Inverness

Once again I've been absent longer than I meant to be. This time it's due to a very busy week at work (we were very short-staffed), and then heading up to Inverness to see Doug's dad whilst we have a brief window of opportunity. He's currently in hospital after a fall which is worrying given his age and our distance from him. 

It's also the first chance I've had to get back to Inverness since before lockdown, and I've fallen for the place all over again. Inverness isn't a flashy place, but it's got a lot going on to recommend it. It's an excellent base for exploring from, especially if you like whisky (Speyside is right there) and you don't have to go far to find beautiful scenery. The town centre is a little dilapidated, but there are hopeful signs of regeneration and a few favourite places still going strong.

There's The Castle Gallery and Leakey's Bookshop. I really like the Waterstones here for new books, there are a couple of decent independent wine and whisky merchants including WoodWinters who give reliable advice, stock some good stuff, and are fairly priced. The food and drink scene also seems to be quietly improving all round since my last visit - there's a very promising addition of a new food hall to the Victorian Market anchored by the new to me Bad Girl Bakery. 

I saw their book first (in Waterstones) and it looked good, delicious even, and then came across their new cafe minutes later (exciting) which only opened here about 2 weeks ago so we're lucky with our timing. The coffee was great, the cake to go with it even better so now I need to buy the book. The food hall itself is a real asset to a city that has its share of cold and wet days - a decent open space with plenty of seating right in the centre of town with browsable under cover shops is a definite plus. 

I feel like this book flew under the radar a bit, it came out late last year but I totally missed it. A flick through shows some great stuff though with plenty of vegan and gluten-free recipes - the coconut, cranberry, and chocolate flapjack I had today was easily the best flapjack I've ever had. It's just as well there's a 500-mile drive separating me from them on a daily basis. 

Other Inverness highlights have included the museum which has got some great Pictish stones and a really spectacular outfit thought to have been worn by Bonnie Prince Charlie, a shopping centre with a stunning view over to Ben Wyvis, and the walk along the river to the Marina is decent too.

A Near Miss

Yesterday delivered more than I bargained for when about 30 tons of masonry fell from the roof of the building across from us at work, missed smashing our windows by millimeters, and genuinely made me think a bomb had gone off. Almost miraculously only one person seems to have been injured in the street, and then not seriously (I hope this stays true). 

Several tons of sandstone and stucco hitting the road makes a hell of a noise, and creates a lot of dust, which looks for all the world like smoke - hence the bomb assumption (and that's a thing that takes you back to the IRA attacks of the 80s and 90s) so there was quite a bit of running and screaming outside the shop which added to the confusion. When fire alarms didn't start ringing there was a moment to reassess before customers started to complain that they wanted to pay for their books. 

When I say it was a near miss, there was a brick the size of War and Peace less than an inch from our staff entrance/exit - exactly where we stand to unlock the door every morning and evening - it seems like the building could have gone at any time and the fact that it didn't earlier in the day when people were arriving for work with deliveries in full swing is another small miracle to be grateful for. 

What I'm less grateful for, but no longer surprised by is the amazingly snotty attitude of so many people in the shop at the time, and after. They did not want to be evacuated to safety until they'd got what they came for despite the very real likelihood that the rest of the building was set to come down, and if it had, we were the only thing between it and gravity having its way. 

Years ago I stood across the street from another shop I worked in whilst alarms rang and 2 fire engines full of firemen assessed the situation watching a man bang on the door to be let in, and argue with the firemen about getting out of the way. Later we found that not only had he complained to head office that we were closed when opening hours clearly stated etc, but he also turned up in person to shout at us. Apparently the sirens, appliances, alarms, arguments with firemen, and smoke hadn't sufficiently communicated to him that the building was in fact on fire (small, quickly contained, and not serious, but still burning at that point). The lights had been left on and he wanted what he wanted. 

This morning I listened to people standing by a barrier complaining that shops stated opening times were X and now it was Y and yet they were still closed. Complaints, they threatened, would be made. Had they seen the local news about the falling building, just visible behind the barriers? Yes, they had. Could they put this together to understand why shops weren't yet open? No. Not without extremely patient explanations. 

I'm old enough to remember when shops closed not just on Sundays, but had half-day openings and closed for lunch too. When I first worked in retail very little opened on a Sunday, we always closed on Bank Holidays, and even when that started to change it meant double pay. Not anymore - it's just part of a normal working pattern. There's also the regular 5.59 debate with somebody that refuses to believe that we close at 6, and will make a point of walking out as slowly as possible, through the exit at a maximum distance so we all have to hang on, unpaid, a little bit longer. 

