Long time no see!

What a week this has been for catching up with old friends I haven’t seen for years!   I  mentioned Brenda in the last posting – we had taught at the same school in the late 70s, and though we kept in touch sporadically we hadn’t seen each other for a good number of years.

Then…….

Coming out of choir practice last week I saw a face in the school corridor, that I recognised, though I hadn’t seen it since 1979!  It belonged to Sheila, from the Isle of Skye, my flatmate in Edinburgh for a couple of years before she got married.  I practically pushed everyone out of the way to get to speak to her before she disappeared.  “Sheila!”  It wasn’t even a question.  She hadn’t changed a bit.  Marriage and two sons hadn’t done what the years have done to several of my friends, and she looked as young as ever.  I, on the other hand, obviously have changed – well, I’ve changed my hair colour and style and put on weight – as she didn’t recognise me at all at first.  I had to remind her!  Well, she  knew immediately then, and we had a long blether – chat – about the years that had passed, before exchanging email addresses and phone numbers, and going on our ways.   It was strange to be able to tell choir members in the pub later that Sheila was the one who had introduced me to Gaelic choir singing during the time we shared the flat, and now I am hoping to reintroduce her to it, if I can persuade her to join the Lothian choir!

Next day, I had an email from Fiona, an old school friend, who I have only seen once since we left school in 1967 – and that was at the school reunion held last year, and which I talked about in the blog here at the time.  Fiona is on the right, standing at the back in front of the mirror.  She’s now retired and catching up with friends!  So we met for lunch the other day and blethered about school memories, our families, things we had done in the intervening years, places we had visited…. lovely!  I forgot to take a photo album along to show her, of the school cruise we went on when we were about 15, so next time we meet I will take it along with me.

My dear friends from Invercargill, New Zealand, arrived in Edinburgh on Thursday night, when I met them off the bus from Cambridge, and took them to their guest house.  We had tea together later, and then yesterday we had an afternoon out, driving a bit round the city, and visiting the former royal yacht – Britannia.  People are generally very surprised and somewhat disappointed at how ordinary and not at all “regal” the ship appears to be, and I think that is why the royals liked it so much.  It was somewhere they could just be themselves, without the prying eyes of the public and the paparazzi tracking their every move.  The private rooms are all very ordinary – stylish, but ordinary – when you see them through the glass panels that have replaced parts of the once solid walls  There are the offices used by the Queen and Prince Philip, as royal duties continued even at sea, and the

 

 

state rooms where lavish banquets and receptions took place on visits overseas.  It is a very interesting ship.

   In contrast to the spacious royal quarters the sailors’ quarters are small and cramped.  Up till 1979 they even still slept in hammocks,, but latterly had bunk beds – three, one above the other, in this case, on each side of a “room” with about 18 inches of a passage between beds. 

Later after tea in Ocean Terminal with views of Britannia’s prow, we took a drive round Arthur Seat and the Crags to see more spectacular views of Edinburgh and its surrounds.  The sun was going down, but against all advice we pointed our cameras in its direction, to get the silhouette of the Royal Mile ridge in the distance, and nearer at hand, Salisbury Crags and the Radical Road, a pathway beneath the cliffs.  A little bit of tweaking on the computer helped to produce this picture….  I’m quite happy with that!

Today Eunice and Keith are having a relaxing day off, as they have been on the go non-stop for about two weeks…and blow me!  The phone rang this morning and here was another friend from long years ago,1966 in fact, but who I have seen a few times over the years  – last time was about 3 years ago, when I made this scrapbook page.   Ruth and her husband are on their way north to visit their son, and are coming through Peebles in about an hour so I am off to meet them for lunch!  I’ll wait till later to post this on my blog and hopefully I’ll have a picture or two more to put in.

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Well, I had a lovely time with Ruth and Patrick, first having a snack lunch and catching up on news, and then a walk along the Green for the views.

We started to take photos of each other and finally had our picture taken all together by a kindly guy sitting on a bench nearby.  So here are the three of us together. 

Now they are on their way again, heading over the Forth Bridge and into the Kingdom of Fife!     I wonder who the next old friend to call will be!  I’ll let you know!

Talk again soon.

Whistlebare!

  Brenda and Donald live in a cottage way up on a hillside, and this is the local name for it, a good one when you consider winter with the wind whistling around the place and the ground pretty bare of trees, except for the forestry plantation behind the house, and a tiny rowan tree Brenda planted in memory of her lost baby, who would have been a young man now had he been able to live.

