CHRISTMAS PREPARATIONS NO 2 - BAKING

Ishbel, aged 12 but who will be 13 years on Hogmanny, has been taught at school how to make a Swiss Roll.

She made one a week ago in my kitchen with a bit of help (to turn it out) from me but this week she did it all herself.  Also she now knows her way around our cupboards so it's progress on all fronts!

It was a huge success - right from cracking eggs in the bowl (and no broken eggs nor mess) to the final product as seen below.

John took this picture recently of our Star Baker walking in the hills north of Glasgow.

* * * * * * *  AND COMING UP FROM BEHIND * * * * * * * * 

Ellie, nearly 5 years old, has been in the kitchen too. Here she is using bread dough that I prepared earlier to make little balls that sit on the pizza plate and have a dish of gooey cheese in the middle.  It all gets baked together.

Using an egg cup she used it as a 'cookie press' for each ball giving it a rather novel Chinese Hat sort of appearance... all good stuff!

Happiness is having your fingers squidging the dough (while getting flour everywhere)!

And here she is in a recent photo having some toast that she butters herself.  She is left-handed so teaching her use her knife so as not to scrape great dollops of butter from the butter dish is challenging!

CHRISTMAS PREPARATIONS NO 1: GETTING IN THE CHRISTMAS TREE

I was confessing to Ellie (4) this week that I just love Christmas!  We listed all the things that she and I like:   Santa Claus and Jingle Bell Rock music and singing Rudolf the Red Nosed Reindeer, the school nativity play, baking cut-out cookies, sending off cards and presents and so on.

So to start things off with the many photos I have now gathered of all these activities, here is Ishbel getting our Christmas tree several weeks ago.

She and I drove to IKEA and headed for the big fenced off area in the car park. It was pouring rain so we dived into the tent for cover and were greeted with the wonderful smell of coniferous trees.

We headed straight back to our house... actually we didn't; we had a quick trip to Waterstone's book shop in the Braehead Mall before we returned home and she got out all the decorations of many, many years to put on the tree.

This is a photo of Don aged about 10 years old where he and Billy Kalke were bringing in the Christmas tree which, I think, my father would have obtained in one of his trips to haul trees to the coast.  The year would be about 1955.

This is a photo of one of my father's trucks hauling a load of ... what I thought was Christmas trees, but I see written on the back of this photo:

1947 Fargo 3 ton with load of [Karl] Maard posts

The aspect of this photo is interesting.  The truck is parked on the edge of the Trans-Canada Highway where we lived at the top of Tank Hill near Broadview Road in Salmon Arm.  Mt Ida is in the far distance. Across the road is Don Ruth's orchard.

* * * * * * * POST SCRIPT * * * * * * * * *

Ishbel found these Christmas stockings which I have made over the years starting in Christmas 1966 when I made one for Iain (and his 3 other house-mates at that time).  

Harriet and Ellie discovered them stuck on the bookshelf like this and were really upset that there wasn't one for them.   The next generation has taken over both Auntie Ish's stocking and Uncle Alastair's.  It was hard for them to get their head around the fact that these were made long before they were even thought of!

SADDLE SHOES

I was reading a book review in the TLS (No. 6067) in July. The book is The Sports Shoe, A History from Field to Fashion by Thomas Turner and published by Bloomsbury. This image was placed next to the article.

It's a photo of saddle shoes on the LIFE magazine cover June 7, 1937. Apparently it is a photo of college girls but the point of interest for the cover is the shoes. And that is what caught my eye.

Meanwhile this is the cover of the current book.  

The book blurb says that it is about

"The story of the sneaker's rise from the first Victorian tennis shoes to the Nike Air Max and beyond 

Moving from the athletic field to the shopping mall, Thomas Turner tells a fresh story of the evolution of the sports shoe against the changing landscape of society, sport, fashion, industry, and technology. The Sports Shoe takes us on a journey from the first Victorian tennis shoes to the adidas Superstar and the innovative technologies of Nike Air Max. ... [It features] common perceptions of this hugely desirable product, this book is a must-have for any sneaker collector, historian of popular culture, or anyone interested in the place of athletic footwear in our lives today."

A review states:

"This book places sports shoes within their wider social context so we can all truly appreciate their significance.” –  Rebecca Shawcross, author of 'Shoes: An Illustrated History', and Senior Shoe Curator, Northampton Museum and Art Gallery, UK"

Ironically, the image they have used is actually not a sports shoe but what I fondly remember as saddle shoes. They are really an 'Oxford' type of shoe (not a 'sneaker' which are rubber based).

And here I am with my much loved pair in about 1958 or 1959. I would be about 16 years old and that is my bike. Behind is the front of our house (facing the Trans-Canada Highway at Broadview Corner).

And this is simply a close-up for the record.

SAILING DIRECTIONS - WORK IN PROGRESS

The Clyde Cruising Club Sailing Directions continue to be used by people who sail in the waters around Scotland.

To help keep the information up-to-date Iain and I work on the text of the Sailing Directions for Orkney and Shetland.  It's all good stuff... he does the sections to do with navigation and passage information and I dot the i's and cross the t's.

This is what the publisher's blurb says about the Directions:

ORKNEY and SHETLAND ISLANDS - Including North and Northeast Scotland

This is a completely new book in which the previously separate volumes covering the Orkney and Shetland Islands have been combined into one. This also includes the principal harbours and anchorages on the north and northeast coast of Scotland from Cape Wrath to Inverness. Passage notes for the Scottish coast and out to the Northern Isles, including Fair Isle, are also included and the Pentland Firth section has been substantially re-written and expanded.

Published by Imray (2016) - 150pp – Spiral Bound – ISBN 978-1846235795 - £35.00 plus p&

In 2016 we did a major re-write of the previous publications which were in 2 volumes.  Here is a photo of Iain talking to a local lad as we checked out information standing on the  hillside above Ronas Voe, Shetland.  Iain wanted to know where to anchor a yacht if, say, you wanted to climb the only hill, Ronas Hill, (the only one of any appreciable size in Shetland and is on this loch or 'voe').  It is a very long voe and is second only to the biggest one in Shetland, Sullum Voe, where the oil comes in.

We have been working hard reading the text and making the changes.  Having 2 pairs of eyes is big help as we find, with our advancing years, that our eyes get tired first reading the manuscript and then accurately marking up the copy using Iain's lap-top.

The job is now without its funny side, however....

Here is the page which relates to Ronas Voe.  As usual we carefully checked the spelling in the text and also made sure that there were no discrepancies between places names in the text and the charts (yellow colour for the land in the box).

A couple of weeks ago we attended the Bearsden Fiddlers Annual Rally in Milngavie Town Hall. When we opened the programme we had a chuckle at a typo in the programme: in the list of tunes to be played was a waltz called 'Rona's Voe'.