Quite allot of work*

So, this week I've acquire yet another pastime to distract me from blogging and knitting (and housework), because C and I finally made it to the top of the council waiting-list for an allotment. Mysteriously this happened the very week that we finally decided to ring them up and ask whether they'd forgotten us, having sent the application off in March and not heard anything since...but that's probably just coincidence. Mysteriously too, although there is a waiting-list, when I went down to the council offices on my day off, I was told we could have a choice of three different plots.**

The allotments are only about two minutes walk from our house so, armed with the key and a (rather idealised) map I pottered off to have a look at the possibilities. After wandering around for some time peering hopefully between rows of beans, I finally found someone else who happened to be there at 3pm on a Thursday to help me get my bearings and we established that the plot I was looking for was the one next to his. So here it is...


No - actually that's a lie: this is ours:


The others were worse, honest - you couldn't even tell where one started and the other ended and they were all covered in the dreaded bindweed. And at least this one has well kept plots on three sides and a fence on the other. Plus we have already met several of the neighbours, and they seem very nice. One offered to lend us a hand with the clearing/heavy digging if we happen to be there at the same time, while the lady on the other side plied us with courgettes to make up for the fact that this season all we have to look forward to is lots of hard work and very little produce.

Owing to 'financial pressures' the council no longer offers to strim allotments which have been abandoned for a while*** (though the lady at the council offices kindly lent us her very own scythe), so, very little knitting this weekend, but quite a lot of what might be described as 'horticultural archaeology' as we struggled to clear away some of the weeds revealing what had clearly been beds of potatoes, cabbages, onions, leeks, and strawberries in the not too incredibly distant past, along with some mint, oregano and chives, a couple of rather miserable gladioli, a soggy lump of old carpet, and about two-thirds of a collapsed shed. Quite a lot of hacking, chopping, digging, getting stung/bitten/scratched by things, and two trips to the tip later this is what it looks like. You can see the floor and everything - there's even one bit that could almost be called a bed (though as C pointed out it does look a bit more like a freshly dug grave at the moment). Not bad for a weekend's work I feel! Now if I can still move my arms enough to grasp my knitting needles...




* I know, I know, sorry...
**Although on reflection after seeing the plots in question, that might not be so surprising.
*** Unfortunately the same 'financial pressures' have also done for the trailer which used to come once a month to take uncompostable stuff to the tip, so our car is now full of a substantial quantity of dock seed and an even larger number of spiders.

Anyone for tennis?

So, one of the reasons I haven't been blogging or knitting as much as usual recently is that I've been spending some of the time that I'd usually have been doing that tracing my family tree on my mum's side. This started because sadly, my Great Auntie Eileen died at the end of May. She was my Nan's younger sister, and the last person of her generation in our immediate family.

After the funeral a few of us were sitting round looking at one of the several photograph albums that have been passed down from that side of the family. They are full of photos of very stern and impressive-looking Victorian gentlemen, their stern and substantial wives (including this lady, whom my mum originally suggested might be Mary Lambert, originator of the infamous 'Lambert bottom', a family affliction which I fear I have not escaped*), and their slightly less stern-looking Edwardian progeny.


However, we gradually realised that Auntie Ei (as she was universally known) was the last person who might have been able to identify quite a lot of the people in the photographs for us for certain. So my mum and I set about trying to work backwards from the people we could name to work out who some of the others must have been, and where and when the photos were taken.


Amongst the identifiable people is the rather formidable figure of great great auntie Nellie Maunder, born in 1893 and seen here as a young gell in her fantastic tennis outfit.* According to my mum, after Nellie lost her fiance in the 1st World War she never married but devoted herself to religion and good works. A redoubtable lady, she served as a Red Cross nurse in the field in both the 1st and 2nd World Wars, amassing quite a collection of medals for service overseas, including the 1939-45 Star, the France and Germany star, the Defence Medal, the Voluntary Medical Services Medal, and several Red Cross long service medals, which must have looked very impressive festooning her rather considerable bosom. By the time my mum knew her as a child after the war, she had become the matron of one of the colleges at Durham University, driving a convertible and lecturing the youth of the day on the dangers of STDs.




Nellie's older brother was my great grandfather, Harry Maunder. Apparently something of a contrast to his sister both physically and temperamentally, Harry was 'on the stage': a 'soft shoe dancer' according to my mum. Quite what his Civil Engineer father, Robert, made of this I can't imagine.


In November 1916 Harry married another dancer, Nellie Magee (second from the left, while Harry is third from the right), and my Nan was born er...8 months later.