 When Brenda bought the cottage several years ago the place was a ruin – 4 stone walls, a roof you could see through (this was from a later picture when the roof was taken down), no window frames or doors, no floorboards – all were gone, used to make fires by walkers and others stopping by, after it was deserted by its last human occupant, the local gamekeeper, probably about 60 or more years ago.

 So, over the years, not without many difficulties and problems, Whistlebare has become a beautiful little house, with views over the Perthshire hills and countryside to die for.  I last saw it when it was in its ruinous state, but visited last weekend to see an almost finished home.     Just a few photos then, and a quick posting, as summer is proving to be a very busy time!                                                The view from the front door.  The road is way down in the valley, with just a track leading uphill.    

The neighbours!

Donald, Brenda and her daughter.

Below is the living room.  I can hardly believe I saw this last when it was an empty shell!

 

 

 

OK then, I’ll be back as soon as I can, so do keep dropping in on the chance there may be more from me!

Talk again soon.

Tempus hasn’t half fugitted

Where does the time go to?  So what have I been up to since I last wrote?   Well, at the weekend the weather was beautiful – hot and sunny – and on Friday a handful of us went to visit another garden open to the public.   Little Sparta is set in the hills to the south of Edinburgh and was a farm originally.   (This is the view to the next farm and the hill beyond.)  The late owner was a poet, artist, philosopher and sculptor, who set out the collections of small gardens all leading from one to another, filling them with trees and plants, and dotting sculptures all over the place.  Some are just slabs of stone with words carved into them.  Sometimes they make sense, sometimes they don’t!  I guess the artist Ian Hamilton Finlay knew what they were all about! It cost an arm and a leg to get into the gardens plus rather an extortionate fee for taking photos, which I refused to pay.  Anyway even if I had taken the photos I wouldn’t have been able to show them here (without permission from the Trust which runs Little Sparta now) so all I can do is direct you to the website, and to a selection of photos also on the web some of which seem to have been taken by Mr Finlay himself some years ago.  This is another website that has some rather nice pictures.

This picture is somewhat reminiscent of the type of thing  you see at Little Sparta, but it was taken the next day, at the Gardening Scotland Show at Ingliston just west of Edinburgh, near the airport – very near, right next to it in fact.  There were planes landing and taking off all day - a day when British Airways wasn’t on strike, we noticed!  To make up for no pictures on Friday I made up for it on Saturday.  And boy, was it hot!  The sun beat down all day, as we (Morag, Mike and I) wandered along the rows of stalls promoting this or that aspect of gardening or selling this and that piece of gardening equipment  or garden ornament you just cannot live without.  What surprises me is the number of clothes stalls, and other ones that don’t seem to relate to gardens and gardening at all.  Last year I bought a lacy wrap that you can wear as a coat, shawl or jacket with hood, but the only time I would wear it in the garden might be on a coolish evening enjoying the last of the daylight.  Here in the south of Scotland it is still  reasonably light up until 1030 p.m. and by the middle of June will be light even later. 

Anyway, the stalls are nice to look at, but what I like best at the show are the little garden layouts, probably not even as big as my garden but what designs and plantings!   I look at

 

one and think “I could do that with my garden!”   Then I move

 

on to the next and think, “Now that would look good in my garden!” and so on, picking out bits that would fit into my scheme!   I take all the photos, get home and look at them, and then I tell myself, “Oh come on!  Behave yourself!  How much would it cost to change this or this to that and that?  An arm and a leg!  Be realistic!”   So my little garden layout will probably stay much the same as it is now, only I hope a bit better-looking!  Maybe you’ll get to see some pictures of it some day!!

 There are also the little pallet gardens, a lot designed and made by school children on a topical theme, green issues, or a fairy tale perhaps.   I loved the three bears eating their porridge al fresco!  This year volcanoes featured strongly, thanks to the unpronounce-able Icelandic one that blew this year, distributing ash that is going to be good for the soil, all over Europe!  Can’t say I’ve noticed much ash, though I did get a mucky film of the stuff on my car windscreen early on!  Some of the pallet gardens, about a square metre in size, are very clever, building up height and using various props to decorate with plants.

