Old Scottish linens for the bathroom

Quite often, when I buy a box of old linens at auction, I will find a little pile of Irish linen guest towels at the bottom of the box. Some of them will be well used and rather worn, but just occasionally I'll find some lovely old pieces of bathroom linen with hemstitching, damask patterns and finely hand made crochet edging. I always imagine that they were somebody's pride and joy, eighty or more years ago, perhaps made by a young woman before her wedding, when she was dreaming of setting up house for the first time. Generally, although not always, the crochet is at one end with perhaps the damask and hemstitching continued at the other end. The main fabric of these towels is of the type that I think is known as 'huckaback' in the USA - a nicely textured linen that makes them both useful and beautiful. People sometimes say to me 'but nobody uses these nowadays, do they?' Well, they do. I have a good friend - for instance - with a real flair for interior design. I'm contemplating asking her to do the occasional guest post on this blog. Whenever we visit her lovely old Lancashire house, I notice that she uses these old linen guest towels in her downstairs cloakroom. And I always find myself thinking how beautiful they look, in situ as it were. But I have also known her to use them to line shelves, with the crochet edging visible - particularly if you are displaying old glassware they look wonderful. And like all these old linens, they launder beautifully!

Tulips Tulips Tulips

I love all the spring flowers - but I think that of all flowers I probably love tulips most - and although the verges and parks are currently full of daffodils - a little later than elsewhere in the UK, this being Scotland - the shops are full of big bright bunches of tulips which I find completely irresistable. And soon, the garden will be the same. They are, on the whole, a bargain buy because they look good even when they are slightly past their best. Don't be in too much of a hurry to throw them away. Daffs shrivel and look sad - tulips just open out ever more elegantly, to show the dark heart of each flower. Even their foliage fades to a subtle yellow, and so long as you keep the water fresh, you can get a week or more out of a large and lovely bunch of them. I have an old Dutch Delft tulip holder - a rectangular blue and white container with a removable top, with holes in it, into which you can slot individual tulips - although obviously it looks more impressive with the large old fashioned parrot tulips - the kind that were once sold for a king's ransome a few hundred years ago. Once the bigger, brighter garden tulips are in bloom, I'll add a photograph of it to this blog.

More Naive Art - Scottish Golf - Turnberry

More delightful Scottish 'naive' art from Alan Lees - this time with a golfing theme. These are pictures of Turnberry golf course, with the Turnberry lighthouse in the background. The picture on the left has Ailsa Craig in the background as well, and the kind of stunningly vivid light which is not unknown in the West of Scotland. The picture on the right is a windy day in spring. The gorse is in full vivid bloom, and one or two players have lost their balls among the spikes! An umbrella has been blown inside out and the players are struggling in a stiff breeze from the sea - all too common in this part of the world. I love these brilliantly evocative pictures - there's a lovely simplicity about them, but the memories they evoke, the atmosphere they create is all too true - and in this instance undeniably cheerful - art which may well remind you of happy days, and none the worse for that. Go to The Scottish Home on eBay to see more of Alan's pictures.

Happy Easter from Scotland!

And here's an Easter photograph to go with the wishes. The plate - one of my all time favourite possessions - belonged to my dear late mother, who gave it to me years ago. She had bought it at auction, along with other items, and it was always the thing I coveted most, along with a pair of very old and comfortable oak framed chairs, which now sit in my living room. It looks like Maling, probably is Maling, though it has no backstamp to prove the point. The blue and white jug, the wee bird, and the bowl that you can just glimpse on the right, are all modern slipware, made in the 1980s by a superb Scottish potter called Jason Shackleton. I adored his work and still do, although I don't think he continued making this wonderful slipware, perhaps because not everyone appreciated it with quite my passion about it! We have a number of pieces - these sit on an eighteenth century Scottish dresser, such as Robert Burns might have possessed. We bought this one at auction, in terrible condition. It had obviously spent many years in a shed, and Alan did a magnificent restoration job on it. It is wonderful storage space, swallowing almost anything you might like to put in it. Our other, much older dresser, the oak press cupboard mentioned elsewhere on this blog, is where the rest of the modern slipware sits, in the kitchen. It includes this fabulously monstrous teapot, also by Jason Shackleton, which has, on occasions, been pressed into service, during large family gatherings. Filled, it is almost too heavy to lift. But it is a beautiful, beautiful item and one which I treasure.

