Hogmanay

or New Year’s Eve to the Sassenachs

Hogmanay started on Sunday in Edinburgh

 

You know you’re getting old when you go to bed early on 31st December.  2013 will be there when we wake up tomorrow.

I can remember some memorable celebrations in the distant past, like the time I cooked dinner for 20, with a whole sirloin of beef on the bone.  The starter went wrong and I kept asking my then husband to serve yet more champagne cocktails while I invented something else.  He included me in that, so that I forgot to make the gravy  Needless to say, no-one noticed as everyone was as mellow as I was!

Or Hogmanay 1999, just a  few days after a devastating hurricane. No-one had any power and the hosts of the party had no imagination so we passed a very dreary evening with a load of silent people we didn’t know and nothing but crisps to eat.  At midnight (French time) we toasted the millennium and inwardly sighed with relief that we could go home now.  Not a bit of it.  Our host insisted that we wait until midnight UST and go through the rigmarole with Auld Lang Syne again, and watch a few damp fireworks outside in the rain.  Their 2 undisciplined Springer spaniels barked and clambered on us for the entire evening. 

The next day we found that most of the tin roof on the barn Jock was converting to a house had blown away and what was left was hanging precariously inwards.  We found some of the sheets several fields away. Work on the inside was impossible until we’d persuaded the roofers to come.  As 90% of the buildings in the area had suffered minor or catastrophic roof damage, you can imagine the wait – until the following May.

Tonight, dreaming in the land of Nod, we shall thank our lucky stars for home and warmth, while outside the weather does its worst.

Tomorrow is a different kettle of fish:  we are to spend the day with a lovely French couple (whom I had taught English), their delightful 4-year-old daughter and equally sympa parents.  I’m drooling already at the thought of Agnes’s cooking.

Have a very happy New Year, everyone, with no sore heads.  May all your resolutions be achievable.

ps NOW MY COMPUTER IS PLAYING SILLY SO AND SOS AND I CAN’T PUT IN THE SCANNED PHOTOS I SPENT HOURS FINDING IN THE LOFT.