There was cookie decorating - an all-the-e-numbers-you-can-eat-in-an-hour bonanza that made this granny feel quite ill but didn't stop the boys longing for the magic cream eggs the magician gave out to his assistants. Fin learned to spin a plate then proved himself a star by sharing the sickly prize with his little brother. The rabbit was wonderful; she picked cards out of a fanned deck and stood for the applause.

Holidays are exhausting.

First there was the run-up to it then there was the event itself, then there was the euphoric exhausted feeling of a job reasonably well done. I’m not talking about the Olympics, I’m talking about my annual ‘holiday’ in Ballater with the Cornish arm of the family. I cook and freeze so I don’t have to cook so much once we are together but somehow for seven people there is always more food needed and expectations are high. With grandfather  present meals are a sit-down affair with proper food, no fish’n chips or take-away pizza or pre-cooked stuff. Not that I would want to do that either, but once in a while it might be good. 

I suppose I like the chance to feed up my son who left home early and does much of the cooking in his own home. I suppose I also like to perform the one thing I’m still fairly good at  to an appreciative audience.

It didn’t give me time for taking scenic outdoor photos and neither did I have the inclination. I’ve seen Ballater so many times before, crossed the switch-back roads over the Lecht; seen the heather and the patchworks of peat cuttings or forestry plantations; seen the blues and grey and purples of the hills... I tend to forget to stop to hear the silence and breath the sharp clean air, which is a shame but I can’t photograph them anyway. All I took photos of were my grandsons which is OK for the family albums but not much fun for others.   

Not so much time to read either. I took ‘The Anatomy of Shadows’  by Andrew Taylor away with me. I think it’s very good, a ghost story set in eighteenth century Cambridge (which is a change. that sort of book is usually set in Oxford.) Sadly I couldn’t settle to it so I’ll start it again another day. I’d looked for something large to take with me  thinking I’d finish the Anatomy and grabbed ‘Game of Thrones’ first volume because I have three friends on contemporary age who are addicted to this series. I started it when I got home and immediately went down with a flu virus so had an excuse to stay in bed. I hated it all the way through for the relentless brutality, cruelty and violence but had to keep reading, even when I really wanted to throw it out the window. George R.R. Martin is, unfortunately, a very good writer and has created something much more balanced  than ‘The Lord of the Rings’ (women have strong roles too and aren’t wifty wafty fairy princesses) but so far it lacks the essential ingredient that might make the violence bearable - clearly drawn up good-bad, Light-Dark lines. I know life isn’t like that but I do like my fantasy to be. The battles in this are about pride, vengeance, and stupidity dressed as heroism. Which now I think about it is exactly like real life.

The same 'flu gave me time to reread 'The Four-Gated City' the last of Doris Lessing's 'Children of Violence' cycle. If I was ever asked which books I would take with me on into a castaway situation the 'C of V'  cycle of five volumes would be the first of my choices (I'm not so interested in the much miss-represented 'Golden Notebook' which I probably came to too late for it to change my life). C of V relates the experiences of young people born into the decades either side of WW2, starting in S.Africa and moving, with Martha Quest, the chief protagonist, to London after the war.  The radical socio-political and philosophical changes that occurred in those time were enormous. Martha painfully absorbs them as she tries to break free from the stifling world she was born into. In an attempt to also set her child free to be who she wants, unconstricted by a mother's expectations, Martha gives away her baby daughter to her ex-husband and his new family. Because I empathised so strongly over Martha's poisonous relationship with her mother I found that very upsetting!

'The Four-Gated City,' a longer novel than the preceding four, follows Martha's flight to post-war Britain where everything is grey and ugly and the people bitter. She is swept up into the era of CND marches and global madness, flower power and the summers of love, through a period of well-organised personal madness alongside Linda. Linda is an interesting character. She has failed to lead a normal life although she has a loving and supportive husband and a small son who wants his mother. She is too sensitive to the waves of humanity in turmoil; she hears voices, eventually learns to separate them and becomes a telepath, an essential part of a dystopian future after the bombs have fallen. 

Strangely fine times

...and still it rains...  It’s enough to depress even me and I’m not an outside person or even a person who enjoys sitting in the sun but the constant grey skies are a definite downer.

The shop is without its bosslady as  daughter, partner and the g’son are in Cornwall, also getting rained on by the sounds of it but I hope they are managing to have some fun. The sense of responsibility being left in charge is huge! Mainly I worry about the rabbit. When I am her carer I fret about her. She is really old now but still able to show her displeasure and the weather has been annoying her too. She likes to get out for a few hours each day, but not if she’s going to get her paws wet. 