New Scottish Art - A Day at the Shore

Alan's painting seems to go from strength to strength at the moment. The painting above (acrylics on canvas board - 20 inches by 16) is one of my all time favourites. It's titled 'A Day at the Shore'. A young woman in a long red dress and sunhat, walks along the sand of what is very obviously a West of Scotland beach. She is pushing one of those big, old fashioned, comfortable prams with one hand, while with the other, she holds the hand of a toddler, a little lad in blue, who is carrying his bucket and spade. In the background you can just make out a misty Ailsa Craig, while a paddler steamer motors along on its way 'doon the watter.'

I don't know why I like this one so much, except that there seems to be something wonderfully evocative and atmospheric about it. The composition is lovely - the eye goes straight to mother and child, but then picks up on the paddle steamer - quite detailed - and drifts across to the distant Craig. There is something so typically West of Scotland about this day - warm but not sultry - always a little breeze in the Clyde. And the little boy with his bucket and spade has, I think, had his attention caught by the paddle steamer. (As anyone who has seen the Waverley pass by knows, they are impossible to ignore - just beautiful vessels.)

The painting is currently for sale in our eBay shop - but when it sells, as I'm sure it will, I'll be very sorry to see it go. He'll just have to do me another one like it!

Alan has been fairly desperate to get away from woodcarving for a little while now. It's not that he doesn't enjoy it, and - as you can see if you visit his site - he is very good at it. But he was constantly being asked to make ever larger carvings for ever lower prices, and each time it seemed to effect his health adversely - carving on this scale is definitely a young man's game. He had always sketched - most of his carvings began life as a series of sketches - and painted, but he himself was aware that his paintings were too stilted and photographic. As a sculptor, a certain meticulous quality was in them. I've been bending his ear for ages to try to get him to free his imagination, but it was when he began to paint in acrylics that things started to go right for him. What he was aiming for, I suppose, was that sense of freedom that he managed to encompass when he was doodling and sketching for a carving - the drawings he produced then were lovely. Acrylics demanded a certain speed. He couldn't possibly hang about! And at the same time he began painting not what he saw but what he felt. There is a certain narrative in these pictures - but there is an evocative quality about them - sometimes nostalgic and timeless, as with this one - but sometimes right up to the minute.

Now that he has begun, he has almost more ideas than he can cope with - so watch this space!

Edinburgh - The Royal Yacht Britannia

We're just back from a weekend in Edinburgh which involved a number of touristy things, The Royal Yacht Britannia, Holyrood Palace, The Queens Gallery, and a handful of good pubs.
Britannia is beautiful, particularly the engines (I have a really soft spot for these stunning elderly Clyde built engines!) How could they ever have thought of scuttling her? The tour is well done and informative and because it's still early in the season we had plenty of time and space to look around. You'll find all kinds of useful information on the link above, but I have a couple of personal observations - one is to wonder why on earth, as a Clyde built vessel, she isn't berthed on the Clyde? And the other interesting observation is the relative lack of opulence aboard her. I mean there are some pretty opulent pieces of table silver, usually of some historical significance (they always make me think of that quote from Dickens, I forget which novel, where the silver is assumed to be saying 'wouldn't you like to melt me down?') But the interiors are relatively simple. No gold bath taps here. And all, so they say, at the Queen's behest. No fuss. It is a very restrained interior, much like (one assumes) Her Majesty. The other wonderful place is the vast laundry. All those uniforms, all that linen to be laundered every single day. They never closed. And it still smells of soap powder.
More about Holyrood in another post.

