A delightful week in the country.

Last week we had our first holiday "en famille" - a week in a rented cottage in Norfolk - and it was great.

Owing to the fact that we went to a wedding on the morning we left and drove to Norfolk after the wedding breakfast, stopping halfway for a brief visit to P's uncle, we arrived at "The Barn" rather late on the Sunday night. But in spite of the inconvenient timing of our arrival, we were greeted by a roaring fire left for us by the owners along with croissants, butter and milk for breakfast, not to mention fresh eggs and a note encouraging to help ourselves to any more that appeared in the hen house during the week and to apples from the trees in the garden.




Having contrived through sheer good fortune to hit upon one of the best periods of weather in the whole summer we spent a happy week pottering, exploring the countryside, and enjoying the peace and quiet. P saw his first Norman castle,



went on his first steam train



got sand between his toes and saw the sea for the first time, though it wasn't really warm enough to get any closer.


And the weather was perfect. Warm and sunny though not hot, but cool enough in the evenings for us to make good use of the wood burning stove. I even managed to do a bit of knitting. Bliss!

Parentcraft

For one reason and another my crafting (and indeed blogging) activities have been somewhat curtailed recently. Obviously, the main reason is the arrival of our son. However, even before he was born the knitting took a bit of a knock. To begin with this was because of the urgent need to devote all spare time to getting the house into some sort of habitable shape for an infant. So my cheerful plans of spending my early maternity leave sitting in the rocking-chair knitting were replaced with seemingly interminable days spent frantically sanding and painting skirting-boards, window-ledges etc. Then, just when all the decorating was done, and I could finally settle down to some yarn-related nesting, I developed carpal tunnel syndrome and found I could no longer hold the needles.

This was a bit of a blow because up to this point, in my few spare moments, I had been concentrating on making presents for several friends and relations also expecting babies around the same time as me* and though projects these were all very enjoyable to knit, it would have been nice to have something for P. when he arrived. Unfortunately, however, the combination of the carpal tunnel, and my somewhat misplaced conviction that P. would be late, meant that the blanket I was making for him remains a sorry little pile of mitred-squares with no real prospect of completion any time soon.**

In spite of this, though, P. hasn't had to go without...

First we received a crocheted cotton blanket, originally made for me when I was born by my Yia yia and re-worked and re-edged for P. by his Yia yia - lovely and cool and perfect for the long promised "barbecue summer" should it materialize.


My mum also passed on to me this beautiful lace-knit shawl which was made for me by my Great Great Aunty Nell when I was a baby.


From P's other grandma we received a lovely pram blanket made to her own design from Debbie Bliss Cathay, which is just the right combination of warm and cool for going out and about in the slightly undecided English summer weather.


Katie presented us with a gorgeous Hemlock Ring Blanket which is light as a feather but still warm enough to cover up a little one when there's a chilly breeze.


And from the Bluestockings came a colourful and wonderfully smooshy Garter Squares blanket, perfect for lying on in the sunshine and watching the ceiling gnomes.***


So, in spite of my incompetence, P. now has the most wonderful array of blankets, all in different styles, weights, and yarns: something for every occasion and climatic possibility, and all much more lovely than anything I would have produced.

Not only that, but, thanks to Liz he has a very smart stripy cardi to wear, and a beautiful quilt and sampler brightening his nursery courtesy of Sara and his Great Aunt Alison respectively.




Isn't it great to have crafty friends!


* All girls, surprisingly. I mean all the babies were girls, not that all the people having them were girls, which is something of a biological inevitability. Projects Ravelled here, here, and here.
** Thus far my one successfully completed post-baby project is an ipod sock and that took me the best part of two weeks!
*** I am reliably informed that there is a species of gnome whose job it is to dance about on the ceiling and entertain small babies, which is why they always appear to be fascinated by something just behind your shoulder.

We apologise for the break in transmission.

This is due to circumstances beyond our control. (Nearly) normal service will be resumed at the first possible opportunity (i.e. probably in about 16 years!).

Tiddly-pom.

This week we've had what is, by my standards, quite a lot of snow. I say 'by my standards' since snow is not something I'm really very familiar with. I grew up in south-west Manchester where a combination of the Gulf Stream and the Pennines means that snow is relatively rare and any weather system of that sort has usually deposited most of its load on Yorkshire, Derbyshire, and higher-lying parts of Manchester* long before it reaches us. In fact, in the whole of my childhood I only really remember one substantial snowfall, which must have been some time in the early 80s.


