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.

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.

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.

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!