Soor plooms skin#
Soor plooms Patch#
Soor plooms full#

Soor plooms full#

Photograph: Peter RossĪberdeenshire is full of wee bakers, and a buttery odyssey is a fine way to explore the area, heart gladdening and arteries hardening as you go. Shona Jamieson, a Cordon Bleu-trained chef, has returned to her native north-east and started a bakery, selling butteries at an honesty box for 50p each.Ĭhef Shona Jamieson runs an artisan bakery, and sells butteries at her honesty box. I’d picked it up from Highlanders Bakehouse in Crathie, by Balmoral Castle. I had brought my own bag of evil to Mr Ballater’s shop. “Evil bricks of tasty,” is the unimprovable description given by the film director Duncan Jones, who spent part of his childhood in Aberdeen. If you visit Aberdeenshire and do not eat butteries, you haven’t visited Aberdeenshire.įlat, layered pastries, butteries look like roadkill croissants and are made from butter, lard, salt, sugar, flour and yeast. What is a buttery? It’s the characteristic staple of north-east Scotland, as much a part of the local identity as the lush green landscape and the Doric dialect. I don’t think I’ll be replacing them.A local greybeard, Colin, who introduced himself as the village idiot (“but I’ve got an awfa lot of competition”) sighs as if such ignorance pains him. Wherever the washing machine has gone, Kenneth appears to have gone with it. There was a dark cavity under the worktop like a missing tooth. Today when I got up a stranger was making breakfast in the kitchen, dressed in a dark orange teeshirt, slim-fit jeans and stripy green socks.

Soor plooms Patch#

Kenneth looked like the pale patch on a duvet cover bleached by the sun, as though all the colour had been leached out of him. Yesterday morning, there was a damp spot by his side of the bed and a trail of drips leading along the landing, down the stairs and into the kitchen. His clothes seemed to fit more loosely, and he was as tense and uptight as a cashmere sweater washed at 90 degrees for an hour.

Soor plooms skin#

His hair was losing its colour, and his skin was grey and wrinkled.įor the rest of that week random items continued to turn up, including a teeshirt the colour of cinder toffee, size medium, and the other green-striped sock. He slept soundly, oblivious, but in the morning he looked washed out. The crashing and thumping of its escape bid drowned out the sound of Kenneth’s snoring. I lay in bed that night listening to the machine waltz its way around the kitchen, bumping into the table on its way to the back door. I unplugged the machine and turned off the water supply. I came down to a kitchen full of warm steam and a pair of damp slim-fit jeans in the drum. Then the washing machine started turning itself on in the middle of the night. That one I secreted at the back of the airing cupboard – after I’d ironed it, of course – ready for the next trip to the charity shop. The kind of shirt he wouldn’t be seen dead wearing. Not in the pastel colours that my husband favours, but a daring dark blue and red stripe with a contrasting white collar. I tucked them away in a pile of my jumpers in case he found them and started asking awkward questions – unlikely, but there’s a first time for everything. Kenneth is a navy briefs man all the way he says boxers make him feel insecure.

I stowed it at the back of his sock drawer, on the basis that the other one might turn up at some point.Ī week later it was a pair of purple boxer shorts. The strange thing this time was the presence of the intruder – a single sock, jauntily striped in shades of lime, emerald and olive. That in itself is not unusual, but since he is a creature of habit and always buys the same brand and colour it never takes long for a stray to find a new partner. Two months ago one of my husband’s black socks went missing.