Hestia at 61 - warning: contains Gaelic

Back in 2012 - those halcyon days where nobody dreamed that a cough in the supermarket could shut down your internal organs and have you hospitalised - I decided to challenge my dislike of Scotland's native Gaelic language and try learning it via resources in my local library.

As with most things I start, it fell by the wayside almost straight away because I wasn't immediately brilliant at it. TBF it didn't get off the starting blocks because Gaelic is a very difficult language to master from books - sounds and letters don't correspond the way they do in other languages.

Fast forward to 2019 and the year when a cough COULD shut down your internal organs and have you hospitalised and I took up Gaelic on the Duolingo app.

Reader, I stuck with it for over 1,000 days - did the introductory course twice and completely fell in love with the weird little fucker. One thousand days - that Duo streak lasted longer than my marriage. 

I have since had a 15 week zoom class with other furrow-browed natives as we plough through the slenderising, the lenition, the irregular verbs and downright contrariness of Scottish Gaelic - and made new friends into the bargain.

From there we undertook a mammoth 30 week session with our indefatigable tutor Pàdruig Moireach. I loved it, but, by Jimminy - it's a hard language.

Even when that set of lessons rolled to a close, a little bunch of us decided to soldier on and we bought a few more lessons from Pàdruig. But what were we aiming at? Why were we putting ourselves through the hell on earth that is the Genitive case, the 16 words for 'the' and coping with no words for yes/no?

Reader, we decided to sign up for our Nat 5 in Scottish Gaelic via E-sgoil (online tutoring). Last year it was about £70 to take your Nat 5, this year? Nearly £400.  The £70 figure was, of course, subsidised and the £400 is what it costs to sit a Nat 5 (a Nat 5 is what we in Scotland used to call an O-grade). Just think of all the O-grades we sat back in the mists of time, with no thought that they had to be paid for, somewhere.

We started last week - just a getting to know you session really - because the onboarding process was not without incident, but we all seem to be online now. There are over 30 of us taking our Nat 5, which can only be good for the future of the language.

Why am I putting myself through the hell of another exam? 

It's something to aim at. Look at me, fearlessly ending a sentence with a preposition at my age! Gaining (one hopes!) a Nat 5 will show a standard achieved. Another tick on the sheet of life achievements.

I turned 61 last month and it was a lot harder to bear than turning 60. When you turn 60 your life is full of glittery cards and balloons and lunches out and people congratulating you and promising that life really can get going now.

At 61 there is a lot less of that. The caravan has moved on and there is no denying that we are over the crest of the hill now. Hell, there was even a report last week saying that there is a huge jump in the aging process at 60 (that's bollocks btw, I've watched videos that better interpret the statistics!). It would be SO EASY to take my foot off the gas pedal and just potter into my dotage - a little bit of gardening here, a little bit of watercolour there.

But I don't want that. I want to keep my brain active and my body moving. So what if I've become utterly invisible? I'm going to find a way to play that to my advantage.

I bought myself a new pair of running shoes for my joggy walking.
I got most of my hair cut off.
I am studying for a Nat 5.
I am looking after my physical and mental health much better these days.

Re-invention isn't the preserve of the young. And you don't need to wait until Hogmanay to make changes in your life. A Sunday night is as good a time as any.

If you want to change, you just start from where you are. I am minded of a quote from Twyla Tharp, the genius choreographer who writes so brilliantly about creativity:

If you are at a dead end, take a deep breath, stamp your foot, and shout 'Begin!' You never know where it will take you."

What are YOU going to do to get out of your dead end?! 

Hestia is baking scones. And binning them.

I am very partial to a fruit scone, with clotted cream and strawberry jam. Very partial indeed *pats tummy* but also rather keen to cut down on processed foods. I would, I decided in a fit of culinary madness, bake my own scones.

How hard could it be? 

Reader, the first couple of times they were gorgeous! Light as a feather and I felt my full Hestia-potentiality might AT LAST be realised. If this is what I could do with plain flour with added baking powder, how marvellous might my scones be if I actually used SELF-RAISING FLOUR?! At this point you may laugh hollowly at my naive, beginner's optimism.

Thus I purchased a small bag of self-raising flour and set to work. 

I baked a batch on Friday (Tartarus was away for the weekend with his boyfriend) and I thought I'd have a little bout of domestic goddessness.  Not only did they refuse to rise, they remained resolutely doughy inside.

I would also like to tell you that I put the failed scones straight in the bin, but they actually went straight into my tummy. Cue stomach-ache, but not enough to make me put the rest of the scones into the bin. I am a waste-not-want-not kind of a gal.

Anyhoo, yesterday (Sunday) I finally gave up and put the final scones into the bin.

Today, Tartarus is BACK (from the NI road racing) with a vengeance and doing all the housework that his slut of a partner failed to do (correctly. Or just failed to do. Which is more likely). I would, I thought again, make him happy with me by making scones. This would prove that I was good for something.