Nellie Maunder (nee Magee)'s antecedents are something of a mystery. According to family legend she was the illegitimate daughter of a theatrical boarding-house landlady (if true, I can't think that went down very well with her more upright namesake, either!). Her mother certainly seems to have been called Theresa (or Teresa) Magee, but where she came from or whether there was ever a Mr Magee seems to have been lost in the mists of time, so at least for the time being the trail on that particular branch of the tree has gone cold.

* In actual fact, I don't think the date of this photograph is consistent with it being Mary Lambert, but whoever's the bottom is, it is not to be aspired to in my view!
**I can only assume that the get-up was meant to represent the game of tennis at some party or fancy dress parade or something, since surely you couldn't actually have played in it!

Bisy, Backson

I know, I know - it has been a ridiculously long time since I last posted. I just seem to have been insanely busy recently and a hundred different things - work, rehearsals, concerts, trips hither and thither, new hobbies, more concerts, old hobbies, the occasional bout of sleeping - have intervened to eat up my blogging time.

In fact, I've been so busy I haven't even had much time for knitting! Mainly because I wasn't organised enough to start the baby knitting (discussed below) much before the baby in question was imminent, May consisted of the Attack of the UFOs for me. At one stage I had seven projects on the needles at once, which is a record. However, inevitably the only knitting I was actually making any progress on was mostly un-bloggable (being destined as a surprise for someone who occasionally reads my blog).

Nevertheless, I have been thinking about blogging quite a lot, and taking photos with the full intention of posting. I intended to tell everyone about the nice walk on the Ridgeway one weekend back in late May. You can tell how long ago it was from the fact that the wisteria in Streatley was still flowering in such a spectacular fashion.


Then there was a trip to Anglesey to see Sara and Tim and Iestyn, who at that stage was still bump.


And there's been a fair amount of gardening which (when a work in progress) was going to be a Messy Tuesday post, but that never happened and eventually the mess disappeared (well not really, but I quite like vegetative mess, so tangles of plants don't count in my book).


In fact there have been any number of Messy Tuesdays (and other days), the most memorable of which being the one that produced this unusual scene on the drainer. This came about as a result of a close encounter between C's laptop and the best part of a pint of Old Hooky, when a cunning plan to move the table without removing either of the aforementioned articles from it in advance went horribly wrong.*

There was a Sunday spent mooching about the Cotswolds in pursuit of my brother and his friends who were taking part in the annual cycling Tour of the Cotswolds. Unsurprisingly we opted to do the 102 miles by car rather than bike. Unfortunately, however, since ours was being serviced, the car in question was a mint green Nissan Micra which cornered like a wardrobe on roller-skates and made a noise like a maddened kitten when asked to climb any sort of wold whatsoever. But the trip resulted in a good pub lunch and an enjoyable afternoon spent following the route of a Saltway on the OS map (even if the car was so small that we had to pull over at one point and open both the doors in order to be able to unfold the OS map sufficiently).

And then finally, last weekend, a concert on the Saturday in Deddington, just north of Oxford gave us the perfect opportunity for a night in a B&B followed by a pleasant walk in the country on which we saw some of this


(which doesn't look that impressive until you realise it's quite big)


and some of these


and some of those


and a fox.

On the knitting front, as Ravelers amongst you may have seen, I finished the sheep yoke cardigan


and on the theme of all things oviform**, the sheep toy that I was knitting on WWKIP day, when various people may have seen me struggling to figure out which way round the head went.


Ovine anatomy finally conquered I then progressed to Enfys the Elephant


and having eventually managed to dispatch the whole lot to Iestyn slightly later than planned when he was 1-and-a-bit weeks old (elephants are hard to knit on the train), I returned to the poor languishing Twisted Flower Socks, which have been on the needles since goodness knows when, and finished them off yesterday!


So now I just have the unfinished, hibernating Probably Jumper (probably not at this rate), the infuriating River Stole, and the Moonlight Sonata Shawl which I cast on at the "cast on day" back in late May, and haven't touched since.

Still things should be a bit quieter now, so I'll have more time...probably...


*His cunning plan I hasten to add, not mine. Though since the whole butter-radiator fiasco I should probably refrain from commenting.
** I was delighted to discover (courtesy of Liz) a while ago that oviform not only means "egg-shaped", but (oviform adj.2) "sheep-shaped". This is one of my all-time favourite unexpected other meanings, the other being emboss vb.2, which essentially means "to go and hide in a wood" - "The police are after me; I must emboss at once!"

