Nicky's journal

Rowan volunteered to cook this feast so I got to be in the hall this time.
We've got quite a few new people, several of whom were persuaded to read poems or dress as hens for the play 'Chauntecleer and the Fox' from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.





It seemed to go really well overall. Lots of smiling faces at the end, and plenty of people stayed to help tidy up.

We had a few panics - arriving to find the power off in the building being the first issue. There were workmen in the church who had turned it off, but it didn't take long to get that fixed once I'd found them and explained that we needed the kitchen to work.
One course got burned, but a quick run to Scotmid to get replacement ingredients solved that. I got a few funny looks as I was wearing 16th Century clothes for the shopping trip. :-)

... and heading home (also in 16th C kit) after the event I got asked what was going on by some people outside the Golf Tavern, so I chatted to them for a bit, and told them where to look for notifications of the next one.

Making marzipan for younger grandchild's 1st birthday cake.
Insofaras her preferences can be established, she likes noisy musical instruments and Mummy best.
I went with making models of xylophone, drum and maracas rather than attempting portraiture.

In a couple of weeks it'll be the older grandchild's 4th birthday.

Then Xmas, Hogmanay, Twelfth Night, Son's birthday and co-Mother-In-Law's birthday.

I am stockpiling wrapping paper...

Working in tourism in Edinburgh means facing The Fringe (and the other festivals) in August.
... yes for some reason we have The International Festival (classical music... and to be fair they started it all), The Festival Fringe (comedy and variety and loads of street performers), the Edinburgh Military Tattoo, the Book Festival, the Science Festival and the Jazz Festival all between the end of July and the start of September.
This year we look like being back to full pre-pandemic levels of busyness.

... which means for Job One the walking tours along the Royal Mile miss out a section of the Royal Mile. Slight complication in that the sides of The Mile are steep so getting anybody who is mobility impaired up and down the alternative route is a bit of a challenge.
... and for Job Two (whisky and beer tastings) we'll be getting lots of frantic messages about travel delays and inability to find the venue due to stages blocking the view of the area...

Overall it'll be fun, but it is going to be a challenge.

My second job is doing beer and whisky tastings. Currently only on a Monday evening.
I'm enjoying it but it's a big challenge getting to know the wide variety of whiskys on the High End option.
Basic and Intermediate have a standard set, but the High End has loads, including stuff from silent distilleries, and it changes all the time.
... well, I said I wanted a job that stretched my brain... and I've definitely got one here. :-)

One of my projects is a piece for Beltane about the changing seasons associated with the idea of Maiden, Mother and Crone (which is pagan revival, not incredibly ancient, but still interesting).

I'm playing the Crone, which involves a lot of getting up at 6am on Winter mornings to film stuff before places get busy with people.
Not enjoying how cold it is, but I'm pleased with how it's all working out.

I am making masks between other projects.
Don't have either the spoons or the overlocker to contemplate gowns or scrubs, but bravo to those who do.
It's a shame and disgrace on the Westminster government that our NHS was so poorly prepared. The NHS tested it's readiness for pandemic (and after SARS, Bird Flu, etc, we all knew it was a matter of when, not if...), and they had four years to sort out the many gaps in the system. But they chose not to.

I am catching up on various other projects that were waiting for me to get around to it:

- a batch of Tudor hats. I had cut out the fabric from old wool jackets before chucking them out. The characters we play are middle class but financially challenged, so shabby chic is the way to go, and recycling old fabrics both works well and saves the environment.

- Exchequer Boards - basically grids on which to do sums in Roman numerals. You can do long division with them, given a sufficient run up. Or should I say, my daughter can do long division with Roman numerals, thereby proving that she's much more of a geek than me. I can do addtion, subtraction (and multiplication if given a sufficient run up to it). Again, I'd had the fabric for ages.

- silk pennants - triangular flags for the top of tents. Slightly held up by my silk paints having gone into hiding, but Ebay provided a new supply.

