January - part 5. A tottering pile of books!

I'll just say that again - a tottering pile of books! Actually it's not really tottering, but is a satisfyingly substantial pile of books, most of which were Christmas presents. The Robert Macfarlane one was one I got for £1.50 in the sale at a discount bookshop, and the Susan Cooper one at the top is one I often re-read at this time of year as it's set at Christmas. I read Marsali Taylor's Death on a Longship on Christmas Day and Boxing Day, and loved it - Shetland setting and boats and a mystery, pretty much ideal for me.

I started this post hours ago with the intention of writing a more substantial post than yesterday's, but got interrupted. It's been a very long day so I'm off to bed now. So much for a post of substance!

Ancient history

Today has not gone as planned. It's my day off and I had a number of things to do, most of which I'd achieved by 10 o'clock (woohoo!), at which time I was standing in Primark trying to get Miss M cheap joggers for when she goes off on her school residential trip at the end of the month. And then my mobile rang and it was the Boy's school saying that he wasn't feeling well and looking very pale. So I legged it to pick him up, by which time he'd thrown up. The Boy is rarely unwell so he's not accustomed to it, and was looking distinctly green and horrified. So we came home, he's fallen asleep and I've been trying to think of things I can get on with without disturbing him. Aha! light-bulb moment - I can blog. At last! So, I'll share my pictures of Shetland plus a smidge of history and see how it goes.

Jarlshof is a multi-period historic site, 4000-years worth in fact, from the late neolithic up to what's left of 'the laird's house' which is the modern bit having been abandoned in the late 1600s - and although even that is pretty old, in the context of the site it feels as historically uninteresting as a 1970s bungalow.

In the laird's house there is a (thankfully modern metal) spiral staircase leading up to a point where you can get an overview of the site, which really helps make sense of it. And that's why most photos you see of Jarlshof look like the photo above, because that's the view from the top of the stairs! I would have liked to have taken more of a panoramic shot but it turns out I don't really have a head for heights any more so I was too busy hanging onto the railing (and cursing Miss M who was hopping around, completely unconcerned) to get more than a couple of photos. What you can see in that picture are the Iron Age wheelhouses, which are getting on for 2000 years old but are still amazing constructions. They're my favourite bit of the site and when you're inside one you're sheltered from the wind so they're really lovely to be in.

Looking up from inside a wheelhouse. 

When they were roofed over they must have really been relatively cosy. Building like that has always struck me as very sensible of the inhabitants given how windy Shetland is anyway, but especially this site which is on the narrow southern tip of Shetland and is exposed from pretty much all directions.

Looks pretty on a nice day, mind. And there's a very beautiful sandy beach nearby, should the Iron Age folks have fancied topping up their tans.

beach view for the Vikings

There's actually much more to the site than my pictures show - there are the remains of Viking houses off to one side. They're the low rectangular ruins in the photo above but they're difficult to photograph in a way that makes them interesting. There's also part of a broch, but that's on the seaward side of the laird's house and erosion has taken a fair chunk of it. As well as, I think, part of it being underneath the laird's house. It's quite a confusing site in some ways because of the long occupation and the re-use of parts by later inhabitants. Fascinating though, and to my delight the kids enjoyed it as much as I had a kid - well, why not? Space to run around, and not-so-secret passages all over the place!

As you look to the south there's Sumburgh Head and the lighthouse and then nothing but waves until Fair Isle. And after that nothing but waves until Orkney. The airport is just to the east of the Jarlshof, hence the helicopter in this picture and the first one. Actually the land is so narrow at this point that to get to Jarlshof and Sumburgh Head you have to drive across the end of the runway which is fun! There are traffic lights and barriers if anything is about to use the runway so it's not quite as adrenaline-rushy as it sounds.

On the last day we were in Shetland we took another drive down to Sumburgh Head to admire the views and watch the puffins, but we stopped in the hotel to get something to eat and while we were eating the fog rolled in so we could see nothing. Up until then it had been so clear we could see Fair Isle, so it was particularly disappointing! We bumped into my brother's old friend James in the car park - he runs Island Trails and was just taking a tour up to Sumburgh Head. I'm sure he would have made it interesting for them though, however little they could see.

