Friday – Burns Night 🙂 In the morning Ady stayed home to do various tidying up and sorting out stuff indoors while I took Davies and Scarlett down to the school for a J Ranger event. Due to lots of politics and quibbling Mike had decided to combine J Ranger with taking the little ones from the nursery along to the beach. We have a student, Kacey, from Canada here just now deciding whether to do her thesis on Rum (as in the subject matter, not a home!) so she was spending the morning with Mike too. I hadn’t decided whether to go along or not as I usually don’t do J Ranger with them unless it is something I am really interested in like the bird ringing. But when we got to the school I got roped in to help with putting waterproofs and wellies on the little ones (three children, one nursery assistant and one clerical assistant equals not enough adult hands per welly!) so I went along at the back helping to spot the wee ones. Davies and Scarlett strode out infront with Mike and Kacey while Coryla, Fliss and I were at the back with Joss, Eve and Elena. It brought out all my anti school, anti formal one size fits all learning as they were chivvied along from catching sight of an interesting shaped pebbles, raindrop on a spiders web or fallen leaf in order to attempt to keep up with the older ones, never actually catching them up anyway, only to arrive at the beach where Davies and Scarlett were identifying four different types of seaweed and it was time to start heading back. The best part of a mile from the school wet, tired and having had none of their ‘what’s this?’ questions answered because that was ‘not what we’re learning about today’. Grrr
Davies and Scarlett were having a great time so I arranged to meet them back at the pier in two hours and helped walk the little ones back to school. I then had nearly two hours to kill and it was tipping down with rain so I decided to go home, take the veg box from the night before up to the static and have a cup of tea. I had just over an hour with Ady and then went back down. Somewhere along the line I missed Mike and the kids who had finished, I thought I’d be smart and walk along to meet them and finally Mike managed to reach me on my mobile to say he was back home and had sent the kids home too so I went home.
We had pancakes for lunch and the kids had showers and hairwashes in honour of Burns Night, then duly prettied up we headed down to the village to celebrate. Dave and Sylvia had asked to do the catering in honour of it being a year on from Sylvia’s darkest moment being helicoptered off the island with a cancer treatment related life threatening issue last Burns Night. Unfortunately they are not always the most reliable folk at time keeping so when we arrived ready to start eating they were still peeling swedes and defrosting chicken breasts. Several of us swung into action to help and I peeled and chopped swedes, sliced haggis and stuffed chicken breasts while Lesley wrapped them in bacon, Fliss set up the tables and Ali got out cutlery and crockery. It’s times like these that totally remind me of why we chose to live here, our random, eclectic selection of people all pulling together to make things happen 🙂
We finally sat down to eat at about 8pm rather than the planned 6pm but the food was well worth the wait. Cullen skink which was divine (both my kids had seconds and thirds!) followed by Balmoral Chicken, neeps, tatties and lemon glazed carrots with cranachan to follow. Ady did the Selkirk Grace, Dave addressed the haggis, we had the toast to the lassies from James, the toast to the laddies from Abby, poems from Fliss, Rhys, Sean and a toast ‘to life’ from Sylvia. We had several drams and then the quaich did the rounds about three times before being drained and put on Lesley’s head!
We then pushed the tables back and got the music on for dancing 🙂 Steven who was staying in the caravan and is a pianist played some tunes which several of us gathered around the piano to sing along to – for one night only we had the Rum version of the Spice Girls in me, Abby, Mike and Fliss 🙂 then loads more dancing and lots of fun. It was a top night 🙂 We finally called it a day at about 1230am and walked home getting in around 1am and to bed about 2am. The kids had a fab night; spending it all on the dance floor 🙂
We had Cullen Skink in Cullen (east of Inverness) 🙂
Balmoral chicken sounds delish, definitely going to do that 🙂 Sounds like a great night!
Comment by Alison — 27 January 2013 @ 11:15 am