Fairy Tales in Scottish Meanderings

Lily was 6 on Thursday. I asked her what she wanted for her birthday and it was a good job I did because the child who was totally into all the Marvel comic superheroes, Spider-Man in particular, Despicable Me, Minions, Trolls and the like has done an about turn and become enchanted with fairies all of a sudden! So the answer was a fairy house or fairy Lego.

We still don’t know where the fairy Lego came from but the house turned out to be a fairy garden which she’d seen on the telly, presumably for the onslaught of Christmas, and which looks a bit fragile and plasticky to me. It comes in a kit which you need to make up and there are grass seeds with it which you have to plant hence the ‘garden’ - but that means dirt or compost until the grass emerges so Nikki said it’s staying at my house!


It was a bit cheaper on Amazon and I had a gift card to use up so when I saw 3 fairies from the same company, one of whom was called Lily (great excitement when she saw that), I couldn’t resist and a fairy watering can also got added to the mix - it’s got a fairy on a swing and a wee door which you can open with a bench for the fairy to sit on so that provided some extra fun.



And bless her - Nikki brought through a large cupcake with a candle in it on her actual birthday because she was getting her 'proper' cake next day at her party. First thing she said was "can we cut it in half for Lilah?", not realising there was another one in the kitchen!

She's a good big sister.

She kind of reminds me of a little girl of the 1950s here with the rosy cheeks, pigtails and puffed sleeves :)


And they're both chuffed so that our numbers are all in sync at the moment because currently Lilah's 3, Nikki's 30, Lily's 6 and I'm 60 :)

Nikki's been on the hunt for a Castle she went to with her fourth year class at school, wanting to see it again. We’re not short of castles in this area - there are at least half a dozen dotted about - however she couldn’t remember which one it was but thought it was pink. Not as far-fetched as it sounds but it did narrow the choice down a bit! We decided it might be Craigievar Castle so popped out there last Saturday, just making the end of the season by the skin of our teeth.

Lily was enchanted.

Apparently it’s the one Walt Disney based the castle in Cinderella on and when you see it you can see why. This is what you see on approach.



And then round the front.


It was especially pretty in the autumn sunshine and the second she spied it, she was asking “Is this where the fairies live?” Of course there was plenty of evidence to corroborate that with tiny little nooks and crannies everywhere so we didn’t tell her otherwise!

Unfortunately you couldn't wander round on your own - you had to take the guided tours and we were worried the girls might get bored or restless. However the very nice tour guide arranged for us to have another guide take just the 4 of us round which meant she could go slightly faster and leave out the more boring bits! And when Lily decided a little hidey-hole in the wall at the side of the huge fireplace in the dining room was a fairy bedroom, the guide very kindly waited until she was out of earshot before telling us it was actually used to store salt, being nice and dry beside the fire.

She was just fascinated with the whole place - the box beds, a hidden bath behind a curtain, the displayed medals, the photos, the silverware, the armour, the statue of the bagpiper which had fallen off the castle above the entrance door and lost its face, the special rooms for dressing in, the toys the little girls who lived there played with, the rocking cradle for the baby and of course all the tiny little offshoots of rooms in the turrets of the Castle. They had small holes in the lower part of the walls which apparently were holes for guns in case you found yourself under attack at any point - one of the downsides of living in a castle! Lily was having none of that though - according to her those were fairy windows and doors ........

But oh my - those stairs! We couldn’t for the life of us imagine how on earth old people, toddlers, pregnant women or sick invalids managed to negotiate the steep, steep, spiral stone staircase - I mean we literally had to go singly and slowly, hanging on to outstretched hands and arms, hearts in our mouths. Coming down was worse - I can only imagine if you took to your bed because you were sick at any point, you probably had to stay there until you were well again - or snuffed it! Although how the hell they would get a body down those steps goodness only knows. And little ones very likely just lived in the nursery where some poor nanny had to traipse up and down the stairs with food at mealtimes until they were old enough to negotiate them on their own.

I wish it wasn’t so expensive to get into these places though. If you get a National Trust card, entry is free but the card costs around £50 a year. The staff at Craigievar took pity on us and didn’t charge for Lily but if they had, we would have been £30 for a family ticket so the card is worth getting if you think you’ll visit a few properties. There are 9 in this area alone and another 5 if you go about an hour away so it's worth it if you're organised otherwise the summer tends to disappear and before you know it, you realise the season’s come to an end.

I bought a card a couple of years ago and managed to visit about 3 places so got my money’s worth but then bought one last year just as I was starting to become ill which eventually resulted in being bedbound and housebound for months so that was a total waste of money.

And Nikki decided it wasn't the right castle after all that so the search continues. Infuriatingly, the answer is on the back of some photos which one of the helper mums took on the school trip back in 1998 but we have no idea where they are! They could be in one of the photo albums which means I’d have to haul out half of this cupboard to get to them.


It may look semi-organised with the files and folders but unfortunately the photo albums are on the very bottom underneath the shelves hidden at the back so I know fine that the mess will just irritate me if I start hauling everything out so I need to wait to do it on an afternoon when I’ve got a couple of hours free and can just have a mass reorganisation. And if they're not in the albums they'll be in the photo drawer in my desk which is choc full of those envelopes you used to get when you got your photos developed. I have labelled most of them by year which should make the task a little easier but there are a few which aren’t and are just a mish-mash of pictures which have been stuffed in there willy-nilly to get them out of the way!