Anther theatre company - the National Theatre of Scotland no less - put on a highly enjoyable performance called ‘The Strange Undoing of Prudentia Hart’. The venue was the Visitors Centre at one of our small local distilleries. It was turned into a pub for the evening and the audience sat at small tables with glasses of complimentary whisky or champagne (or orange juice!) The action took place around (and on) the tables. It did mean rather a lot of screwing ones neck around to follow them. The cast of five began the evening with loud ceildih music, very spirited, with an excellent singer,  until the story took over in cheeky rhyming couplets. Miss Prudentia Hart is a buttoned-up but romantic young librarian who has been asked to speak at a dry academic conference on: ‘The Border Ballad: Neither Border nor Ballad.’ Her special interest is the many depictions of the Devil and Hell in the ballads. She is the only speaker who still feels the soul of the people expressed through them but her audience grow bored, more interested by new theories such as that proposed by the   the feminist professor who sees the ballads as separatist and an example of the male assault on the vagina!

 To cut the tale to the bones, (which is a shame because it was so well done and so atmospheric, one cast member being an amazing singer in the Celtic tradition who just opened her mouth and the songs came flooding out)  Prudentia falls from the stage into hell where she spends many thousand years studying the ballads in the devil’s library, learning about her own nature as she does so and slowly coming unbuttoned, losing a few garments now and then till she is in her underslip when she realises that the way out of hell is to seduce Old Nick himself. This she sets to do, steals the keys whilst he is in a (post coital?) daze and her hands emerges through the cracks in the asphalt of Asda car park back into 2012 where she is caught and held by the obligatory knight in shining armour (motorbike helmeted young professor) who helps her finally escape. 

I get so caught up in these things and love being part of the action! It reminds me of the Roundhouse days only better. I’m still enjoying it!

The rain has  made this sort of entertainment extra important somehow since we are deprived of summer and a proper solstice feel. Something else I saw, at the private cinema, a Japanese film called ‘Afterlife’ made me think about memories and though the story-line was a bit daft it has stayed with me. Haunted me, wouldn’t be too strong a phrase. The film begins with preparations being made in some sort of run-down sorting house for ‘the next group’ to arrive. As they walk out of a bright light and are sent to their find their guides for the week ahead it is clear that the  group is made up of people coming through death into a between stage before eternity. They are given three days in which to decide on the most important memory from the life they had just left.  In an unemotional, matter-of-fact atmosphere the newly dead accept unquestioningly these instructions, sitting in their rooms watching video tapes of their lives or talking it through with their advisors as they try to decide on a memory. When decisions have been reached the work begins to reconstruct that memory and film them in the scene again. much plywood and paint is used. When the films have been made they sit in a cinema to watch and as their memory comes up they are taken by it into and eternity where that memory is all they experience. Very worrying. I said it was daft, and it was, but I fretted all the way through about which  memories of my life were the most important and came at the end to the surprising conclusion that the time when the children where very young and I was often ill with asthma, wen I had thought myself to be quite miserable in many ways, there were the moments of pure happiness spent with the babes and my husband; only the world outside my family was too hard to for me to handle.

I put down ‘Broken Harbour’ by Tana French with great reluctance yesterday morning. It’s one of those books I want to keep going although the story line has played out because I want to know what happens to the characters tomorrow and beyond. 533 pages of hardback size (it seems to have arrived first as paperback) just weren’t enough. The pace set in the first paragraph never lets up; often it accelerates taking the stress up a degree with it.  It’s a straight through, linear account with very few retrospective passages except when strictly necessary to illuminate the present. This is the fourth of her crime novels I’ve read and I’m glad to see she is young because I’m hoping to read plenty more. 

The narrator is a male, Irish, detective on the Murder Squad. TF has already shown she can speak as fluently and convincingly as either male or female. She is very, very good at dialogue and doesn’t need to give her characters tics or eccentricities to make them instantly recognisable when they speak. 

Of course the detective, ‘Scorcher’ Kennedy (oddly his nickname was the only thing that didn’t ring true for me... not sure why that is.... but he isn’t often called it so it didn’t get in the way.... )  is angst-ridden and the case has a painful hook in it specially for him. Of course there is tension between him and his rookie partner Richie who needs licking into shape. Of course Kennedy has a malfunctioning family member who throws personal pain and guilt into the already exhausting and draining emotions expended on the case. Given all these ingredients that I’ve come to expect from the modern crime novel, this book still has something fresh of its own to offer in the way they are exposed bit by bit, adding to an already complex and bewildering case. TF is observant, perceptive of human nature, and very, very good with words. 

