People often ask me: so what do you do all day? And I give them the same old spiel about meeting up with friends, exploring Orkney & the north of Scotland, and so on. Mostly, that’s true.

Well, today was pathetic. Up at 8:00 (at least 90 minutes later than usual). A long (1 hour) walk with Scout in the rain. When we got home, I changed back into sweats (I never do that), and apart from a 15 minute chat with my sister, I did nothing. I spent the morning watching YouTube videos, had a pie for lunch (you are not going to believe the contents: baked beans & cheese in a square pastry), sat on the sofa all afternoon with ginger ale & popcorn and watched a Netflix documentary series about a truly batshit crazy family in Idaho, followed by the entire Queen’s Gambit series (for the fifth time (?!?!)), had leftover Chinese food for dinner, then watched the grandkids’ vigil in Westminster, followed by the last episode of Shetland.

That was my day. Just pathetic. But every once in a while . . .

*Postscript: I made up for Saturday’s sloth. Sunday was a beautiful sunny day, so in the morning we went for a long walk down to the shore, along the harbourfront, and up through the town. In the afternoon we followed St Mary’s Path through a little wood and around a pond, and at night we drove up to Evie in hopes of seeing the Northern Lights (we didn’t see any). Oh, and the meals were better too: porridge for breakfast with Orkney milk, homemade soup for lunch with locally grown vegetables, and homemade stew with Orkney beef for dinner. I am redeemed.

The day I passed my driving test and got my license in the 70’s, I asked Mum if I could drive to my Dad’s office by myself to tell him in person. When I got to his office, I pulled into a parking spot and . . . bumped the car parked in front of me. Damn. (There was no damage at all to either car and I didn’t say a thing to anyone.)

Since then, I have been in a couple of accidents on the road (only one was my fault), but I can honestly say I’ve never hit anything stationary. Not a garage door (like a neighbour once did), not a cement pillar (like my Dad once did), not a snow bank (like a friend once did), and not a road sign (like a high school buddy once did).

Well, I could say that was true, until I got here. My puir, peedie, wee car. Back in March I backed into a low wall in my cousin’s driveway. And yesterday, I backed into a 3′ high by 6′ x 6′ cement block in a field up on the cliffs – it was a field for God’s sake – how did I manage to hit the only manmade object for miles? And to truly add insult to injury, I didn’t know what the impact was of leaving bird poop on your car. I hadn’t noticed it on the rear passenger door – I have no idea how long it had been there – when I tried to clean it off, it seems guano will eat into a car’s paint job. Oh dear.

On my nephew’s last day in Orkney, I took him to some cliffs I hadn’t visited before: the seas stacks at Yesnaby. JW loves anything up high (my sister promised me that she wouldn’t hold me responsible if he fell whilst here – a very real fear) so this seemed like a perfect last day trip. The wind was so fierce that day that I decided Scout & I were better staying in the car, while Jack wandered the cliffs. He loved them. And, more to the point, I got him safely to the train in Inverness on Thursday, after which point his safety became somewhat less of a concern for me.

Well, this morning was so beautiful I scrapped my plans to vacuum and do laundry and headed out with Scout to see the sea stacks (sometime called ‘castles’) for ourselves. I think I may have found my favourite spot on Orkney. This was some of the most amazing landscape I’ve seen. The photo here and the ones in my Gallery don’t begin to do it justice, and the cliffs are so much more dramatic than they are in pictures. Also, much, much higher.

I will be going back again and again, even if it is a 35 minute drive to get there.

Today was my nephew’s last day in Orkney (more on the A9 later). After dropping him at the train station – Scout is going to miss him – I headed over to the airport Marriott hotel. It’s one of the few chain hotels I prefer to a local inn. Very good prices, quiet rooms, decent bar, and lovely staff (or so I thought).

Their lobby has a dining area at one end and sofas and TV at the other. Scout isn’t allowed near the dining area (fair enough) so we headed to our usual spot with her lying quietly on the floor against the wall, and me in a chair with my wine.

Sat beside a nice couple from London who were waiting for their replacement flight home (EasyJet had cancelled). Scout didn’t move a muscle after all her walks earlier in the day. Imagine my dismay (that’s the word I’m going with here – still working on New Year’s resolution #2) when some bossy little madam (again, NY’s res) came and told me Scout had to go. It was the rules. I asked if it was a new rule, as every other time I had stayed here the staff had assured me she was welcome, just not near the dining room. Nope, it had always been the rule. Really? Every other employee had been wrong, and she was right? Huh.

