Storm Babet has abated leaving much devastation in its wake. We have come through unscathed and are out and about again. Having said that we got here to the Aurrie in a very round about way. Here’s how!

Miracles do happen

You all know by now that when the days start getting shorter we sometimes go to the cinema after breakfast. Today we had to drop our car off for repair, so the garage  drove us to the Hippodrome, Scotland’s oldest cinema, to watch The Miracle Club.  Set initially in Ireland it’s a heartwarming story about the women of Ballygar going to Lourdes in search of miracle cures. A tad predictable but suffice to say that they find Lourdes a bit of a con. Unsurprisingly no miracles of the God given kind but some minor ones of the human variety. It’s a good watch.

You get a cup of tea and a biscuit at the Hippodrome. It’s called a “cuppa screening”. All too much for a lady seated behind us who snored loudly for a considerable part of the film. Thankfully more a comment on her state of exhaustion rather than the quality of the film. There were a few giggles but no-one woke her. It’s all part of going to the cinema with a load of other retired folk. The garage collected us again and with our car restored and it being a nice day we set off into Fife.

Eventually we ended up in Lower Largo. it’s a pretty little fishing village where Pat used to go on holiday as a teenager.  She would come with her best friend by bus and, at the time, although just about fifty miles, it seemed like the other side of the world from Glasgow. That was a fair while ago so she didn’t see much that seemed familiar today.  However, what you do notice driving down to the beach is a number of strange sculptures and elaborately carved gates. They’re by local artist Alan Faulds who carves them from solid Scottish oak and decorates them with up to twenty coats of paint and varnish. Presumably to protect them from the salty air.

Service over and above

The Aurrie is housed in what used to be a Baptist church down near the beach. These days it’s a café come gallery and event centre for the local community.  It even serves as the cinema. There seemed to be very few customers when we arrived but it was quite busy.  Lots of people hanging a new exhibition and setting out craft stalls. It had a great community feel to it, summed up nicely by one of the counter staff. She was sitting at a table with a baby sound asleep on her chest. At least it wasn’t snoring! The baby wasn’t hers, she was just looking after it for one of the women mounting the exhibition. Now that’s service!

Apparently, the Aurrie gets its name from an old Scots word for “area”. It’s applied to the slipway road leading down to the beach.  The locals say that there are as many ways to spell it as there are grains of sand on the beach. We counted the grains and can confidently report that that is a slight exaggeration.

Plain as well as spiced apple scones were on offer. It had to be spiced apple! As we sat there with our scone watching everything going on (always interesting watching people deliberating how to hang pictures) we completely forgot to take a photograph of our little spiced apple wonder. Apologies! Suffice to say that it wasn’t topscone material but still very enjoyable. No lessons learned

Having watched The Miracle Club and witnessed community spirit thriving in Lower Largo the total disaster happening in Israel and Gaza seems all the more confusing and sad.

What is noticeable, however, is the one-sided nature of the media coverage. With world leaders lining up, one after the other, in support of Israel it seems as if there is only one side to the story. The whole thing has been sparked by an atrocity launched on a music festival in Israel from Gaza. No-one seems to be asking why they would even think of doing that. As with most of the world’s trouble spots the origins lie with Britain. Past masters at creating countries based on religion. After partitioning Ireland on religious grounds in 1921 you might think that they would have learned from that experience before doing it again in India in 1946 and Palestine 1948? Apparently not!

KY8 6BT                                                  The Aurrie

///pounding.tummy.proved