Frost Flowers

These were taken in our conservatory the other morning - and a very cold night it had been too. If I had been just a little earlier, I would have captured these amazing frost flowers before the windows misted over. The insulation worked well - the conservatory was quite warm and the insides of the windows were totally clear - but you could see the most amazing natural forms covering the glass on the outside - like seaweed or ferns perhaps, more than flowers. I remember these beautiful shapes all too clearly from my early childhood. My parents used to say that 'Jack Frost' had been and breathed on the windows in the night, and I vividly remember running my fingers over the glass to melt the patterns. But back then, the frost flowers were on the insides of all our windows - since central heating was unheard of for all but the wealthy few. The water in the glass beside your bed was known to freeze over in the night as well. However did we survive, I wonder?

Steam and Sail on the Clyde and a Wee Observation about the Weather.

Snow is forecast here for this afternoon and tomorrow. Certainly it's cold, and we've had the occasional unpleasant hail shower, but so far the snow has only amounted to a few flakes. And as I type this, the sun is shining. Every single year at this time, we have a wee media frenzy to do with the weather. What happens is this. In February we generally have a warmish spell. The wind blows and the smell of spring is in the air. The snowdrops are in full bloom, the trees are in bud, the very earliest of the blossom, essentially 'winter flowering' is on the trees, and a few timid daffodils are beginning to show yellow blooms instead of green spikes. You may even manage to do a bit of gardening without getting trussed up in warm coat, hat and gloves. At this point there will be a sudden outbreak of articles in the press about Global Warming and the ridiculously early spring and how we are all about to go to hell in a handcart. A couple of weeks later the temperatures will fall again, quite dramatically, and we will be well and truly back in winter. A meteorologist will be trotted out on the television to discuss it. Boringly (from the interviewer's angle) he or she will point out that all this is completely normal, par for the course, all part of a typical Scottish winter weather pattern, and so on, but nobody will really listen.

I actually heard an interviewer asking a seismologist last week if the (quite large) English earthquake had been caused by climate change. No, he explained, patiently, although you could hear his inward sigh. No, that's on the surface of the earth. This is deep inside. Sometimes the media chatter (to which I suppose I am contributing here and now) is so loud that nobody ever stops to listen.

Here, meanwhile, is another picture, this time of Steam and Sail on the Clyde - one for those who loved Para Handy, and his Puffer, The Vital Spark, I think!

Gallus

Now there's a good Glasgow word for you - though it's virtually untranslatable. It means daring, mischievous, cocky, self confident, iconoclastic, all of the above, and more. Often coupled with 'dead' as a suitable intensifier. A story to illustrate: when my son was first living in Glasgow, he and a friend were walking home late one night. They met a man coming the other way, slightly the worse (or better) for drink. He brandished a couple of broken bottles at them and as they recoiled in horror he grinned and said 'Only joking!' and went on his way. That's gallus. In fact it's probably dead gallus.
I've been writing a piece about Glasgow, and the word has been much in my mind. But I was thinking about it even more today, when I posted what I thought was a faintly humorous observation about something on a professional website, to be met with a series of what can only be described as spiky responses. And it struck me that I have been living in Scotland for so long (we moved up here when I was twelve - it's my country, my home) that I now take ironic self deprecation coupled with a certain gallus sense of mischief completely for granted. It never occurred to me that somebody might actually take me seriously. The Scots I know and love regularly puncture pomposity with a few well chosen words. I'm used to it. It's a baseline for all interactions. But I had forgotten that not everyone understands or approves and I do sometimes wonder if this isn't one more symptom of the chasm which seems to be slowly but surely opening between our countries.

Painting Scotland

My husband, Alan Lees, who has spent many years working as a woodcarver and sculptor, is doing more and more paintings these days - although he's working on some carved 'waymarkers' for a woodland walk at Straiton in South Ayrshire, even as I type this. However, it's hard and dirty work, with - as usual for craftsmen and women of all kinds - poor remuneration for the effort put in, never mind the actual artistic skills involved. Increasingly then, he is turning to paintings, and increasingly he's working in acrylics, liking the speed and vivid, 'primitive' colours. The pictures too have a primitive, folk art quality about them, and other people seem to like them too. One of his recent feedbacks, in our online shop, The Scottish Home says that he will be 'famous' one day. We certainly hope so! He's quite famous already for his carvings - people are forever coming up to him and shaking his hand when they find out what he does - but I think at the moment, he would rather be painting, and the vivid, graphic and very Scottish quality of some of these makes them ideal as interior design pieces, as well as for people who may want to be reminded of Scotland - industrial Glasgow, as well as the landscapes of the west.

