Wandering Around Talking To Rainbows

I need some help/advice. (I definitely still know at least a few fannish Canadians right?)

So I’ve been thinking about going on holiday later this year, maybe end of September, beginning of October. Originally I’d planned either coastal Spain or bimbling around the low countries on an inter-rail ticket. (My local airport flies directly to Schipol, trains from there around Europe are easy.) There is - as of like a week ago - an absolute shitshow going on with the new post-Brexit passport controls/biometrics for UK travellers with the current advice being to get to the airport at least 3 hours early. And look, this may all be sorted by September, but I got caught in the post covid/Brexit nonsense on a work trip to France a few years ago - fucking running with a giant rucksack of Camera kit through Charles De Galle airport from passport control to my gate with a gate agent - and I’m not keen to repeat the experience. So between programmes the other day I pulled up seat61 intending to look at fun inter-rail options via Eurostar because, so my internal monologue went if I need to be at the airport that early I better be flying transatlantic at least. And like fuck am I going to the states while Trump’s in office…

…Yeah.

So back in 2008, when I worked in a call centre and used to plan train adventures between calls to keep myself sane, one of my favourite ‘and while I’m dreaming I’d like a pony’ plans was to do the ‘Canadian’, through the Rockies, across the prairies, across a fair chunk of Canada really. I spent way too long looking at pictures taken out the domes of the viewing carriages along that route. It was out of my budget, and oh goodness, I could not cope with the logistical uncertainty - the train shares tracks with freight, which has priority, so when it’s late it’s not minutes it’s hours, even now with the adjusted compensatory timetable they still recommend you don’t book onward travel or flights for at least 24 hours after your expected arrival time. But all these years later, I can afford it - not the fancy ‘prestige’ option, but the tiny individual sleeper cabin? A couple of nights in Toronto and Vancouver at either end to explore those cities and act as a buffer zone? Totally do-able.

Given the state of the world right now, neither Japan or Australia feel entirely feasible right now - I was never going to be willing to fly via Dubai, it was always going to be via Singapore, nonetheless - the logistics are just beyond me right now. But Canada. I could do Canada. And I’ve wanted to do that specific train journey for a very long time. I’d half planned to get my other bathroom re-done, but the thought of taking that money and turning it into a new bathroom suite when there’s so many places I’ve never been and things I’ve never done, just feels so pointless. I want to knock a destination off my life-list.

So Canadians - or just folks who’ve spent time in Canada - what’s your advice? What am I missing/not taking into consideration? Which direction do I go: East to West (with a detour to Vancouver island) or West to East (with a detour to Montreal?) What time of year? (I was thinking Autumn colour but I’m persuadable. However, I remember Chicago in February, and my friend C’s other bridesmaid flew in to meet us from Manitoba, and nothing she said made me want to do Winnipeg in winter…Would Spring be a better choice?) Should I stop off along the way? If so, where? Have I, in fact, lost my damn mind?

Oooft, I have missed skating.

(For the newer readers, I used to be a roller derby referee. Roller skating - quad skates - was a big part of my life for the back half of my twenties and my early thirties. I drifted away from it after I moved up to Inverness, but I’ve loved roller skating since I was a little kid, so while I don’t really miss derby these days I do miss skating.)

I’m still on my ice hockey kick after the Olympics and one of the knock-on effects is being really aware of how much I miss skating. I’ve been meaning to check when the public ice skating sessions are and try to convince one of my skating buddies to chum me along to a session for ages, and this weekend I finally did it. And it was great!

I haven’t been on any sort of skates since before the pandemic and I think the last time I was actual ice skates was in Princess Street Gardens just before Xmas 2013 when my then girlfriend decided that would be a cute date idea and then spent the whole session clinging to either the edges or my hand! I wasn’t sure how well it would go, but after a slightly wobbly start it all came back to me satisfyingly fast. (My buddy was even rustier but also got the hang of it eventually, we did a fair bit of skating round holding hands like kids because she’s had a stressful week and was getting into her head about it. That was pretty fun too. We had a lot of fun reminiscing about ice discos from our teen years.) The ice was a mess so I didn’t dare try crossovers or anything too fancy. (The kids team had practice that morning, and I don’t think they bothered to send the zamboni out between sessions as we got there at the start of the session and it was pretty roughed up already.) The rink skates are super rigid so my feet are a bit sore from that - actually I ache all over from nearly 90 minutes of skating, but I had so much fun. My buddy gave up after the first 45 mins of so and went and got a hot drink and heckled from the sidelines while I went zooming around gleefully with a big stupid grin on my face. I was high as a kite, all the good endorphins. We’re going back - or at least we’re going to try the rink at Aviemore instead. I cannot stop grinning!