So that's a bit of Shetland - the opposite end from the pictures in the previous post. I've stuff to write about (gasp) crochet, but I'll leave that for another post.

A taster

Foula from Eshaness

I've been trying to do a blog post since the end of July. And now it's mid-September. And actually I'm very tired just now so this isn't even a proper post, but I'm working on the assumption that if I write a short post tonight I'm more likely to write a longer one tomorrow. Well, it's worth a try.

The picture above is from our trip back to Shetland in July. There's at least a full-sized post to be had from that, plus about a gazillion photos, so the picture is a deal I make with myself to write more another day. Anyway, the picture is of Foula, off the west coast of Shetland, and is taken from Eshaness which is on the north-west coast of Shetland. It was a beautiful day that day, all sun and sparkle, and I love that this photo is all shades of blue, yet it looks warm.

heather

And from the same day, heather and grass and blue sky as we climbed a steep hill that I climbed a lot as a kid.

It's not really very high, but it was the highest hill in our immediate area and has wonderful views (well, I think so anyway):

The waves are rolling on

*sigh*

It's been one of those nights when nothing works out as planned. I drove over to my brother's flat, as planned, to watch the Up Helly Aa live webcast. I took stuff to make bannocks, as planned. And my brother ordered a Chinese takeaway (shut up, bannocks totally go with sweet and sour chicken; bannocks go with everything) as planned. Well, the takeaway arrived, so at least that went right.

The bannocks just went horribly wrong. I was adding the buttermilk gradually, but it went from 'too dry' to 'horrible claggy mess' in the blink of an eye. Eventually I got the mixture sorted and got them on the griddle but although they looked perfectly cooked on the outside they were still sticky on the inside.

So we started on the (excellent) takeaway and watched the procession. Every year tlhe coverage gets better and better and they seemed have more cameras including what appeared to be one in the playpark this year. Incidentally the commentators kept saying 'the burning site' but I still think of it as the playpark, which is exactly what it is on a normal day. They were reading out many of the #uphellyaa Tweets, including mine about the bannock disaster so that was my 3 seconds in the limelight!

Then I got a text from my husband asking if I knew where the keys to his car were, and I got that awful sinking feeling. Sure enough his keys were in my jacket pocket and he was supposed to be picking Miss M up from gymnastics at nine. So rather than sitting around reminiscing with my brother I had to head back out at half past eight to go and fetch Missy.

 Talk about wanting to kick yourself.

In other news I bought a fountain pen for 60p today. It would have been cheap anyway, we're talking a Sainburys' basic effort here, but it was in their sale so 60p. Sixty pee!  So I've been practising my neat writing.

Swings and roundabouts (and burning galleys).

The waves are rolling on.

Ah'm makkin bannocks

A grim day outside

One of my earliest memories is of being at the playgroup at the community hall and sitting at a table just below the stage playing with playdough (not Play-Doh, just salt dough) with some of my friends. I was about three or four, and my friend Allan was rolling out the playdough when he announced in a deep and serious voice 'Ah'm makkin bannocks'. I don't know why it stuck in my head, but it did. Maybe it was just because he sounded so earnest.  Allan is now an accountant but in my head he's still the little boy who was makkin bannocks.

Anyway, since Up Helly Aa I've been meaning to have another go at bannocks, as my last couple of tries were a bit hit and miss. As it was a grim, wet, windy, wild day today I thought a bit of baking might cheer things up a bit or at least stop me staring out the windows. I googled and found a Youtube video, Makkin Shetland Bannocks, in which Mina Flaws demonstrates how to make bannocks, obviously.  It helps a great deal seeing someone making them and technique seems to make a difference as today's batch turned out a lot better than the last lot!

The ingredients are given in imperial measures in the video and I'm a metric cook. I thought my kitchen scales had a way of switching to imperial but I couldn't find it - I'm sure it's blindingly obvious and I'll figure it out sometime next week but for today I was googling again.

