Moving On

The friend of a friend from Kuala Lumpur who was mentioned in January bid an affectionate farewell this morning. He’s been a great asset, on the one hand, a round, jolly little bloke who takes life as he finds it, so not domestically hard work, on the other, very intelligent and a good conversationalist, so not boring either. It is, though, a different world; having landed here from KL in order to work in Oldmeldrum, he’s been living with us for a couple of months; but he’s now going to take switch roles to being a kind of troubleshooter moving between several sites between Yorkshire and the Clyde Basin. He obviously enjoys what he does, enjoys being good at it, and finds it all very interesting, but it’s very alien from our perspective. Admittedly, once there are 4,000 books and 100 paintings in your life, living out of a suitcase ceases to be an option, but even if the practical difficulties didn’t loom so large,  I think I’d find living like that terribly stressful. Anyway, good for him, and we’ll hope to see him again once in a while.

On another tack, we had a Historic Moment this morning. Twenty-four years ago, the Professor and I got married. His Spanish aunt sent a message which caused, at the time and subsequently, a certain amount of hilarity: ‘I will give you the family silver coffee pot. But you must understand, the postage is ruinous, and I am very poor now. Imagine, when I last went to the bank, I was forced to fly economy class to Geneva. So you must pick it up when you are next in Malaga’. Well, strange as it may seem, twenty-four years have gone by without any sort of pressing reason to visit Malaga. But the silly old thing died last year, and the Professor’s saintlike cousins have been sorting out the orts and leavings, and it turned out the coffee pot did still actually exist, and they brought it back with them … so after three days of getting it clean, he made coffee in it this morning. I don’t suppose it had been used in decades. So there’s a sort of small satisfaction about it all – nobody really needs a silver coffee pot but there is such an element of waste, loss and futility in the story of the Spanish aunt, sitting behind shut shutters decade after decade, feeling sorry for herself, it’s quite nice to have salvaged the thing as a memorial of the more dynamic phase of the family history.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               

Fur

Once Miss Kit became unwell, she stopped being able to manage grooming her back, because she lost flexibility. I've been combing her top side and tail for months. But it's only in the last few days I realised that she has pretty well given up on grooming altogether - that the soft fur on her flanks, where the underlying skin is also soft and sensitive, was going into little lumps from neglect. I bought a new brush from the pet shop, and put it to use. There were offers to bite, tantrums, outbreaks of lying flat on my lap purring blissfully, more offers to bite and so forth. But now, after several sessions and the production of a hatful of orange fluff, Miss Kit's beautiful silky fur is beautiful, flat, and silky all over, and we have both conceded that it is now my business.

Parituriunt montes

The Duchess of Newcastle allegedly used to sit up in bed in the small hours, yelling ‘I Conceive!’ At which point a rabble of amenuenses who were curled up like dogs under her four-poster would crawl out and reach wearily for their pen and ink. We are not thus blessed. Both the Professor and I are wrestling with books so long in the gestation that they are in danger of turning in to wind-eggs, if not plain old sulphuretted hydrogen. Both books were perfectly lovely ideas, but both have been interrupted by this, that and the other thing over the last few years, and the problem with that is that one gets to a sort of gloomy ‘surely everyone knows that so it can’t be worth writing about’, based not on what might be called out-there published knowledge, but merely on having outlined the idea to umpteen people. We are both having a trying time, and since most of our waking hours are thus employed, there is not much to blog about.

One interesting thing in the course of the last week -  by a circuitous chain of coincidence, I discovered that a seam of opal had turned up in Ethiopia, about 3,000 feet above sea level. The Mountains of the Moon was the classical geographers’ name for the source of the Nile, and some nineteenth century explorers identified this with the mountains of Ethiopia (the Nile has several sources, in fact). But I liked the idea of being able to say to someone, here is something which was fetched from the Mountains of the Moon. It was my mother’s birthday, so I did.

