The day after the storm and there's a door and some flashing blown off up here in Drumbuidhe and the mystery of why the generator is still running (the temperature adjusted voltage is too high? the freezer compressor kept running? a n other device is draining the battery?). I've spent three days recovering from my part III exam in Benbecula and cowering indoors in my pyjamas as the winds (gusting to 145km/hr) howled outside.
The part III exam was even worse than I was expecting (and I was expecting it to be truly dreadful). On the weekend before the exam I posted a draft of my case study to my ex-colleagues for comments. Alas they took it personally and I was cold-shouldered for the duration of my exam. My ex-boss replied to the draft with a fair number of corrections (about half of them were relevant, but quite a few were editorial) and the comment that my case study would fail and that, if I submitted it as it was, she would write to the part III examiners noting that I was bringing the architecture profession into disrepute. I received her comments halfway through the exam and responded by drinking and smoking heavily. I was then dumped by A again (I know, I know, it's getting tedious how often this happens, but even I wasn't expecting him to do it immediately after taking off his clothes and getting into bed with me...).
The case-study situation did improve the next day as I talked through the study with D, a retired architect on S Uist and got hold of my academic mentor to check what the situation was with hostile bosses. I was at least reassured that the case study was interesting, accurate and well-written and one's boss has no business writing to the examiners.
The exam itself was just hard, hard slog and wasn't helped by interruptions while I was working out a fee offer using my spreadsheet - I was talking to S (who wasn't supposed to be invigilating but since M wasn't talking to me, he got the job by default) when my sister phoned me up and immediately put my 5yr old nephew on the 'phone so I couldn't say "I'm in the middle of the exam" and S now thinks I'm really rude. Hey Ho.
I slept for what seemed like 3 days when I finally got the whole damn thing into the post. A took me for a last beach walk and, alas, he missed the track back to the car so I ended up trying to follow him over rough machair. In the dark. In a hailstorm. This left me cold, wet and scared which did nothing to improve my temper. A's not that great at coping with guilt so, the next morning, my last hour on Benbecula was spent listening to him ranting at my rudeness - although I'd made tea, helped fix his bike and set up 'The Killing' for him to watch, my failure to say "goodnight" quickly enough had left him unable to sleep.
There are still so many things I wanted to do in the islands but words cannot describe how relieved I was to leave Benbecula.
I'm now starting to get back on track for Christmas (still not decided where to spend it of course) and I've got a parcel of Christmas Cake, sloe gin and Christmas tree biscuits packed and ready to send down to Devon. Since sister K has an aversion to nuts (no allergy, she's just picky) I've adapted the Glasgow Cookery Book recipe to incorporate chocolate chips as follows:
Chocolate Christmas Cake
250g plain flour plus pinch baking powder
1 tablespoonful cocoa
200g butter
200g sugar
4 eggs
25g ground almonds
1 tablespoonful treacle
600g mixture of chopped apricots, prunes and figs
100g chopped dark chocolate
The night before, soak the fruit in whatever spirit you have to hand (I used a mix of orange juice and whisky). Cream the butter and sugar then add the eggs alternately with the dry ingredients. Stir in the treacle and fruit and add to a 20cm cake tin. Bake at 170C (gas 3) for about 2.5 hours. I leave it to cool in the tin overnight to ensure the cake holds its shape and use just icing sugar for decoration.
