Happy New Blog

As you see, The Deep North has migrated – from somewhere north of Alpha Centauri to a new home in the environs of Sirius. It’s a bit of a shock to be moving after all this time (the decennial is coming up), but please note new address, and we’ll soon all get used to it.  We welcomed in 2013 with a certain amount of quiet jollity, thanks to the presence of the Godparents. Someone gave us a book written, or at least, styled, by an acquaintance with a design shop/mail order business, as a result of which we have all resolved to become more artless. Not least because you can clearly make quite a good thing out of it. The Godparents, of course, live on Calton Hill, and the thought of the Great Edinburgh Hogmanay Hooley going on around them all night was not a prospect which pleased. The Laird of Northfield sportingly decided to host a musical evening for refugees from central Edinburgh (Brahms and Liszt, we presume), but that did not seem like quite far enough, and then there was still the problem of coming home with the milk, so they withdrew to the quaint rural peace of outer Aberdeenshire. Our own celebrations were rather low key, but yesterday, we did get ourselves to Cromarty, which had plainly been doing things in style. Hardly anything was open. Fortunately, the Queen of Cracked China was up and trading, having had just a wee do, sixty people. And someone had even turned up three days later to return a champagne flute. We want hardly anything, though it’s always fun to see what she’d thought of next. We bought a lovely bone egg spoon (having given the nicest one to some child who liked it), a couple of linen teatowels, and some of the good soap she sells. She’s broken out in lampshades – and good, well designed lampshades are not easy to find: these look like something Artless of Great Ormond Street would sell for three times what they, in fact, cost. We have all the lampshades we personally require, but it looks like an excellent idea.