I do have the feeling that when I come to the end of one of her novels I am left hollowed out, a bit down, and in need of something sweet to eat. The next read has to be lighter. But, if I can’t take sorrow  or human frailty I’d better stop reading crime fiction. Only Reginald Hill can leave me feeling that Humour played a meaningful hand in chasing away the dark.

.....from these parts.

No new puppies (new shrubs, but they don’t have the cuddle factor), no holidays in beautiful places, only a teaspoonful of sunshine in a bucket of rain, so not much to take photos of. On the plus side I ‘ve been getting around thanks to aforementioned (in other entries) friend. I saw a play that is now touring the Highlands called ‘.....from These Parts’. A one act ‘Alien Abduction Comedy that explores the changing population of the Highlands and what it means to be local in a cosmic context.’  To quote the blurb.

The set they created is terrific;  beautifully painted flats with a plethora of detailed bric-a-brac sitting on shelves all so cleverly done we felt we could pick stuff up. Of actual moveables there were only table, chairs, ketchup bottle, tea pot, washing liquid, coffee mugs etc.. to depict a garage workshop and a kitchen all in one. At one point the nose of a fancy sports car is dragged in for repair. It must have been fun doing it.  The piece de resistance was an ‘Intergalactic Communicator’ built in real life by Michael Start, our local automata expert, renowned for his contribution to  ‘Hugo’ and ‘the Woman in Black’ amongst other things. The Communicator was the cause of an impressive  denouement with lots of flashing lights, bits that rotated, whirred and clicked, then from off stage a blast of dry ice carried off the amateur UFO hunter who had supposedly created the communicator to make first contact. He had, reprehensibly, been secretly hoping it would take him away from his life on this planet into something more exciting, whilst at the same time he tried to prevent his daughter from leaving him to go down to London in pursuit of her own dream. His last words, heard from afar, were along the lines of; ‘But there’s a lot of nothing up here! Nothing but space that goes on for ever. What the *@* do you find to do with yourselves?’ More or less what one of the recent English visitors to his garage had said to him. Point well made.

The piece was written by two locals men who have produced and toured with several plays over the last few years though until now I, in my shell, had missed them. They call their company ‘Right Lines’ and it looks as if they usually have an issue to air and expose. I don’t know if they always turn it into comedy but lightness suited this particular topic. Incomers to these parts can cause irritation, or even bitterness, especially if they aren’t sensitive. 

Other than that excitement I have only to report a change of diet - no carbs for a while - that is having an uncomfortable effect on my inner microcosmic system....

Spurred on by the needs of my recently widowed friend who lives a mile or so out of town and can’t drive, I’ve been getting about more than usual and last night did something I wouldn’t normally have contemplated - attend the ceremony for the making of new Burgesses. Friend was singing in ‘The Big Choir’ which is a happy band of people who like singing but don’t want to join the excellent, but very formal, established town choir for which one has to be able to read music. The BC had been asked to provide some entertainment at this occasion and I thought they were brilliant; they sing with their whole bodies. The formal choir doesn’t. When it lurches from classical into Spirituals or Blues territory it’s a bit painful. I’m almost tempted to join the BC but years of asthma and necessary medication have given me a voice like a frog. Or toad. Anyway it’s a shame because  they made me want to sing.

The other entertainment was - no surprise - a piper. Now I can enjoy a good blast on the pipes, even in an enclosed space, but this lad went on and on until I thought I’d have to shoot the airbag or crawl out on my hands and knees before I got a migraine. Lots of feet were tapping and he got huge applause so it was only me suffering.

Though the Charter-giving ceremony itself was rather lacking in dignity and, well, ceremony, it was quite touching. The six worthies had their good works read out and very worthy they all are of the honour. I felt quite moved. The making of Burgesses has been going on for at least 500 years, maybe longer, though there seem not to be any records. The first charter giving the town the town the title of Burgh was probably given in 1140 by King David, the revised version defining the rights and privileges of  the burgh in 1496 by James IV.  This acknowledgement of the people who work hard for the town probably would have been celebrated at the Riding of the Marches, but last night we just sat in a Church on uncomfortable pews.

Half way through - and this for me was the real highlight - I had a unusually clear vision of the area in which I have been living for 25 years; the sturdy core of born and bred locals, the Scottish incomers, the English incomers,  the incomers from overseas who come and go, some staying (often to their own surprise) have given this little town a distinctive character. The local people are rooted and secure enough in their identity that, with the occasional pulling in of horns, they are prepared to welcome their incomers with interest and even affection. It makes for a satisfying textural mix. I think I’ve finally found somewhere I feel I belong.

PS: I don't put the name of the town because I want to avoid Googlers - can't feel free to say what I like if it's going to be too accessible.

Everywhere is very green just now, hardly surprising as it continues to rain. Some creatures don't mind.