. Even if it does make me feel absolutely ancient.

We’ll be having the family back here for the Christmas/Hogmanay holidays and if the heating freezes up then – you’ll be able to hear me screaming, even if you’re on the other side of the world!

Scottish words: smirr

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We get a lot of rain in Scotland, of all different sorts. I think that smirr is the most annoying kind because when you look out of the window it’s very difficult to see it. It doesn’t really fall like ordinary rain and so it has no sound and if you aren’t careful it’ll fool you into thinking that it’s just another grey, dreich day. But if you venture outside in smirry rain and you aren’t dressed for wet weather – before you know it you’ll be drookit, drenched, right through to your knickers! It reaches places that ordinary rain doesn’t reach.

Smirr seems to be a Scottish phenomenon, my eldest brother has lived in the Netherlands for the whole of his adult life and although it’s damp there too, smirry rain is unknown to them.

In Ian Rankin’s book Black and Blue he describes smirr as being a fine spray-mist, which is a fair description I suppose. I’ve always thought of it as very low transparent cloud. Whatever it is – it’s very wet.

The Hanging Garden by Ian Rankin

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This book was first published in 1998. I must say that I didn’t enjoy this one as much as Let It Bleed. It’s a very personal storyline for DI John Rebus with his daughter being knocked down in a hit and run incident. Is it his fault given that he is involved with gangland warfare on the streets of Edinburgh?

There is also the possibility that a WWII Nazi war criminal is living in Rebus’s patch. Coupled with the fact that there are also foreign gang members from Japan and Chechnia and a young woman who is being forced to work as a prostitute in the mix too – there’s definitely a lot going on.

But somehow this one wasn’t a page turner for me although I did carry on to the end. I think I’m going to give Rebus a bit of a rest for the moment and my bedtime read is going to be Margery Allingham’s The Tiger in the Smoke, which is supposed to be her best.

Christmas card writing

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I couldn’t put it off any longer so I just had to get on with writing the Christmas cards or else I would have been drummed out of society! It’s not so much the cards that take the time but all the wee letters that I have to include to the people that I owe letters to. I know some people do those Round Robin things but I really don’t like receiving those myself so I wouldn’t send them. Anyway, now I just have to get to the post office early tomorrow and send them off.

I thought you might like to see these original Christmas cards from the 1950s. They turned up in the store room of a local print works which was closing down, so they are unused.

I toyed with the idea of sending them to people but then decided that as they aren’t glossy and glitzy like modern cards they probably wouldn’t be appreciated. So they’ve been added to my collection of old postcards, and things that other people probably wouldn’t give house room, but I find interesting. Anyway, I think they have olde worlde charm.

Winter garden

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This is how my garden looked after the first heavy snowfall, as you can see I had hoped to hang some washing out, hence the annoying washing line. I like to get the fresh air at stuff but in the past I’ve had to prise the clothes from the line and prop the stiff as a board washing up against furniture until it thaws.

I think it’s about 6 inches deep here but it did reach about 15 inches and I didn’t venture out in it again after nearly breaking my neck just going out to the bin with rubbish. The snow was solid ice by then. Speaking of which – none of our bins has been emptied for weeks now because of the roads, so fingers crossed that they can get to us this week before the snow hits us again. The forecasters are promising us more snow at the end of the week, and it’s below freezing again.

My greenhouse door is frozen shut. The same thing happened last year and the cold weather went on so long that my oldest cactus plant died. It was quite sad really because I bought it when I was only 11 so it was about 40 years old. The cacti had been fine in there over the whole winter in previous years.

This is a photograph of a local school. If you look carefully at the lower roof you can see the damage which was caused when a lot of thawing snow slipped onto it – £80,000 worth of damage apparently!

The Belton Estate by Anthony Trollope

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The Belton Estate was first published in serial form in 1865 and for some reason seems to have been quite neglected over the years. I have to say that I really enjoyed it and it was a very quick read for me.

It’s another story featuring that dastardly thing – an entailed estate. Belton Estate is owned by Mr Amedroz, a widower with a grown up son and daughter, so the entailment shouldn’t be a problem. However, the son Charles has been indulged and spoiled by his father and after spending all of his father’s money and leaving nothing for his sister Clara’s future – and being the selfish, self pitying swine that he is, he commits suicide.

