A Bride Dances By.........

Hullo ma wee blog,

It's not that unusual a sight really. A bride dancing by that is. After all you expect to see a bride dance, especially at her wedding reception. And Lisa was the archetypal beautiful bride, slender and elegant in a stunning figure hugging white dress, her startling blue eyes and the glow of her slight tan lit equally by excitement and pleasure at being among friends and family with her husband for the first time. Lisa and Sam had recently come home from their marriage in the states where Sam's family now live and had arranged last nights celebration for family and friends who could not attend the wedding.

They make a perfect if contrasting pair. They are complete opposites. something that's often said about couples but is rarely so true as it is in this case. Sam is calm and thoughtful, his African heritage shows in an athletic build and in skin that shines from inside. Serenity beams from his face and is communicated by his bright smile, crinkling eyes and a soft spoken voice that hints at a good, and expensive, education. He is the cat who has the cream and he knows it, but he's not about to brag. Sam walks and talks with an even and considered pace as if everything should be savoured.  Lisa is bright and energetic, a petite, pale skinned Scots lass with those aforementioned startling blue eyes and a frank, inquisitive look always on her face.  She's full of the life which beams out of her every pore and shows in restless activity and a mouth which rarely stops talking. What you see is what you get. Rarely will a thought or feeling cross her mind without honest expression. If Lisa doesn't like you, you will know about it. Thankfully the reverse is also true which has brought her a band of close friends, my lovely G included. Always excited and enthusiastic, she communicates at breathtaking speed, vocally, by phone or text.. She lives in the moment, or did until Sam, and then motherhood came along, and likes to have everything organised on her terms. They make, as I said at the top of the paragraph, the perfect pair. They were joined last year by a son, Jacob,  as bright eyed and smiling a wee piece of humanity as you are ever likely to meet.

The reception started traditionally with the bride and groom greeting arriving guests until, with the hall filled, they moved to the dance floor for their first and solitary dance, cheers, clapping and whistles ringing round the room. As guests joined in the evening followed the norm and we celebrated with dancing and drinking, children running round tables, playing chase or hide and seek and young girls hauling Dad's, Uncles and even Grandad's off their chairs as they wanted to dance, dance, dance to every song the DJ blasted out from behind his light-box. People leaned into one another and shouted conversations took place about mutual friends, relations or even football. Intimate groups formed at tables or by the bar as friends and relatives sought each other to chat or catch up. Older relatives congregated together at tables to talk and to watch while the young, the energetic and the deluded stayed on the dance floor.  Time passed quickly and the lovely G and I, who had intended to stay for only a short while as we had a long drive ahead to get back home, realised that we had passed our planned departure time in good company and easy, if loud, conversation with the group of her workmates we were sitting amongst.

By the time we noticed we were an hour behind our planned departure time we had come to a break in the proceedings and, as the DJ announced a short break, the lights came up around the room. Lisa took to the floor with a microphone to make a speech of thanks to the assembled crowd. As she came to the end of this she asked Sam to step onto the floor as she had an announcement just for him. Sheepishly and not, I suspect, without some trepidation, Sam duly made his way towards his wife who began to explain that she had a secret which he had been keeping from him and that she now needed to confess. She had for some time been arranging for a special surprise to come to the reception and that it was now time to reveal her surprise. She wanted to have a performance for Sam. She wanted to find an African dance and music group and had found that just such a group was performing at the Edinburgh Festival and that she had managed to book them to come to the reception to perform for Sam.

The groups name was 'Grassroots' and this would be the first time they had played at a private function such as a wedding, normally playing only full blown concerts. I guess they experienced how determined and persuasive Lisa can be when she gets started.

As she introduced them, drums began to beat and the five performers came in with deep voices chanting, the beating of the drums marking the rocking gait as they slowly passed through the wedding party to take center stage on the dance floor. For the next thirty or so minutes the room was transformed by these imposing performers draped in lion and leopard skin, black and white ostrich plumed headdresses scraping the ceiling as they danced and jumped and cavorted to the native drums and the rhythms they created.  We were taken to sun baked village squares, to royal enclosures and to women working pounding corn or rhythmically scrubbing clothes on river stones by sun drenched riverbanks . As bare feet stamped a rhythm and gourds filled with small stones rattled you could feel the heat of the sun and the dust rising from baked earth. They shook knobkerries and small shields as they sung songs of celebration, of manhood and of rituals from a foreign land and culture. They sung and danced a blessing for a happy marriage and a joyful life. They taught us in the audience to accompany them in the song of blessing, the words echoing across the room from performers to audience and back in hypnotic repetition and as we sang and chanted and clapped to the rhythm Sam and Lisa began to dance, sometimes together and sometimes turning to move on their own, an instinctive and spontaneous reaction to the music and the emotion.