A lot of it is done by experience really. The first four were slightly singed as I had the heat a little high, but you don't want it too low either or it'll be raw in the middle (I'm hearing Paul Hollywood saying that in my head).

But overall they looked pretty good. Actually I was really chuffed with how they turned out and they tasted not bad at all! Going, as ever, for the multicultural experience I had bannocks instead of naan bread with my sweet potato and chana dal curry and it worked brilliantly. Mmmmm..

Food photography's a bit weird isn't it? I very rarely try it because everything turns out yellowy orange. Fortunately this is a yellowy-orange curry so that's okay. Or so I tell myself.

In non-baking news I'm going on with knitting my cowl, having fixed the bit which had inadvertently stopped being moss-stitch for half a (lengthy) round and turned into rib instead. That was a lot of un-knitting. I might even be finished by the time spring kicks in!

Traditional

Yesterday was the last Tuesday in January and I was to be found at my brother's flat where it has become traditional that we order a Chinese takeaway, watch Promote Shetland/60 North TV's live webcast of the Up Helly Aa procession and get horribly nostalgic for howling gales and the smell of paraffin. The coverage was particularly good this year, with no real glitches, and we were following it all on Twitter too (#UpHellyAa of course) which was entertaining - the webcast commentary team read out the more amusing and interesting tweets during the procession so it's all very interactive these days.

I took my knitting of course  - I'm using Álafoss Lopi at the moment so that's thematically appropriate. My brother took this picture and laughed because in it I'm knitting, the galley is burning on the telly and there's a copy of the Shetland Times on the coffee table. All we need are bannocks and we'll have all the clichés - so that's the plan for next year! A Chinese takeaway and bannocks...

There are some nice Up Helly Aa photos on the Shetland Times website if you're interested.

January is always a Shetlandy kind of month for me because folk there have Up Helly Aa to look forward to and, by contrast, there's not a lot to look forward to where I live now, unless you count Burns' Night, which I don't. I do like haggis but I buy it cheap after Burns' Night, when the supermarkets realise they've overstocked it. I got 60 North magazine in the post the other day to fuel my homesickness entertain me, and I enjoyed it very much. There are various articles about knitting-related stuff, including one by Donna Smith. There's also a good article about the whaling which obviously is a very emotive subject now, but it was once very important in Shetland.

January here is about my children learning Scots poetry at school, oh joy.   My son hates it (he's not a performer) and my daughter relishes it but has never got into the final of the school's Scots poetry competition much to her disgust. However I had a mysterious text from the school yesterday saying, to my amusement, that she's getting a Road Safety/Scots Poetry prize at assembly tomorrow (parents are invited along if their kids are getting Best Work Award or anything). The amalgamation of Road Safety and Scots Poetry tickled me. I shall go along tomorrow with anticipation.  Ssh, don't tell her, it's a surprise.

This is the poem her class had to learn:

Lament for a Lost Dinner Ticket by Margaret Hamilton

See ma mammy
See ma dinner ticket
A pititnma
Pokit an she pititny
Washnmachine.

See thon burnty
Up wherra firewiz
Ma mammy says
Am no tellynagain
No’y playnit.
A jist wen’y eatma
Pokacrisps furma dinner
Nabigwoffldoon.

The wummin sed Aver near
Clapsd
Jistur heednur
Wee wellies sticknoot.

They sed Wot heppind?
Nme’nma belly
Na bedna hospital.
A sed A pititnma
Pokit an she pititny
Washnmachine.

They sed Ees thees chaild eb slootly
Non verbal?
A sed MA BUMSAIR
Nwen’y sleep.


The Blogger spellchecky thing is completely freaking out at that!

As tradition dictates

As recent tradition dictates, on Up Helly Aa night (last Tuesday in January) I go round to my brother's flat, we order a takeaway, he connects up the laptop to the telly, and we watch the Up Helly Aa webcast and get faintly homesick. Or maybe nostalgic. Really if you can't be there in the wind and rain (and it was a particularly vile night in Lerwick that night), watching the webcast in warmth and comfort is the next best thing. It started out a few years ago, as one of the commentators said, with three cameras and a laptop. Maybe that's slight exaggeration (or it might be the literal truth!) but it was a fairly low-key affair, and lots of fun for all that. However it's getting more slick and professional every year, without losing its sense of being truly local.