 

Change for the sake of change

I've spent a few days in the warm South, which, I have to say, obliged with some bright blue skies and general loveliness, welcome after what has been a very grey and muddy start to the year. Not that we're missing all that exciting snow, O no. But it's certainly been looking a little dreary up our end of things for quite a while. It was a good brief trip: I did some work, had a nice pizza with friend Carol in the sort of Italian neighbourhood restaurant which is emphatically not an aspect of NE Scotland, but is still to be had in parts of London, admired the camellias, cyclamen and so forth which adorn sunny Ealing, and came back to observe, such is the force of refreshing one's eye, the extreme unpleasantness of the dog's bed. She lives in a cage, by her own preference, she clearly loves it and feels safe there. We introduced a flat plastic mattress, but on top of that there has been a sort of compost of bedding - a nice mohair blanket which was rashly introduced to the washing machine and thus shrunk to half its original size, two charity shop crochet rugs, and an airline pseudo cashmere fleece from one of our long-haul-habitué friends. These have been scratched into nests night after night and have become quite disgusting. With great firmness and decision, we visited the Turra pet shop, and bought a sort of dog duvet, in a fleece cover with poppers. When we got home, the silt of squamous bedding was evicted (Miss Dog looking on the while, with deep misgiving), and borne off by Tony to cosset the compost heap. The Professor inserted the new bed. Miss Dog entered her steel hotel, sniffed dubiously, shot out again, looking martyred, and pointedly stretched herself out on the floor. The Professor retrieved the airline pseudo cashmere fleece, and laid it over the unacceptable new bed. Miss Dog re-entered the steel hotel, with an air of  'I'm not convinced'. Three minutes later, she was asleep. The newness of the bed seems to have been forgotten. Not for  the first time, we have reflected that compared to her obstinate and cunning predecessor, these young dogs you get nowadays ... no stamina. Not a brain in their heads. Miss Best Friend would have taken DAYS to come round, and exacted a toll of treats and considerations.

Country Life

As promised in my last, I had a lovely sticky time making a cover sketch for my Venetian pal. I don’t, for good reason, have much faith in my ability as a painter, because I don’t put in the time and concentration to develop my skills, so if I want to do anything in colour, I turn to collage. The Professor buys Country Life these days – leaving aside the property porn, it has very sensible articles on  issues which really do affect country life, and remains, as it always was, good on architecture (though it has to be said, it is Tottering By Gently which is the ultimate thumb in the scales as far as the P is concerned, especially if it features Slobber the Labrador, Ms Tempest, take note). But even the property porn, though, has its uses as far as I’m concerned. The magazine is printed on good quality paper, and it’s terrific for collage because there isn’t bleed through from the back. For this particular design I wanted a lot of blue, and a dozen or more optimistic skies from Savilles, Jackson Stops etc. were culled and put to service. All good fun. The main subject (a leaping fish) was composed of a cuttlefish, close ups of halved strawberries and strawberry ice cream, and a drawing of a Ferrogamo shoe. One slightly more irritating feature of the last few days is that I have developed an ear infection. Fortunately, I was picking up the Prof from his Chinese doctor the other day, and so the good Dr Wu kindly took a look down the offending orifice with an otoscope, and assured me that there was no problem in the ear canal, but merely in the outer ear. This is jolly good news but for the time being I have a sort of cauliflower ear, though not from the usual causes. And I’m a bit deaf. It will pass, with the aid of ibuprofen and hot cotton wool. On a more cheerful note, I have discovered something nice to do with celeriac! The Two Nice Girls do keep giving us the damn things and in cold weather, there is a limit to how much céleri-remoulade a body can stand. Following a tip-off, I simmered the celeriac with a small potato and part of a vegetarian stock cube. Once everything was cooked through I drained it, mashed it, and added garlic, parsley, celery salt, a knob of butter, and crucially, a slosh of truffle oil. Then I left it on a very low heat to dry out a bit while I did everything else,  since celeriac is sort of watery at best. And after all that,  I can say, absolutely, this is the nicest thing to do with celeriac yet discovered hereabouts.