In the large hall there are displays of specialist plants, like the clematises here. I love these to bits!   There are bonsai displays, stunning flower arrangements, more gardens, as well as stalls for Wildlife organisations and Horticultural organisations, while way at the far end of the hall are demonstration areas where you can learn how to cook fancy dishes with the vegetables you’ve grown, or how to make very plausible “stone” troughs for your alpines, out of polystyrene fish boxes!  My legs were aching by the time I reached the hall so I didn’t explore it fully this time.   I took lots of pictures of flowers outside though, so here are some of my favourites…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Then there were  the birds of prey….a gorgeous barn owl who loved being stroked, and the

 

 

 

European Eagle Owl who twisted his head round 180 degrees to look at me.  This is really his back view!  The little baby of the same variety was sheltering under a table out of the sun, looking fairly miserable, I thought.  In about three weeks he’ll be the size of the other one one!  What a rate they must grow at!

So, at last we were all gardened out, so the next best place to be was home.  As we neared Peebles the skies darkened and it looked like there would be a storm.  Luckily we didn’t get it – but Edinburgh did!  Thunder and lightning, torrential rain… the lot, apparently!   I hope the plants and gardens survived for the last day of the Show on Sunday!

Talk again soon.

Celtic festival

Morag told me about the Celtic Festival going on at Newbattle Abbey, on Saturday past.  It all sounded rather interesting so I was keen to join them in going along.  The Abbey, like Glenbarr in Kintyre, isn’t an Abbey as such, but a splendid big house, not too far from Dalkeith.   Oops! Just discovered there was a Cistercian Abbey on the same site in the 12th century, but the present house dates from the 16th century.

For years now it has been a college running courses in all sorts of subjects, which are open to adults wishing to gain extra qualifications .  Their variety of short courses interested me quite a bit.  I fancy the Creative writing,  Oral Story telling, Gaelic, and Genealogy.

The Celtic festival was a “celebration of celtic culture and woodland heritage”  offering various activities for all ages, and the chance to learn new skills. I signed up for a workshop on Story telling, and one on Breton Dance – I thought it was a bit more genteel than the Scottish and Irish dancing and that it would minimise my aches and pains!   Ah, read on, dear friend, read on!!!

The story telling workshop, held upstairs in a small classroom, was fun.  We all had our own reasons for wanting to learn how to tell a good story, some of the group working with children with disabilities – is that PC these days? – and learning difficulties, myself because I have tended only to read stories to kids when I was a baby sitter and later a primary school teacher – in a former life!  I love traditional stories, fairy tales and the like, especially from the Scottish tradition, and would rather like to become a story teller  professionally!!  The first activity was given over to making up a story about an object we picked at random out of a “goodie-bag” handed round by Bea our tutor. 

My object was, strangely enough, a little leather boot of the type associated with the “Wee Folk ”. the Little People, and we all had the chance to tell our story to a partner.  Now, I’m not very good at making up stories – I write better, and about things I know  - so with only a minute to think up what to say proved quite hard.  My story ended up consisting of stolen bits from a variety of  existing fairy stories, but I think I told it well enough.  Next activity, after a bit of discussion and some hints and ideas from Bea, was to read a typed story given each of us, and  after 5 minutes of studying them and planning how we’d tell our one, we each had to tell the group in our own words.  My story was another fairy story, while Nick had a sort of Arabian nights one.  Mags had a kind of environmental story,  and these were the only ones we had time to listen to.  Bea talked about our stories and evaluated the way we told them.  Nick actually had applause for his rendition!  I dried up in the middle of mine and had to have a reminding look at the cribsheet, but I did alright otherwise.

Then I headed down from the first floor tutorial room to the vaulted crypt where the dancing seminars were held.    A couple of musicians with hurdy gurdy and a set of bagpipes provided the music and we were instructed on the basic steps of our first dance, a linear dance all holding hands and linking arms and moving round  in a follow-my-leader fashion, round the pillars. 

 

By the time we had gone round and round and in and out a few times, I realised that even though it was a gentler form of dance, my left hip was not going to stand up to it so I dropped out and watched instead.  What a shame!  It looked like a lot of fun!

After exploring the Crafts marquee in the gardens, I found Morag, Mike, and Morag’s mum in the ceilidh tent (KAYli –a ceilidh is a gathering of people for the purpose of entertainment such as singing, dancing and story telling)  listening to some folk bands and watching some Scottish dancing, but soon we opted for finding a cup of tea,  and ended up eating icecream and listening to a couple of young buskers.  Not sure what the third one was there for though!  

There were several stalls in the gardens devoted to some woodland and other outdoor activities, but there were a few items on the flyer that I didn’t find at all.  I think maybe they were  subjects of workshops held in the morning so we missed them!  However it was an interesting afternoon that may lead to something more in the autumn when the college session begins again!  Who knows!

Talk again soon.