At Geneva

According to Jonathan Green's Slang Dictionary, to say someone has "been at Geneva" means they have got drunk.* Well, last weekend C and I were both a Geneva for several days, but only in the literal sense, taking advantage of a meeting that C had to attend to have what I supposed could be called a "minibreak".

C lived in Geneva for 6 months as a student about 12 years ago, so it was a bit of a nostalgia trip for us, as well as giving us the opportunity to catch up with some friends who moved out there about a year and a half ago. Unfortunately it is also about twelve years since I last spent any amount of time in a French-speaking country, and to my considerable embarrassment I found that, though I could still read signs etc., I could no longer conjure up the words fast enough to speak to anyone, or at least when I thought I could, half the words that came out turned out to be Greek, so that I ended up speaking a sort of generic "Foreign" which confused everybody, including myself. However, that aside, we had a very pleasant weekend.



On the Friday whilst C was in his meeting I spent a pleasant morning wandering the shores of Lac Leman admiring the Jet d'Eau (which owing to the imminent arrival of Euro 2008 currently has an enormous inflatable football flying above it), and taking pictures of random things which appealed to me.

In the afternoon I strolled through the Old Town and across the River, past where C used to live, to the suburb of Carouge, where I sought out Tricolaine (discovered via Ravelry), and it's very lovely owner Annelis took me in, made me tea, and allowed me to stay most of the afternoon, chatting and knitting (not that I got much done), and also sold me some Debbie Bliss cotton at a very reasonable price (more of this anon when it actually starts to look like something).

The Saturday morning was spent wandering around the Botanical gardens in glorious sunshine looking at lots of lovely flowers blooming away merrily, and trying to photograph the wildlife with varying degrees of success.


The Botanical gardens also contains the most amazing carousel, with huge creatures to ride in most of which have ropes that can be pulled to make their wings flap or their legs waggle. Unfortunately, being sadly lacking in small children I didn't have an excuse to have a go on it, but we did end up coming back in the afternoon with our friends and their two year old so that she and her dad could have a ride on a very splendid-looking tortoise.


Anna is the recipient of the cardigan of many colours which some people may remember me knitting a while ago. At the time I remember being worried that by the time I finished it it would be too small. As is the way with these things, by the time I actually got to the end it was apparent that this was not going to be the case - indeed if I had missed a few meals I might well have been able to wear it myself. Still, the advantage of knitting for children is that you can be fairly sure that they will at some point pass through the size of the garment, albeit perhaps fairly briefly, and so it should get some wear sometime.** So, a good six months after it was posted, I finally got to see the cardigan in action. Still a bit on the big side, but I'm sure she'll grow into it.

Unfortunately however, all this unaccustomed hanging about in bright sunshine caused C to take on a distinctly madder hue, and so the following day, when he was still experiencing la vie en rose, we were forced to scurry from one patch of shadow to the next like a couple of holidaying vampires. Spending a large part of the morning in the (very extensive) archaeological site under the cathedral solved a lot of this problem though, and then, after lunch in the park and a brief visit to the longest park bench in the word for old times' sake, it was back to rainy Oxfordshire, having once again contrived to miss what was probably the only sunny weekend of the year in England.

*This presumably has less to do with the place than it does with GENEVA n.1: A spirit distilled from grain, and flavoured with the juice of juniper berries (i.e. gin, the name being a corruption of Dutch genever < the Old French word for juniper).

**Unless of course the child in question turns out to be 19 before reaching the requisite size for their pale blue sailor suit - but even my sizing discrepancies have yet to reach quite that order of magnitude.

A Small and [Un]orthodox Mess

This week - C being away - the house is uncharacteristically tidy so I have had to create some mess for Messy Tuesday. However, fortunately I had the perfect excuse having just received an Easter card from my cousin. Orthodox Easter is on Sunday, and once again, despite my best intentions, I failed to buy any Easter cards when it was Easter here. I even went into a shop and looked at them thinking "I really must go back and buy those before Easter is over and they take them all away", and I still didn't get round to it.


Needless to say I didn't have enough time to create anything to compete with Dina's meticulously cross-stitched Easter egg, so instead I spent a happy evening cutting up little bits of brightly coloured paper, sticking them to cards (and myself, and the table), and leaving trails of Uhu around the place like some sort of weird solvent-based snail.


Still this was a fairly cheerful occupation and greatly improved by the fact that, for the first time this year, it was actually light enough, and warm enough, when I got home from work for me to sit at the kitchen table with the back door open. Thank goodness for a bit of sunshine at last. Things in the garden are beginning to wake up. Lazarus* the fuchsia is getting his first few tentative leaves and the fern, which three weeks ago I was on the point of digging up because I was sure it was dead, has turned out not to be.


