Brrrm... brrrm... brrrm....

Today, a mere 17 years after I got my provisional license, I finally got round to taking (and passing) my driving test.

So you'll all know to stay off the roads from now on.

brrrm...brrrm...brrrrm....

In the dock

I keep hearing how the miserable, wretched, soggy so-called summer weather this year is, "good for the garden" and in particular is producing bumper crops of massive vegetables. Well not in my garden it isn't. All I have to show for it is about 200 small, sour, unrelentingly green tomatoes with not even the slightest suggestion of turning yellow, let alone red, and a greenhouse full of minuscule peppers and aubergines, barely a fruit between them, shivering and dreaming of warmer climes. Not only that but all my courgettes have got brewer's droop. The plants are big and strong and look as though they're going to be impressive performers, but just when the fruits reach about three inches long and everything seems to be going well suddenly go all limp and squashy and then fade away to nothing.* And it's not just the vegetables either: my nasturtiums have been reduced to the finest Shetland lace by caterpillars, although my hops are finally flowering, they are looking distinctly sad and autumnal, and unsurprisingly given the complete and total absence of sun, I have the most pathetically tiny sunflowers ever - about the size of a ten pence piece.


However, there are plants that don't seem to object to the weather: the docks on the allotment for one are going from strength to strength springing up as fast as we can cut them down, as unfortunately is the creeping buttercup. Taking advantage of a brief interlude in the deluge this weekend C. and I set about trying to stem the tide a little bit, digging up something in the region of 180 dock plants in the course of the two days, with roots varying in length between a couple of inches and a couple of feet.** When everyone else is busy taking in the harvest it was a little demoralising to be leaving with nothing but a bucket of rubbish and a bad back, but we also installed two more raised beds and a couple of enormous compost bins, so we're a little closer to having something recognisably allotment.


I did bring back a couple of rather splendid gladioli, a legacy of whoever had the plot before us, which helped to brighten the place up a bit even if they're not actually edible, and we have finally this week tasted the first fruits (or at least salad vegetables) of our labours in the form of two very hearty little lettuces, which the wet weather hasn't done any harm at all (though it's a fair measure of just how wet it has been that I've only had to water the things once since I planted them in July).




At the risk of coming over all Uncle Monty, I do have a soft spot for vegetables as things of beauty in themselves, and there's something very gratifying about such shiny green lusciousness. (They did also taste quite nice). But for the time being, in the absence of other produce I've been having to content myself with admiring illustrations in books and seed catalogues and dreaming of next year (when the weather will hopefully confound expectations and be perfect). If it's not, however, perhaps I can take a leaf out of Felix's book, or indeed this book half-inched from my mum's bookshelf at home, and knit myself a harvest. It's probably easier on the back and definitely less likely to result in nettle-rash.




* And they can't even claim this has never happened to them before either: it happened last year as well, though to be fair the weather was equally rubbish then.
** One of the larger variety did for my garden fork. Well, C. did for my garden fork by putting all his weight on it in an attempt to lever the thing out of the ground, and it was only a "ladies'" fork, but the result is the same. Splinters all round.

Tubas in the Moonlight

Actually there aren't really any tubas in this post*, but there are some tubers and quite a lot of knitting for once.

The tubers are these - Shetland Black potatoes - which we originally bought to eat, but some of them started sprouting so I planted them, and now have slightly more than I did to start with. It wasn't a very substantial crop, but not bad considering they were growing in a bucket round the back of the greenhouse, and they do scrub up to a rather striking purple colour which it turns out fades to blue when they're cooked, but can be made pink again by the addition of lemon juice.


The weather having reverted to type and gone back to being miserable, cold and wet, however, I've been spending more time indoors knitting than out amongst the plants and have finally managed to produce a few FOs.

