Fiona's Quiet Life

Richard Thompson, one of the Fair­port Con­ven­tion ori­gin­als wrote the words to “Farewell Farewell” after his girl­friend Jean­nie Frank­lin was killed in a car crash in 1969. She was a dress designer hence the ref­er­ences to ‘cut­ting the cloth’. The tune is a tra­di­tional one “Willy O’Winsbury”. Sandy Denny of Fair­port Con­ven­tion made it her own. In turn, Sandy is now being remembered 30 years after her death by the release of a film about her too short life and career.

The You Tube clip here is a more recent but very beau­ti­ful ver­sion of that song per­formed by Mary Black who is accom­pan­ied by the legendary Jay Ungar, Aly Bain, and Jerry Douglas. Molly Mason, Jay’s part­ner bows the double base. This per­form­ance is from the BBC’s Transat­lantic Sessions.

Click to watch in You Tube

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went to see the M74 archae­olo­gical dig this morn­ing, nobody was dig­ging the there was plenty of evid­ence of the work in progress.

last night the cam­era club had a ‘friendly’ against a pres­ti­gi­ous edin­burgh club .…..we won by one point but the judge came out of the ark so nobody from either club took any notice of his opin­ion ‚in fact there was gig­gling in the back row, not me i was gig­gling in the middle row. i had not entered any­thing in this com­pet­i­tion so i can be object­ive. things i would have loved to hang on my walls he poo pooed and chocol­ate box pic­tures got high points. he even gave award win­ing pic­tures low points.…it was a good laugh.

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back to the salsa last night.….…picture is basil’s cousin, Ros with her friend Hammie.….….…having missed 3 weeks we were very behind but man­aged by the end of the even­ing not to be too tangled up. the whole thing is going to decamp to the white­craigs rugby club on the 6^th of May as the hall we use now keeps being closed for holidays.…..Pearl De Marco is the name of the teacher, i was going to put a link on here but i cant remem­ber her web address.

mean­while i some­how did my knee in and it is now strapped up using the strap­ping i had to buy for the trek so noth­ing is ever wasted if you keep it long enough.…..which is why my attic and gar­age are yet again in a state of over fullness.

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a grand­son asked me recently if the title of my blog is irony, after this week­end i can see why he should think so.

spent Thursday with grand­son, Fri­day morn­ing col­lec­ted Brother from Queen St. sta­tion, he was over from Den­mark to go to Strath­clyde university/ Jordanhill col­lege 75 th. anniversary. It was a two day event so i delivered him at the beau­ti­ful build­ing in the after­noon of fri­day. Sat­urday we hunted down tas­sells ( in Buchanan St ) for his shoe laces as he was attend­ing the din­ner in full high­land dress.….….……215 dishy PE teach­ers in kilts. mean­while him upstairs was hav­ing a party on Sat­urday night ( 8 till late ).….….…..he wanted it to be a joint one again but i was ambi­val­ent, he worked out why that was , i.e. the last party we did that for was Basil’s sur­prise 80^th.….…..so it was just an upstairs party, any­way it turned out in con­ver­sa­tion with one of the guests that he and his par­ents had been patients of Basil and he hadn’t made the con­nec­tion dur­ing the birth­day party and hadn’t gone in to Basil’s room to see him …a bit sad but it was prob­ably bet­ter for him to remem­ber Basil as a great doc­tor. Gor­don joined the upstairs party hav­ing arrived abso­lutely sober by taxi from the din­ner , then he and a guy called John talked very enthu­si­ast­ic­ally about cricket.….….….just like he did all my childhood.….great aunt Euphemia banned the word cricket when we vis­ited her.

then this morn­ing Gor­don and i had to be up at 5 a.m. so that I could drive him to Edin­burgh air­port to get his plane back home.…the red sheep are still on the grass pyramids.

i had all the sheets and tow­els washed and dried out­side in the sun by the time he phoned me from home.
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Today we went house hunt­ing in Bearsden, East Kil­bride, Hamilton, Fernie­gair(near Hamilton), Stone­house and Law (near Carluke). The ones at Bearsden were nice but they weren’t big enough for the money one of the houses were 999,999. One of the devel­op­ments at East Kil­bride had nice houses but Grandma didn’t like the small stor­age space and kept on say­ing “where would you put your suit­case”. The other devel­op­ment at East Kil­bride didn’t have a show­house. At one Devel­op­ment the sales assist­ants ignored us. The one at Fernie­gair didn’t have a show­house but the sales assist­ant was very nice. The ones at Stone­house were nice but the sale assist­ant ignored us. The ones at law were nice and the sales assist­ant was nice to us. So me and Grandma had a great day.

The pic­tures are:

1. Me, Cameron, writ­ing this art­icle on Grandma’s laptop.
2. One of the signs we saw advert­ising new houses.
3. A view from the car on the way home.
4. My garden get­ting fixed up.

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