My pictures are rubbish because obviously being pictures of the telly they're a bit fuzzy, but you'll get the fiery gist and possibly get an idea of how windy it was.

What a lot of non-Shetland people maybe don't know, even if they've heard of Up Helly Aa, is that this one, the big one, the Lerwick Up Helly Aa, is only one of a number of Up Helly Aa celebrations, as a lot of the country areas have their own on different nights. An absolutely filthy night is often the norm for a rural Up Helly Aa. In the town, the galley is burned in the playpark in the middle of town so although it was certainly a grim night on Tuesday they get a degree of shelter from surrounding buildings.  When you're launching a galley into the sea in a gale, in a village that is barely more than a hamlet and everyone's tramping through bog and across beach to watch, a wild night in every sense is pretty much what's expected.  There's a teeny bit of footage, plus a bit of good-natured ribbing at the expense of those who burn their galleys in a playpark, in this video.

There's no denying however that the Lerwick Up Helly Aa is a real spectacle.

The town hall flies the raven banner for the day and this year the clock faces were lit up in red. It doesn't show up very well in that photo but it looked good on the webcast. Social media make the experience more shareable - a lot of people were tweeting about it, tweets were being read out by the webcast commentators and I saw a tweet from one of my old school friends, now living in New Zealand and therefore up early to watch it, so we're now following each other on Twitter. Shetland people are often scattered round the world anyway, and since the oil boom there are a lot of people who possibly only lived in Shetland for a short time but get a chance to relive Up Helly Aa this way. Technology makes the world smaller. And also a bit weirder.

Thinking sheep

I'm off into Glasgow tomorrow for the third Glasgow School of Yarn, a woolly event organised by my favourite wool shop The Yarn Cake. I'm excited. If I can stop sneezing I will be very excited.  I don't wish to sneeze all over the goodies in the marketplace, or through the Shetland Lace workshop I'll be attending. I know, Shetland Lace, coals to Newcastle, eh? But I've only recently started doing lace, I'm really more of a Fair Isle person, so it'll be interesting.

Illustrating this post is a photograph of a photograph, which can more or less be subtitled 'What happens when somebody gets bored of painting the house'. This was many years ago, and Dad was the culprit. On three sides of our house were fields of sheep so this fitted in quite well really. (No, it wasn't permanent. Alas. I could have lived with it like that!)

Equilibrium

 I woke up on Friday morning to discover that my sense of balance had stepped out for a bit. I assume it's some kind of inner ear thing - I didn't feel light-headed, faint, sick or anything like that, I just wasn't clear on what was up, down or sideways. I found myself clinging to the floor, thinking 'the enemy's gate is down' which isn't much help when you're trying to get to the bathroom. I'd be rubbish in space.

It eased, and sleep helps, but I'm still a bit off-balance and spinny. It's all very odd, and has meant I haven't done some of the things I've meant to do over the last few days.

However I have made bread (above) - on Saturday, from a packet mix admittedly, but it was quite nice and I feel inspired to make some more, this time not-from-a-packet-mix.

Today I did some spinning.

I've had a spindle or two since my re-enactment days. The light one got sat on by somebody and snapped but this one, my 'good' spindle survives. I don't know if it's 'good' in a spinning sense but as an object it is lovely. However I've never really got to get grips with spindling. Somebody kindly showed me the basics at a re-enactment event years ago - at Scarborough Castle actually, after a largely sleepless night in a tent pitched in the castle grounds. Scarborough Castle is on a headland sticking into the North Sea, and the wind was quite 'fresh' that night. So I didn't take it all in that day. But I've had a go a few times since and yesterday I actually got round to looking up a helpful Youtube video, which has helped. As you can see the 'yarn' is quite lumpy but believe me it's way better than it was. It suddenly started getting almost even instead of insanely thick immediately followed by insanely thin. I was quite proud of myself and went downstairs and said to My Beloved 'I've been spinning' and he looked confused and said, 'What, your head?'  Actually my head was surprisingly unspinny while I was spindling. The same cannot be said for the Powerhoop class I was at this morning - all those hoops spinning round and round and round did not help my balance issues :-D. Apparently I looked like a rabbit in the headlights. Hmm.

