In which I re-enter the world of blogging.

It's been a while hasn't it? Stuff has been going on - Miss M has had a birthday, I have started studying again (I'm going to finish the Open University degree I started before the kids came along), and, er, I dunno what else. It's just all seemed rather busy recently. Mostly the studying really - I've just been figuring out the best times to fit it in. My plan is to stay a week ahead with it at all times so that when things like the school October holidays and Important Eighth Birthdays happen and I get no studying done whatsoever I'm not losing way.

This year I left booking the cattery too late and it was completely booked up so it wasn't possible for us all to go up to see my parents in the October break.  In the end the kids and I took the train up and left My Beloved with the cats, giving them a bit of peace and quiet to watch zombie films or whatever it is they do when we're not around.

We had a lovely time in the not so frozen north. Miss M and I even went paddling in the burn up in the hills (very 'refreshing' - euphemism for 'a bit chilly'), and the Boy accidentally went paddling when he fell in the Spey. Fortunately it was a) slow-moving at that point, b) shallow, so all he got were wet feet, and his socks and trainers dried in no time next to my parents' wood-burning stove. Bliss... (the stove, not the wet trainers).

Toasty warm

Toasty warm being what I am currently not. 

However last weekend was the schools' February long weekend so we headed up north to see my parents and I spent as much time as possible basking in front of their stove. Aaaaah, bliss, bliss, bliss. It warms their living-room so efficiently that it was actually too hot by the standards of others*, though just right by mine. I was only sitting, knitting, reading or talking after all.

Lichen princess.

Lichen shapes.   Looks a bit like seaweed, doesn't it?

We went to the Highland Wildlife Park one day and saw the red pandas. I can't tell them apart in my photos but there were three - mum, dad and the cub who is about seven months old. I thought this picture was of the cub but now I'm not sure.  Back around the time the cub was born my dad was supplying bamboo shoots to the wildlife park - they'd asked if anyone in the area could provide any and as Dad has a lot of bamboo in the garden (he loves the stuff) he took some along every few days.

When we were there in the summer, Miss M went along on a bamboo trip - ah, it looks so warm!

But in February it was distinctly chilly. We headed back south on Tuesday morning. We'd had a wonderful time (not just basking in front of the fire - spending time with Mum and Dad is also excellent) and it was too short as always.

I think we timed it quite well though - according to Traffic Scotland, who I follow on twitter, there were various road closures due to accidents and weather conditions the day before and later that day and probably into the next day.

Back here it's been occasionally snowy, occasionally wet, occasionally windy. Today it was grey and dreich until ten to three when it started raining (just in time for standing in a cold windswept playground waiting for the kids to get out of school - you'd be amazed at how often the weather turns unpleasant at ten to three), rapidly followed by sleet and then snow.

Rather wet snow so I imagine it'll be gone by morning, but it's distinctly chilly and I'm dreaming of my parents' stove.  It's been a really mild winter, mostly wind and rain, and Scotland is for the most part far too hilly for flooding, so it's been an easy winter really. But it's okay to be dreaming of some warmth now, isn't it?

*i.e. the rest of the family, who do not feel the cold ever. Weirdos.

St. Andrews bliss

So it's the tail end of the school holidays - the kids are back to school on Wednesday. And although it's been a great summer, I think they're quite happy to be going back really. Normally I'd be quite relived  - being chief finder-of-interesting-and-fun-things-to-do for seven weeks takes its toll, and I am pretty tired I admit, but it's been so much fun this year. Partly because we had a lot of good weather, and partly because the kids are a bit older and better able to entertain themselves.

Last week we had our final fling and headed off to St.Andrews for a few days of pottering. We stayed in the same place as last year, a hall of residence, though finally finally it's got rid of the ridiculously short-sighted name of New Hall (it was built when I was a student) and is now Agnes Blackadder Hall, after Agnes Forbes Blackadder who, in 1895, was the first woman to graduate from St.Andrews University and went on to become a doctor of some note - more information here. It's a good name, though I suspect part of its popularity is due to the opportunity for many many Baldrick jokes!

 We did a lot of nothing much - some time spent on the East Sands rock-pooling...

 ..some paddling, quite a lot actually, even the Boy joined in - those are his feet there..

.. some eating of ice-creams. Or sorbet in my case. Mmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

One evening the Boy and I went for a wander out towards the hall I lived in during my first-year. It's no longer there, thankfully, and has been replaced with self-catering 'apartments' which look much pleasanter to live in, but the path to it is just as lovely as it ever was.  That field was one of my favourite views when I was a student. I saw it in all weathers and conditions.