That occasion was notable for two reasons. Firstly, there was enough snow for my dad, my sister and I to roll a snowball all the way down the hill from near the church to our house, a distance of several hundred yards. In my memory this snowball was the size of a small car, though since I was even shorter then than I am now, I suspect this is something of an exaggeration. It was certainly very heavy and we had to enlist the help of several passers-by to move it the last few yards. I think the original plan was to make a snowman, but by the time we'd got it home we'd all rather lost interest, so it just sat outside the house for a remarkably long time, slowly dwindling and (owing to the interest of passing dogs) taking on a disturbingly yellow tinge towards the bottom.

Secondly, it was the one occasion when we were permitted to break the embargo on playing on the nearby golf course. We spent the afternoon happily sliding down the slope at one end on our newly acquired (and soon to be abandoned) yellow plastic sledge, along with several other kids, the only one of whom I now remember was a lad called Colin, famous for having once addressed the most ferocious dinner-lady in the school using an interesting combination of four-letter words, the existence of which the rest of us had only heard vaguely hinted at.** Again, in my memory this slope included an immense drop worthy of an olympic ski-jump, though given the fact that the place is on the Mersey flood-plain, this can't really have been the case. What I do remember for certain, however, is that the fun came to an abrupt end for me when some sort of aerodynamic instability resulted in my reaching the bottom of said slope with me on the bottom and the sledge on the top, and a large quantity of what was by then very hard, compacted ice went up my jumper and severely grazed my back.

Anyway, this week I have for the first time in my life experienced being effectively snowed in, but not quite for the reasons I'd have expected. In my mind being "snowed in" has always conjured up the tales a Norwegian friend used to tell of only being able to get out of the bedroom windows, but in our case it wasn't getting out of the house that caused the problem so much as getting anywhere else once one was out.


On Monday despite the fact that there was only a relatively paltry inch or two here, London - if accounts on the radio were to be believed - was completely buried in a single 40-foot drift. As a result most of the trains to Oxford (at least all those originating in London) weren't running. A fairly short sojourn in the freezing cold at the station, where there was no information on when, or even if, a train might be expected, convinced both me and my manager that my time could be spent more productively working from home, so back I went. On Thursday by contrast we awoke to a fluffy white blanket 4 or 5 inches deep, but I made it into work with only a fairly mild amount of inconvenience and back with no trouble at all. Friday, however, was a different story.

Again we got up to find that in the night another few inches had been added to the not inconsiderable snow that remained from the day before, and again, with cries of 'Call that snow? That's not snow - I used to live in Chicago!' from C, we set off as normal. However, it soon became apparent that there are some significant differences between Chicago and Didcot when it comes to snow. First of all, Chicago has snowploughs. Secondly, people who live in Chicago know about driving in snow even on uncleared roads.

We made our way towards the station, C adeptly rescuing us from the slight skid that resulted from turning out on to the refrozen sheet-ice that was the ungritted main road and negotiating both the enormous potholes which seem to have opened up in the road surface where it had been mended with what was presumably snow-soluble tarmac, and the imbecile 4x4 drivers still smugly belting about the place at 40mph. On the slight incline which is the closest Didcot has to a hill people were frantically spinning their wheels and cursing and the roundabout at the end of the road resembled a curling rink. It was packed with cars gingerly inching forwards and the occasional impatient idiot sailing inexorably past their desired exit, sideways, at speed, with a look of slight bewilderment.

Having mercifully negotiated the roundabout without incident, however, we then discovered that the queue of traffic on the road to the station did not result, as it usually does, from some kid having pressed all the pelican-crossing buttons, but was in fact nose-to-tail as far as the eye could see with an ominous siren noise emanating from somewhere towards the A34. At this point it started snowing heavily again and we decided that a "snow day" might be in order after all and went back home.


Under other circumstances I would simply have walked to the station, but given that increasing bumpage means that I am considerably less steady on my feet than usual at the moment, this didn't seem like a particularly good idea. It's not that I have entirely lost my sense of balance or become incapable of normal exercise, but the unaccustomed weight/girth means that I am apt to over-compensate if I feel myself start to slide. The day before I only completed the walk from the station to work by a) walking in the road where it had been gritted or b) clinging to fences, railings, and the wall of Worcester college. And aside from the obvious disadvantages of falling on one's face when pregnant, the prospect of being plunged into the grey-brown semi-frozen slurry that was two inches deep on all the pavements - particularly when I only have two pairs of trousers that fit and the other ones were in the wash - was not an attractive one. Added to which there was the distinct possibility that once down on such a slippery surface I would be unable to get up again unassisted, and would be left flapping and floundering in the stuff like some small woolly cetacean.