It was mesmerising and I could do nothing but watch as the bride danced by.

Lisa and Sam.

I couldn't believe I'd accidentally left my camera at home........



Listening to Ladymith Black Mambazo,  'Inkanyezi Nezazi'.

1st August Celebrations

Hullo ma wee blog,

Today we had our very own Swiss national day here in bonny Scotland. Family and friends came to help us gorge our way through lots of Raclette and Bircher Muesli washed down with lovely Swiss wine from the village where our relatives live, as well as a few bottles from elsewhere around the globe. Lorraine and The Lovely G decorated the hall and kitchen and laid the table with special tablecloths, mats and lanterns and other bits and pieces brought back from our short trip a couple of weeks ago.

We found authentic Raclette cheese from Ian J Mellis in Edinburgh and had lots of other cheeses, hams chicken and veggies to grill with our tabletop Raclette set. It's another one of those kind of retro meals, like that other Swiss tradition of fondue, which lends itself to conversation around the table as everyone picks what they are going to have and gets it onto either the top hotplate section to cook or puts in into an individual tray to go under the grill section before sitting back and chatting as the purpose built tabletop cooker does it's stuff.

So, as the afternoon quietly passed, we spent the time eating and talking and having a great time, even taking some time to phone over to Switzerland and speak to the family at their celebration. They're so pleased that we keep the tradition going at this end too.

As usual with a rare family meal, we bought far to much food and have lots of lovely left overs to use up over the next few days. G's brother Leonard was keen to borrow our Raclette set so they could have a party with some of their friends that they ended up taking the set back home to Fife for a while.

A Night in the Enchanted Forest.

Hullo ma wee blog,

A couple of weeks ago Saturday saw the lovely G and I head off for a night out at the invitation of her brother and his girlfriend to join them, her sister and partner and a couple of other friends. A leisurely drive of just over a couple of hours north across the Forth Bridge and on up the A9 past Loch Leven to Perth and onwards towards whisky country until we reached our final destination of Pitlochry.

The weather on the way was bright and blowy to start with but by the time we crossed the Forth Bridge an hour or so later had begun to close in and the first eager drops of rain started to show on the newly washed and polished car just as we reached the Fife coast. Its always the way of it isn't it. Life is like a far side cartoon some times.

At Pitlochry mid afternoon we found a bustling wee town jumping with what were obviously visitors who had probably come, like us, for the Halloween festival and particularly to see the 'Enchanted Forest'. Pitlochry has become well known over the last few years for this event which turns a nice enough woodland walk into a spectacularly lit Halloween trail with the forest path picked out by small lamps lighting the way and with the forest and Loch Faskally lit in multiple layers of light and with scenes from history and folklore laid out in specially created little grottoes.

The lovely G's brother and girlfriend were already at the hotel so the first thing we had to do was find a place to park as the hotels own car park was full. We managed to find a space a few hundred yards away on the High St and lugged our overnight stuff down to the hotel to be checked in by the by now all too familiar, for visitors to British hotels bars and restaurants, eastern European member of staff.

{Don't get me wrong here, I don't have the slightest problem with immigrant workers coming to the UK, as long as they are legal, law abiding and tax paying, and also that they are doing a job that is paid at the right rate and is also open to British people if they want to apply, although I do have some concern that the numbers of particularly Polish coming in to these jobs does in itself keep wage rates low and will do until there is parity across the whole EU which is decades away if it ever happens at all. On holiday in Poland this year we were told that the average monthly pay in Poland is about 20% of UK average earnings so no wonder that Poles now account for almost 10% of Edinburgh population.}



It was to be an evening of good food, easy conversation and happy companionship. Times to be reflected on and enjoyed again and again that make life worth living.