( I do not need my own ice skates. I do not.)

Speaking of making a good start on some new year’s resolutions, I thought I’d break myself easy with the re-read/re-watch project with something fairly short.

I was, for reasons, re-reading a bunch of raven’s fic the other night and came across and re-read their Piranesi fic from yuletide (I think?) a few years back. It reminded me how much I enjoyed the book and made me want to re-read it. In a remarkably sensible move, given that I was just sitting at my computer reading fic and chilling to classical music, I got up and grabbed it from the shelf, sat back down and started reading it, planning just to read the first chapter before bed to get me started on the project. I read half the book that night and the rest of it the following morning. (I pretty much only didn’t just stay up stupid late because I got uncomfortable in my desk chair and in getting up to decant to the sofa realised the time and reluctantly made the sensible choice to go to bed.

( Here be Spoilers )

This week I've been working on making a good start to one of my resolutions, to start a new recipe notebook. (When I first started learning to cook in an organised fashion, while I was going my post-grad, I took a nice notebook I had and wrote down all my succesful recipes in it. It's a multi-coloured decade's worth of recipes that I refer to regularly even now that I'm a vegetarian and many of the recipes aren't one's I'd ever cook now.) I've been meaning to start a new one for a few years now, but never got round to it, because, well I had my tablet and most recipes I was cooking that weren't in actual cookbooks were on the internet and it was just easier to look them up, but it's really come home to me in the last year when I've gone to look something up and it's just gone. (Not even random people's food blogs, but places I'd expect things to be like the guardian or the good food magazine page.) So I've started in on recipes from my 'cook new recipes' challenges from the past few years, and a significant percentage of them are lost to link rot and paywalls.

But the other thing I've noticed - and part of what makes me want to keep the project up - is that my handwriting is really rusty. I've had to make fairly heavy usage of my tippex mouse because I keep missing letters out of words, not even in the analogue version of typos just I'm so out of practice of writing by hand that I'm half-forgetting how to form the letters properly. I used to have a problem with missing out letters when I wrote essays because I was writing so fast to keep up with my brain - the main reason I switched to typing, as it's much easier to keep up with the speed of thought/ideas that way - but I'm just copying out recipes here. Though on the plus-side, forcing myself to slow down, to form the letters properly is making it a more meditive experience than I expected it to be.

I've always prided myself on having nice handwriting. Ever since we did a unit on the Victorians and spent that whole term perfecting copperplate script I've written a minorly adapted version of that. (I adjusted some letters to be more easily read by modern eyes, so I wouldn't get marked down for mis-spelling words because my teachers that didn't recognise my old-fashioned letters.) All through secondary and university my preferred method of studying was to make notes and the rewrite my notes and I still have piles of notebooks about the place in neat multi-coloured copperplate. So it's both weird and minorly upsetting when my handwriting isn't neat despite my best efforts. No doubt with regular practice it'll improve but at the moment I'm falling a low way short of my own high standards for my handwriting.

It's a ridiculous thing to be having feelings about, I am aware, but nonetheless, I am having them. My handwriting isn't as nice as it used to be - less smooth, more effort for less pleasing results - and it annoys me. I'm feeling a little rusty here, it's a thing.

It's the end of the year, and I’ve got time for one last album for this challenge.