So, I called in and opted to take the day as leave and we sat around the house doing the sort of thing that seemed appropriate to being snowbound, which in my case was mostly knitting and eating hot buttered crumpets. C worked from home on his laptop except for a brief interlude when in a fit of Chicago-inspired nostalgia he went out to "shovel the sidewalk". Since he is in fact British, however, he drew the line at doing any more than the bit immediately in line with our property, and since neither of our neighbours even cuts their grass or opens their curtains on a regular basis, this made very little difference. In fact the only effect was that periodically an unpleasant gritty sound accompanied by muttering emanated from outside the front door as a parent who was happily towing their small child on a sledge hit the snowless section and started spraying up sparks.


Nevertheless, it's secretly always good to have an excuse for an unexpected day of idleness, particularly when it's not accompanied by illness and is accompanied by tea and crumpets. And it meant that I finally reached the end of my bootee-knitting marathon and made some serious progress on the second Mingus sock which has been languishing since before Christmas. Today the temperature finally made it above zero, most of the roads are clear, and an increasing number of the pavements, and even in the garden the occasional thing is beginning to poke its head back up above the (now rock-hard) snow. Now there's just the small matter of the "severe winter storm" they're forecasting for tomorrow...





*Like Liz's house.
** As I recall there were extenuating circumstances: in a bizarre accident the dinner-lady in question had just inadvertently sliced off the tip of his finger while opening the gate onto the playing-field.

A Good Read?

One of the small perks of a job like mine is coming across books you'd never encounter otherwise, particularly those with weird and wonderful titles, and the last few weeks have been a particularly productive period in this respect. Usually I don't get to read enough of the book in question to establish what it's about, so, for instance, I never did get to find out what was so impossible about Babs the Impossible (1901) or who or what the "Nobbles" of Me and Nobbles (1908) was. Neither was I able to take the time to discover precisely what sort of climatic conditions the author might have had in mind when he entitled his 1944 book The Incredible Year: An Australian sees Europe in 'Adolf Hitler Weather'.

Sometimes, however, ignorance on the point of subject matter is to be preferred, as the book itself turns out to be nowhere near as interesting as the title might lead one to expected. Imagine my disappointment, for instance, when one of my all-time favourite eighteenth-century titles - The Coal-Heaver's Cousin Rescued from the Bats; and his Incomparable Cordials Recovered (1788) - turned out to be a rather dull religious tract and not a rollicking tale of derring-do at all. Likewise The Mental Accountant (also 1788) proved to be a self-help guide to doing long-division, rather than, as I'd hoped, an early novel about a young man driven to insanity by the exigencies of double-entry book-keeping.

One work which does sound as though it might be a good read, however is The Life and Adventures of Bampfylde-Moore Carew the noted Devonshire Stroller and Dog-Stealer (1745) which purports to be the autobiography of one 'Gypsie Carew'. Described by the Oxford DNB as 'Carew, Bampfylde-Moore (1693-1759), impostor', he was apparently the son of a Devonshire rector who ran away from home to take up a career in swindling and general blackguardry. At various times this included eloping with (and later abandoning) the daughter of a Newcastle apothecary (goodness knows how since his portrait suggests he was a remarkably ugly man with an even uglier dog - presumably stolen), being transported to Maryland as an 'idle vagrant', managing not to be press-ganged on the way back by pretending to have smallpox, being elected 'King or Chief of the Gypsies', and travelling the country with the Young Pretender.

Carew seems to have got away with quite a lot of his nefarious undertakings. Not so another unsavoury character I recently came across in Lloyd's Weekly London Newspaper for Sunday, February 27, 1848. W. Johnson, alias Montroe, alias 'Jim the Greek' and his accomplices J. Flower and J. Bunton were apparently involved in arranging and executing a number of burglaries in and around Woolwich. According to the newspaper, on this occasion they approached a Mr Duffill to see whether he would help them set up another job and the following (rather comical) exchange took place:

'Bunton said, "Would a thick one or two be convenient this cold weather?" Duffill said "I do not understand"- when Bunton rejoined, "Can you tumble?", meaning, understand, Duffill said no, and Bunton said, "Do you know of any one that has any dust?" Duffill said, "I know not what you mean."'

and who can blame him!