Wrong.

The scones again failed to rise and I just took their pale, flat, flabby bodies from the oven, let them cool down and tipped them straight into the swing bin. He said nothing, but I felt as if my failure with the scones was just confirming to him that I was indeed generally fucking useless.

Actually, I'm being pretty unfair on him. He DOESN'T think I'm useless. I can practically promise you that as soon as I am out of his eyeline he doesn't have a single thought about me at all.

Which I hope one day to play to my advantage in some as-yet-unforseen way.

I digress! Back to the scones. I don't know what I did wrong. My hands are cold. I barely touched the mix to draw it all together. I remembered all the ingredients .... I wonder ..... My wondering took me back to the kitchen (now cleaned up by the Mrs Mop that is Tartarus after any kind of break: see any kind of post that I made after any of his trips abroad for work) and lo! I hauled out the flour. And. Yes. You guessed it. I have been using the PLAIN flour and not the self-raising flour.

I'll have another go this afternoon with the right flour, but am not looking forward to telling Tartarus that I know where my mistake was made. If anything will underscore what a useless bit of humanity I am, it is admitting that I have used the wrong flour - not once, but twice.

Promise to post pix of some DECENT scones. Assuming that I make some!

Hestia and Spring

I am hesitant to say this, just in case Mama Nature decides to throw storms or snow all over the west coast in a fit of pique, but today feels a bit like Spring.

It's just coming up to the Easter weekend and yeah, it feels quite nice outside really.

Feeling Nice Outside means that I have to don my gardening jacket and get out there and do something in the garden. Which isn't really fun because the soil is still bloody cold to work with.

Anyhoo - I had to get four plants into the front garden before they reported me to Monty Don for cruelty (been waiting - in the kitchen - to be planted for a fortnight) and so today was the day for getting them in.

In other news, here are some photos of a lovely pot that I have at the front door.

Crammed with goodies from Farmer Gracy (can recommend - quality bulbs for sure!) We have Blue Eyes hyacinths, tiny turkestanica tulips and the foliage for the Rasta Parrot tulips and the Pheasant Eye narcissus are all up and looking lovely.

Almost feeling like the garden could look nice this year.

Almost. 

Knitting Effin' Socks

Many, MANY years ago, my late auntie Chrissie taught me to knit. It was quite an ordeal for her because as a left-handed knitter, I SEEMED to do the right things, but my stitches were not quite kosher. She also ended up smoking about 60 cigarettes a day. But I don't think that teaching me to knit was the reason. Not the whole reason at any rate.

My late auntie Betty taught me to crochet and we used to sit up until late on a Friday night, our hooks flashing as we watched Don't Watch Alone. Which should really have been renamed Don't Watch With Your 12 Year Old Niece. It was me that ended up with the twitch after that.

Fast forward many decades are another dear now-departed friend, Fifi, decided to teach me how to knit socks. Reader, after she died, I had that half sock on my needles for over TEN years. I couldn't bring myself to go on. I couldn't bring myself to rip it out.

During lockdown I forced myself to get the sock back out and back knitting it. I had already done the tricky bit - the turning of the heel. I ploughed on for a few more rows before Nero decided that he loved the feel of real wool in his mouth and half my sock became an unravelled ball, the other half became salivary felt.

More recently, I became determined ONCE AGAIN to actually complete one or two of my craft projects and the sock needles glinted at me accusingly.

'I can't knit socks,' I moaned to the lovely Karen Wiederhold. Karen took up knitting socks during lockdown. She can churn out a pair of hand-knitted merino gents socks quicker than I can cast on 68 stitches. She has also designed patterns for all sorts of things for magazines.

'Try again,' she urged.

'I can't. I knit left-handed and it always ends up a dog's breakfast.'

Then, in a moment of supreme self-sacrifice she uttered the words that she has probably regretted most days subsequently 'I'll help you. There aren't many things that I haven't had to deal with when I was setting patterns.'

Now, reader, at this point you probably think that I got the (now ancient) denim blue sock yarn out and got started. Not a bit of it. Neither did I use any of the mysterious yarn stash that I have accumulated in a box beneath the spare room's bed. No. I did, of course buy NEW YARN.

It was lovely yarn in from one of the OPAL 4-ply ranges at the Wool Warehouse, but sadly, I don't seem to have kept the yarn band and nor can I find the receipt.

Anyway, we began. Oh reader, I wish I could tell you that it was all plain sailing this time around. Karen pulled on her Big Girl pants and led me through the long-tail cast on. Tick. No problems. Then 20 rows of ribbing (2 plain, two purl) Tick. No problem.  It was around this point that I realised that something funky was happening: I was knitting my sock from the inside out. 

There then followed several frantic and increasingly abstract concept video calls with Karen who was pretty baffled.  But she kept on gently explaining to me where I was going wrong. But it was like trying to explain Quantum Physics to a budgie. 

