About three days a week I bake a tidbit for my grandson's supper. He gets fed plenty at school but getting home at 9pm he needs a snack and his poor mum is running two businesses so has less than no time for cooking. These feta, olive and sun dried tomato scones Look very knobbly because of all the bits but are my personal favourite (obviously I also benefit from this baking) The recipe is one of Delia's. She's fail-safe. Almost.

I though I would have a lot tp say about my experiences at a Qi Gong workshop this weekend but now I have the pad in front of me I'm finding it hard to put into words so, in brief, it was good and I feel a lot better for it.

It didn't come as easily as yoga. When I first started yoga classes, an awesome 40 years ago, I felt as if I knew it already and some of the asanas I did as a child, instinctively, without knowing they had been given names. Qi Gong feels new and awkward, but my body seems to approve!

I love dragons and if I sewed I would make as many dragon wall hangings as chillside makes fat ladies! I very much regret a clay dragon I made long ago that had its tail broken so I threw it away. I could have glued it back.

The last two Cinema Sundays have been dedicated to an Italian director, Gianni Di Gregorio. I've decided I like his style. He was compared somewhere to Woody Allen but that doesn't really do him justice. In both these films he takes the protagonist's role. In the first, 'Mid-August Lunch' he surrounded himself with elderly Italian ladies who had never acted before and, from what I could gather, he gave them very little in the way of dialogue so they were as much themselves as possible. The ' leading lady', the oldest, plays his mother who is a startling nonagenarian with grossly over-sunned skin, large grave marks, creases you could fall into and be lost for days, veins the size of the Urals , and a glamorous blonde wig. She should be appalling, but she is gracious, elegant, feisty and she is dressed in chic Italian couture. I vowed to buy myself some more long gloves after watching this though because hands as we get old - mine anyway - can be quite grotesque.

This redoubtable woman appears as his mother in the next film, 'Salt of Life', even more elegant as this time she is meant to have money, with a different set of card-playing cronies. In both she runs her son ragged as he tries his best to please her because he is obviously fond of her. The theme of the second piece is the middle aged man's despair at the onset of old age. He tries to hold it off by courting, hopelessly, ( his eyes drooping with melancholy, like a particularly loose-skinned Basset Hound) young vibrant women.. He sees his contemporaries doing this, and even older men, but it doesn't work for him. He joins the ranks of the old buffers sitting outside under the lime trees smoking and making comments on passers by. He thinks of topping himself. But it ends in a resigned sort of OKness.

This week I have mainly eaten Tapas!

Wednesday there was the Scottish tapas: haggis in tempura batter, fish in ditto but no chips, Aberdeen Angus sausage stew - and that was about the limit of the pub's imagination, the other dishes were more predictable.

Yesterday it was Chinese; easy for the restaurant really. They had had some Chinese ladies teaching them how to cook authentic dishes for the week-long New Year celebrations, so just served small portions for the tapas: Wonton soup, (always my favourite) Dim Sum, and, requested by my friend, beef in black bean sauce, which wasn't such a success because they had sliced the beef all wrong, too thick and not along the grain so it was really tough.

Predictably, at both venues, there was always the dish that was far too salty. I suppose the traditional taste for sweet things in this part of the world has to be balanced by saltier savoury dishes. (Just my theory.) I'm always grumbling about the amount of salt in everything up here. Sometimes it's all I can taste, but when i complain (politely) the waitresses/chefs look bemused and say no-one else has complained.

Sigh.

The Dim Sum were very very nice though.

No photos. Sorry. I always forget my camera...

My reading jag has included the three Tana French (new Irish crime writer) I bought last year. I'm waiting for the next. She really is very good. Each novel has been written in the first person, so far she's voiced two men and one woman and seems equally comfortable with either sex. The protagonists are liked by their job - in the Irish Guard, detectives, one often under cover, one the senior of the other two. This is satisfying as it gives different views of the same characters. I'm going to quote a bit here from 'Faithful Place' the last so far, which has more humour than the other two.

 "You're looking very well,'Carmel informed me, predictably. If the Risen Lord appeared to Carmel one morning, she'd tell him he was looking very well. Her arse was in fact pretty high-impact, and she had developed a genteel meet-my-sinuses accent that didn't surprise me one bit. Things round here were much more like they used to be than they had ever been.'

 So, apart from reading a lot, last night I went to a talk on Daoism given by my acupuncturist, an amazing lady.I've read (tried to read) the Tao Te Ching and I've use the I Ching a lot but I have never arrived at any useful understanding of what Daoism is other than the belief that all is interconnected. Last night I finally got a glimpse,and really like it. It certainly must be the oldest philosophy in the world because there are signs of its presence way back in prehistory. It preceded writing and believes that the true Dao is beyond words. Difficult for westerners. Bisong also made her audience (a mixed bag of Scots, Germans, English, Ductc, Austrians, Australians - and that was just the ones I knew) laugh by saying that westerners can't follow Chinese conversations because they jump around from one subject to another like children. She puts this down to Daoist thought which permeates all Chinese society.

 All in all it was an interesting evening and I was impressed with myself for going!!

 Lunchtime today I'm celebrating Robert Burns with a friend who, like me, doesn't get out in the evening much. This means 2 pints of real ale for him, a whisky for me and - wait for it - haggis tapas!

Kung Hei Fat Choi!

The Year of the Dragon welcomed in.
I missed the 'Waking the Lion' because the hall was full, but it's available on YouTube. Wish I'd been there.