First the Moonlight Sonata shawl which I started back in late May. Gratifyingly it used up exactly two of the three skeins of Jitterbug I bought for it, leaving the whole of the third for me to do something else with. I'm not sure that I blocked it quite to the right shape, as I found it a bit difficult to work out exactly how much to stretch the shaping around the shoulders. It doesn't quite do what it looks as though it ought to from the pictures on Ravelry, so perhaps I'll reblock it at some point, but on the whole I'm pleased and it promises to be very cosy. Needless to say, the lousy weather does nothing for the colour of the photos.



Mostly, though I've been fighting to complete two projects as presents for my sister (who was in the UK for a couple of weeks) before she left to go back to Australia again. She is a marine biologist and so coming across various knitted sea creatures on Ravelry I felt I had to have a go at making some of them. The first thing I attempted was Hansi Singh's Octopus. I decided to use some of the Debbie Bliss cotton I had left from Enfys, which turned out not to be the wisest choice since the inelasticity was once again a definite disadvantage when it came to doing lots of increases and decreases. However, I finally produced something which looked vaguely octopus-like (admittedly on the second attempt, the first having come to a sticky end when I came across a stray leg at the bottom of my knitting bag, and discovered to my dismay that I'd inadvertently made a Heptapus instead).


In order to allow her to use the octopus as a paperweight I struck on the idea of stuffing it with a balloon filled with fine gravel (the sort you use to mulch cacti). Getting the gravel into the balloon was a bit of a challenge. A certain amount went in fairly easily with the help of a kitchen funnel, but I soon reached the point at which I needed to stretch the balloon in order to get any more in. Ever resourceful, C. got around this problem for me by inserting his chin into the funnel up to the nose and blowing down it to inflate the balloon whilst simultaneous waggling his head from side to side to shake the gravel down into the balloon. This presented a very entertaining spectacle, not least when the waggling inadvertently moved his face away from the edge of the funnel on one side, allowing the balloon to deflate and leaving C. with a surprised expression and a mouthful of gravel.


However, the gravel balloon idea seemed to work relatively well, so having successfully completed the octopus I then moved on to something more challenging - the hermit crab. This is without doubt the most fiddly thing I have ever made and I won't be in a hurry to make another (certainly not in cotton). That's not to say that there's anything wrong with the pattern, which is a masterpiece of yarn-meets-mathematics which I find truly amazing. Grafting the shell together and watching it curl itself into a tight little helix was tremendously satisfying. However, it does require an awful lot of grafting - not least on each of four legs and two pincers, and consequently I overran rather in terms of completion time. Most of yesterday was spent frantically knitting and grafting together crustacean legs (and almost completely ignoring my sister as a result), and it finally got sewn together a mere 10 minutes before she had to leave for the airport.


So, what to knit next is the question now. I have sworn off creatures for a while, and will be returning to socks for the train. To this end I have already started on a pair of Hopscotch socks, which in this case really are Oxford Bluestockings, being not only blue, and knitted in (or around) Oxford, but made to Liz's pattern from Katie's yarn.

For home I have high hopes of conquering the infuriating River Stole which has been languishing in my stash for ages, but then what? Currently burning the biggest hole in my stash are 10 balls of grey Jaeger Matchmaker Merino 4ply...any suggestions?

*For anyone who's wondering, it's just the title of one of my favourite Bonzo Dog songs.

Bedtime

This weekend we acquired some sturdy 6 x 1 in. planks courtesy of the nice people at Oxford Wood Recycling and we have our first proper raised bed. What's more, as of this evening it has plants in it (transplanted from two very overcrowded tubs in the garden).


Whether they'll still be there in the morning is another matter. I reckon there's a fair chance they'll have been reduced to stumps by every slug and snail in the district (I think I can hear the munching from here) or beaten flat by the torrential rain we've had this evening, or possibly just washed away altogether. However, for this evening I'm enjoying having one corner that does look a bit like a genuine allotment with actual plants, even if it does only consist of 24 rather bedraggled lettuce.

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!"