Presentation Day

Several weeks ago Petrina, who runs all the village activities, resigned from the community committee after 18 years. Her long service is to be honoured with a surprise presentation at today’s Clicking Needles. We have all been charged with bringing a plate of food, so that this can be celebrated with a traditional afternoon tea.  The only smallish hiccough is that Petrina is snowed in and as she can’t get her car out, has said she won’t be coming into work today.

The village machinery whirred into action to avert the embarrassment of today’s ceremony lacking the guest of honour.

Andrew has been co-opted, together with his Land Rover, to collect Petrina at 2.15. As Petrina has also gone down with a nasty cold, he had to slightly let the cat out of the bag in order to persuade her to turn out, so she has an inkling that something special is afoot.

Despite the appalling conditions, most of the Clicking Needle ladies managed to make their way to the village hall - even those snowed in were offered lifts from neighbours with snow tyres or they walked down with crampons strapped to their boots. 

Platters of food including smoked salmon, mince pies, shortbread and Christmas cake made a steady appearance. The knitters brought out their needles and handiwork from the past week. The teddies are coming along splendidly, and I proudly showed off my two bears (Edward and Mrs Simpson).

Sally, who set us the task to knit bears, is still working on her first bear – a brave endeavour considering she has never knitted before, but she is having a little difficulty with increasing and decreasing stitches. Her teddy has somewhat lopsided ears.

Jeanette’s teddy is perfect, except for the fact that one arm is rather skinny and stunted, giving him a slightly deformed persona. Theresa, as usual, outdid us all by sitting and knitting four teddies on one set of needles, all in different colours. We have now set our target to be 100 teddy bears.

Once all the knitters, non-knitters and even several men appeared in this bastion of female enterprise, Andrew made a charming speech, reflecting on Petrina’s triumphs over the past 18 years and we clapped as she received her engraved crystal flower vase, and toasted her in time honoured tradition with a cup of tea.

I was introduced to Giles, one of the committee members, who is a mine of information about the village. He is adamant I must return in August for The Gathering. Yes, I know it sounds rather sinister and cultish, but it is in fact a sort of mini Highland Games. And in 2011 the very first World Tug Of War will be held in our village! Apparently contestants are coming from as far flung as Canada and Australia. There will also be a re-enactment of the battle of the Stewarts from c. 1745, so it is going to be a fine Gathering and about 1500 people are expected to flock to the village to take part.

I told Giles about my great great great great great great great great great great grand-daddy, Oliver Cromwell, and the battle he had fought right here, in the churchyard in 1653. Whilst impressed about my heritage, as Giles was well aware that most direct descendants had died out after five generations, he was unable to shed any more light on Cromwell’s skirmish as although he is an historian he has only studied the village history from the 18^th century onwards. I am invited to tea in the new year however, so that we can delve more into these matters of historical significance.

Talk turned to the snow, ice, snow and further layers of ice. Jean reckons if you are going to shovel your lane you have to do it while the snow is soft, but you also have to shovel right down to the ice, otherwise you may as well not bother. I could use a shovel right now, just to find the path outside my front door:

We hear Heathrow Airport has become zoolike, with hundreds if not thousands of stranded passengers, many of whom are now spending their fourth night sleeping on makeshift beds at the various terminals. People have queued for five hours to get on the Eurostar train to Paris and now there are no bookings available before new year.  Traffic on the roads is at a crawl and in some places at a standstill, with tales of people trapped for up to 20 hours in their cars in freezing conditions. Visitors from overseas cannot understand how the British can be so incompetent at managing their transport system because of a few inches of snow. No comment.

Jeanette and I are due to leave for England tomorrow and have abandoned the idea of driving to Pitlochry railway station – not for fear we will not get there (although this is a consideration, given the road is covered in snow and so far no snow plough has come through to clear it) but because when we come back our vehicles might be buried deep and irrecoverable.  The railway line from Inverness to Edinburgh – the very one we have tickets for - is closed today. Worse, the line to London (Jeanette’s final destination) is also closed; we are not sure about my connection from Edinburgh to York. The forecast is for worse weather, so over a few sups of Edradour whisky this evening, we have devised several Plans.

Plan A: hitch a lift with a friendly neighbour (Jean) north to Pitlochry station in the morning to see if the Inverness train is back on line (sorry, bad pun). If the train is cancelled ....

Plan B: hitch a lift with friendly neighbours (Mahri and Gilmore) south to Perth, leave the car, catch a bus from Perth to Edinburgh to get our train connections.  If no trains are leaving Edinburgh we are, in a nutshell, stuffed ... so

Plan C: we will hole up at the best 5 star hotel we can find and celebrate Christmas with copious amounts of champagne.

Theresa has reassured us – nay, informed us - that should we not be able to get across the border, we will be both be having Christmas dinner at her house, which is Plan D.

So with some trepidation, I am now heading south for yuletide festivities, back in a week – Happy Christmas to all my blog followers and trust you have a safe and happy holiday.