The next day there was more messing around on rocks, investigating rock pools or pretending to be on a pirate ship:

Also a trip to the aquarium and a visit to the castle. I'd got the kids a drawing book each and the Boy spent a lot of time drawing plans of the castle, while Miss M wrote lists of rooms and other points of interest.

She particularly likes the mine and countermine, which are a siege mine and the tunnel dug by the besieged to meet it.  She got her daddy to take her down the tunnels several times. From inside the castle you go down the countermine which is very low-ceilinged and truly unpleasant until you climb down a short ladder into the mine, which has a higher ceiling and is generally more spacious as those digging in from outside had better equipment and so on. From that point steps lead up until they eventually stop at a wall, which I imagine stops you ending up in somebody's cellar, and there's a small manhole in the ceiling letting a bit of light in. I don't think Miss M is all that interested in the history really, it's more the 'secret passages' thing. Unfortunately I'm claustrophobic (hence the mine/countermine being a job for daddy!) and have never actually got further than the short ladder bit, but I've just watched this Youtube video that shows what it's like (the second half, on the way back from the far end, has better lighting so you get more idea what it's like). Hurray for the Intertubes! I can't imagine I'll ever get to the end of the tunnel myself, but at least I know what it's like now! Dark mostly.

I think that's our last time at the hall as sharing a family room is so tiring, especially when the youngest gets overtired after eight o'clock and we all have to go to bed early, but maybe a holiday cottage or something next year, if we go back. Shame really as breakfast there was fantastic, but decent sleep is even more so!

Going wild on our birthday

 No, I'm not using the Royal 'we' - as well as my 42nd birthday it was the Boy's tenth birthday, ooh double figures!  And it was a glorious day too - we were in the Highlands again visiting my parents for the long weekend, so we all went to the Highland Wildlife Park for the day. There was still snow on the mountains but it was hot (that's Scottish hot, probably just tepid to Californians and similar, but the kind of day on which peely-wally Scots get just a bit pink-and-singed-looking). The camels looked quite relaxed and sleepy. I think that's a yak in the background. A yakground. Or possibly it's a spy-sheep in a mac. Incognito.

Another camel catching some rays:

This is a rare sight, the saltire against an actually properly blue sky:

Well, it's rare in the soggy bit of Scotland which I inhabit anyway. My family mock me for my habit of taking photos of blue skies but it's good to relish them and even better to look back at the pictures when it's grey, wet and generally dreich. Look! It's so bluuuuuue!

That's the view across the snow monkey enclosure. I'm relaxing just looking at it.

Like Eliza Stickleback, I was also taking pictures of the 'wrong' things - such as lapwings and oystercatchers in the bit of the park you drive through. Well, the bison and suchlike were further away from the road. And I like birds, especially oystercatchers but my oystercatcher picture is a bit blurred.

I indulged myself with a pink drink with my picnic - rose lemonade! I'd never seen or, obviously, drunk it before but it was too pretty not to have as a birthday drink, don't you think? 'Weird but nice' is my summary. The Boy tried a bit and agreed.

A very nice day indeed. I was quite happy to be 42 (in recent years I've not been keen on the new number but 42 is different) and the Boy seemed quite pleased to be ten. Even if I kept muttering 'you can't be ten, you were just a baby a minute ago' and other similarly parental things.

odd things

 Some more pictures of our little break, this time those of a more random nature.

 This one is a view of the Castle Sands from the castle itself. I was hoping to take the kids down there because it's a great beach - plenty of rock-pooling opportunity, a mixture of sand and stones so the chance to find 'treasures' (sea-glass, shells, interesting stones) and a tidal saltwater swimming-pool which I've never actually swum in, not being one of the loonies brave souls who participated in the May dip (swimming at dawn on the 1st of May).  Unfortunately in 2011 there was a landslide by the steep path down to the beach and it's still closed off, awaiting shoring up and the May dip has moved.  It made me notice how much the shoreline and cliffs near the castle are reinforced. There's a reason half the castle is missing after all!

Also from the castle, somebody has decorated the top of a bit of railing with the very distinctive Tunnock's Caramel Wafer wrapper:

 Another blue-sky at the East Sands picture, just because I can:

Sallies Quad (St. Salvator's Quad) - specifically the bit that used to house the anthropology department:

 
Messing with the kite  on the West Sands:

 Climbing around on the rocks on the beach by the Golf Museum:

Seagull at the St. Andrews Aquarium glaring at the aquarium seals who were being fed:

We left at around lunchtime on Thursday, stopping at the supermarket for some picnic things, parked in Crail just down the coast and ate our picnic in the car. Crail has a very picturesque harbour (by which I mean it's been painted and photographed a gazillion times - try typing 'Crail' into Google images and you'll see what I mean) but we didn't think the kids would be that interested so we skipped that and just ate our lunch. I was very taken with the parasol opposite where we were parked (click on the pic if you can't see it):

It turns out that's a shop called The Old House Interiors and the parasol is there come rain or shine (or, if you follow the link, snow). While were watching, a very dignified grey and white cat stalked out of the garden and sat by the parasol for a bit before wandering off on a sedate adventure up the street.