This evening, while watching last night's Top Gear, I've been going on with the yellow stripey thing, which I should have finished by now as we're onto Green (March/April) in the Project Rainbow spectrum, but there you go, these things happen. I should never have tried to knit it while watching engrossing subtitled Danish crime drama last week!  Talking of which, slightly tangentially, the next thing to get excited about is Shetland (showing next Sunday and Monday), which I am so looking forward to, even if Douglas Henshall is nothing like my idea of Jimmy Perez. I shall be squeeing at familiar places though, and looking out for one of my friends who was an extra for a day. And no, on a clear day you cannot see Norway..

Mixed Challenge

It's hard to believe that last Friday we were out sledging. Since then we've returned to classic wet and windy, though with icy rain as an added wintry touch.

Talking of classic wet and windy, Tuesday was Up Helly Aa and as new tradition dictates I went over to my brother's to watch the webcast of the procession. It was a little laggy but nonetheless enjoyable. It was clearly a pretty wild night weatherwise (and in every other sense come to think of it) in Lerwick so as next-best-thing options go watching the webcast from Glasgow was a pretty good next best thing.

But never mind the weather, I'm indoors now and talking about the Mixed Challenge. The Mixed Challenge is a thing on a Ravelry forum that I peruse and the idea was that in the month of January we'd do try to meet four challenges:

• Finish a WIP (work-in-progess) - anything lingering that is crafty
• Photograph an outside flower
• Write a letter
• Cook something from a new to you recipe

Just small challenges but to quote the originator of this month's challenge 'The idea is to get you to try something you might not think of doing, but nothing too extreme.' Which seems a very good idea to me! Especially in January when as I've mentioned before I tend to feel a bit Januaryish and in need of things to motivate me.

So finishing a work-in-progress first. I liked that this wasn't necessarily a knitting thing, though obviously I always have things on the needles that need to be finished at some point.  I managed several with this challenge. I finished the circle socks that were hanging over from December.

I started and finished the Fair Isle hat for C's baby - so not a work-in-progress as such but I'm pleased with having had quick project that didn't languish on the needles. And I also started and finished a jam jar cosy, if that's the right name for such an object:

I'd bought a cheap bunch of daffodils the other day and all my vases (all my vases, I sound like Mr Collins - 'I should say all her vases, for she has several!') were either too tall or too narrow-necked. So I used a jam-jar and thought I'd knit a sleeve for it to pretty it up a bit. I've seen this done in crochet but my crochet is not up to it, so garter stitch stripes it was.



I also finished sewing some little felt hearts I'd been making last winter, and now they're hanging up on my calendar looking colourful.

'Photograph an outside flower' was always going to be a tricky one in Scotland in January.  At the start of the month there were still a few of the dyer's chamomile flowers clinging on looking more than a bit sad:

But other than that there was very little. There were some small blue flowers on a plant in my garden - the name escapes me and as it's blowing a hoolie and chucking it down out there I'm not going out to check the label - but I couldn't get a picture in focus. So I cheated and took one of the daffs from the kitchen outside and took a picture of it in the snow, purely because it looked pretty!

The new recipe challenge was an excellent one as I rarely cook from recipes and have a rather stagnant repertoire of Things I Cook. Nice things, but the repertoire could do with expanding. So after much browsing I chose the Fruity Lamb Tagine from the BBC Good Food website, made it and blogged about it last week (in the post 'Things and Stuff' - I'd link but it's only two posts ago so that seems a bit silly). It was very weird browning the lamb and knowing I wasn't going to have anything minty with it - I'm obviously such a creature of habit that the smell of lamb immediately makes me want mint!  Pavlov's cook..   But it was really delicious, it will be added to the repertoire and I'm so glad I had the Mixed Challenge to push me into cooking something new!