Well, I’m afraid I let down my drinking companions by complying with her request. The husband was quite up in arms on my behalf. But my polite-Canadian, obedient-banker conscience didn’t want to make a public fuss, so back to the room we went (Scout & I, not the couple – it’s not that sort of a story). No more Marriott Inverness for us going forward.

You know what today’s news was. I wanted to watch the coverage of the Queen, with others. So after twelve minutes of sulking my room, I picked up my wine, hooked on Scout’s leash, and headed back down to the lobby. Scout lay down in the same spot, I sat in the same chair, and we watched the news. Miss Bossy-Pants must have finished her shift, as she was nowhere to be seen. One of the other staff stopped and petted the dog.

It was a small victory and yes, I probably should have stood up to her in the moment, but you know what? I won. Only downside – the couple from London had already headed back to the airport before my return, so the hubby prob still thinks me craven. Ah well.

Edit: next morning another waitress remembered Scout, by name(!), from our previous visits, and came over for a cuddle. The Marriott has been redeemed in my eyes.

Yesterday I ticked off one of my three New Year’s Resolutions.

The first was to cook, prepare, etc, at least five new fish or seafoods that I had never prepared at home. I’m part-way there: I’ve made smoked scallops (turns out they’re not to my taste), tusk, stone crab claws, and fresh white & brown crabmeat.

The second was to swear less – still a work in progress, dammit.

The third was to have visited at least ten of the 70 Orkney Islands by the end of the year, and yesterday I accomplished that.

The Mainland	South Ronaldsay
Birsay	Westray
Burray	Shapinsay
Lamb Holm	Hoy
Glimps Holm	South Walls

The house-hunting continues. Cut-off (moving day) is 29 October. I applied for a 3-bedroom house about a 3-minute walk from here, but it went to someone else. I tell everyone I meet that I’m looking and after chatting with a lady in Dounby I realized I needed a way to let people get in touch with me if they do hear of something, so I have printed up some homemade business cards. I carry them everywhere now.

I don’t think I’ve ever given credit for my logo. I put together a couple of different ideas in PowerPoint and then sent them off to my sisters with a disingenuous comment like, “these are a couple of the ideas I’m playing with – nowhere near done yet – off to walk the dog. TTFN.”

And exactly as I anticipated, within a couple of hours my youngest sister had come back with what is now my official Ontario to Orkney logo. I knew she wouldn’t be able to look at what I had done and not ‘fix’ it. (I have the best sisters!)

My nephew JW is staying with me for a week – like my last houseguest, one of his favorite things to do is try different foods. We have had Haggis crisps, Lorne sausage, Wife of Westray cheese, haggis, cockles, anchovies, sardines, and curried duck Lahore.

I thought we might go a tad more traditional and order a pizza this evening, so I went online to see Buster’s menu (‘Buster’s American themed diner’). These are the basic topping choices. I knew the Brits put corn on or in almost everything. Baked beans came as a bit of a surprise, but the one completely out of left field was . . . . wait for it . . . . bananas.

Brits don’t put what we consider to be cocktail sauce on their shrimp cocktail – I mean the red, tomato-y, horseradish sauce that comes with the frozen shrimp ring. Instead, they serve Marie Rose sauce. Marie Rose is very like Thousand Island dressing, but without the little chopped bits, and with a splash of brandy added. I am telling you this to set the stage for yesterday’s run-in with a neighbour.

Okay, so run-in is a misnomer. Bruce is a lovely, elderly gentleman with a pretty spaniel, Freya. They are pretty much the first people we met the week we moved in. We always stop for a chat when see one another in the street, and he is always quick to introduce me to anyone else who might pass by.

Yesterday we saw each other by the school grounds and got talking about my trip to Scandinavia. Discussing Copenhagen (a city we both really liked) led to Stockholm (he’s been; I haven’t) and he said I must go, and when I do, be sure to see the Vasa. I asked what that was and he said, “It’s Sweden’s Marie Rose.” I said, with a puzzled look on my face, “What’s the Marie Rose?” His reaction was immediate and obvious. He started, and then a look of shock and dare I say, judgement came over his face. I tried to recover by saying, “You mean the sauce?” (although I was pretty sure he did not), but that seemed to just be digging myself even deeper. I mean, it was as if I had said, “Who’s Winston Churchill?” His reaction had been quick and slight, just a flicker, but unmistakable: what kind of an education did you have?

