No heatwave in Ullapool

We are back in Ullapool for the next fortnight. We arrived yesterday. While Europe is sweltering in temperatures of up to 44 degrees and the south of England is having a heatwave at 34 degrees, the temperature is a lot cooler here in the north of Scotland! The daytime temperature is about 17 degrees, which I actually quite like, because I struggle in the heat. So today I walked up Ullapool Hill, where I appreciated the cool breeze which kept me from overheating. However it was also grey and a bit drizzly, so I’m hoping for a bit more sunshine, and the forecast is mixed for the next couple of weeks so we’ll go outside when we can. It’s lovely to be back here though, just us and the cats. 
In the previous few days we did some clearing and tidying around the house, I had my hair cut, we had lunch with Davie, I had lovely coffees with Chanel and Rachel, and we both had coffee with Alison Kennedy with whom we chatted about the old days in Cambuslang. 
Meanwhile on Friday Jennifer and Russell, who are in France, went on the painting day which we gave Jennifer for her 60th birthday. It was with an ex pat British artist called Adam Cope, who runs various courses. They seem to have enjoyed the experience, however it was a long day in the woods and although they had packed lunches and water, there were no cups of tea provided! Russ almost permanently has a large mug of tea in each hand, one for himself and one for whoever he happens to meet in the house, so this was indeed a hardship. They sent us photos of their paintings, which were very impressive. Jennifer is already an accomplished artist, and Russ’s painting was very good; the day course was intended to be fun rather than just instruction. However Jennifer said that she did learn a lot so I hope that she feels inspired, and maybe Russ will too once he gets over his “lack of tea” trauma! 
On Saturday evening we had Cornel and Heather round for dinner, which turned out very well, especially the Tiramisu if I say so myself! In all fairness, James’ gazpacho was also excellent. 

Who needs Glasto when we have Glasgow!

James and I have been to two excellent but very different concerts this week. On Tuesday we went to see Sparks at the Concert Hall, I think it’s the third time that we have seen them. James had got us great seats and the music was so good; Russell Mael still has a very decent voice at the age of 76, and his big brother Ron on the keyboards is 79! It was impressive that they have just released a new album, their 38th, and played new music as well as their old favourites. The audience was rapturous and  we enjoyed it very much. 

And then on Friday we went to see Simple Minds at Bellahouston Park. The concert was outdoors and the weather forecast was terrible; there was 80% chance of rain! So we dressed in our waterproofs, including waterproof trousers. The only problem was that it was really warm, so although the rain did arrive, I felt quite hot and clammy! Neither of us have seen Simple Minds before. They were genuinely huge in the 1980s so it was good to get the chance to see them even though we were about 40 years late to the party! Jim Kerr and the rest of the band seemed to be genuinely enjoying performing, and we certainly enjoyed watching them. My only slight comment was that some of their best known songs were a bit samey, but they were all great and James and I loved our evening. 

Sunny Summer Solstice

The summer solstice took place on Saturday morning at 3.42 a.m. and it was another hot day. It was nice to see everyone in their summer clothes on the Main Street. However it was overcast and there was one sudden shower, which was inconvenient because I was sketching in the garden and had to scurry indoors with my art stuff! James arrived back from his camping trip to Glen Feshie in the afternoon; he had a great time and did lots of hill-walking as well as a 16 km round trip by bicycle into the hills. It was so warm that he didn’t need to worry about being cold in his tent, which he pitched beside a stream. 
Kerry has been sending me photos of wedding dresses that she has been trying on. I’m so touched that she is involving me all the way from New Zealand. Needless to say she looks beautiful in all of the dresses! It is eighteen months until Kerry and Jamie’s wedding and I’m sure that the time will fly by. 
Rain arrived on Sunday as predicted but the temperature hasn’t dropped much; it’s still summery. We went for lunch to the Duke’s Umbrella in Argyle Street, using a voucher kindly given to us by Marjory and Forrest. And then we spent the whole afternoon working on the Anderson and Eadie family photos. Neither of us really wanted to tackle it because it’s so time-consuming, but once we got started we managed to finish the whole of the 1950s and felt sense of progress and satisfaction. The task involved an investigation to identify a war memorial in front of which a family group, including James’ Dad, was standing. We assumed wrongly that it was in Scotland, but then James remembered that the Andersons sometimes went on holiday to Scarborough. He did a quick internet search and sure enough it was Scarborough War Memorial, with its quotation from Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, “So he passed over, and all the trumpets sounded for him on the other side.”
Heather and Ewan came round for coffee this afternoon, we made madeleines for them in order to continue our recent French theme after our fabulous trip to Paris. We chatted about our holiday and their cycling holiday in the Loire Valley, which sounded marvellous. 
Later I finished my painting of the staircase at the Hameau de la Reine; it’s very amateur but I’m really pleased to be drawing and painting again. 