We become smarter

To be sure, Lord Mungo Strathbungo is busy Adding Tone, albeit from the privacy of a back bedroom for the time being (he needs some kind of support before moving to his final destination). But chatting with the good Tony, who has, entirely off his own bat, chosen to do his house days in a collar and tie and an apron, found hin murmuring about the apron (a butcher's one) which he clearly regarded as faute de mieux, and not quite the thing, not quite suited to the dignity of the house ... I can take a hint as well as the next chap. Ebay, after a bit of messing about, yielded an offer of a stout cotton twill apron in a conservative shade of British Racing Green, with an embroidered name thrown in ... so I organised one such, WITH name, which has delighted him. Dear Tony appears to be channelling his Inner Butler. When he was rhapsodising over this garment, I said hard-heartedly that I thought the butler's apron of tradition was yellow and black stripes (think: Nestor the Butler in the Tintin books, Hergé was a devil for details). Tony gave me a quelling glance, and said, 'I've always thought green very smart'. So clearly I have come up with the right thing. Otherwise, in what you might call the official part of my responsibilities, my examination responsibilities have finally come to an end. My last set of paperwork was shovelled onto the desk of the relevant secretary on my birthday, so there it goes and there's an end of it for this exam diet, Laus Deo. I  now have a bit of time for one of the weirder propositions to come my way - my Venetian friend asked me to illustrate a book on idioms.  I was amazed to find that her publisher quite liked the idea, so I'm going to spend some time tomorrow having a lovely play around with a cover design.

Every Home Should Have an Ugly Nobleman

 

The Professor’s wish list is a fairly strange phenomenon. We had a bit of a morning off on Saturday: the plan had been to celebrate Dr Brennan’s birthday with the Huntly Two and the infant Hercules, but Fate intervened in that something horrible went wrong with Dr B’s car. He phoned from the environs of Dundee, where he had been coming up from Sunderland, with plans to scoop up his older son en route, and it all had to be cancelled – so the other of the Huntly Two and her mother came and spent Friday night with us, and Saturday was unexpectedly free. We went to take a look at the good Scottish craft shop, and there, among all the tweed and glass, was a lifesized plaster bust of an ugly nobleman. Actually, not hideous, certainly not in the Giangastone de’Medici class, but merely a Victorian fellow with a curly moustache, wearing a plaid – Lord McSomebody, doubtless. I’d pretty much forgotten that the Professor once tried to buy such a busto at a sale in Edinburgh, with the assistance of the ex-Tropical Uncle, and was pretty miffed to be balked of his prey. Anyhow, it transpired that he still wanted one, and a bit of further investigation revealed that Lord McSomething was to be had jolly cheap, so we bought him. He needs a certain amount of restoration, but once tidied up, the idea is that he will go at the end of the hall under the octagonal mirror, and Add Tone. Which I’m sure he will. He will not be given an old cricket cap, a form of Artlessness, which is, in our view, long past its sell-by date. Having bundled him into the car, we then went on to visit an antique shop which has produced interesting things in the past. On this occasion, the most interesting thing turned out to be the proprietor. In the course of general chatting, it turned out that he and the Professor shared a passionate interest in a local worthy who became a gay Jacobite art-dealer in eighteenth-century Rome, and he had some interesting bits of information about how stuff had moved from one big house to another in the area, which is the sort of thing an antique dealer gets to know about. All of which goes to show that you never know what will happen when you get talking to people.

