Sunshine and snow

A much better ski day for me today! I met up with my pleasant ski instructor, Federico, in the morning and we spent two hours on the blue run practising my turns. I felt more confident although my knee still isn’t great. Most of all I thoroughly enjoyed myself and I’m so delighted still to be skiing. Federico is 24 and has a cat called Osvaldo known as Ossie. The weather is fantastic, with sun and blue skies. Meanwhile James, Heather and Ewan skied the Sella Ronda including a stop at the famous woodcarving shop where Heather purchased another hand-carved deer for her collection. To my surprise they got presents for me too. James gave me a cute round-bellied marmot and Heather and Ewan got me a gorgeous little kitten. Both of these were hand-carved in Val Gardena from pine wood, so you can see the grain of the wood. I felt very moved that they all thought of me. Another great evening ensued, culminating in brandy back at our room. 

Return to Arabba

The journey to Arabba went very smoothly yesterday; we flew from Edinburgh to Innsbruck and then had a two and a half hour bus journey to Arabba. Ewan informed us that the last time we were here was six years ago, in 2019. We are back in the same hotel, the Sporthotel, and it’s just as smart and comfortable as I remember, and the bedrooms seem to have been refurbished in new, lighter wood. We were too late for dinner but were served cold platters of food in the bar area. After a celebratory brandy in our room we slept well, although woken at 7 a.m. by very loud church bells! I dropped straight back to sleep and woke in good time for a hearty breakfast. Then;  came the inevitable footering around to walk down to the ski hire shop, leave our skis at the chairlift, back up to the hotel to leave our snow boots and then back down to the chairlift. My skiing started disastrously; despite going down a reasonably easy blue, my right knee was instantly painful and I felt that I could hardly turn to the left. I encouraged the others to ski on while I made my way back to the resort. I managed down ok and decided to go up a wee chairlift that I could see culminated at a short wide blue run. Except that I got into the wrong chairlift and was lifted back up to the top of run 22 again! So down I painfully skied a second time and then went to book myself three individual lessons at the ski school for the next three mornings. I will also buy a knee support because foolishly I didn’t bring one of the couple that I have at home - I say foolishly because I already knew that my right knee has been deteriorating; last week I couldn’t bend it when I was attempting to get out of the bath! And this morning it was very sore when I was pushing my foot into my ski boot. I spent the afternoon in the spa and was impressed to find out that James, Heather and Ewan had skied 32 km today! We had a convivial evening and by the end of dinner we noticed that it was snowing lightly. 

Northern Renaissance Brunch

We left Ullapool on the rainy afternoon of Tuesday 13th January after an excellent fortnight in sun, wind, snow, sleet and rain. The next day was the first session of my Children’s Panel training. It was informative and interesting, and the group I’m training with are all very friendly. When I got home I did the homework from Day 1 straight away because I will be on holiday next week. I will then have a few days to do the preparation for Day 2 which is in a fortnight. I had a busy couple of days of shopping, haircut, packing, and I met up with Sue for brunch in Burnside. I met Sue on my Northern Renaissance Art Course, and it was very nice to see her again; we chatted about lots of things including Krakow and the Marian Altar in St Mary’s Church. I got my results back from the course a few days ago and was delighted to get a “B” with just over 70%. I found doing the essay and visual test to be helpful in consolidating my understanding of the course, the whole experience was great fun. I’m hoping to do another History of Art course later in the year, and it will be interesting to learn about a different art movement, but there will always  be a big part of my heart in the Northern Renaissance! 

Hamnet in Inverness

We had a pleasant wee half day out in Inverness today. We had lunch in the Marks & Spencer‘s café in the town centre. This also gave us the opportunity to stock up on a few items for the freezer. Then after a quick trip to the bottle bank, we went to the Vue cinema to see the much anticipated film of Maggie O’Farrell’s book, Hamnet. I enjoyed it, and it was fairly true to the book, although it missed out an important thread about the approach of the plague which I think is a pity. And it was much more about Anne (Agnes) Shakespeare than about Hamnet, whereas the book had more about Hamnet’s life; somehow it lacked something of the humanity of the book. We enjoyed chatting about it on the way back and arrived in Ullapool before dark. 