I try not to dwell on the smug customers who explain they're breaking the spines of books and generally thumbing them because they like to have a good look before ordering on Amazon who are so much cheaper. Awesome. Point out the shitty employment conditions and tax-avoiding tactics that fund those low prices and you're So Rude - they'll never come back. Sadly, a lie - because they're a dead loss, the sort of delights who leave their unpurchased from us books lying around any old place in the shop so we can't find them again for actual paying customers. 

The same people are naturally outraged at the number of places closing up for the day of the Queen's funeral, although they themselves will not be at work either - but who will serve them whilst they complain to each other about how we should be a republic and state everybody is equal? 

Yesterday was a very near miss, and it was frightening. It's left me with very little patience for people who can't see beyond their own convenience. I'm back at work tomorrow - wish me luck. 

Shetland Wool Adventures

It's almost Shetland Wool week which means there are a whole lot of Shetland themed knitting publications to look forward to - this is a quick round up. 

Shetland Wool Adventures journal volume 4 has been out for a few weeks and is the normal collection of patterns I genuinely want to knit, book reviews (by me), recipes, walks, and articles relating to the islands. I genuinely love this journal, which I think is going from strength to strength. The piece on Tom Kidd's photos was a particular pleasure to see. His books are currently hard to find but are a wonderful record of life just as the oil industry really started to change Shetland. Available Here

I have pre-ordered my Shetland Wool Week annual and am really looking forward to it arriving, I might not be able to get north for the event but I've been following on insta and the patterns look great this year so at least I'll be able to enjoy from the comfort of my own sofa. To order the annual and check out the rest of the merchandise have a look Here

Previous wool week patron Donna Smith has her first book of patterns coming out in the next few weeks too. Donna's designs really hit the sweet spot between timeless, traditional, and contemporary so I'm excited to see this - it's called Langsoond, same as the yarn that comes direct from her sheep, and will be available to pre-order from Friday the 16th Here

And finally, I might be most excited about a couple of reprints from The Shetland Times. I've been one of the chorus of voices calling for these to come back into print over the last few years, and although somebody very kindly sent me a copy of 'A Shetland Pattern Book' a while back, being able to easily buy it again for the first in 30 years is something to celebrate. What I like so much about this book is its size and simplicity. The same size as the squared jotters we had at school for putting patterns in. It's maybe not the most exhaustive collection of patterns and motifs but it's probably the easiest to use. The original even has pages at the back included for making notes and jotting down your own patterns.

Maggie Smith's companion volume A Shetland Knitter's Notebook is also getting reprinted and I haven't yet read that and again, I'm looking forward to it. The availability situation on The Shetland Times website isn't entirely clear, for the pattern book it's saying sold out as I type this - and I wouldn't be at all surprised to hear that the whole print run had been snapped up - or it might mean copies haven't come in yet. Either way, keep an eye out for it Here and again, lots of other great books to browse there too. 

Post After Post-Mortem - E.C.R. Lorac

I have so many books to write about at the moment and post review at work, my stint as host for #ReadingHeyer done, and almost being finished with wedding thank you letters I think I might actually have time to get stuck into some reviewing here. If only it would cool down a bit!

I read Post After Post-Mortem a while ago but hadn't found the opportunity to write about it until now. In some ways that's been a blessing, I thought the book was okay whilst I was reading it but with time to reflect there's more to it than I originally thought. 

The Surrays and their five children are a prolific and successful family of writers and professionals, the youngest daughter has just got a 1st class honours degree from Oxford, and is worried that the family doesn't need a 7th author - though she possibly fancies writing a thriller. Her older sister, Ruth, is a respected author and reviewer whose championship can make a career and who seems to have the literary world at her feet.

It's Ruth who is found dead, apparently due to suicide, an event that shocks her family to the core - and then a letter arrives from Ruth to her brother Richard. It's been delayed by having a miss-written address and both the time it was sent and the contents suddenly raise questions over the suicide verdict. 

The family and Ruth's friends are wary of police intervention, in an effort to protect her name they've not been entirely honest, but their white lies and omissions have muddied the waters, and they're even more hostile to the idea of murder than they were of suicide. Everybody suddenly appears as a suspect, and there's the possibility the murderer isn't done yet.