In a year when it felt like everyone in my age bracket was obsessed with Oasis going back on tour, the equivalent band for me, Pulp, released a new album and went out on tour. (I was 11 going on 12 when I first heard Disco 2000, it was on a funny shaped sample CD that my dad got as a freebie somewhere, he brought it home, handed it to me and said ‘you’re going to love that one’ and I was hugely annoyed he was right. Different Class was the album that defined my teen years - it rewired something in my brain.) I’m mostly glad I didn’t try and get tickets after all, the surprisingly large number of clips of their Glasgow gig, were up in the gods of the Hydro which is realistically where I’d have ended up and overall if I couldn’t have been down on the floor, I was just as well just watching their ‘surprise’ Glastonbury gig. (It was the 30th anniversary of their classic Glasto performance when they were at the height of their fame.) I really loved both the singles they released from it - I was doing a lot of driving for work, and despite how much 6Music over played them both, I never got sick of either track - and the new bits I heard on the Glasto set so I fully intended to pick up a copy of the album - More. I just never got round to it, until the end of November when I was looking for a pick me up in HMV and spotted a ‘colour’ vinyl edition in the twofer deal - I got Air’s Moon Safari an album I’ve loved for years, but only ever had it ripped from an friend’s copy - and knew that was exactly what I needed.

(And because Pulp absolutely know their audience, particularly for the vinyl edition, there's an insert with both production details and all the lyrics - seriously bands underestimate how much added value having the lyrics provides. Also I got the 'green' vinyl addition and it's just a gorgeous shade of bottle green which makes a gorgeous contrast with the orange on the central label. Just nice simple design. When Jarvis and Candida from the band were interviewed by Jo Whiley after the Glastonbury gig, Candida noted that when they’d all got together to rehearse they’d felt excited to make music together again for the first time in ages and I think you can tell, it really feels like an album made by a band enjoying making music together. I mean they’ve been a band together for longer than my entire life, when they released their breakout album His and Hers in 1994 they’d been going for like 16 years! It’s nice to think they just get back together every so often because it’s still fun to make music together.)

It was a great choice. Got to Have Love and Spike Island are still clearly the stand out tracks - classic Pulp tracks - but listening to it on vinyl, just letting it play while I was doing other things was a great way to let the rest of the album soak into my brain. Tracks I’d probably have skipped over in digital format, or even just on CD for being a bit blah, have settled into my brain and become favourites. It’s such a middle-aged album and I love it, just listening to Jarvis’ wry dead-pan commentary on life and love, that mixture of cynicism and hopefulness that is their trademark, is soothing to me. The stripped back beauty of some tracks versus the lush production of tracks like The Hymn of the North an album that reminds me why I still love this band so much. I was going to pick out my favourite tracks to talk about - Grown ups and Background Noise - but the more I listen to the album the more I fall in love with it all the tracks. It’s not often that one of your favourite bands from your teens gets back together and makes one of their best albums - I’ve been lucky Skunk Anansie came back with a banger in the form of Black Traffic but that was 2013, I think, it doesn’t happen a lot - and I’m so glad they did.

So, yes, I am in fact writing these out of order, but writing the last one made me think about this album and as it was also gig related I thought it was a natural companion piece to follow up with. So this album choice was a result of two different gigs. As noted previously I went to see the Scottish Ensemble and Anna Meredith doing their collaborative album Anno at the Barbican at the end of September, and then at the end of October I went to see the Scottish Ensemble here in the Inverness again. To my intense amusement, working with Anna Meredith again had clearly reminded the ensemble how much they enjoy playing her work, because the whole second half of the Inverness gig was pieces by Anna Meredith re-arranged for string ensemble. Mostly from her first electronic album Varmints - the lead violin noted with clear irony before they played Nautilus that that piece had been intended as a clear break from her previous orchestral work - and having experienced it as something akin to a transcendental experience - I virtually floated home afterwards - obviously I had to go and actually listen to the album in question.

I didn’t initially love this album, despite it being much more what I was expecting from Anna Meredith - before I encountered Anno I knew her mostly from her film scoring work - but as I’ve continued to listen to it across the last month, I’ve come to the conclusion that I like it more the further away from the gig I get. For example, I can now listen to Blackfriars and feel it’s glorious rhythms combine happily with my memories of my recent holiday in London, of standing outside Blackfriars station at rush hour, hearing bells and clocks striking all over the place, feeling the ebb and flow of traffic around me and the rumble of the tube below - I have a whole bunch of field recordings I made in and around that tube station - and think, yes, that part of London does indeed feel like that. I also feel like I’ve been able to fall in love with Nautilus and Scrimshaw all over again in their own right, without constantly comparing them negatively with their reimagined versions. (Honestly I want to hear Nautilus re-arranged for brass a la that Hannah Peel album I wrote about earlier this year.) I do think I need to go see Anna Meredith live in her own right next time she’s touring, because I think her work really lends itself to live performance, to variations on a theme and interacting with visuals and graphics, a proper multimedia experience. However, now that I’ve got enough distance from the gig, I can happily also enjoy it, lying on the sofa with low winter light and just the fairy lights on, through big headphones and let it transport me to other places.