Complications

The little car has decided to misbehave. Yesterday when the Professor unlocked it, it mysteriously wound down its windows, and it was quite difficult to persuade it to wind them up again. Later in the day it was required again, and wouldn’t start. The first thought of course was that it had done in its battery: Tony turned up this morning with jumpleads, and clearly it is not that. Nor is it a fuse; after prodding at its innards for a bit, he was compelled to admit defeat. Later in the day, the AA will turn up and see what is to be done. All very tiresome. We ended up having a pottering sort of morning – since Tony was most obligingly turning out on a Saturday it seemed like a good idea to have something for him, so we had a play with a rather nice book we bought ourselves for Christmas, Great British Bakes, which contains archaic recipes of various kinds. I made ‘old Welsh gingerbread’, which turned out to be delicious; it’s actually a sort of loaf sized treacle scone, with butter, but no egg, and Tony was enthusiastic. The Professor, meanwhile, wanted to make Honeycomb gingerbread, which is a sort of brandysnap, because it sounded intriguing. It is now cooling – I’m not sure we have got it quite right. These sugary things are tricky because they are soft when they come out of the oven, and then either go hard, or don’t, and if you overcook by just a fraction they will burn. While all this was going in, with Tony pottering in and out reporting on the car, we virtuously dealt with the Root Mountain. The Two Nice Girls’ veg-box is rather root prone at this time of year. We drew the line at neeps, Burns night or no Burns night, but the Professor has made céleri-remoulade with the celeriac, and I have  peeled and cut up beetroot, carrot, and parsnip, which can be variously deployed over the next couple of days. We have a friend of a friend staying awhile, who was recruited from Kuala Lumpur to  head up a firm in Oldmeldrum, such are the oddities of international commerce. He is in the middle of a complicated arrangement of getting cars to the right place: he is currently in Edinburgh and will be brought back here tomorrow by a friend, so soup and a sandwich are on the agenda. I think it very likely that the soup will be carrot, in the circumstances.

Catch up

It’s been an awful long time since I did anything about the blog – the reasons are many and various. We had a succession of guests over Christmas/New Year, and then in the first week of January, went South.  There were several reasons for this. One was to see the Greatest Living Shakespearean, who was passing through London en route to I Tatti and had an evening spare, there were various work related considerations, and also, there had been an SOS from Rory the Sculptor. Two or three years ago, he was commissioned to produce seven martyrs for the screen of St Albans Cathedral, replacing the ones destroyed at the Reformation. They are a mixed bag of Protestants and Catholics; Oscar Romero, Alban Roe, Amphibalus and Alban (inevitably), George Tankerfield, a protestant martyr I hadn’t heard of who was burned just outside the cathedral, Elizabeth of Russia,  and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Rory took it into his head to use the Professor as the model for Alban Roe, noted for, among other things, playing cards with his warders the night before he was hung drawn and quartered. Rory was most urgent that, as the project neared the finishing line, he needed to see the Professor again, so off we went to Cirencester. It’s pretty soggy up here, quite uncharacteristically so, but the south-west was completely waterlogged. One of our friends in Oxford reported that her garden was completely full of water and she had sandbags at the back door, and certainly, the view from a westbound train was a dismal vista of silvery sheets of water with dispirited bushes and trees marking the lines of what would normally be roads. It was lovely to see Rory, but after lunch, we took off in his spectacularly decrepit car for his workshop. This is a congeries of disused sheds in a corner of the local agricultural college, and is entirely without heating. Icy mist shimmered up from the saturated ground, and we got colder and colder. It was all very interesting, we considered Elizabeth of Russia’s nose and what could be done about it, and I was even, I think, able to be mildly useful on the topic of Roman military uniform; the Professor was rephotographed from all angles, and eventually we tottered off, frozen, in the direction of London, and from thence, home. Where what with one thing and another, we both went down with hideous colds. Apart from unavoidables, invigilating and marking, we are both staying as quiet as possible and trying to get better. I’m mostly all right now, though the Professor is still making noises like a sea lion. But the first of the snowdrops are out, and it has finally stopped raining.

PS: the ever helpful Tony discovered why we had electrical problems on Christmas day, which was a bit of a relief. Not the bothy, I am thankful to say, since fault-finding would mean digging up 60 yards of buried cable, but the little oil fired heater in the greenhouse, which has gone rogue in some fashion. Easily replaced. We had forgotten that all the outside electrics come under 'bothy' in terms of the circuit breaker layout