Weather update

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I realised that the schools were going to be shut again yesterday (Monday) when I had to make a freezing foray to the loo at 6 o’clock in the morning, and discovered that it was snowing heavily again. We had had very little snow during the whole weekend and hoped that the worst was over, but no such luck. So the schools in Fife were closed for a week and a day. They opened today though which is just as well, it’s all very well having to be closed for a wee while but there are exams coming up and a teaching schedule to work through.

Last night we made our last trip through to Dundee with yet more stuff from Duncan’s room, it’s amazing how much there was. I wasn’t looking forward to the journey, remembering the last time. But D. was back living with us because he didn’t have his computer and needed help with putting his new tv together. He’s sorted out now thankfully.

The roads to Dundee were still ridiculous and we haven’t seen a gritter yet this year. The councils ran out of salt and grit last year because of the very cold and long winter and it looks like they are determined not to run out of them again, in fact they’re just not using the stuff.

The worst of this new snow has fallen on the central region and there have been hundreds of people stranded on the main motorway through Scotland. People have been stuck in their cars for over 24 hours in some places. The problem seems to have started with articulated lorries which jack-knifed in the ice, blocking the roads. I think they’re planning to get the army out there to give a helping hand, I certainly hope so anyway.

Just William by Richmal Crompton

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This book was perfect bed time reading when we got in from crazy jaunts across the country in the snow. William is a lovable character just 11 yers old and up to all sorts of naughtiness from a more innocent era. It was first published in 1922.

Chapter XI begins:
‘She’s – she’s a real Botticelli,’ said the young man dreamily, as he watched the figure of William’s sister, Ethel disappearing into the distance.
William glared at him.
‘Bottled cherry yourself,’ he said indignantly. ‘She can’t help having red hair, can she?

I know, I know – it’s daft, but just what I needed.

Thanks again to Niranjana (Brown Paper) for pointing me in the direction of Richmal Crompton.

If you slide your gaze over to my Library Thing thingmyjig on the right, you’ll see that I’ve started reading Ian Rankin’s Black and Blue. I thought I would probably go back to the beginning of the Rebus series but decided to start on this one as it’s in an omnibus edition of three which I’ve borrowed from the library. When I’ve finished with those ones I’ll start at the beginning.

What I’m really supposed to be doing at the moment is reading War and Peace and I can’t avoid it any longer so I’m planning to start that tomorrow, during the day time, I don’t think it’s bed time reading, somehow.

A Snowy Beveridge Park

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We managed to get a wee bit of a walk around this park today and for some reason it was almost deserted. What has happened to all the kids?

Maybe they’ve been busy playing in the park all week as the schools were closed and they’re fed up with it all now, but there wasn’t any evidence of them, no snowmen at all. Had they all been dragged to the shops by parents keen to get Christmas shopping done?

As you can see, the pond has frozen over and there were footprints in the snow which is on top of the ice but it really isn’t safe to walk on it as I’m sure it isn’t thick enough.

The weather forecast is predicting another very cold week ahead for us so it might be as bad as last year was. You can see here a photograph of the park which was taken during the Christmas holidays last year.

This is the refurbished fountain which had to be taken apart during the so called summer because somebody forgot to turn the water off last year and the resulting ice must have damaged it. It doesn’t look nearly so nice now and I suppose it’ll take a few years for it to weather nicely.

Strangely there doesn’t seem to be nearly so much snow in the park as there is in the streets and gardens.

Weather update

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According to the news report tonight it’s colder here than it is in Iceland and Scandinavia, we seem to have got all their snow, but it doesn’t feel too bad when you’re out walking in it. By the time we trudged through the snow from the town today we actually felt too hot, we were laden with more household necessities for Duncan’s new place.

There hasn’t been much snow today and we’re hoping that we’ll be able to drive through to Dundee tomorrow with more stuff and maybe order ‘white goods’ – the most boring things, to my mind anyway.

However, the temperature here is set to plummet to -6 degrees Celsius which I believe is 21.2 degrees Fahrenheit. So the roads are just going to ice up completely and it might be too dodgy to venture out in the car.

The schools are still closed and I’m sure they won’t be open tomorrow, they’ve only ever been closed for two days in a row before but we have had it a lot colder, in the past we’ve suffered -18 degrees Celsius and the fact that there isn’t much wind at the moment is good but on the other hand I suppose that’s why we’ve got this weather front stuck over us and going nowhere.