Storm Goretti

Many areas in England were affected by Storm Goretti yesterday and today. It was much hyped in the news with predictions of high winds and snow. There were indeed high winds with lots of trees blown over in the south west, and very sadly one person in Cornwall was killed by a falling tree. However I was rather taken aback this morning when I saw, on the news, the photos of the snow deposited by Storm Goretti in the Midlands. There seems to have been only a thin layer of snow, maybe about 4 to 6 cm at most, and it is clearly melting quickly because you could see that the roads were already fairly clear. Despite this underwhelming amount of snow, buses and trains in England have been cancelled and road traffic has been hugely disrupted. There has however been little coverage of the significant amounts of snow that we have had in the north of Scotland over the past week, where there has been no fuss at all about the genuinely difficult driving conditions. 

Wood

The cold snap continues. We had a snowy walk around the village yesterday where the views were so beautiful in every direction that we were forced to stop constantly to take photos! We had lunch in Cult Café and then walked back via West Terrace where we could see the Summer Isles in the distance, covered in snow and lit up by the low winter sunlight. 
We ran into Basher at the chip shop on Thursday where he was ordering himself a hearty lunch, and asked him if he could deliver some softwood; pine logs. Soon he arrived round with his trailer and unloaded a huge pile of wood onto our driveway. James positioned himself beside the woodpile just inside the garage door, while I threw the small logs into the garage beside him. James then built a new pile of wood, which will dry out over the next few months. After a few near misses the inevitable happened and I did hit accidentally him on the thigh with a chunk of wood, for which I apologised profusely. 
Whilst having a cosy evening by the fire, I came across a wee two part series called Stories from the National Gallery, about its history and some of its paintings, made for the 200th anniversary in 2024. It was awfully good. I think that the National Gallery may be my favourite Art Gallery that I have ever visited. 

Rogie Falls at last!

It snowed a lot during the night into 3rd January and is lying much thicker on the ground now. Davie and Chanel set off for home by car about lunchtime. They let us know when they were safely home late afternoon; the roads were very snowy between Ullapool and Inverness but they took it easy and got through okay. Meanwhile James, Ally and Cat went for a walk up past the quarry and along Loch Achall, while I took photos of snowy scenes around the cottage. We had mince pies that Ally and Cat had brought from Fortnum and Masons with brandy cream while sitting beside the fire. What have the cats been up to over New Year? I think that they have very much enjoyed the company and attention of the young folk, and they have loved lounging about near the fire, but are not very keen on the snow outside! 
This morning we were up early to give Ally and Cat a lift to Inverness Airport. Their flight wasn’t until 11.50 but it had snowed again overnight and we wanted to allow plenty of time. Sure enough the road out of Ullapool was completely covered in snow and James had to drive slowly, although we soon passed several snow ploughs and the road conditions improved steadily as we approached Inverness. We had time to have breakfast in Tiso before dropping Ally and Cat at the airport. Their plane was only slightly delayed and Ally sent us a photo of the de-icing machine spraying the plane; soon they were on their way back to London.
James and I decided that we should head straight back to Ullapool because more snow was forecast. However on the way we made an unscheduled stop. James and I have had a long running joke that although we pass the car park for Rogie Falls (near Contin) every time that we go to Ullapool, we have never visited the waterfall. Well today was the day! We set off down the snowy path through tall trees whose branches and twigs were heavy with crisp snow. It was so pretty! The sun slanted through the trees but it was very cold. We crossed the little suspension bridge over the falls which were cascading enthusiastically over the rocks into the Black Water which was indeed very black. The snow didn’t start until we were back at the cottage where we had a cosy evening with the cats.