OUT WITH THE OLD.....

The snow, which was beginning to thaw at the time of my last post to this blog last Sunday afternoon, had virtually disappeared by Tuesday. The ground, which had been under a foot of the white stuff, displayed not a trace of it after 36 hours of wind and rain. However I see, from the Met Office website, that winter is set to return to the islands by Thursday. Let's hope that it's only a temporary reappearance.

I've been working, when light conditions allowed, on the two presently easeled (I work flat on the smaller paintings, so the easel is figurative) commissioned works, and I have even managed a couple of hours on the "stock" work of Gourdon harbour. I received encouragement in the post, in the form of a Christmas card from previous customers in Canada, who exhorted me to "keep up the blog!". It's good to know that people read these posts, even when I feel I have little of interest to relate in them. My grateful thanks to Kim and John from Toronto - for everything!

My brother made one of his flying visits to the islands of his birth last week. In accordance with what seems to have become a tradition, we honoured him by laying on a tattie soup event at Brugarth, Whiteness, for Wednesday tea-time. In the afternoon I took up my usual station at the sink, peeling and dicing copious quantities of carrots, swede and potatoes for the soup, which was to have been made on "reestit mutton". Sadly, what had been supplied to us had seen none of the cure ingredients which would have distinguished it as "reestit" from the "piece o' saat mutton", which is how my mother described it. These ingredients, which many curers keep a close secret and vary according to the manufacturer's tradition, go into the saline solution in which the meat spends a day or two prior to being hung up to dry until it is as hard as rock. Accordingly, Wednesday's soup was a little disappointing flavour-wise. We made a better-tasting potful with two bits of fresh boiling beef last year.

My brother arrived on Tuesday morning's ferry and left with the same vessel on Thursday evening. On Friday I paid my last visit of 2010 to Brugarth, where I found my mother well, having enjoyed her festive season so far, with lots of visits from her burgeoning family. In addition to the usual cooking, washing-up, shopping and multifarious small jobs I help her with, I took the bulbs (which I had planted back in October, and which have all responded to the treatment from my horticulturally inept hands by miraculously sprouting shoots) from the dark place underneath the workshop bench to the front porch. As my mother says; "hit's aye somethin' growwin'!". Even the tulips, which I had planted outside in the front border, are showing signs of life.

I returned to Lerwick in the late afternoon, unpacked my provisions from the Whiteness shop, filled my meter with cards from the same source, checked postal and electronic mail, and settled down for an evening in front of the box. I didn't intend to go out again until Monday afternoon at least, and I had resolved to be in bed by the time the chimes sounded at midnight (changed days for me!) and I was just dropping off when the fireworks gave me a rude awakening. Bye-bye, 2010!