Several decades ago, I once pulled into a garage forecourt to fill my wee mini up with fuel. But then I realised that my fuel cap was on the other side to the pump, so I drove round the fuel pump and could NOT understand why my fuel pump was STILL on the wrong side. After a few minutes of sitting feeling baffled, the penny dropped and I tried reversing back into the pump. I was so spectacularly bad that I ended up just driving away in SHAME.

This was exactly where I was with my knitting.

No matter how many videos I watched and how many times I turned it all upside down or knitted back across a row, the bit of sock that I knitted was standing UP like a chimney, not hanging down like a ... sock.

There were tears. But I would NOT be beaten by a SOCK.  Karen persisted. She may have developed an alcohol dependency, IDK. I wouldn't be surprised ... it took a long while to sink in.

And so the months dragged on - Prime Ministers came and went, the economy plunged deeper than a Victoria's Secret bra ... but I made progress.  Sure, there were so many errors in Sock 1 that I thought I would never wear them, but, dear reader, I did get them finished!

TADAAAAH!!!!! My first ever pair of socks!

Kitchener toe! Woah - what has happened to my font?!

TADAAAAH - second pair of socks (with the original ancient wool!)

TADAAAAAAH - current pair of socks with yarn gifted to me by the patient and lovely Karen. You should check out her stuff! Pardon the pun, but I'm HOOKED!

THANK YOU KAREN!!!!

Possibly the worst tabloid in the world

This post started out as a different animal altogether, but between typing the title (originally - my midlife crisis is here!) and getting to the end of the first paragraph, Huw Edwards was revealed (on his behalf, by his wife) to be The BBC Presenter at the centre of The S*n's story about photographs of a sexual nature being paid for.

And I just felt so sad.

Edwards is in hospital where his mental health is buckling - as you might expect after being outed by The S*n. The statement confirming that he is the much-speculated presenter was made by his wife.

I am glad that his wife was the one to make the statement (he clearly isn't in a position to do so) and it gives his family some element of control over the narrative - his wife isn't sitting at home keeping dutifully silent and one would hope that after nearly a week his five children have now got their heads wrapped around what is going down.

I am not here to troll or gloat over what has happened. There but for the grace of god go I. We are all entitled to a private life - so long as we don't break the law while we're living it.  At the moment it seems that he hasn't broken the law (maybe breaching covid lockdown rules). We don't know everything and I hope people won't be too quick to judge anybody in this scenario other than the ghastly S*n newspaper.

Remember - those paragons of virtue at The S*n used to count down the days until their favourite boobilicious page 3 girls hit 16 years of age.

My reaction also depends what kind of creature we've got here: It wasn't too long ago that we had Philip Schofield coming out as gay to nationwide sympathy and then a few breaths later, looking for all the world like a child-abuser at worst or someone who was prepared to collude with a child-abuser at best.

But if what we've got is simply a closeted gay man who likes younger guys? That's not exactly news, is it? The world is full of older people who prefer younger people's bodies - it's not the end of the world. It's horrendous for his wife and children - but should be PRIVATE to them.

And it would seem that the first young man was not responsible for outing Huw, but his mother. And for a mother to take her story to the press instead of the police, well, I have my doubts about the intentions behind that - but maybe I'm being too unkind.

Another young man has come forward and produced emails where Edwards is splenetic at the thought of this young man outing him on Twitter. To be honest, I'd be fucking livid as well.

But what possesses a man who is in the public eye to take such risks?  You cannot be telly-famous in the UK and put yourself onto 'dating' sites (I don't know whether they all met on a dating site, a paid content site or on a gay forum etc) and not expect there to be a high risk of something going catastrophically wrong.

Perhaps we can assume that he was listed there under a username or handle that was not his real name and did not load up photos that would identify him to casual viewers. Perhaps he only revealed who he was to those he had struck up private correspondence with and grew to trust ... slipping into the DMs as they say. Oh Huw - it seems that you misjudged your security with at least one of them.

I feel so sorry for his wife and family in all this, blind-sided by their loved one having (we assume) a completely closeted Other Life. The shock, the betrayal, it will pile in on them for months as each of them replays a million different events and conversations as they look for signs and the realisation that when dad said/did this, it was really THAT.  None of that is anybody's business but theirs.

Huw Edwards is not squeaky clean. Truth is, nobody is.We all have our private worlds and foibles and mostly they harm nobody. More stuff might come out and I might change my mind - but as it stands today - consenting adults did something sexual. The world is FULL of that. Meanwhile, our former PM can't share his Whatsapp messages because he's 'forgotten' the log-in details. HE'S a criminal. But hey ho, let's fire up the torches and grab the pitch forks and go for somebody different instead. It's a mess. 

I just hope Edwards and his family get the help and support they need. 

And I hope The S*n finally sets in the west and Liverpool gets the last long and hollow laugh.