I’m glad that we aren’t any further north though because it’s going to be -27 degrees Celsius tonight, which is -16.6 degrees Fahrenheit. I’m sure a lot of people have to cope with weather a lot worse than this but we just aren’t used to snow which stays around for a while. When I was a wee girl we didn’t have snow for years and years, which I was quite happy about because on the rare occasion when it did snow – it turned to slush in about half an hour.

This is the fourth bad winter that we’ve had in a row so it looks like we’re going to have to get used to it in the future.

Win-terrrrr

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We just had to bite the bullet yesterday and despite the horrendous weather we hired a van and made our way to the flat pack furniture shop beloved by many that is Ikea. The journey there was pretty hairy because so much snow had fallen. Duncan has taken the week off work and as luck would have it all of the schools in Fife are closed so my husband was able to drive the van. The worst nasty moment was when we crashed into a roundabout and ended up spinning around and pointing in the wrong direction but we managed to get out of that situation and carried on to Edinburgh.

Our plans for a leisurely look around the store and having a late lunch there before buying everything required were shot to bits when they announced that the store was closing in one hour not long after we got there. So it was a mad dash roung gathering up beds and bookcases and such before being chucked out and having to brave the roads again.

It was a slow journey back to Kirkcaldy with the snow coming at us, on and off. Then when we got back home we just threw some food down our necks, loaded some more stuff into the van and set off for Dundee and Duncan’s new flat.

I hate roundabouts. We skated around them and at times it was really terrifying as the van didn’t really like any change in direction, it’s just lucky that there was hardly anybody else on the roads. The snow was even worse when we got to Dundee and the van got stuck in the entrance road to Duncan’s place so we just had to unload all the stuff and trudge through the snow which was about a foot deep. Then up to the second floor flat – no fun at all.

My husband said we’re getting too old for such shenanigans, and I think he might be right. We had to dig ourselves out in the end, with the help of some very good neighbours and a dog.

The journey back to Kirkcaldy was very scary especially when a blizzard hit us and we couldn’t even see the road at times. I dreaded seeing the lights of up-coming roundabouts in the distance. But we made it, and returned the hired van unscathed.

During that marathon journey in three different counties we only saw one snow plough and it had the plough bit raised so it wasn’t doing anything. We saw no gritters at all.

We had to travel across the scary Forth Road Bridge twice yesterday, but today it has been closed for the first time since it was opened in 1962 – which just shows you how bad the weather has been. It’s quite depressing really as we have a long way to go till the end of the winter. It used to be very rare for us to get snow before Christmas but winter seems to come earlier each year now – and stays with us longer, and summer is non-existent.

This is a photo of a very disgruntled bird which appeared in my garden after our first fall of snow. I think it’s a snipe, but I’m not sure. I’ve never seen a bird like this here before, it’s definitely some sort of wading bird and the poor thing seemed to think that the snow was sand because it kept poking its enormous bill into it and was very disappointed to find nothing it could eat.

September by Rosamunde Pilcher

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It’s St. Andrew’s Day – Scotland’s patron saint, but we don’t really do anything to celebrate it, no flag or kilt waving. But I thought it would be nice to read and ‘flag up’ a Scottish book for the occasion. Here it is!

September was first published in 1990 and is a sort of loose sequel to The Shell Seekers in that Noel Keeling appears in it as a minor character and there are references to the wider Keeling family in it.

Although I really enjoyed The Shell Seekers I have to say that I loved September, it’s a real comfort read and I can see myself going back to this one from time to time over the years.

It’s set mainly in Scotland in a fictitious place called Relkirkshire which is described as being north of Fife, which is where I happen to be sitting at the moment, so I imagined the setting as being Perthshire, the descriptions certainly sound like that lovely county which is a wee bit north of here.

The book begins in May and finishes in September and in the middle of it Rosamunde Pilcher takes us off on a summer holiday to Spain to get a wee bit of summer sunshine and escape from the rain in Scotland, just as lots of people do in real life. She did the same thing in The Shell Seekers only in that one she took us off to Portugal.

It’s a family saga involving lots of the families within the Balmerino estate and the wider neighbourhood from the laird and his wife to the Indian family running the local shop and there’s even an evil mad-woman whom Pilcher has given the surname of Carstairs, which happens to be the name of the State mental hospital in Scotland.