To prepare us for the cold walk through the forest we headed off to a fantastic local restaurant where all the staff were dressed for Halloween as ghouls, witches and warlocks, and very atmospheric it was too. The meal was fabulous and I had probably the best steak I have had in a couple of years. It was absolutely beautiful and the pepper sauce which I had asked for on the side was also perfectly ticketty boo; warm, spicy yet still creamy soft. Just fantastic. I was left the choice of wine and luckily hit on a super wee red. So much so that we had another bottle and could easily have had a couple more, but of course the night was young and we needed to pace ourselves...



After dinner we took a special bus from the hotel up to the forest.



and spent a leisurely hour walking and enjoying the light show. Its the first time the lovely G and I had been, but we all agreed we had such a good time together that we are doing it all again next year.



I'm looking forward to it already!



See you later......

Please note the fantastic photos on this post were taken by Dave Wardle, a professional photographer, who was part of the group and are copyright. Please don't reproduce them. Thanks...


listening to Glinka Overture to 'Russlan and Ludmilla'

The start of another week

'Towards Torness'


Hullo there ma wee blog.

Well all went well with the first of August celebrations on Saturday evening. The lovely G planned the evening out and her two brothers and wife and girlfriend { what is the simple pc way to say that?} came with Leen and K staying over and T+T heading back home to see to their kids, who at 18 and 16 must have had their plans for a parent free Saturday night spoiled in all probability. Its one of the few pleasures left for parents I imagine. We had the table decked out with Swiss tablecloth, napkins, placemats and even had some traditional paper lantern 'lampiones' with real candles swaying outside the patio doors - even if it was too windy to go the whole hog and light them. We even downloaded some Swiss music { definitely no yodelling or alphorns thanks very much}. All very twee but a good laugh as its not taken too seriously........



We had Raclette using the rarely displayed Raclette set brought all the way from- UM - Edinburgh now I come to think of it. We have only used it a handful of times so it was good to do it again. A Raclette set is basically a table top cooker with a communal hot plate/griddle on the top and individual cooking/grill slots underneath where you put whatever you fancy into a metal spatula type affair and grill it to your liking under the hot plate. Raclette is the name of the melty cheese you are supposed to use in the dishes but it can be hard to come by especially up in rural Scotland so I used Tallegio instead which turned out to be a very suitable alternative.

So we used whole boiled baby potatoes, cheese, onions mushrooms bacon, ham, and peppers with various pickles and other nibbles to go along. We polished off a few bottles of good wine and had such a great time chatting around the table that we stayed in the dining area for most of the night and only when T+T went at about 11pm did we move to the lounge. Its a very kind of retro meal I suppose in a 70's flairs and fondue kind of a way but we were introduced to it in Switzerland many years ago and we kind of like the kitschy feel to it and its a bit of a laugh.

We finished the meal off with one of G's fabulous Bircher mueslis, bursting full of fruit, yogurt and a touch of cream and oats. Just the absolute dogs do dahs.........

After a late night it was a late brekkie too with just some simple bacon rolls and the last of the Bircher muesli. Then Leen cycled back home {50 miles} and K followed on after with the car.

G and I took ourselves off to the Riverside bistro in Abby St Bathans late in the afternoon for a quiet drink and a wee walk along part of the Southern Upland Way. Not far, just enough to loosen up and get the kinks ironed out a wee bit. Then we had a quiet night in to get G ready for another week of pure slog at work.



Today I have been surfing the job sites as per and getting a couple of applications ready. When I have them complete a contact who vets applications for the police is going to give them the once over against the selection criteria and give me some feedback so I can hopefully iron out any issues before the application deadlines at the end of this week. In the late afternoon I drove through to pick up G from the office in Edinburgh and we went to the Filmhouse on Lothian Rd to see "Fermats Room" in a lovely little cinema which looked like it only sat about 80 people. We had a drink and a light bite in the cafe at the filmhouse before the show which was nice but expensive. Still, look on the bright side - at least I qualify for concession rates for the films as I am now one of the great unwaged.

The film was ok but as usual I struggled to stay awake. Honestly put me anywhere dark and warm and I am going to be nodding off in about 15 minutes. Its really frustrating when I cant sleep at night even when I'm completely knackered.


Oh well



gotta go, see you later.................



listening to ' Playing for Change'...... " One Love"