Delightful summer weather

Oh it’s warm and lovely! It reached 27 degrees on this beautiful summers day, and I have spent almost all day in the garden. It has been splendid. Davie popped round for lunch and we strolled down to Miller’s Bistro on the Main Street. I was surprised (although gratified) to find it to have air-conditioning, surely a first for Cambuslang Main Street. It must be a result of our changing climate. Then we headed home and sat under the pear trees at the top of the garden and ate ice lollies. The cats love us being outside so they appeared and kept an eye on us. Davie noticed a huge and amazing peony growing all by itself among other plants in the flowerbed beside the path to the shed; it is white and fully opened, so beautiful. 
Hilary arrived for coffee in the afternoon; of course we sat outside for our chat which was very pleasant. And after Hilary left I stayed in the garden; I did some drawing and read my book and looked up at the blue sky through the verdant branches of the trees and listened to a blackbird singing very loudly. I had plenty of things that I could have been getting in with in the house, but the weather was just too good to stay indoors. 

Social and Sunshine

It has been a social week. On Sunday, which was Fathers’ Day, Davie and Chanel treated us to a celebratory curry. We had a lovely evening with them, full of laughter as we related our anecdotes of Paris. James and I had brunch with Gerry and Janis on Tuesday at All Bar One where we saw lots of photos of beautiful wee Rory, who has gorgeous and very expressive eyes. 
EK book club was at my house on Tuesday and we had a really good laugh, but also discussed some very serious current issues in education; the workload seems to be getting worse and worse for teachers in schools. Too many great teachers are leaving the profession in their 30s or 40s, including two who go to the book club, one of whom has just resigned. It is a huge loss to the profession; the councils / government are driving good people beyond their limits. However I applaud these brilliant women for having the courage to walk away, hopefully to a brighter and more rewarding future. I sometimes wish that I had been a bit bolder in my life choices. 

I had a lovely trip up the Clyde Valley on Wednesday with Janet McDougall to Rosebank Garden Centre for lunch and then Garrion Bridge Garden Centre for coffee.  

This morning I had coffee at Costa with Monica who was telling me all about her daughter’s recent hen weekend in Reims, France, which sounded fabulous. 
And as well as a lot of hilarity, some serious issues were discussed, both personal and regarding the unrest all around the world, when I met up with my lovely school friends aka Ladies who Lunch today. We had our usual lengthy lunch and chatted for ages; one of us is going through a particularly hard time with family health just now and was not able to attend; we were all thinking of her and she messaged us during our meal which was reassuring. 
The weather is set to become warmer and warmer in the UK over the next few days and when I got home from town I was able to sit outside in the garden. It’s not quite as warm as Paris was last week, but still pretty good, and sitting outside on the patio was like stepping into a warm bath! 