I’m not going to say any more about the story because I don’t want to spoil it for anyone as I definitely recommend it as a book to immerse yourself in when you are in need of a bit of rest and recuperation. It’s one of those books that you really don’t want to come to an end.

I didn’t see much Scottishness in The Shell Seekers but with September Rosamunde Pilcher definitely proves herself to be a Scottish writer. She even understands the standing which the Episcopal Church has within Scotland and its relationship with the Church of Scotland, and I can assure you that there are plenty of Scots who are completely clueless about that.

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?

Let it Bleed by Ian Rankin

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This is the second Rebus book by Ian Rankin which I’ve read and I’m sure I’ll be reading quite a few more of them. To be truthful, my heart did sink just a wee bit at the beginning because for a minute it seemed a bit purple prose-ish but he soon settled down into a more relaxed style.

I don’t want to say too much about the storyline because I know that quite a few people are reading Let it Bleed. Judith (Reader in the Wilderness) and her Ken have been enjoying it. Suffice to say that Rebus is the passenger in a police car on the Forth Road Bridge on a freezing winter night. He and his colleague are chasing a Ford Cortina which might have the Lord Provost’s daughter in its boot. The Ford is heading for Fife and they are determined to stop it from reaching there because they want the ‘collar’.

But that’s just the beginning and big business and politics play their parts in this book too.

I get completely engrossed in good books and at one point Rebus was doing a helluva amount of hard drinking and I actually found myself thinking – Thank God I’ve got a bottle of Irn Bru in the pantry – which is a well known Scottish fizzy drink, famous as a hangover cure!

I can’t think of anything particularly ‘Scottish’ which would have to be explained to anyone, but I have heard some English people prononunce the Irish name Siobhan (Rebus’s sidekick) as – See o ban- when of course it should be Shivon.

I hope that you’re reading this, Joan Kyler of Pennsylvania, whose name always comes with a soundtrack in my head – (65-0-0-0) because you might like to see if you can borrow this one from your library, especially as it features that ‘scary bridge’ which you drove over some years ago.

I think Ian Rankin is particularly good at conveying just how cold it feels in the east of Scotland during the winter. It’s the wind chill that gets you and as he says sandblasts you, so it’s always a lot colder than the thermometer says.

This is one of my favourite Irn Bru adverts. Have a look if you want a laugh.

Fortunes of War by Olivia Manning

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Olivia Manning’s Balkan and Levant Trilogies are probably better known as Fortunes of War as that is what the BBC serialisation was named. The first three books were published separately between 1960 and 1965 as :

1. The Great Fortune
2. The Spoilt City
3. Friends and Heroes
and later published in one big volume as The Balkan Trilogy.

As you can see an audio version is available.

The sequel is The Levant Trilogy which was published in three volumes between 1977 and 1980 as:

1. The Danger Tree
2. The Battle Lost and Won
3. The Sum of Things.

If you’re at all interested in World War II you’ll love these books. I read them all in 2008, just before I started blogging and I don’t even have any notes on them but I thoroughly enjoyed the books and they’re written so well I was finished them in no time at all, which was the only disappointing thing really.The writer Anthony Burgess said that they were, “The finest record of the war produced by a British writer.”
Can’t say fairer than that can you?

I remember that I loved watching the BBC serialisation but for some reason it’s never been re-shown, unless I’ve just missed it somehow. It starred a very young Emma Thompson and Kenneth Branagh. I think it was only the second thing that I’d ever seen Emma Thompson in, the first programme was by the BBC again and it was called Tutti Frutti. It was ages ago now and again it doesn’t seem to have been re-shown. But at last, it’s out in DVD.

It was set in Scotland and also had Robbie Coltrane and Richard Wilson in it. I remember it was very funny and is just the sort of thing that they should have on now in these dark and gloomy days. Emma Thompson was able to do a very good Scottish accent. Her mother is the Scottish actress Phyllida Law.

I think I might just put the DVDs on my Christmas list, if my husband’s looking for any ideas!

Scottish words: gallus

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Gallus or gallous is what my mother was always warning me that I must not be. Which is a shame because it seemed to me that it was the gallus people who had all the fun in life.

A gallus person is cheeky, self-confident, a wee bit of a devil and as far as my mother was concerned ‘common’. Bubble gum chewing and red nail varnish wearing, if they happened to be female, and distinctly ‘fast’.

They were described as being gallus because it is a corruption of the word gallows, which is where they were destined to be hanging from if they weren’t careful.