Something I noticed all over Fife was the number of poppies on the verges - wild flowers generally but the poppies especially, masses of them.   I tried to photograph them but it's not easy when you're moving - honestly there are some in the picture above! After we crossed the bridge (Forth) on the way home I only saw one lonely poppy by the side of the road. In the olden days when I'd get the bus down from St. Andrews to Glasgow every second or third weekend in the summer to go and visit my Beloved who'd gone home for the summer, I'd sometimes see poppies on the way, especially in one field between Cupar and Glenrothes, so I suppose it's a flower I associate with the summer in Fife anyway.  Nice :-).

When we got home I discovered one poppy flowering in our garden - yay!

"A little city, worn and grey "

Hello! We're back from a couple of completely blissful days in St. Andrews.  Now St. Andrews is a place full of memories for us -  my Beloved and I are a cliché, we're a St. Andrews University couple.  We met there, started going out, graduated and eventually got married.  And this week we took the kids there. Somehow we hadn't been back for years.  I don't know why really - it's not that far. The Boy had been before as a baby but only for a day, and Miss Mouse obviously had never been, so we thought a couple of days of seasidey fun on the drier east coast would be a bit of fun for them and pleasant for us. And it was BLISS!

We arrived at lunchtime on overcast-but-warm Tuesday, went to the castle, then to Jannetta's, the ice-cream shop:

 Bit of an odd expression on Miss Mouse's face there - concentrating on her tub of ice-cream I think!

 

This was a bit of a treat for me because although I don't like ice-cream I do like sorbet. It's not often that I can get ice-creams for the kids and a sorbet for myself but Jannetta's has a great choice of sorbet flavours. I had the raspberry sorbet (mmmmmmmmmmmm..), and the next day tried the apple sorbet which was a bit odd but also lovely. They also did an Irn Bru flavour sorbet that I really must try next time we're back there, as well as the more usual mango and lemon sorbets and I can't remember what else.

 After dinner we headed down to the beach. This picture was taken at about quarter to eight, so after Miss Mouse's usual bedtime - but normal routines don't apply on holiday! I don't know what she was doing there - being King Canute? Whatever it was, the kids were having a blast.

Then the next day..

..the sun came out! Oh, it was glorious! We headed straight for the beach first thing and packed a whole summer's worth of summeriness into one glorious day.

Splashing in the shallows (naturally!)..

..pottering around in rock-pools and tracking the tide dropping,

... and building sand-castles.. That's Miss Mouse's first effort in slightly-too-waterlogged sand!

And this is what it looked like through my sunglasses! Pah, who needs Instagram when a pair of sunglasses can provide retro sepia fuzziness ;-).  Is it any surprise I was so happy? And I really was. I grew up very close to the sea (and by 'close' I mean a matter of metres) and I miss it. Most of the time I can ignore missing it, but the moment I hear the waves I can feel myself relaxing.. All this was at the East Sands, the smaller beach, but the one we knew the best having lived close to it for two years.

Later on we went to the West Sands where I took the classic iconic St. Andrews skyline photo - where 'classic' and 'iconic' mean 'that bit at the start of Chariots of Fire'. The trouble with the West Sands though is that it's windy and, dare I say it, a bit boring... I mean it's just a big expanse of sand. Very dramatic though. We did fly a kite for a bit but the kids got a bit fed-up so we headed back to the East Sands and then went for a wee walk around the harbour and along the pier.

Another St. Andrews photographic cliché :-D.

To complete the seaside vibe we got our dinner from the chip shop and ate it sitting on a bench on Market St (outside the Buchanan building where I used to have painful 1st-year French classes and art history lectures, and my brother did an entire German degree). Fish and chips on a sunny evening in St. Andrews, and no need to do a French translation ever again - perfect.

Buckets and spades, sandcastles, kites, ice-cream, fish and chips - see what I mean? An entire summer in one day.

We were staying in a hall of residence (pictures on my 354 blog) - it's used for bed & breakfast guests during the summer break. In fact I worked there as a chamber-maid in the summer before my final year and the summer I graduated. The hall (unimaginatively named 'New Hall', though they've finally got round to finding a proper name for it apparently - when it'll actually get changed I don't know) was new then, in fact it was still being built the first summer I worked there. So it was odd staying there as a guest. I can remember cleaning the room we stayed in!