Clara is now in dire straits with no money and an ailing elderly father. When her father dies she’ll be penniless and homeless as the estate passes on to a distant cousin Will Belton. Clara fancies herself to be in love with Captain Frederic Aylmer who is a relative by marriage and a Member of Parliament (usually a bad sign), so when Will Belton, an honest, shy and gentle chap falls in love with Clara she turns his offer of marriage down. Silly Clara, but it had to be done, for the sake of the book.

Clara’s father is sure that the wealthy Mrs Winterfield who is Clara’s aunt by marriage will provide for Clara in her will and so thinks that he has nothing to worry about but Clara knows that her aunt is going to leave her estate and money to Captain Aylmer.

Eventually Captain Aylmer proposes marriage to Clara and she accepts but it isn’t long before she is comparing him with Will Belton and as Frederic is a cold man who never seems to be able to behave the way a fiance should to her, things begin to cool.

When Clara’s father dies she goes to stay with her prospective in-laws, whom she hasn’t met before and it’s obvious that Frederic’s mother and sister are dead against him marrying Clara.

That’s as far as I’m going with the story, because I don’t want to spoil it for people who might want to read it. Previously I’ve read The Barchester Chronicles, and I loved those books, so funny. Trollope must have known a fair amount of ghastly women in his time because he writes them so well. Mrs Proudie, the bishop’s wife, is wonderful in her awfulness.

But what struck me about The Belton Estate is that my copy had originally belonged to my mother-in-law. We inherited it along with a bookcase full of books so I’m fairly sure that she read it. We’ve been married for over 34 years and it’s taken me till now to discover who my mother-in-law took as her role model. It was the tyrranical Lady Aylmer of course, Frederic’s mother!

Charles Dickens often wrote about the conditions that poor people had to suffer, because he had been there himself and presumably hoped that he could help by writing about the inequality of life. Trollope, who was of a different class seems to have been trying to do much the same thing for the women of his own class who were put in a difficult position by entails. He’s also very sympathetic to women who were often harshly judged for what would be seen as a small misdemeanour if committed by a man. It seems to have taken another 20 years for entails to be abolished, by the Reform Bill of 1885.

Anyway, I recommend The Belton Estate as a good read, especially if you’re a bit wary of Anthony Trollope’s work.

Black and Blue by Ian Rankin

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The blurb on the back of this book says: Rebus is juggling four cases trying to nail one killer – who just might lead back to the infamous Bible John. And he’s doing it under the scrutiny of an internal inquiry led by a man he has just accused of taking backhanders from Glasgow’s Mr Big.

I enjoyed this one too, it takes us away from Edinburgh which is Rebus’s comfort zone and has him travelling over to Glasgow and up to Aberdeen and even over to Shetland and on to an oil rig. The storyline involves the oil industry and a murderer who is going by the name of Johnny Bible, a copycat killer who is styling himself on Bible John who was a real murderer in the Glasgow area in the late 1960s. He was never caught and just ‘disappeared’ making most people believe that he had died.

Black and Blue was published in 1997 and Ian Rankin couldn’t have known that nearly 20 years later a murderer called Peter Tobin was going to kill a young Polish woman whom he knew through their Roman Catholic church – he buried her under the church floor and during the police investigations they realised that he had links to areas where young women had disapperared. Men in their 70s don’t suddenly begin a career in murder.

Tobin had moved to England and had lived at numerous locations, in the garden of one house they found the body of a Scottish teenager who had been abducted from a bus station 20 odd years before. Tobin still had a distinctive bracelet which she had worn and her father was able to identify, and what is even scarier is that Tobin apparently had lots of pieces of women’s jewellery, but he isn’t saying who it all belonged to. The body of another young woman was found at another house he had once lived in and he has been convicted of those murders too. However he claims to have killed 48 women, but won’t give any details. But there is one woman who miraculously survived a Bible John attack, and having seen photographs of Tobin which were taken in the 1960s – she is sure that Tobin is the man who attacked her and left her for dead.

The police photofit picture of Bible John was in every train when I was a 10-12 year old and it was very similar to photographs of Tobin so it would seem that Bible John didn’t die but just carried on killing in different places until he was caught by the Glasgow police as an old man.

So back to the book, Black and Blue was just a bit strange because of the recent developments in the Bible John case and also the fact that Rebus goes ‘on the wagon’ towards the end of the book and starts drinking orange juice, so no Irn Bru was required by me!