Postcards from Oz - AU Edition

Our annual Burns Night supper, six guests, so altogether a group of eight. This year, Cavendish and I came up with the following menu:

My Heart is in the Highlands

~Traditional: The Skye Boat Song~

1st course: Traditional Cullen Skink

~Toast to the Lassies: Afton Water by Robert Burns~

2nd course: Black and white pudding and pan-fried scallops with pea and mint puree at the side.

~Traditional: Come by the Hills~

3rd course: Haggis with pumpkin, mixed vegetables and mash at the side

~Traditional: Loch Lomond~

4th course: Apple Crumble with blueberries (absolutely delicious and kindly provided by one of our guests)

~Auld Lang Syne: Sing Along ~

The things that enter your guestroom once you are approaching middle age and realise how catastrophically out of shape you have become …

Btw.,

selenak

I'm currently in the process of planning our summer holiday in the Scottish Highlands. Starting from Inverness, mostly by rail. Sometimes it's just weird which remote places you can discover simply by checking out every single stop along the train line (not that there are that many stops to begin with *g*).

Altnabreac (from Scottish Gaelic Allt nam Breac) is a tiny settlement within the former county of Caithness, in the north of Scotland, and now within the Highlandcouncil area. The settlement, notable for its remoteness, consists of Altnabreac railway station, the former Altnabreac School (converted into a house in 1986), and a couple of scattered dwellings. It can only be approached by train, or along unsurfaced roads from the nearest village, Westerdale, about 12 miles away.

Altnabreac, like Dounreay, was considered as a location for a final repository for the UK's nuclear waste. However, this idea was not pursued.

If you live in an area as densely populated as I do, where one city seamlessly blends into the next and even the greener agricultural fringes with their fields and small patches of woodland just seem a little less tightly knitted, you are used to a certain level of business. Cars on the road. People running their errands. Supermarket customers queuing at understaffed checkout desks.

So the following observation took me by complete surprise, though I certainly should have expected it. After all it is mid-January; for days temperatures have been below zero, even here in north-western Rhineland. No snow, though, just frozen soil and puddles turned into ice.

Under these conditions there seem to be few places so perfectly quiet, so perfectly at peace with themselves as a garden centre at 9.15 am on a Wednesday morning.

Plants in deep slumber, their leaves rolled up or lost. In a heated glass house some eager azaleas, pink crimson and white. Not a soul in sight except for an employee quietly unpacking some bird seed.

(Before you ask what on Earth I was doing there: Cavendish had asked me to get some bark mulch for his Dahlias.)

On a less winterly note: Yesterday evening we finished rewatching Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, which has aged surprisingly well. A clear victory of writing and acting over relatively low production values. Even in this day and age of near perfect CGI worlds the show manages to be every bit as atmospheric as it used to be. Also, it’s fun to see a young Peter Capaldi play Islington.



 

Watching an interview from the Leipzip book fair where you can see the interviewee (looking uncomfortable and somewhat distanced right from the start) getting increasingly uncooperative with each ensueing question. Not good? Right? Even worse if the interviewer happens to be a professional journalist possessing an academic degree in German literature.  (For a few years she even occupied a teaching position at the University of Milan.) So one should expect a certain amount of interesting actual discussion going on there, thoughtful questions, perhaps even honest curiosity. Right?

Among the questions asked in front of rather large audience were the following treasures:

"Did you take drugs when you wrote that?"

"Your protagonist reminds me of Parsifal. You are familiar with Parsifal, aren't you?" (Interviewee was looking puzzled, due to the Parsifal connection being somewhat far-fetched. I would have been puzzled as well. Also one should not forget to mention that both the interviewee's parents are high profile stage actors, a small biographical detail adding even more to the insult.)

Last but not least:

"What did your parents say to your book? Do they like it?"

 

*headdesk*
 

• Hilary Mantel: Wolf Hall
• Sven Regener: Herr Lehman

• A rather intriguing and audience friendly staging of Wagner's Parsifal in Cologne, additional fun for Star Wars fans included
• Kaeptn Peng und die Tentakel von Delphi in Cologne which was quite extraordinary, literally and figuratively breathtaking.