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l other sources say teayn willie then goes to our phone box to call the police meanwhile much to the annoyance of the coastguard around 30 russians have landed at footabrough in pursuit of erich which is totally illegal and basically an invasion of british territory they search the countryside passing close to crookataing but not going in erich was taken to the lerwick police station where local authorities point blank refused to hand him back to the russians before being transported south it seems he got to stay in the u k though not much is known about what happened to him after this questions were raised in parliament though not many see hansard here there doesn t seem to have been a lot in the british press or much fuss searching around for details i ve found more references to american publications than any other but it s still a curious story and even more curious that it s not better known erich was definitely lucky that he found people to take him in the shetland landscape doesn t offer much cover if a search party is after you and reports of 30 men sounds like the crew of the ukrania meant business an account from the shetland times is here there s now a go fund me page here by our i m thinking of all or any of us who might read this years later my father and stepmother bought this croft house renovated it and lived in it for a number of years it has an amazing view and seems a ridiculously tranquil spot for this kind of excitement absolutely the sort of emergency that demands a phone call posted by desperate reader at 3 51 pm 3 comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest friday february 21 2020 a post about my dad my father is a man who needs a project in his life for preference one that involves him making something and with a minimum of paperwork not his thing his current project unfortunately looks likely to involve a lot of paperwork not much building and needs some good ideas i hope i ve got the genetic inheritance to look this good when i m 75 he has adopted a phone box which is desperately in need of rescue because it was on his land he could buy it for a pound but fixing it up will cost thousands it can t be used as a phone box again and isn t near much but it s a well loved local landmark when it was working and i was much younger i made desperate phone calls looking for a lift to avoid the 2 mile mostly uphill walk back to the village from it or just sheltered from the rain in it when my youngest sister was much younger a book selling neighbour left a clue in it for a midnight harry potter treasure hunt one launch day it must have overlooked the time my dad rescued a whale that was caught in some mooring ropes for a few years there were some knitted mushrooms by it a bit of yarn bombing from a visiting knitting group which were brilliant and those are just my memories unfortunately it needs more loose change than any of us have and without a clear idea of what the box could or should be used for it s hard to know how to go about raising the money if anybody has any really good ideas about what the box could be used from we d love to hear them but my dad has always been the sort of person who believes something will turn up and because he s my dad the sort of man that this stuff happens to something did turn up he found a message in a bottle it had been at sea for around a year and longish story short the man who had released it promised a thousand dollars to the charity of dad s choice and to send him another thousand dollars the cheque has arrived we weren t convinced this would happen and when it clears will cover a good portion of the cost of a new door for the phone box if ever there was a message in a bottle or otherwise from the universe that a project was meant to happen this must be it he made me my glove boards and for my 40th birthday gave me a silver teapot in a box purpose made to store it when my next sister hit her 40th she got a silver teapot in a box shaped like a treasure chest with a false bottom in it our youngest sister not yet anywhere near 40 has a fabulous toilet roll holder made out of a broken 19th century japanese walking stick he is always building things the box is near the head of lera voe in shetland the road goes to burrastow where there s a small hotel and a handful of houses around but not a lot of passing traffic it s a place you most likely have to go out of your way to get to which takes bookselling neighbourliness and friendship above and beyond posted by desperate reader at 5 12 pm 11 comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest thursday february 20 2020 hag s nook john dickson carr it s possible that hag s nook is my favourite john dickson carr so far i won t say of all time because there are going to be plenty more to read but there s something about this one that i particularly liked the elements are now quite familiar a murder with plenty of gothic embellishment a hint of the supernatural a locked room situation and a little bit of romance for good measure in business like hands it s an effective formula and john dickson carr s hands are very business like in this case a young american graduate is visiting dr gideon fell he meets a pretty girl at the station and is delighted to hear that they re heading to the same destination but she seems a bit troubled when young ted arrives in chatterham the village turns out to be dominated by the ruins of an eighteenth century jail with some nasty legends attached to it meanwhile the pretty girl s brother has to spend a night in the same jail to collect his inheritance but there s a legend that the men in the family die of broken necks and he s none to keen on having to keep vigil he turns up dead the next day so he was right to be nervous carr flirts with the possibility of this turning into a ghost story all the way to the end but it s never more than a flirtation there s to much humour for anybody to start seriously worrying about things that go bump in the night my favourite detail is ted s confusion about how english money works it s pre decimalisation so he pays for everything with notes to avoid having to count out the coins and is consequently weighed down with pockets full of change but just enough doubt to create a pleasing sense of melodrama i keep thinking about this book in relation to the recent bbc adaptation of the pale horse and wishing in more or less equal measures that sarah phelps would leave agatha christie alone and that she would tackle carr it seems to me that he s more or less writing what she s filming so perhaps she wouldn t need to change the plots so much and that carr would be wonderful on screen on the page he s reasonably cosy but there s plenty of room to pull out the darkness in his work and make all sorts of things out of it posted by desperate reader at 9 40 pm no comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest monday february 17 2020 skerries mitts the skerries mitts pattern comes from marie wallin s shetland book they looked like a useful and quick knit that wouldn t be complicated and i had most of the colours she used along with close enough substitutes for any i didn t they are quick they re not complicated they are useful and i m on my third pair now they seem to get promised away before i finish them the fourth set might stay with me the only bad thing i have to say about them is that they use hardly any