I didn't warm to some bits about a woman's place and cod psychology early in the book, but the examination of a family that seems outrageously successful on the surface, but still has their problems is interesting.  Early on Mrs Surray worries that they have tempted fate, and so it seems to be. In the end the motive for murder is almost an inconsequential one, except to the murderer of course, which seems more believable somehow than plots about killing a spouse for the love of someone else or murdering for a large inheritance. 

It's an interesting and thoughtful mystery that seems timely against the growing cost of living crisis - Mrs Surray's worry that the good things of the world have come too easily to them and there will be a price to pay seems like it might be prescient as most of us find we're struggling a little bit more, and the politics of envy is rife on social media.

Queen Elizabeth II 1926 - 2022

 The news that the Queen had died this afternoon broke just as I got home tonight, I didn't expect to be quite as sad about it as I find I am. My earliest memories are around the silver jubilee celebrations, this years Diamond jubilee is something that I'll always associate with preparations for getting married. In between those events, there's a lifetime of memories punctuated by royal appearances and occasions. 

I've managed a lot of near misses when it came to seeing her, my favourites being a toss-up between ducking behind a pile of grit for a much-needed wee as a very small child just at the moment her car went past and catching a train to London which left at the same moment the queen got off her train in Leicester on the opposite platform. Not significant life moments maybe, but my parents split when I was young, those early jubilee fragments are a significant part of the family life I remember before that happened so they're precious to me.

However we feel about monarchy we surely all have memories like this - of days out and excuses for village get-togethers, going to see a spectacle with friends, buying tacky memorabilia and loving it anyway. This really does feel like the end of an era, maybe more so as we're looking toward a difficult winter anyway, so for now I'm going to make a cup of tea, drink it from my jubilee mug and reflect on a life of duty and the passing of an icon. 

Guards! Guards! - Terry Pratchett

The read books are beginning to stack up on my desk, but the time to write about them is proving hard to come by. The last week has been big on damsons and dog sitting. My workmate bought me the last of the fruit from her tree - she is an absolute star for this, they're really lovely fruit and now I've got 2 kinds of damson jelly and a damson and vanilla jam. I am sharing this with her.

My mother's dog just considers everything that doesn't revolve around her is a waste of my time. I'd say that she's not wrong but this goes up to and includes sleeping - she thinks we ought to be up and walking by 5.30 so when I was still in bed at 5.45 she was very vocally put out. The combination of dog and mother is still the best way to put a hard week behind me that it's worth the early starts. It's even worth the general impression that the dog gives that one of them needs to keep me in sight at all times in case I go off with the spoons or something. 

I started reading Guards! Guards! immediately after Equal Rites and then stalled halfway through - a reminder of why I stopped reading Pratchett altogether back in the day. The book was fine I just got bored with the joke and had to make myself finish it. I might not have bothered but that I wanted to exorcise the horror that was the BBC adaptation a couple of years ago. 

In the end I'm glad I carried on. I have happy memories of reading Pratchett through some difficult times. He was a warm and funny guide to some of the complications of the adult world that I was beginning to negotiate in my late teens and if my reading taste has changed considerably since then, the essential decency of Pratchett is still a constant.

None of my younger colleagues at work have read him, so I'm going to try and persuade them to have a go - they're around what I consider to be the right age to discover him (early 20's,  younger would be a bit better). I have found that I really enjoy listening to Pratchett via audio books, more of which in my next post, so I'm not just trying to palm off unwanted review copies onto them. It's very much that I want to see what they think of him. 

When I first read these books it was in a recession, the one that saw Leicester lose great swathes of its textile industry, and a time that seemed quite bleak (halcyon days by current standards). At times like this a writer who can make you laugh and maybe believe that things will sort of work out has to be a good thing. 

Gallant - V. E. Schwab

I've set myself the goal of reading through a chunk of the books that have been hanging around for ages and that I'm not overly excited about (not necessarily the same thing) in the hopes of clearing some serious space before peak season brings lots of unmissable new books through the door. 

Quite a few of these are proofs from work picked up with the intention of widening my reading range so I can better recommend things. Honestly, it's a lot easier in the wine trade where you just have to taste something, a process that takes a couple of minutes including the time to make a more or less intelligent note about whatever you've just tried. 

It maybe doesn't help that I'm old enough to know my reading tastes fairly well, and also to have limited tolerance for what I consider bad or lazy writing. 'Gallant' didn't fall into either of the latter categories, and I've been curious to read Schwab for a while. When I actually got down to it though, this will likely be the only book of hers I ever read. 