I also finally plucked up the courage to plant my sweet peas out into their new willow basket-cum-obelisk. I bought it months ago, but it's been so cold I haven't dared try it out for fear of frost. It's not the easiest thing to plant access-wise and I got myself tangled in it on a few occasions and found myself contemplating a week spent on my hands and knees in the garden waiting, either for someone at work to remark upon my non-appearance, or for C to come back and find me kneeling like some demented dog with its head trapped in the railings. However I did manage to extricate myself eventually and was mercifully spared the indignity of having to go round to the neighbours with an overgrown lobster pot on my head and plead for help. I think it should look quite pretty if they grow, and it means I can have sweet peas on the patio, thus saving valuable border space for something else.



*So called because despite severe (if unintentional) maltreatment every winter [i.e. being left out in the frost, being put in the greenhouse because its warmer and then forgotten about and left to die of drought, being confined to the same pot and the same (by this time) nutriant-free compost for the best part of five years...] so that I am always convinced that this time I must have killed it, it always comes back to life in the spring.

Playing catch-up.

I have been somewhat remiss in writing Messy Tuesday posts recently. Needless to say this has nothing to do with any lack of mess and much more to do with lack of time and opportunity to photograph mess. Indeed, the tide of mess has been gradually engulfing us despite our best efforts to keep it at bay.

The original plan for last Tuesday was to post the tremendous mess which is our loft, full of abandoned boxes, badly stacked suitcases and the previous owner's enormous collection of early 80s DIY magazines (they explain a lot), and then to follow it with the impressively tidy space which would replace it once we had sorted through all the clutter, re-lagged and boarded the usable part, and converted it into a sensible, useful storage space.

Unfortunately this didn't quite happen. The first step in the plan was to buy the "dissipation units" for the downlighters set into the hall ceiling. I know that a dissipation unit sounds like an small but organized body dedicated to encouraging hitherto upstanding people to get pissed and hang about with bad company, but actually its a thing to dissipate the heat from the light so that you can put insulation over the top without running the risk of the whole lot going up in flames. We saw them in B&Q in Manchester and so assumed they'd be readily available, but no. After several days trying every hardware and electric store in the district we drew a complete blank so the loft continues to be unboarded and full of junk. And having abandoned all hope of sorting it out I couldn't in fact be bothered to go up there to photograph it for Messy Tuesday.


Anyway, this week we decided to tackle the mess which is the hollow wall at the bottom of the garden. This is designed to be a planter, but it has always had one end missing and we've always said that one day we'll rebuild it while, for the past two years, simply living with a plant-pot wedged into the end in a forlorn attempt to camouflage the crumbly bit.

Once again things didn't go according to plan. For a start, when we started to dig the contents out to make some room it turned out that only the top 5 inches actually contained soil. The rest was made up of bits of old carpet, a large quantity of electrical cable, some rubble, a plastic water pistol, a shelf bracket... We didn't look any further than that.


Secondly, removing the three broken bricks from the end of the wall resulted in the rest of it coming away in large chunks - not the intended result. So, we gave up with this too, stacked the bits back up, replaced the pot, and continue to live with the mess. Still, at least it gives me a messy Tuesday post.

Pin Money

This week I have spent a grand total of £4.40 on sewing pins, and this is the reason for it.


I finally got round to finishing the incredibly frilly Greek doily last Sunday when this happened.


The snow was very pretty and we spent a cheerful morning wandering the fields behind the house taking pictures of things which aren't really supposed to have snow on them. But picturesque though it was (and good fun for trying out the lens on the new camera) it did rather put a crimp on my plans to spend the day gardening.


Still, every cloud, as they say: instead I spent most of the afternoon sitting in bed, chatting on the phone, drinking tea, and crocheting, which meant after weeks of only working on it in 15 minute bursts on the train, I was finally able to make some serious progress with the doily and produce a FO.

However, having completed the actual crochet I have been struggling unsuccessfully to block it all week for the simple reason that it has so many frills and furbelows that needed pinning out, that I ran out of pins on three separate occasions. Having raided my "reserve" pin box and then been to buy more on two consecutive lunchtimes, I eventually finished pinning it out on Thursday night. It took a grand total of 314 pins and after pulling them all out this morning my fingernails will never be the same again. But it is finished and considerably more successful than my last doily-related effort I think.