You'd have thought that this would have been enough to indicate to the gang that this Duffill chap wasn't perhaps a dyed-in-the-wool crook of their own caliber, but they apparently explained to him in words he could understand that they would "go regulars in" (i.e. give him a share in the proceeds from) any job he could put them up to. At which point Duffill agreed and then promptly went off and told the police, who arranged a set up and caught them in the act. When Flower's house was searched "skeleton keys and various burglarious instruments most ingeniously concealed, were found". And that, as they say, was that.

Now why don't you get crime reports like that in the papers these days?

A New Year's Revolution

Yet again the first day of the Christmas holidays was greeted in our house with the traditional cry - 'I don't feel very well'. Faced with the prospect of a half-day at work followed by the long drive to Manchester, C. manfully struggled out of bed looking like a wet rag and, insisting he would be fine, went downstairs and poured his coffee onto his breakfast cereal, at which point it was decided that maybe we'd go up the following day after all, when hopefully he'd be a bit better. By the next day he did indeed feel a bit better, and I felt a lot worse. So we passed Christmas Eve in the time-honoured fashion, listening to the Nine Lessons and Carols in heavy traffic on the M6 whilst I sucked cough lozenges and frantically knitted last minute Christmas presents, and Christmas morning found me with a festive tea-towel on my head humming Dink Donk Berrily on High into a steaming bowl of Vicks VapoRub.

In spite of this inauspicious start, however, Christmas itself was a very merry affair with two-thirds of the family gathered together to eat too much, drink too much, and wear silly paper hats (the remainder being condemned to an antipodean Christmas consisting of lying on the beach with temperatures in the high thirties centigrade, poor things). After some initial trepidation and a prolongued spell of chestnut-wrestling, we successfully cooked our goose (once we'd finally pursuaded it into the largest roasting tin we could find) and used the resulting fat to produce some very fine roast potatoes and (as a result of an impromptue game of hunt-the-table-mat) a small skating rink in the middle of the kitchen floor*.

Everyone seemed happy with their presents, though since we bought my parents a dishwasher and they gave us half a shed, not everything was actually wrapped up. My brother and his partner had gone to considerably trouble to wrap up our present from them, though we didn't have much trouble guessing what it was nevertheless (it's a large spade).


Getting it out of the wrapping was another matter, however. Alongside a lot of other lovely booty I also received a gratifyingly large number of exciting knitting-related presents, including the lovely gold-plated Harmony needles set from C.


The Christmas knitting was a bit of a wash-out however. My cunning plan to order yarn to arrive whilst C. was away at a conference so I could knit him a hat and scarf in secret fell at the first hurdle when it failed to arrive until the day after he came back. Abandoning all attempts at secrecy I decided to start with the scarf which was supposed to be made from Rowan Purelife organic wool (in colourway tannin), but so much of the dye came out that after simply casting on my hands looked like I'd been knitting with newspaper, so that went back into the basket to be experimented with at a later date.

Instead I turned to the hat, which had by now become two hats, since my mum had also requested one for my dad. His existing favoured headgear was one of those ribbed acrylic affairs that ought to be rolled at the bottom and worn as a sort of beanie with a big rolled brim, but my dad prefers to leave it unrolled and only pull it down as far as the tops of his ears, leaving the remainder standing up on the top of his head like a black woolly nipple and causing my mum great consternation, particularly when they have to go out in public together. So, all the way up the motorway I frantically plugged away at Turn a Square, but despite having got gauge and produced a very nearly finished hat by the time we reached our destination, it soon became apparent that even on C's capacious dome the thing looked like a pillowcase, so it had to be frogged and reknit on smaller needles. Neither was done in time for Christmas, but they did both get done over the "festive period", and seem to have been hits, in the recent cold weather, so all's well that ends well.


In fact, this Christmas knitting has followed the pattern of most of the autumn which has been a singularly unproductive period knitting-wise for me. I still have only one Mingus sock, and the Tangled Yoke, though it has edged forward a little in the last few days, has largely languished unattended. In part this was because I had to break off to make other things, such as the Felix cardigan and more recently large numbers of Christmas-card stockings.