A Burns Supper an Amazing Damask and a Spooky Observation

A few weeks ago, we hosted a Burns Supper for a group of sixteen friends. The table took a bit of time and trouble to get right - what with candles, Burns napkins (had to scour Glasgow for those - couldn't find any in Ayrshire, though doubtless there were some, just not where I was looking!) tartan ribbons for the whisky bottles and heather from the garden - there is always heather of some sort in bloom in the garden even in February. I used one of the Scottish Home's tablecloths, an enormous banqueting cloth which has been sitting in my 'stock cupboard' for a couple of years, and which I have not yet brought myself to sell, partly because I always suspected it would come in handy one day. It is a lovely, lovely old damask, with a stunning design of game birds, stags and so on woven into it, and I reckon it probably came from a hunting lodge somewhere, and was used for those mammoth dinners that people would once have had after a day out on the hills. It is truly enormous - you can see just how big, from the picture on the left: 12 feet long by just under 8 feet wide. Unfortunately it does have a little damage, mostly along the edges, one or two worn places, and a few very small cuts, but nothing that anybody noticed while it was in use.
We provided the venue, the cock a leekie soup (traditional, with prunes) home made oat bread, potatoes and cheese. The rest of the meal was brought by assorted friends, including haggis, home made steak pie, and three spectacular trifles, all different. As we sat there over coffee, there was a sudden power cut, but since we had a great many candles already lit, nobody much cared. There is a sense in which this old house comes to life when the electricity goes off. I always feel it, and it seemed peculiarly powerful that night. When our guests had left, I pottered about by candlelight, gathering up glasses and dishes. I paused in the sitting room, listening - and as always, felt that there are people living here still who prefer candlelight. The next day, I wrote a poem about it.

Arran from Maidens Bay

Alan titled this recent picture 'Digging for Worms' and it reminds me of doing just that, years ago, when our son was a wee boy, and we spent a happy but hectic morning on the beach at Ardminish, on the Isle of Gigha, digging for worms in the sand to use as bait for fishing. Not, mind you, that they ever caught very much, he and his dad. My own father was a more successful fisherman and used to take his beloved grandson to local trout lochs, with the permission of various owners (my Polish dad used to be able to charm the birds out of the trees, as the saying goes, so getting permission to fish was a piece of cake. Or trout. ) But whenever Alan and our son went sea fishing they very seldom caught anything. They did enjoy the process. And digging for worms was peculiarly satisfying, though not - I suspect - for the worms. But most of them escaped as well. And at least our son liked to eat the fish that he did manage to catch - usually barbecued with herbs and lemon and black pepper.

Today feels like the first day of spring, although it is still January - but for once the rain has stopped, the sun came out (briefly) and the hedgerows seemed to be suddenly full of snowdrops. The colours in the picture above - although they look exaggerated - are, as anyone who has visited the West of Scotland will know - absolutely true to some days and times. Lovely!

New Scottish Artworks Available Online

Here at The Scottish Home we have decided to take the plunge and devote a section of our online shop to Alan's artworks. We've tried selling them this way with varying degrees of success but feel that we've never been wholehearted enough about it before. And besides, he's working in a new and interesting way. For the last six months or so, he has been painting in oils and acrylics rather more than he has been woodcarving - although he hasn't abandoned the carving altogether and is still available for commissions, here. He has worked his way through horses and cattle, tackled the odd illustration for Tam O' Shanter, painted a selection of boats and is now obsessively painting scenes from Clydeside and Glasgow - semi-industrial scenes, with various 'naive' figures going about their business. Of everything he has done, I find I like these pictures very much - there is a sort of primitive, folk art quality about them which seems quite original to me - most commercial Scottish art these days tackles a Scottish rural landscape, particularly that of the highlands and islands. But these are urban, full of life and interest and charm (like the picture of a football match in the snow above) and I suspect they might appeal to a worldwide audience, particularly of people with a Scottish ancestry - and there are a great many of them about!