Turns out the Mary Rose was one of Henry VIII’s flagships, which sank off the south coast of England in a battle with the French and is now preserved as a museum in Portsmouth. Every school child knows that. In my defense, ‘Mary’, said in an Orcadian accent, sounds very like ‘Marie’. But even so, I still would have been no wiser – it was absolutely not one of the things covered by Mr Beacock in my Grade 7 History class.

Well, I feel I have let Bruce down; I am just a peedie bit diminished in his eyes. The temptation, at the time, was to say, “So, do you know who Laura Secord was? Nellie McClung? Louis Riel?”, but I did not. I just went home and made some shrimp cocktail.

Fred. Olsen cruise line charges for wifi.  And it ain’t cheap: £120 for the whole cruise, or £12/day.  As recently as our last cruise three years ago I wouldn’t have cared at all about having email or internet access, and in fact only ever used the ship’s ‘business centre’ to check in with family periodically, but when you combine travelling alone, leaving Scout with people I don’t know really well, this blog, and researching upcoming cities stops online, well I need my wifi.  (I’d have been perfectly happy with 10 minutes/day on one of the ship’s own computers, but Fred. Olsen doesn’t have a business centre for the passengers’ use.)

I came up with a work-around (a cunning plan, as Baldrick would say) – I decided that every second or third day I would sign up for one day of wifi.  I would sign up at noon, and have 24 hours of access, meaning I could check in with my sisters in the first afternoon and then again the next morning.  I could post updates on my cruise over a two day period, so they wouldn’t pile up.  A maximum cost of £36 instead of £120. Hah.

When it was announced that our cruise was changing and I wouldn’t be able to get to the shops I wanted in Szczecin, I wanted to do some research into what to do in Copenhagen.  I would have used the travel guides in the library here, but (a) someone keeps stealing the pertinent books each day and not replacing them until we’ve left the relevant city – I suspect one of my dining companions (mainly because he told us that was what he was doing); and (b) one of the Scandi-specific travel guides I did find on their shelves was a Fodors (good) from 1992 (bad).  I had just finished up a 24-hour paid wifi session and didn’t really want to have to pay for another one so soon.  And why should I have to?  They changed the cruise destination, I didn’t.

So I went to the Guest Services desk and said I wanted one day of free wifi to allow me to make changes to my plans and research Copenhagen.  The clerk said she would raise it with her boss.  I went back the next morning to renew my request and was told, yes, management had cleared a one-time, one-day free wifi access for me.  The young man diffidently explained that management was only doing this for me and hemmed and hawed, until I said, “You’d prefer that I not broadcast this to the other passengers, is that right?”  He sighed with relief and said yes, exactly.  No problem at all from me.  I left quite pleased with myself (and I am not posting this until after the cruise is over – not that any of the other passengers know of my blog).

I want to be clear – I know spending an additional £12 on a cruise costing over £2,000 shouldn’t matter and I’m just being petty.  If they hadn’t been charging us for every, single solitary thing, I wouldn’t have felt so strongly about it.  But I still resent having had to pay for an ice cream cone beside the pool – I think that was the proverbial straw that made me nickel and dime them right back.

Elderly British men seem to like to lecture.  My experience recently has been a series of solid, senior, middle-class British men pontificating on a variety of subjects, usually unasked.

Last week a bristly Englishman spent 15 minutes explaining to a waiter the history of beer-making in the UK over the last several hundred years (he hadn’t asked); last night a voluble gentleman from Cheshire told his waitress exactly why he was going to see the true ‘Little Mermaid’ statue in Copenhagen and not the one on show for all the tourists (she hadn’t asked); and this morning a natty-looking pensioner from Edinburgh told me why the tour guide was wrong about Britain’s role in liberating Copenhagen at the end of the war (I hadn’t asked).

Uncle Ian isn’t like this.  Dad wasn’t like this.  Hunh.

But I do like people-watching.  I am my mother’s daughter in this area, although not of her calibre.  Norma could carry on an entire conversation with our family at a table in a restaurant, all the while tuning into what was going on at several other tables around us. 

I sit with my book at my breakfast or lunch table and just observe what’s going on around me.   My favourite so far on this cruise is an elderly English couple, very pukka, very Britain-rules-the-sea.  They are very pleasant and very polite.  Every morning at breakfast (and I do mean every morning), they have found something to complain about – always in a highly instructive manner.  Milk for tea should be served warm.  Bananas should be available every morning at the buffet.  The teaspoons were too big.  On the second morning, they actually planned out who would complain about what.  She told him he was to cover the fact that the bacon was not cooked crispy enough, while she tackled them about the quality of the toaster. Plan made – off they went.

‘Nowt so queer as folk.