yarn and i really need to clear out more of my stash i liked the first pair but they were a bit to long for me and although the colours looked good they weren t my colours for the second pair i took out a few lines of plain colour whilst keeping the patterns and moved the thumb opening up a bit whilst making it smaller for the third pair which i m currently working on i ve changed the motifs around for the next pair i m thinking ribbing instead of moss stitch possibly making them much shorter and so it goes on there s nothing especially clever about the pattern it s a tube with a thumb hole in it which is satisfyingly adaptable and good for keeping wrists warm what it s brilliant for is using as a kind of swatch i m lazy about swatching and getting colours to work in fair isle style knitting is an endless challenge each pair of these mitts i ve made has shown me things which would work better which is amazingly helpful in both finished pairs i made mistakes that i ve found quite interesting in the first pair i missed a single row colour change in the second pair i forgot i d changed colours round and used green when i had meant a purple pink colour the difference those few rows make to the overall look of the mitt really surprised me i m wondering how many pairs i ll need to make before i m totally satisfied with the results posted by desperate reader at 9 43 pm 6 comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest saturday february 15 2020 hazelnut meringue cake way back in my teens and early twenties i used to work for my stepmother over the summer she had what would now be called a boutique hotel we did dinner bed and breakfast dinner was the fun bit the menus changed daily and were based on what we could get or what turned up there was a shady character known as kevin the poacher who sometimes appeared of an evening with fish he was basically poaching from my father but we bought it anyway i started to learn about wine in those summers became committed to cooking seasonally and locally and discovered a lot of excellent desserts a hazelnut and raspberry meringue cake was a favourite something i always wanted for my birthday but never made because winter raspberries are not appealing i used to bake a lot more than i do now and kind of miss writing about cakes especially valentine s day seemed like a good excuse to make something and a packet of hazelnuts left over from christmas made some version of this cake seem like a good idea the recipe is in jane grigson s fruit book where she makes a few suggestions for alternatives to raspberries february is not the easiest month for soft fruit but i bought a bowl of rock hard plums from the market and slowly baked them with sugar vanilla and some madeira until they gave up and relaxed they turned out well the plums still sharp enough to balance the sweetness of the meringue and the texture of the cream the hazelnuts give the meringue both flavour and texture it would probably have looked a bit prettier if i hadn t poured the plum syrup over the cream it might have been good to have whipped it into the cream but it tasted great the meringue recipe asks for 125g of hazelnuts baked in a low oven gas 2 around 140 c in a fan oven for 10 minutes until they re brown all the way through let them cool and then grind to a coarse powder some lumpy bits are good whip 5 egg whites to stiff peaks slowly add 300g of caster sugar whilst still whipping and then whip in half a teaspoon of white wine or cider vinegar gently fold in the hazelnuts i made this as a 2 layer cake quite large because i wanted the meringue to be reasonably thin once it was in the oven it occurred to me that i could have made it into 3 layers it could just as easily have been a sort of pavlova tart affair we used to make this in cake tins which meant everything was the same size but i find it easier to use baking sheets and judge the size by eye the meringue used to be a devil for sticking to the side of the tins however it s done it wants to be sitting on some greaseproof paper and cooked for 35 40 minutes at gas 4 160 180 c depending on your oven let the meringues cool and then fill or top with fruit and whipped cream just before dinner posted by desperate reader at 1 53 pm 6 comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest thursday february 13 2020 the whip by juliet gilkes romero at the rsc we went to see the whip on monday and it was brilliant which does not make it the easiest play to write about my theatre companion and i have been discussing it ever since with undiminished enthusiasm we re not generally very excited about contemporary plays and even less keen when they deal with big issues our experience with these has not been particularly encouraging there s often a depressing tendency to over explain and emphasise in a way that can feel patronising and clumsy the whip doesn t do that partly because it s not a single issue play it hinges around the attempts to get the bill through parliament in 1833 that abolishes slavery we know it gets through but the history that we ve chosen to remember sort of stops there it was a tweet from the treasury in 2018 that highlighted the fact that as a country we only finished paying off the debt for reparation to slave owners in 2015 and an iniquitous apprenticeship scheme there are also reform bills in the offing to regulate the conditions in factories and to change the poor laws and a growing interest in women s suffrage and indeed full suffrage for men all of these things are woven together along with a gripping political drama about the process of getting an act through men who appear to be idealistic reformers turn out to have equally reactionary ideas on other subjects and feet of clay in general we all know what s right and wrong but the question is how you put right something that s wrong without making things worse the very idea of reparation to slave owners is disgusting but without it there s no chance of the legislation being voted through and every chance of serious civil unrest there is question after question about morality along with gentle reminders of how desperate things were for the poor in britain terrible working conditions coupled with poor laws that severely restricted mobility which raises more questions for me perhaps the biggest being why wasn t the cost of reparation a scandal that lasted how did that get brushed under the historical carpet it s not a short play and it s emotional watching but we spent most of it on the edge of our seats the impression was that the test of the audience was the same in a twitter world identity politics are so polarised that it becomes intimidating to try and engage questions rarely seem welcome spending a few hours watching something that both encourages questions and embraces the moral shades of grey and complexities of a situation felt liberating it s a clever interesting thoughtful powerful play with an amazing cast quite a lot of them are also on king john that work beautifully together there are excellent performances from corey montague sholey katherine pearce who is amazing in king john too debbie korley and richard clothier in the big parts and they feel like generous performances as well ones that give everybody involved the chance to shine it s absolutely worth trying to catch this whilst it s on for another 5 weeks or so i m also really keen now to read everything i can by juliet gilkes romero and would go w...