A Week In St Andrews

It hardly seems like five minutes but we've been here at the caravan in St Andrews for over a week now and before we know it we will be getting ready to hit the road again for the return journey to Framlingham. The sun finally peeped out from behind its grey covering today after a dull, wet and cloudy week.

Although it's always sunny when we see these two. Melody will be one at the end of this week and she's growing up extremely quickly. Rose has had a year to get used to her sister sharing the limelight and the two are beginning to become good friends and playing together.

Sarah was doing some yoga training in Edinburgh at the weekend so we drove into the capital to see Duncan and the girls.

Rose loved a little playground we found tucked away in a back street.

 And I was fascinated to see the trams finally running after years of traffic disruption. The trams themselves are very modern and look very comfortable.

I spoke to my favourite Scottish farmer and asked if there were any fields available for me to try with the detector. He told me that one of my favourite fields (on which I have found some very nice ancient artefacts over the last year or two) was available.

But when I saw the height of the stubble I wasn't exactly excited at the prospect of searching the field - I had to hold the detector about six inches off the ground.

So it wasn't surprising that I didn't find a great deal.

Although I do feel that the only decent find (this ornamental buckle) has a lot of age to it and may well be of the Viking period. I have asked the museum in Edinburgh and will see what they say. 

We've been watching the X Factor again (gluttons for punishment I know). I wonder if this little lady will be entering thirteen years on from now.

And Then There Were Four (And two wee ones)

The party is now just a memory. Our friends left on Sunday afternoon and Monday morning and I drove Paul, Josephine and Catherine to Edinburgh for the long train journey back to Rochester late on Monday morning. We had had a great weekend and I loved having everyone together.

That left us with just Sarah and Duncan and kids to rattle around in Craigengar , the big house in the country, that we had hired for the event. It's an interesting building. It could sleep fourteen or fifteen quite comfortably.

The centrepiece and hub of the house is the large open plan lounge and kitchen which is very comfortably fitted out and has a great sense of space and light.

Another major benefit of the house is its location. It is only forty minutes drive from the centre of Edinburgh but is very much in the country with views of wide open space in all directions.

It's way down a track behind that clump of trees.

Perfect for taking little ones for a ride in their push chair.

We've had a fairly lazy few days. Sarah and family went to a nearby farm heritage centre on Tuesday while Marion and I went and had a look at a local outlet village and bought a few clothes. Yesterday we drove into Edinburgh and had a look around the fabulous museum. Today we're having a quiet day at the house before we pack up and head back to St Andrews and then back to Framlingham on Saturday.

We've eaten well. Rose made a pizza all on her own.

And so did I.

It's been five weeks since we left Suffolk and headed up to Scotland. It's been an eventful five weeks - September 2013 was certainly a month that we'll never forget.

All Quiet On The East Fife Front

You may have noticed a paucity of blogs this week but there's little point in blogging when nothing much is happening. We've had a good, family week. Despite the impression that you may get from the photos below, it's been pretty miserable on the weather front so we we filled our spare days with simple pleasures like reading, listening to the radio and watching TV. We did manage a couple of days out too.

On a Wednesday of incessant rain we needed to do something indoors so we had a trip out to the Perth & Kinross Antique And Arts Centre. It's a huge showroom with maybe a hundred individual cases of antiques and collectables. There was nothing spectacular but it's the sort of place where you might well pick up a bargain. We were a bit concerned to see these G Plan tables classed as "antiques". We had a single table in this range when we got married! The tiles are a bit dated but the tables are in perfect condition and beautifully made- someone will get a bargain at £80.

Thursday saw us taking Sarah and Rose to Edinburgh for the day. It's one of the nicest rail journeys that you could take. The train runs along long stretches of the Fife coast and the Forth bridge crossing is always a highlight.

I did a bit of sightseeing looking after Rose while Marion and Sarah did some shopping. We had a look at the magnificent Sir Walter Scott Monument.

Rose was not impressed.

Now that's more like it.

Yesterday we had the pleasure of looking after Rose for a whole day. We picked her up at around nine, took her shopping and then took her back to the caravan to play and have lunch. The sun came out later in the day and we managed to take her to the beach before taking her back to her mum and dad. We had a wonderful time and we think that she did too.