My only fail was in the 'writing a letter' challenge. I could do it today, though I've no idea who I would write to, but I've got a cold and to be honest I'm planning on going back to bed for a bit while my jeans dry on the radiator (soaked from the knee down - clammy, lovely..) before getting the kids from school.  And although I haven't written a letter I did have an excellent result from having written a letter in December. With several of my older relatives I put a letter and a photo of the kids in with the Christmas card. A few days ago I had a 'phone call out of the blue from one of these relatives to say thank you for the card and the pictures. Jean is an older cousin of my mum's, in her eighties, and she sends birthday cards without fail to everybody in the family.  I haven't actually seen her for decades, but I send her Christmas and birthday cards and try to let her know what we're up to and so on, and she rang up to say how much she liked the picture of the kids.  It's easy to stay in touch electronically with my contemporaries and in fact with quite a lot of the older generation, but it's good to be reminded that not everyone's online or chooses to be online and that a letter in the post is a nice thing for anyone to get.

I'm intrigued to see what February's challenge will be. I'm guessing not bungee jumping. Hope not anyway, I'm forbidden to in case my retinas detach - you know like I was planning to go bungee jumping.. *rolls eyes*  I leave the insane adrenaline junkie stuff to my brother and, slightly worryingly, to my daughter who seems to take after her uncle rather than sensible people like her parents.

Being Katie Morag

Do we all know who Katie Morag is? Ah, good :-). I enjoy reading Katie Morag books to my daughter - they're a bit of nostalgia for me as I was once a child who stomped around beaches in my wellie boots. Now that my brother is scanning the old slides I'm entertained to notice that actually I'm more Katie Moragish than I'd remembered.

I had Big Boy Cousins:

That's me, my dad and my little brother with them.  Looks a bit steep doesn't it?

Granny Island is a brilliant tractor-driving character and should I ever be a Granny I'll model myself on her (yes, I can drive a tractor), but I didn't have a Granny Island or a Granma Mainland myself.  I had just the one Granny who lived in Ireland (Granny Ireland then?)  - here she is visiting us:

That's me and my brother with her on one of the beaches (for there were several) in the immediate vicinity of wir hoose. When I think of myself as a kid I mostly remember wearing trousers, which, so I thought, makes Childhood Me different from Katie Morag with her stylish skirt-and-wellies look. But as you can see I obviously did wear skirts some of the time. Just not with wellies in this case.

The picture below is possibly not that clear but if you click on it you'll see me striding purposefully around in my wellies. Clearly a child on a mission.

Brr, looks chilly.

And finally, just for the fun of it, here's a picture taken on Victoria Pier in Lerwick, looking inland obviously. I don't know what year - late 1960s? Early 70s? Mid 70s?  Anyone know about cars? I'd ask My Beloved but he's gone to bed.  I am of early 1970s vintage but I wasn't paying that much attention to cars as a kid, and I'm not enough of a car buff to guess. Great cars though - they look the way cars look when they've been drawn by me. I never could draw cars.

What's interesting about this picture is that from that angle, aside from the cars not much has changed about this view since then, or hadn't last time I was home. If you have a look at the Lerwick Harbour webcam, one of its angles is not dissimilar to this one. Don't look too closely at the zoomed-in webcam shots of the boats in the harbour swaying up and down and side to side.. you'll get queasy. Or is that just me?

Burning yer boats

Hurray, January's finished! And it finished on a Tuesday meaning that last night was Up Helly Aa, always the last Tuesday in January, so I was over at my brother's house watching the webcast of the procession. There were technical issues (possibly at our end, or possibly due to the volume of viewers) so it was a bit laggy and the broadcast failed just as the torches were about to go into the galley, but despite that it was the next best thing to Being There. I took some more pictures of the tv screen (that one above is about the best) but they didn't come out well so I'll give you a link to some pictures on the BBC news website, and the Shetland News article on the event (if you scroll down to the bottom there's a link to Billy Fox's pictures of the day too). Considering that the procession and galley-burning is just the start of a very long night of celebration (one of my friends updated Facebook to say she was just off to bed at 6 o' clock this morning) it's very impressive that there are pictures online already.