But it was lovely.  Most of the other guests were golfers, mostly American, mostly older than us - of the kind my Californian friend Kelly described as 'Howards and Marthas' (i.e. the archetypal sweet enthusiastic elderly American tourists) during her JYA year in St. Andrews. I only saw one child apart from our own, but didn't feel they had to be on best behaviour or anything (though they were really good). It was all very laid back and in any case golfers are very absorbed in the topic of golf!


I can't wait to go back!




Oh right, the poem the title quote is from:

Almae Matres - Andrew Lang

(St Andrews, 1862. Oxford, 1865)

St. Andrews by the Northern Sea,
   A haunted town it is to me!
A little city, worn and grey.
   The grey North Ocean girds it round,
And o'er the rocks, and up the bay,
   The long sea-rollers surge and sound.
And still the thin and biting spray
   Drives down the melancholy street,
And still endure, and still decay,
   Towers that the salt winds vainly beat.
Ghost-like and shadowy they stand
   Dim mirrored in the wet sea-sand.

St. Leonard's chapel, long ago
   We loitered idly where the tall
Fresh-budded mountain ashes blow
   Within thy desecrated wall:
The tough roots rent the tomb below,
   The April birds sang clamorous,
We did not dream, we could not know
   How hardly Fate would deal with us!

O, broken minster, looking forth
   Beyond the bay, above the town,
O, winter of the kindly North,
   O, college of the scarlet gown,
And shining sands beside the sea,
   And stretch of links beyond the sand,
Once more I watch you, and to me
   It is as if I touched his hand!

And therefore art thou yet more dear,
   O, little city, grey and sere,
Though shrunken from thine ancient pride
   And lonely by thy lonely sea,
Than these fair halls on Isis' side,
   Where Youth an hour came back to me!

A land of waters green and clear,
   Of willows and of poplars tall,
And, in the spring-time of the year,
   The white may breaking over all,
And Pleasure quick to come at call.
   And summer rides by marsh and wold,
And Autumn with her crimson pall
   About the towers of Magdalen rolled;
And strange enchantments from the past,
   And memories of the friends of old,
And strong Tradition, binding fast
   The 'flying terms' with bands of gold,—
All these hath Oxford: all are dear,
   But dearer far the little town,
The drifting surge, the wintry year,
   The college of the scarlet gown.
St. Andrews by the Northern Sea,
   That is a haunted town to me!

Unexpected colour

 While the rest of our little trip north was nowhere near as warm as it was the day we travelled, it was pleasant enough and we had a lot of fun outdoors.  My dad works part-time at the Highland Folk Museum, a beautiful open air museum where I could happily spend hours just mooching around, so we made a couple of visits there while he was on duty. Actually it was so busy that he always seemed to have loads of visitors round him (which is good!) so we barely saw him there, but it's always a good place for passing the time happily.

 This is beside the excellent play area at the museum - the kids were happy climbing things and I was happy photographing flowers!

 Outside the 1930s school the Boy spent ages playing hopscotch while Mum, Miss Mouse and I had a look round the garden next to the school.

 Inside one of the newer exhibits, the tweed workshop. I think the last time we were there it was just about to open, so it was great to see inside. I love all the bits and pieces of textile production, spools and shade cards and shuttles and the like. There was a loom in there too, with a Work In Progress on it,  but for some reason I didn't take a picture of it.

 Back in my parents' garden, Thorfinn's rose - the rose-bush under which their cat is buried!

 Miss Mouse and her daddy cycling to Kingussie - the cycle path is brilliant and Miss Mouse did really well. I think we might try taking the stabilisers off her bike this summer. She seems quite keen anyway.

 Back at the museum again - one of the hens at the croft, looking idyllic!

 Broom at Loch Insh. The broom was glorious everywhere - you can see a whole lot in the background of the cycling picture too.

 Just warm enough for the paddling pool.  Two minutes later she ran off inside to get her 'kini' - she fondly imagines it's a bikini but actually it's a tankini.  To my mind it wasn't quite warm enough for that but Indestructochild thought otherwise!

Still, never one to be able to resist paddling, I had to join her. 

So there, holiday pictures inflicted upon you :-). I love our mini-holidays - the beginning is always a bit frantic, getting the cats to the cattery, loading the car up and so on, but once we're on our way it's brilliant. I probably shouldn't speak for My Beloved who does all the driving on these trips! Though he did say that he quite enjoyed the Scenic Detour, even though it took longer.  But a few days just pottering around does us all some good.