However, overall my lack of progress has mostly been due to a rather different sort of WIP.

Between the middle of September and late November I was suffering terribly from what is commonly, and in my case completely erroneously, known as morning sickness. For me this struck virtually every day from about 5.30pm onwards, putting a serious crimp on my social life and turning me into what I recently saw described as a 'bog ostrich'.** As a result, instead of passing my evenings knitting, blogging and in various other gainful practices, I spent the majority of them lying on the bathroom floor. Mercifully, however, this has now finally passed and so normal knitting service should be resumed presently, though how long it will last is another question, since all being well, the major production of 2009 should be a little boy, due sometime in mid-May.

*It's a long story... Basically the table-mat was put under the roast potatoes when they were removed from the oven for stirring and then seemingly vanished. After much searching we all became convinced it had been put back into the oven with the potatoes, so my brother took them out again and held the tray in the air so that we could inspect the bottom of it. Only he didn't manage to keep it quite level... Needless to say the mat turned up later somewhere else but despite much scrubbing the kitchen floor retained its ice-like quality for the rest of the evening, being only slightly improved by the addition of several ounces of flour during a gravy-making escapade later on.

** A person who ends every evening with their head down the lavatory.

FFOs, FPOs, and FSOs

In the absence of anything more exciting to report, here are a couple of Finally Finished Objects, Finally Posted, and couple of Finally Started Objects too.

Firstly a Very Belated Baby Blanket for Katie and Will (and more to the point baby W).





This is a fairly simple crochet blanket in Patons 2ply Baby Pure Wool, but for all that I was quite pleased with it. I started off following a Sirdar pattern my mum bought years ago, but after the central panel decided I didn't like the stitch for the side panels and so modified it slightly. Despite being quite a straightforward crochet, however, it took me an absolute eternity to finish it, for which I am eternally embarrassed. It was supposed to take me two weeks and in the end it took more like six (plus a bit of time at the end to get round to blocking and posting it). But it has finally reached its destination at last, albeit somewhat later than its intended recipent.

Secondly a pair of Baby Moc-a-Socs for Iestyn. I love this pattern and have been meaning to make it for someone for ages. These didn't take very long and were great fun to knit (though I think I might make some mods the next time round to reduce the amount of seaming which I hate - not that there was exactly a lot of it in the first place).


And so to the Finally Started Objects. I've managed to get my train knitting back on track (haha) and have slowly but surely been making my way along a Mingus sock in Jitterbug velvet plum from my stash. I've had the yarn for absolutely ages but have been dithering over what to use it for. It has been earmarked for any number of pairs of socks in the past, but never made it as far a the needles before. However, I finally bit the bullet and it's working very nicely for Mingus: the stitch definition is good and the twisted stitch pattern shows up well.


There have so far only been two small flies in the ointment. The first materialized when in an attempt to be sensible I decided to divide the yarn in half before starting to knit. I carefully weighed and re-wound it into two balls, but didn't notice until after I'd cut it that one 'half' was rather larger that the other. It turns out that the the fact that I got the same weight when I weighed each ball actually reflected the fact that the scales were malfunctioning rather than that they weighed the same! The next few days should see whether I can actually make it to the toe of the first sock with the smaller 'half'. The second fly was the snapping of one of my 2.25mm Brittany needles whilst trying to execute a sssk on the train on the way home. However, as ever Liz came to the rescue and picked up another pack for me from Iknit a couple of days later, so I now have 10 2.25 dpns, which should be enough to get me to the end, even if the large number of ssks and k3togs the pattern involves means I arrive there in a shower of splinters.


And finally, I have succeeded in casting on for the Tangled Yoke, which is supposed to be my "home" project for the time being. This too got off to a bit of a bumpy start. Having supplemented my pre-stashed 4 balls of felted tweed with some more of a different dyelot in order to get enough for the project, extensive swatching proved beyond doubt that I would have to knit from two balls at once since the difference in the two lots was clearly visible. So I cast on and knit a row or so. Then I realised I'd cast on for the wrong size so I frogged and cast on again and knit a few more rows. Then I realised that at some point I'd become confused about which ball I was knitting with and in which direction and had started at the wrong end and with the wrong ball so that I now had wonky ribs. So I frogged again, cast on again, and knit a bit more. At the moment that's as far as it's got, but I'm hopeful that I'm over the worst. At least for the time being.