The prices, at the moment, are exceedingly reasonable, mainly because we are aiming to build a market so have a look at them and let us know what you think.

Still January, Still Raining, Still Cold

But two signs of hope this morning. As we lay in bed, my husband and I, wondering which one of us would get up and make the tea - actually, I'm fibbing, because it is always him, but just very occasionally on Sundays I do it instead - we heard the unmistakable cadence of birdsong from the garden. It was thin and half hearted and it didn't go on for very long, but it is still a sign that spring is on the way. Yesterday, on my way to town, I drove past a few little drifts of snowdrops at the side of the road.
On the other hand, real snow without the drops is forecast for tomorrow, and I am writing this with a fan heater blowing on my feet, but my hands are still freezing. This is mostly because those of us who live in old houses and attempt to make a living from the creative industries can barely afford to heat our homes in the UK at the moment.
We have double glazing where we can. We could do with replacing the upstairs windows, with double glazed units, but since this is a listed building, they would have to be sliding sash windows and we can't afford them. Downstairs we have lovely old shutters, which we use as soon as night falls, and they are a godsend. We have put secondary glazing over the upstairs windows, but it is never as efficient.
We have insulated our loft. Cavity wall insulation is not an option, since our immensely thick stone walls do not have cavities. There is no gas in the village. We once lived with a multi fuel boiler for several years, but it had to be fed constantly, and the house still felt cold. Now we heat the place with a mixture of oil central heating, oil radiators run on electricity, a hugely efficient multi fuel burner in the living room, which we mostly feed with smokeless fuel - and the odd fan heater to keep the workers' toes from freezing off. The oil is so pricey that we can only afford to run the heating for a few hours morning and evening, and even then the bills are appalling. I scatter vintage blankets about the house and use them. I wear layers. I wear woolly socks. And some days I am still cold.
We are hardly souls in Scotland.
On New Year's Eve, we visited some friends in the village, who are living in a lovely new build house. It looks very like one of the old cottages, it is quite small, and exceedingly well insulated. All those of us who live in the more 'historic' properties were, within minutes, fanning ourselves and saying things like 'My God it's so hot!' Body temperatures adjust. But sometimes it does cross my mind that a nice, small, insulated city flat might be the answer...

January in Scotland

Not a good time of year, on the whole. Also, I've been neglecting this blog, in favour of wordarts because I've decided to post a whole novel on there, a bit at a time. It's called The Corncrake, and I've only got as far as posting Chapter 4 (although the whole book is written). It's something of a Hebridean homage to Wuthering Heights so if you like that novel and/or if you love Scotland, you might enjoy it. I'm already working on something quite new, which I hope will be sent out by my agent in the usual way. But, for reasons too complicated to go into here, involving extensive rewrites, she can't really send this one out. I reckon it's a good commercial tale, and I've decided to post it and see what happens. But it will take a long time to get through it - midsummer by my reckoning! When, hopefully, the rain will have stopped.
Early in December a friend told us that the autumn had been the dryest for thirty years, here in Ayrshire. Since by that time the fields around the village were a sodden mess, he got fairly short shrift, while stoutly maintaining what his rain gauge was telling him. He may have been right, but the statistics were only an indication of the thankless task of judging the weather here in Scotland, because it hardly seems to have stopped raining since he first mentioned it. Predicting droughts from dry spells lasting a few weeks is impossible in this country. Right now, it is dark, wet and windy. In between times, it is cold. You would not want to be here.
Meanwhile, I have decided to broaden out the scope of this blog a bit, and post the odd reflective piece about what is going on in Scotland just now - socially and politically, as well as all the nice stuff about houses, gardens and antiques - in fact a little more about what it means to live and work in Scotland in the early years of the twenty first century.