So, that's January gone. Thank goodness. I lost my camera on Sunday. I think it fell out of my bag on the train into Glasgow. Nobody has handed it in to Lost Property at the station. I would if I found a camera, but perhaps I'm in the minority. I hope the git that's acquired it enjoys my pictures - my daughter posing proudly with her dance exam certificates, for example. I hope they're bored to tears by my photographs of apple crumble and of streetlight reflections on icy puddles. I'm a bit peeved. I'm using My Beloved's camera now and it's just not as good. *sigh*

February has started with my daughter's class assembly - their topic was Chinese New Year and they did an excellent presentation. It was lovely. They all looked so tiny, but there they were reciting quite complicated lines, and they all spoke so clearly and looked as if they were having fun. It cheered me up no end. Also it's a cold, clear sunny day, and that helps no end!

hearts and stars

I made a heart yesterday. I'm not sure if it's a very small pin-cushion or if I'll attach a ribbon and hang it up somewhere (Miss Mouse has her eye on it - she wants it to be a pillow for her teddy, but it's really too small for that). The idea was to brighten up miserable January with a bit of colour, and I thought a few hearts in cheery colours might do the trick!

It was cold and clear on Sunday night so the Boy and I went out into the garden to look at the stars. We didn't have a hope of seeing the aurora as the glow of Glasgow is to the north of us, but we did get a good view of Orion and I was pretty pleased with myself for finding Cassiopeia. And as he was interested, yesterday I showed the Boy various aurora pictures online - some cracking ones on the Shetland News report and Paula Moss Photography. When I was a kid I used to find the northern lights a bit creepy - I remember standing at our door once watching it then having the urge to run back inside. It does look a bit like a dodgy special effect in a film I suppose! I do kick myself a bit now, that I lived in a place with reasonably dark skies (though the flare-stack at the oil terminal did affect that) and more opportunity for aurora-watching than most places in Britain, yet I didn't stand still, watch and make a point of remembering these moments. Especially when so many of my friends now I'm on the mainland say that they'd love to see an aurora. There's nothing like being irrationally irritated with your former self!

The waves are rolling on

Occasionally (just occasionally) I find myself thinking that teh Intartubes are overrated. And then as we get towards the last Tuesday in January, when I'm in the midst of my annual bout of homesickness, I remember web-cams. And yesterday being the last Tuesday in January and therefore Up Helly Aa, I spent a little time in the morning watching the Visit Shetland webcams - here's a photo of what the webcam showed happening at the Cross just after 10am:

In the evening, even better, I was over at my brother's and he set up a convoluted arrangement of cables, laptop and television so we could watch Visit Shetland's live internet coverage of the procession.

Waiting with baited breath..

for things to get started..

then watching as if hypnotised 'til the finish (for us)..


..at which point I realised I was late for meeting (appropiately enough) my knitting group buddies! It was a bit surreal actually, after being so immersed in what's going on in Shetland, to be wandering round the southside of Glasgow!

So a lovely evening - congratulations to Visit Shetland and all who worked on the coverage, it was great! If you look over on Kozetland1's blog there are some gorgeous pictures of the day.

Rummaging

I've been rummaging through boxes from the garage - hey, we only moved in four-and-a-half years ago. This was to make way for a potential new motorbike for MrBorg of course (not rolling my eyes honestly). In the process I came across this little plaque that I made in a pottery evening-class years ago and had completely forgotten about. It's based on a goose design from a Pictish symbol-stone. I love the animal designs you get on symbol-stones - simple but very striking.

Other excitement this week (because I lead such an exciting life!) was the arrival of the New Year edition of the Shetland Times, including the calendar, sent by my aunt. I'm really happy with this year's calendar, very cheerful sunny picture, certainly compared with the grey murk outside my windows this week.

My sleep is much improved so I've been happily continuing my log-cabin knitting each evening - off to do that now!