Begins

I woke very early and decided to just get up and finish clearing my bedroom and making the bed for H&P coming on Friday to join C&T who arrive today. I was sorted early enough to nip to the shop for the ingredients to redo the icing for the birthday cake, then had some toast before setting off to Marchmont. It took a while to defrost the car but the drive was beautiful with lots of sunshine and frost on the ground across the hills.
I arrived at the common room for the craft workshops and it was all cosy, with the fire lit and the coffee on. There were only three of us at this first Reading Group as the other four or five who’ve signed up couldn’t make it today. Never mind, we had a lovely chat and W and I learned a lot from E’s commentary on the short story she’d chosen to kick us off. It was Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Mosses from the Old Manse https://www.gutenberg.org/files/512/512-h/512-h.htm#chap25 which W and I both found very hard going….mainly the writing style and the lack of characterisation. The points he was making though, about the value of art for art’s sake as opposed to taking a utilitarian view of its value, were interesting and led to lots of discussion. We also chatted more generally about what and how we like to read, the history of the workshops here and the plans they have for future developments, artist residencies and grants programme. This is where N works, and he slipped in every now and again to rebuild the fire and check we were ok. We agreed to skip December for a meeting and instead meet again towards the end of January.
Chatted to N a bit and gave him the advent calendar and some other bits and pieces, then drove home to ice the cake and have a sandwich before collecting C&T from the station.
We came home for tea and flapjacks before going out for a wander round town. We walked through Princes St gardens (extras) and nipped into the galleries to see the Scottish collection and of course my favourite Velasquez and Leonardo paintings, then wandered home via the Mound (trying unsuccessfully to work out what the projections on Castle Rock and New College were meant to represent) and a quick tour of EFI.
We settled into the evening with drinks, nibbles, then haggis, neeps and tatties, chatting non stop about family, Borneo, mutual friends, house restorations, walking tours, tech issues and gym membership amongst other things.
We took some tea through to settle on the sofas for a while but then had a fairly early night.