Memory Foam Mattress - an update

Those of you who follow this blog from month to month may be wondering how I am getting on with my loathed memory foam mattress. Not very well is the answer. I am now beginning to wonder if it wasn't all a plot on the part of my insomniac husband to inflict the same problem on myself, except that he's far too nice to do that to me. But sleeplessness induces paranoia you know. If pushed, I would say that I have 'got used to it' to some extent. That is to say that the smell has disappeared, and I also manage to fall asleep on it. But this is because I delay going to bed until exhaustion really sets in, and then read for half an hour or so. So I fall asleep at one or one thirty ....and then I wake up again. You know that feeling when you look at the clock, hoping and praying it will be morning, only to find it is three thirty, or four at the latest? At that point I will be (a) so hot that I feel as if the whole bed is going into meltdown and me with it (b) utterly uncomfortable with pains in various joints and (c) stuck. I now think that whether or not you can get on with these mattresses depends very much on the kind of sleeper you are. Some people move around more than others. My husband lies like a stone. I fidget. But you can't toss and turn with any ease on memory foam so you don't fidget, you struggle. It's like lying on very firm mud. It also seems to have the same effect on my lovely duck down pillows, so that they start to feel as though all the individual feathers have solidified. So I toss and turn (with extreme difficulty) and alternate between extremes of heat (under the duvet) and cold (outside the duvet). In the morning, Alan's side of the bed looks as neat as when he got into it. Mine, by contrast, looks like that scene in the M R James ghost story 'Oh Whistle and I'll Come to You' - you know - the horribly crumpled bedclothes in the spare bed. My sister in law, well warned by me in advance, tells me that they have just bought a new sprung mattress with a thin layer of memory foam on the top. She tells me it is extremely comfortable. This does not make me feel any better. I need sleep. I need to knit up my ravelled sleeve of care a bit. Dear God, I need a new bed.

Dry Rot - The Joys of Owning Old Property

Apologies for long silence on this blog. We have had dry rot. Invasion of the body snatchers. The curse of old houses everywhere. Dry rot was a late introduction to Britain and came in on imported timber in, I believe, the nineteenth century. If I could find the grave of the man who first imported it, I would dig him up and kill him all over again.
The spores lurk in the structure till conditions are just right. Then they germinate, and set off in search of water, through whatever happens to be in their way, stone walls in this case. When they find wood, they suck it dry (much like a Doctor Who or Star Trek alien) and continue on their merry way in search of more. The big 200 year old oak lintel over one of our windows was badly infected and had to come out. One end was like cheese. Unfortunately, the other end was rock solid and took forever to remove. The whole corner of the downstairs study had to be opened up, the infected wood removed - the stuff looks and smells alien as well as causing so much damage - and the walls treated with fungicide (and a blow torch, just to make sure!)
The only saving grace was that the chemicals are much less noxious than they once were and don't smell at all. Was this introduced for the benefit of humans? Not on your life. It was because dry rot treatments were adversely affecting bats. Call me old fashioned but I'd put human health before bats any day, but hey, what do I know?
We thought for a while that we would also have to dismantle our son's room - only just redecorated - but because ours is a very old cottage, with a great deal of space inside the walls, it wasn't necessary.
I think if I were starting all over again with this house (heaven forbid) I would open the whole thing out, taking much of it right back to its original stonework, which is beautiful. It would make a much bigger house, and there would be nowhere for the dry rot to hide. But since we have neither the time nor the money to do that, we'll just have to work with what we have. Even as I write this, my husband is starting to attempt to rebuild that corner of the room, and the window. And when he's finished what will amount to three week's intensive work, the room will look pretty much as it did before. Soul destroying or what?