I held off on making this post until today, as it’s my last day of annual leave, so the last day of my dedicated writing time. Writing has been going well, I’ve now written as many words as I had by the end of the year last year so I’m officially caught up. As I started November 6000 words ahead of where I was last year, I’m hoping to maintain that, ideally I’d like to be able to say I wrote 10,000 more words this year than last but we’ll call that a stretch goal! (The return of my fic writing ability/motivation means that I’m hopeful that I’ll be able to spend December writing a bunch of treats and pinch hits, thereby getting a decent word count for the final month.) An interesting thing about this year’s writing is that it hasn’t consumed everything else. For a start, I’ve finished the non-fiction book I was reading this month, and I’ve started another.

My other personal target for this month was that I wanted to finish the little crochet crab that I’m making. It’s the first proper amigurumi that I’ve tackled so getting it successfully finished will tick a bunch of boxes. It goes in fits and starts because I keep having to take it to my knitting group to get help. (Being a very beginner crocheter and working between UK and US instructions can be complicated - I was taught by someone who uses US terms, one of the ladies at knitting uses UK terms and the other is Dutch!) So I have finished the body and a leg, and I’ve made half a claw but now I’m stuck until I can get to knitting and have someone show me what’s meant by ‘turn’ in this context. I have, however, found a good video for doing magic circle so hopefully by the time I finish the legs - there’s eight - I’ll have that down pat. I’m travelling for work this week, so I’m hoping to get the rest of the legs and both eyes done while I’m away. That way I can ask about both the claw and the eyestalks while I’m there and get both sorted out. It’s fun looking at the progress that I’ve made on it, I’m quite pleased with the stitch texture I’m getting now, and I’m pleased to have mastered decreasing but already I can see where I’ve improved and got better. Like, I’m having moments of realising ‘oh that’s why keeping the stitch count right was so hard’ and ‘oh that was silly, of course I should do it this way instead’. (I did, as predicted end up breaking the flismy little plastic hook that came with the kit - my tension is tight! - but actually now that I’ve dug out a metal hook of the correct size I feel that I’m getting on better, I don’t know if it’s just that I was worrying about snapping the old one, or if it’s actually easier with a hook of a different material.) I’ve been zooming through my podcast backlog while I’ve been working on the crab, which has also been quite satisfying.

At the start of last week I kind of felt that I wasn’t making much progress on many things I wanted to have done this week, but looking back on it, I think I’ve done everything I needed to do. There's definitely more things I wanted/intended to do but the time critical stuff - things that needed ordered and bought by deadline, stuff that was expiring both food and digital stuff have been dealt with - has been done, I've added a bunch of lights to places in the unending fight against the lack of light. I got some more cute decorative lights, fairy lights and a snow globe style one. Also while i was tidying out other things, I found some stick on press lights that my dad gave me ages ago and had no idea what I'd do with them, and it dawn on me they'd be ideal for the meter cupboard so now the cupboard with the fuse box and the electric meter and the cupboard where the gas meter lives have little press lights so I don't have to juggle my phone's flashlight when I'm trying to send my meter readings.

I didn’t get my curtains dry cleaned in the end because when I took them in to the dry cleaners, they were like ‘oh no’ because they’re both thermal lined and from Dunelm and apparently they’ve had a run of those where there’s something wrong with the thermal lining, so they stick together in the machine and the lining shreds when you try to separate them again. (Sometimes they’re fine, but they’re not often that they’ve got a special report and letter they give people to get their money back/replacement curtains from Dunelm.) The dry cleaning lady recommended - as mine were dusty rather than actually grubby, I vacuumed them when I took them down - hanging the outside on a nice dry breezy day and giving them a febreeze! I even got my good sewing shears sharpened - now if I could just find my chalk I could get to work on shortening those curtains. Though I do now have...concerns about ironing the new seams...