We can't wait to do the same with our other granddaughter Catherine or even maybe both of them one day.

After the lull of this week we've busy days ahead. A five a.m. start and drive down to Framlingham is planned for Wednesday. We're staying over on Thursday before heading down to Rochester for a couple of nights with Paul and Josephine. This may be our last Framlingham visit before we move our furniture in. We've got a lot to do. We're meeting a bedroom fitter to plan the dressing room, checking progress with the woodburner, timber windows, bathroom tiling and aluminium bi-folding doors, seeing a man about fitting a home cinema sound system and burglar alarm and seeing another man about the landscape design. And that's not the main purpose of the visit - the kitchen fitters are fitting a mock up of the kitchen for us to run through too. On top of that there will no doubt be half a dozen queries from the builder. If all goes well we won't need to go back until December so a peaceful November beckons - apart from a trip to a birthday party in Southport that we're going to turn into a week's break.

On Looper And A Couple Of Recent Reads

Following our long walk around Loch Leven on Wednesday we did indeed sleep well and our bones were aching as we rose in the morning to head to Edinburgh for the day. We had a few presents to buy and we needed to get some bits and pieces to finish off the bathrooms in Framlingham (toilet roll holders, towel rings – you know the sort of thing).

We always enjoy our visits to Edinburgh. It’s the perfect sized city; everything is within fairly easy walking distance but there’s loads to do - good shops, museums, restaurants and galleries and much more. We went into Harvey Nicholls to look for a present. It’s a super shop and it would be easy to spend hours browsing in there. We just bought the present and enjoyed a cup of coffee but we’ll make sure that we have plenty of time next time we visit.

We debated which film to see with the last few pounds remaining on our VUE gift card that we got for Christmas but hadn’t spent due to the lack of VUE cinemas near St Andrews and Framlingham. It was a toss up between The Perks Of Being A Wallflower and Looper. Each scored about the same on the IMDB website but Looper came out slightly on top with the critics.

It’s one of those films that creates a grim, dystopian view of a future where half the population appears to be living in abject, lawless, poverty while the remainder is involved in a hedonistic, drug fuelled life of relative luxury. This future is 2044, only just over thirty years away so I hope that it’s way off the mark as I wouldn’t want our grandchildren living in it. It seems that thirty years ahead of that it will be impossible to dispose of a body without being caught so the criminal mob, who by then have mastered time travel, send their victims back thirty years where they are unceremoniously disposed of by hit-men known as loopers.

It’s a complex but interesting idea, which becomes even more complicated when the time traveller turns out to be an older version of the assassin himself and sees Joe ( Joseph Gordon-Levitt) sitting down to steak in a diner with his older self (Bruce Willis). Throw in a kid who is a sort of six year old medium with one hell of a temper and his sexy mum to create a love interest and you’ve got a plot that doesn’t make a lot of sense but is nonetheless an entertaining couple of hours with plenty of action.

I enjoyed seeing what happened to one of the loopers who travelled back and escaped his younger self. The mob exact violent revenge on his 2044 version but we don’t witness the violence and instead watch the older man metamorphise before us – a clever idea. The romances between the lead character Joe in both 2044 and in the future are unconvincing but they aren’t central to the film, which is essentially a sci-fi shoot em up,  and I’ll forgive them.

I haven’t written about what I’ve been reading lately. The WIFI here at the caravan is so poor that I struggle to upload the blog but I’ve enjoyed Caroline Flett’s Separate Lives, Meg Rosoff’s What I Was and  I also read Summer’s Lease by Charles Mortimer which is entertaining but very dated just thirty years after it was first published. I am currently reading The Quincunx by Charles Palliser as part of Scott Pack’s internet social reading group – see the link to Meandmybigmouth blog over to the right. This is a monster of a book at over 1200 pages and not something that I would have normally picked up. However, it’s surprisingly good so far and not at all what I expected – and owes more to Charles Dickens than any 21^st century writer. I’ll let you know what I think after then next 900 pages.

It's a quiet week this week with no trips to Sufoflk planned so I hope we can get to a couple of films in Dundee, take granddaughter Rose and daughter Sarah to Edinburgh and also have a day out with the detector. After that we're really excited about seeing the progress on the house in Framlingham on 24th October and even more excited about seeing this little lady again on  25th. She'll be almost three months old.