Investigating a Bugler

James and I went over to Muirhead Vaccination Clinic this morning to get our second and last Cholera prevention drink. After waiting the obligatory ten minutes to make sure that we did not have any adverse reaction we decided to go for a walk, and James suggested nearby Drumpellier Park. What a difference in temperature to our sunny and sweltering walk in Chantilly on Saturday! Here the weather is cloudy and much cooler, but it’s still summery and the park was filled with wild flowers and grasses. We extended our walk through the woods and circled back to the very nice visitor centre for a coffee. 
Back home I started painting a watercolour of some flowers that I saw at the Hameau de la Reine at Versailles; I feel inspired by all the beautiful gardens that I saw in Paris and its environs. Still on a French theme, James and I made some madeleines. We baked them using a madeleine mould that we bought two years ago in Paris, in a big cookware shop that we wandered into in Les Halles. It’s the first time that we have used it but better late than never! The madeleines didn’t rise quite as much as they should have, probably because I didn’t chill the batter, but they tasted absolutely delicious and very lemony. 
I have also been doing a bit of detective work. When we were having lunch at Au Clairon des Chasseurs in Montmartre last week, Ewan pointed out a striking mural painted on one of the walls inside. It consisted of a French military bugler, sitting in a relaxed manner on the edge of a table, dressed all in blue with a blue cap and white gaiters, backpack on his back. Ewan and the rest of us speculated about the origin of this mural; was it a copy of a well known painting? Did the soldier date from the 1st World War or earlier?
The bugler stuck in my mind and last night I browsed around the internet to try to find him, using reverse image search to no avail, and typing various descriptions of him, also unsuccessfully. Finally I turned to online community Reddit and uploaded the photo that I had taken of the mural, asking for help in identifying it. And when I woke up this morning I was delighted to have received a reply from a kindly person who had found the original photograph of the bugler, upon which a military artist called Alphonse de Neuville had based one of the characters in his painting “Eclaireurs d'avant-garde franchissant une rivière (Crimée)” which he exhibited in 1869. In the painting, the bugler is transposed from a table to the front of a boat crossing a river. This possibly dates the original photograph to the 1850s and I was very surprised that artists sometimes used photographs as resources as far back as the mid 19th century. In fact my investigation has raised many more questions in my mind about 19th century military art and I have thoroughly enjoyed it! 

Château de Chantilly

Yesterday was our last day in France and we decided to spend it by visiting the Château de Chantilly and its gardens, only half an hour’s walk from our hotel. It is very beautiful, set in verdant grounds beside a lake. It was the home of the Ducs de Condé for several centuries, but the last of their line, Henri d’Orléans, donated it to the French state in 1889.
It is actually made up of two buildings; the Petit Château which was built in about 1560, and the Grand Château, which was destroyed during the French Revolution and rebuilt in the 1870s. The new part blends in very well with the old; you can’t really tell the difference, but I realised that the new bit is not much older than our house! It has a fantastic art gallery called the Musée Condé, apparently the biggest collection of paintings in France outside of the Louvre. It specialises in French and Italian paintings and book illuminations of the 15th and 16th centuries. My favourite was the Three Graces by Raphael.
Back outside we went for a long walk around the grounds, keeping to the shade where possible because it was another very hot day. I had thought that the thunder and lightning during the night would have cooled down the atmosphere but it was still very warm. We had lunch at the Hameau restaurant, cool and idyllic among tall trees. Interestingly the hameau at Chantilly was Marie Antoinette’s inspiration for her own hameau at Versailles. However this one, rather than being an idealised peasant village, was intended to look like a hamlet from the outside but amaze the host’s guests with its opulent interiors. 
We walked right up to and around the wee round lake at the very end of the gardens, and then meandered through gardens which had roses and statues, and along paths back to the castle and to the royal stables beyond. By the time we got back to the hotel I was very overheated and a bit grumpy, however I was proud that I had managed to walk more than ten kilometres on such a scorching day. We had checked out of our room in the morning but we were able gradually to cool down in the air-conditioned foyer of our hotel, where we drank lovely complimentary chilled water and read our books. We took an Uber to Paris Charles de Gaulle which only took about thirty-five minutes. All seemed to be going so smoothly, however it was a bit irritating that our flight was then delayed nearly an hour and that it was full of over-tired children who were worn out and some of them crying loudly after the excitement of their trip to Disney! Their parents looked even more exhausted! We were home by 12.30 although that was 1.30 a.m. French time so after an affectionate reunion with Tom and Floof we soon dived into bed.