Afternoon Tea

Had the pleasure of a real old fashioned 'afternoon tea' last weekend, courtesy of some friends who live in an old farmhouse. The home baking was fabulous - scones, several sorts of cake, buns, home made jam, clotted cream, millions of mouthwatering calories heaped on one long damask tablecloth! (and a perfect use for these tablecloths, I might add.) Among the offerings, all served with pots of good leaf tea, was a chocolate cake so rich and dark and dense and gooey that somebody aptly described it as a nuclear reactor among chocolate cakes. Not that anybody could manage more than a thin slice. This lead to speculation about a possible 'chocolate cake' diet - one slice of said cake for breakfast, with a couple of indigestion tablets for good measure, and you wouldn't want to eat anything else at all for the rest of the day. Worth it though. Definitely worth it.
The other revelation was to do with the classic British 'cream tea' which is normally a combination of home made scones, good jam and clotted cream. There are regional arguments as to which goes on first, cream or jam, but it does rather depend upon the consistency of the cream, which can vary from very thick and buttery, to slightly softer, depending upon where y0u acquire it. Either way, it's a delicious dish, but another one that does rather take the edge off any desire to eat for many hours afterwards. As well as the traditional scones, however, our friends also served small, fluffy, white rolls (freshly home baked, naturally, with just that faint tang of yeast that seems to be disappointingly absent from bought bread). A 'cream tea' on a bread roll instead ofa scone is a revelation. Light as a feather, not remotely sweet and sickly. It should have a name all its own but I can't think of one at the moment.
Afternoon tea seems to be making a bit of a comeback here in the UK: a very civilized meal although , unlike our more robust Victorian and Edwardian forebears, most of us can't really manage to eat dinner or indeed anything else, for the rest of the day!

A Scottish Cottage Wall

A few weeks ago we stripped all the plaster off one of the walls in our old cottage sitting room. This was a wall which had been slightly damp for years and years, and every possible cure had been tried, inside and out, on roof, chimney, walls. Eventually our friendly builder intimated that the plaster itself had turned 'sour' and the only cure was to strip the whole thing off, with the possibility of adding a false wall, with a space behind to allow air to circulate. In the event, the stonework behind the plaster (which was indeed very sour) was so beautiful that we decided to point it up and leave it. It became clear, moreover, that when the cottage was built (some time between 1808 and 1811) it was never intended that these walls should be plastered at all - hence the problems on this, the chimney wall. What really fascinated us though, was the sight of the 200 year old lintel stone, which had once sat on top of an enormous old fireplace - you can see it in the picture, with a layer of ancient soot along the edge. This would have been the kind of fireplace where all the cooking went on, possibly, back then, with an old fashioned metal 'swee' to swing the pans in and out, over the flames. High in the wall to the left is a very definite space - either for a lamp, or a candle, or just possibly for keeping the salt dry. We're not sure - but a candle looks very nice sitting in it!
The other surprise is just what a change it makes to the room - opening it out somehow, and making it, possibly the darkest room in the house, seem much lighter and altogether warmer. The stonework will, I hope, look even nicer at Christmas time, when I get going with the holly and ivy!

Scallops

Went out for a very posh lunch yesterday. My main course was salmon with 'scallop' which turned out to be just that: a single (albeit delicious) scallop, used as a garnish. And no wonder. Commercially, they cost a fortune.
Which took me (inevitably) back to Gigha, earlier this summer. We were given a large bag of cleaned scallops by a fisherman friend. We took them to our self catering cottage, and Alan cooked them, flash frying them in a little olive oil and pressed garlic. We ate them at the picnic table outside the cottage, looking down into the bay, at the turquoise blue waters from which they had been dredged. We divided them between five of us, one each, and another, and another, until they were all gone. Fortunately the teens in our party didn't like the look of them. We didn't press the point. We must have had about seven or eight each. They were completely delicious, tender, and with a real tang of the sea about them - that faintly astringent taste of really fresh shellfish from clean salty waters....
Afterwards it struck me that all my most memorable meals seem to have been fishy: sardines with salty potatoes and spicy sauce in a small restaurant in Candelaria on Tenerife, mussels in Bruges, and again, this year, in the south of France, fresh crab on Gigha, and now scallops from the same place. But the scallops were most definitely the winner.