I had planned to do all that this weekend but that's been scuppered by only getting 45 minutes sleep last night :( My neighbour, Mhairi, is a young girl who lives on her own and is usually very quiet. She has this friend in Wales though who comes up every now and then and stays for the weekend and every time she does, Mhairi invites a couple of other friends round who all seem to smoke (Mhairi herself doesn't) so they stand outside her back door when they want to light up. My bedroom is also at the back so I hear the voices/laughter clearly - clearly enough to wake me up if I'm sleeping.

This would be fine if they just stayed up late but they don't - they stay up THE WHOLE BLOODY NIGHT and come out EVERY HALF HOUR. I've tried everything - going through to the spare bedroom, reading, going on my phone - nothing works - I just lie there sleepless with murderous thoughts. It was a record this time though - 7.15 a.m. was the last time they were out - I went downstairs for my breakfast hoping they would feel guilty if they saw me pottering about the kitchen but I highly doubt it made any difference.

I spoke to Mhairi about it the first time it happened (5 years ago!!) because I was still working then and had to go into work the next day on no sleep whatsoever so was not amused but she did nothing about it and I don't want to fall out with her because she's so quiet the rest of the time. Thankfully the friend doesn't come up too often so I guess I'll just put up with it. I know some of you on here deal with noisy neighbours on a regular basis so I should be grateful it's only every now & then.

And at least I was able to solve a problem I had with my photos not updating on iCloud - they came to a halt on the 27th September and I couldn't figure out why. Normally I just e-mail photos to myself when that happens but the Yahoo webmail has been out of action for weeks now as well - no idea what's going on there - so I couldn't get them to show up anywhere on my Mac. Finally discovered (after 3 hours of research!) it was because there wasn't enough space on my phone - apparently Apple don't upload anything unless there's more than 300MB of space on your device and mine was chokka. I've now deleted some stuff to make more space and bingo - the upload has merrily got underway at last. So the night wasn't totally wasted!


Well the weather’s certainly changed. When I was typing this initially, I was in the car down at the beach - it was pouring with rain and there were regular ominous rumbles of what sounded like thunder although I never saw any lightening. I'd decided I needed a weekly 'dedicated writing slot' so had got into the habit of writing for a couple of hours after table tennis on a Monday afternoon but the weather was usually so nice, I would end up parking the car in some pretty spot and then go for a walk once I was finished.

This place was a firm favourite.


It’s also where the dolphins frolic around in the North Sea and the car park I was in when I took that photo is where the dolphin spotters sit so it can get a bit busy in the summer. But it’s actually too chilly now to sit in the car any more - I’ve had to switch the engine on a few times to get the heating which isn’t too economical so will have to find somewhere to retreat inside from now on. I find if I go home I can't settle to write because I can see too many things which need done all around me!


Back in May I decided to try to do something about the extra weight I’d put on while I'd been ill - I’d soared to almost eleven and a half stone and on a 5ft 3” frame that’s not good. Inputting my details into My Fitness Pal, it depressingly told me that I could only eat 1200 calories a day to lose a pound A MONTH!! I knew from experience that wasn’t enough and would probably end up in me bingeing so decided I would try and see what I could comfortably take in without being too hungry, even if it meant I had an extremely slow weight loss.

I started it in earnest when I was down to eleven stone and a half pound, and after some trial and error, discovered if I stuck to an average of 1400/1500 calories a day, with some moderate exercise during the week, I would lose a pound every 3 weeks. You can’t exactly ‘live it up’ on 1500 calories though so going out for tea, my birthday, the reunion, etc, all interrupted progress but I’ve managed (with a lot of patience!!) to lose 6lbs so far.

Clothes are starting to fit better - I don’t feel so uncomfortable - and I make sure I give myself a treat so that I don’t feel deprived because that way bingeing lies. I’ve discovered I really like dried papaya and pineapple so I have a small bag of that in the evening as my ‘sweet treat’ and always have sugar in my cup of tea with my evening meal and that seems to do the trick. Overall it's working.

I was horrified at the sneakiness of TESCO recently though.

As I’ve mentioned before, when I was ill I had no appetite and found that a Tesco filled sub roll would suffice for both lunch and tea, having half at lunchtime and half at teatime. That also meant I could keep the second half in a Tupperware box by the bed and didn’t have to go back downstairs to the kitchen because even that had become problematic at that point. As I got better, I gradually managed to have the WHOLE roll for a meal - a red letter day when that first happened!

It made sense to have my main meal at lunchtime as I had the most energy then and was pretty much spent by teatime so I would grab one of the sub rolls for tea. That hasn't changed in months so every few days, I buy another lot plus a prawn and pasta salad to keep me going and then try to vary lunches as much as I can to compensate. A few weeks ago, I realised they had totally changed ALL the sub rolls in size and quantity and even the prawn salad had been reduced with a subtle change to the carrots they use in it. It dawned on me that I would never have noticed any of that if I was just buying them every now and then - it's only because I was buying the same stuff so often that it was so noticeable!

I was shocked at how blatant it was and wondered how many other things are suffering the same fate that we might not notice in our general shopping habits? In one way it kind of helped me because obviously the calories were reduced accordingly so, without really making too much of an impact, I was able to save an odd hundred calories here and there daily but it annoyed me that the prices stayed exactly the same! I don't want to pay for being hungrier! I might write to them actually and see if I can get a voucher or something to go towards the shopping.

Every little helps :)

Well the smokers seem to have finally gone to bed at last so I might head back to mine and see if I can grab a nap to see me through the day!