I’ve felt that Wednesday is my Lucky Day since I won £150 in a competition on a Wednesday when I was 17 years old. It was The Women’s Gas Federation Young Homemakers Award. £150 was a lot of money then. I guess I would think of it as two treat bottles of whisky now. Yes, I am a cook with a taste for The Water of Life and that is one of the reasons why we moved, five years ago, from West Sussex to Orkney.
I have struggled to justify buying lots of whisky since moving here. My husband is not a fan so it is just for me and, occasionally, a few whisky-loving friends. In Chichester I ran a whisky dining club for women and that meant that I was buying at least five bottles every two months. They were to sip and share as we nibbled our way through tasters after a responsible, tummy-lining main course, mixing and matching - or not - the foods to the selected drams. So I have been very bad at posting whisky reviews regularly on my YouTube channel in the last five years. I also feel at a disadvantage as ‘the younger guys’ are into the tech with microphones and gizmos and I am a woman who has given cookery dems and talks for 45 years, just sharing my love of the stuff. But I am making excuses now and not telling my story of a double-booked Wednesday evening on Orkney.
This year I entered some veg and preserves for the first time in the local show. The South Ronaldsay & Burray Agricultural Show is, I believe, the oldest on the Islands. The week of local shows culminates in the County Show, a very important day for a largely agricultural community. I was delighted, locally, to win two firsts, four seconds and two thirds: my pointed cabbage and my marmalade with the local Vara gin reign supreme. I was a bit disappointed that my Florence fennel came second to my neighbours French beans in the Any Other Veg class, but I was amazed and delighted that my Cos lettuce got a second. You win some and come second in others. A weekend cookery course with me at the WI Denman College was once the second prize in a competition in BBC Good Food Magazine. It took me a while to come to terms with that. I am OK with second prizes now.
I then heard that there was Prize Money for my homemaking efforts but that it was to be collected a few weeks hence on a Wednesday evening. Prior to this I had signed up for a whisky tasting on Twitter of some drams from Whyte & Mackay. Run by Steve Rush @TheWhiskyWire, it’s a great way for me to stay whisky-connected. Sign up and, if selected, you get samples mailed to you and, cometh the day and the hour, you set to and taste, swapping comments on-line on Twitter. Excellent. Except when you double book and it’s Whisky or Winnings as both are scheduled for 7pm on the same Wednesday evening. How much would my winnings be? And would my whiskies arrive in the middle of a postal strike? There was no sign of them when Wednesday dawned, a non-delivery day.
Then Streamline arrived and there were my whisky samples, just in time. Was I to trust collecting my winnings to my friend Edwina who was also due to be In The Money? (More than me, I imagine, but then she had entered the Show before.) No, my non-whisky-loving husband said that he would go and collect the money for me and so I now have a wages-style envelope with £5.60 inside it in my purse, waiting for a rainy day - and we have lots of those on Orkney. And I have a bottle of Whyte & Mackay’s Whisky Works Quartermaster on my Whisky Wish List. At just under £75, half my original Lucky Wednesday Winnings, it makes me Out Of Pocket. Again.