The blurb promised that it's great for fans of Neil Gaiman, The Secret Garden, and Holly Black. I more or less like all of those things, but I rate Holly Black by far the highest on the list and Schwab was more at the Neil Gaiman end of the scale for me. I enjoy his storytelling but I haven't loved it since I was a teen reading The Sandman. If you wanted a dark fantasy that explores issues about family and belonging that mixes the gothic with the Secret Garden though, you'd definitely get what you paid for.

It's an easy book to read too, once I'd decided I'd finish it, it was easy to read 100 or so in what felt like no time at all (a little over an hour maybe?) and I got through it fast. Olivia, the main character is compelling, the story was sweet, but in the end, it made very little impact on my imagination. In part, this was because as intriguing as I found Olivia, nobody she interacted with really came off the page. Not her newfound friends, or foes, and the ending fell flat for me too, there just wasn't any depth to any of it.

On the other hand, there will be people who quite rightly love this book, but I think they might be younger readers. And this is something I find mildly annoying about how a lot of fantasy fiction is currently marketed - this book is about a 16 year old girl trying to find a family and a home - to me that's teen/young adult fiction. Schwab writes books that are marketed in both categories - this one goes into the adult section which I feel does it a disservice.

Or maybe our current classification system no longer adequately describes books - possibly science fiction and fantasy need to be split, certainly, a lot of the books that involve young women in fairytale or gothic settings having fairly chaste adventures seem like they should have their own category. Oh to have a bookshop of my own where I could get really granular about how things should be shelved.

Jam Season

I don't know where the time is going right now. Between work, the Powder and Patch Readalong, trying to catch up on a backlog of reading, knitting, and all the other bits of life my days just disappear. I have finally got a small pile of read (instead of half-read) books sitting on my desk, but it's almost 8pm, I'd dearly love to spend the rest of the night knitting and watching The Sandman - but I've just finished simmering some damsons and apples ready for jelly making and have a couple of other kitchen jobs to tackle.

After that, I need to prep the next 3 read-along chapters because I'm at work all day tomorrow, and then I need to get to bed in good time to be woken up by the antisocial builders working on replacing cladding to the university halls of residence across the way. For reasons, they do something noisy to scaffolding every morning from around 7am. I know from days off that by about 10am it's nice and quiet again but it's too late to be useful. 

I'm not a morning person, and whilst I'm a big fan of flammable cladding being got rid of, I'd really like it if they started an hour later. The hour between 7 and 8am has never been a productive one for me - the best I can do is drink coffee and read newspaper headlines/Twitter trends. I'm really looking forward to term starting and the relative quiet of new neighbors. Say what you will about students, they're rarely a nuisance early in the day. Or at all these days outside of the excitement of freshers week. Students have genuinely made great neighbours for almost 18 years now. 

But back to my damsons - they came from a work colleague who was in no way prepared for how enthusiastic I would be about getting them, are beautifully, plumply, ripe and to my mind mark the beginning of autumn. Or perhaps more correctly the Shetland word, hairst which is more of a mix of autumn and harvest - appropriate for a place where August is very definitely the end of summer.

Apparently, we're currently having a 'false Autumn' with trees losing their leaves after the recent extreme heat, it's likely to be followed by a false spring with the possibility of finding more elderflowers (although I see a lot of dead elder trees about in this drought so maybe not) but one way or another August has always felt like the turn of the year to me and maybe this year more than most. It's a year since I got engaged, and found a new job, and the next year looks set to bring equally big changes - and how have I got this far from damsons?

I'm using Diana Henry's Damson and Juniper jelly recipe as a base, but ditching the juniper. She uses apples as well as Damsons, and it was a sign of the times that nowhere had Bramley apples for sale today, the ones I settled on (the ones on offer in Tesco, variety unclear) refused to really soften which is a pain but they'll make the damsons go a bit further anyway so it's fine. I'm going to split the juice between 2 jelly batches tomorrow - 1 will be plain, the other is going to be spiced with cinnamon, star anise, and possibly vanilla.

It's jelly rather than jam because fishing the stones out is such a nuisance and because the boil it strain it boil it approach is reassuring if you're at all squeamish about the possibility of bugs. I am. 

From The Abyss - D K Broster

For anyone who has been following the ups and downs at Waterstones it'll probably be fairly clear why I haven't got back to reading and posting as much as I'd like. It's been a challenging time on the shop floor and I'm both really tired and quite keen not to look at another book when I get home. I'm still loving the job, it's just very full on at the moment.