- fake panelling banners for the feast hall. We hold two medieval feasts a year as a rule, and generally get between 25 and 45 people at each one, so the hall is quite big. We have quite a lot of decorative banners already, but they end up a bit random and they cover the various modern notice boards in the hall we use. For my daughter's wedding the plan was to completely cover the modern notice boards with hangings and then put banners over them.
Since her wedding was March 21st it ended up as a lovely, tiny intimate affair with only close family attending. We went ahead with the lunch after the ceremony on the basis that the local attendees had basically constantly been in each other's company for the preceeding month as arrangements were sorted. But the big wedding receiption in the evening has been put off until after lockdown.
So anyway, I thought, since I have time, why not paint panelling on the hangings...?
So 25 banners, 8'x5', each with nine panels painted on them... to be dyed, hemmed, marked out and painted in two colours. I am on Day Thirteen of that project and probably have another two or three days to go. It's entirely my own fault really. And it will hopefully look good when it's done.

- a new outfit for me for the wedding feast.
That was definitely not even slightly feasible in the run up to the wedding.
There were six months to do the bride's daytime dress (my co-mother-in-law is doing her evening one), my son's new jerkin, various matching accessories in bridal fabric (shrugs and sashes for the bridesmaids, ruche ties for the men of the wedding party), make wedding buttonholes for 40... (down to 15 on the day, but I'd made them by then...) and hemming the hangings (see above), make sweetmeats, etc, etc, etc.
But now there is time, so yay, new dress.



Tudor hats


Painted silk pennants


Kirtle lining (and masks)


Exchequer Board


Fake panelling for the hall. Repeat x25


The wedding party.
I made all the bright green items, and the red rose buttonholes. And my hat. Because the Mother Of The Bride Hat is definitely a thing.


Some of the sweetmeats for the wedding cake.


Rainbow masks


More Masks


More masks. I have friends who don't believe that black goes with everything, so I keep coloured fabrics for making stuff for them...

Have now passed the 14 days since interacting closely with friends and family, and three weeks since I was last physically present at work, and I don't think I've had Covid-19.
I've had ear ache, a sore throat and a chest full of gunk, but that's probably not it, most likely just my usual chest infections.

Am trying to exercise, practice music and practice Gaelic a bit each day, although on the days when I felt unwell I skipped the exercise because post-viral fatigue is not a fun thing.

I have a large backlog of craft projects, so I'm not short of general stuff to do. And have been being extra vigilant on the cleaning because while there's nothing to be done about CV-19 except hope I end up with the mild version, I don't want to add in the possibility of secondary infections.

Virtual choir, virtual gaming and virtual pub nights are also a good thing. And Skyping with the kids and with friends is also helping with the sanity.

It's kind of unreal. There's a world altering crisis out there and people on the front line are working stupidly long hours with stupidly little proper protective equipment and there's relatively little I can do to help. Sitting in a bubble, waiting for the storm to pass.

Tried out a Tudor recipe for candied whole oranges.
This required getting marmalade oranges which are only available at certain times of the year.
They worked reasonably well and were certainly tasty, bit like solid marmalade (obviously) so fairly intense.

Only three weeks to the next feast, so lots of organisation to do...
I really should know better than to volunteer for these things. This time I'm cooking it.

This year at Beltane I was the left wing of a giant albatross puppet (her name is Coleridge, obviously).

Rehearsals involved the usual frustrations of playing games instead of getting on with stuff, resulting in a huge amount of stuff needing done outside of main sessions, and no fewer than two extra three hour sessions each week for the last fortnight.
The choreography could also have been sharper if we'd rehearsed more.

However, all that is just normal for Beltane. It frustrates me every year, but I know it will happen every year.

On the night things went well. It was pretty intense as the chap on the other wing was leading the movement so I had to watch him constantly and be ready to copy whatever he did. At the start he seemed a bit nervous and kept making fast movements, which are hard to follow (and we'd discussed as an issue previously) but once we started moving around it worked pretty well.
I'm hopeful that Coleridge looked like a bird moving, not like four different components in a loose association.
The other problem is that when watching and flocking to the other wing I couldn't also watch my own wing tip, and the crowd were pretty close, but I managed not to hit anyone. I put this down to luck and a bit of my steering.

I'm fairly used to being mistaken for Ed's social worker when we're out and about, but today was a new one :
Picture me in jeans, DMs with rainbow laces, black t-shirt and long black coat, probably hair all windswept too...
"Ed! Your lawyer has arrived!"
Seriously. :-)