Even that couldn't put me off 'From the Abyss' once I started it though. Edited by Melissa Edmundson who proved she knew what she was doing from the first collection of Women's Weird from Handheld Press, this covers D. K. Broster's weird fiction from 1907 to 1945 and it's a treat. D K Broster was best known for her Jacobite trilogy written in the 1920s. I'm kicking myself a little here as I has a battered copy of 'The Flight of the Heron' unread for several years - and cleared it out still unread to a charity shop last summer. Never mind.

As it happens I have come across at least one Broster short story in another weird collection - 1933s Couching at the Door which is unsettling enough to be unforgettable. The really good thing about 'From the Abyss' is that the stories cover a long enough time period to show Broster's style thoroughly evolve. It always feels like reading the same woman, but with enough variety in tone to never be repetitive.

It also helps that Broster has an engaging sense of humour, especially for the tales that lean towards the decadent style, which honestly is most of them. I enjoy fin de siecle decadence quite possibly more than the next person (at least in this corner of Leicester) but a little can go a long way when you take it too seriously. 

Which brings me back to 'Couching at the Door' wherein a poet who has been published in the Yellow Book and is now enjoying a life of aesthetic luxury in the Cotswolds with occasional trips to Europe for cabalistic going on finds out the meaning of the thoroughly modern phrase 'fuck about and find out'. Aleister Crowley's effect on the English imagination has been something he's undoubtedly have reveled in. The thoroughly deserving poet's persecution starts in the form of something he takes to be a ball of fluff about the size of a spider, something that when he manages to be brave enough to pick it up to drown it flutters unpleasantly in his hand. 

The drawing fails, the thing continues to grow and pursue him, it's terror lies mostly in its movements, and our collective memories of that feeling of an insect in the hand, and maybe the deeper terror of putting a hand out to flip a light switch and finding another already there. 

The Pestering (brilliant title) works in a similar way - a persistent spirit who makes his victims supremely uncomfortable. 'The Promised Land' was maybe my favourite - it flips from darkly funny, to plain dark in a moment and is haunting for completely different reasons to most of the other stories - with the possible exception of 'The Juggernaut' which has the same blend of comedy suddenly switching to a bleak kind of tragedy. 

The title story, 'From the Abyss' cleverly takes an idea that is on the surface appealing - I won't detail this because it's a massive spoiler, and again imbues it with a subtle terror. Altogether it's a really strong collection that consistently managed to subvert my expectations. The bad things that happen are rooted in a sort of domestic banality set against gorgeously artistic backgrounds. It's a tremendously effective device and a book I'll turn to again and again. Big thanks to Handheld press for this review copy. 

Undefeated - The Muckle Ayre Stole

I started this stole more than 2 years ago, in the first 2020 lockdown. I battled with it for months and kind of grew to hate it. At the time it was the most complicated lace pattern I'd ever tried, and it was possibly just a little beyond me. It's still the most complicated lace pattern I've ever tried but I'm a slightly better knitter now and I've just knitted 10 rows without any obvious mistakes so keep your fingers crossed for me.

Two years in a project bag hidden under my bed hasn't done the stole any apparent harm, and it seems blessedly moth damage free (unexpected holes really would mean tears). Two years break from swearing at it has also reignited some of my enthusiasm for the pattern - I wonder if that'll survive trying to dress it (or if that day will ever even come)? 

Lace is hard work, it calls for a degree of concentration that fair isle patterns do not despite how complicated they can look. At least with colour work, you can see where you've gone wrong and rip back easily enough. Because the Muckle Ayre has no plain knit rows and a lot of yarn overs and knitting together of stitches going back is really hard. 

When I started this it was the first time I'd used lifelines, and the first time that I discovered they didn't necessarily work. The theory is that you can rip back to the lifeline, where you know all your stitches were correct, and start again from there. I did it a couple of times only to discover there weren't the right number of stitches left on the needle. There was swearing. Now I'm still using them almost entirely to be able to see how many repeats I've done. 

Still, after a couple of months hiatus from knitting (mostly heat related), a bit more progress on this beast of a project felt like a good place to start again. I haven't bought any yarn this year, which has made no noticeable difference to my stash at all - busting some of it will definitely be a winter project/ambition. This was my only wip, making progress on it feels almost symbolic of a wider ambition to clear the decks (the books really need attention). It's also a measure of how badly this project got under my skin last time. that even two plus years down the line I remembered I was 8 rows into the repeat.