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.

Knitting and Not

Once again, it has been a ridiculously long time since my last post. In part this is because, for much of September at least, C. and I were off enjoying a long and luxurious holiday. I came back with grand plans of blogging it all in detail, but once back, a series of very busy weekends, and work, and various other more pressing things pushed it out of my mind, and somehow it never happened. For similar reasons my knitting has also been at something of a low ebb, and I haven't had much to report on that front either, but finally I thought I should devote my extra hour this weekend to catching up a bit, albeit in a slightly potted version.

So, the holiday... We started off, (like a large number of other rather more newsworthy people this summer) in Corfu. I hadn't been to Corfu before except to change ferries (well my mum tells me I had but I was about 3 at the time and don't remember it, so it doesn't really count). On reflection, arriving at 7am on a Sunday after an overnight flight when we couldn't check in until 1 might have been a mistake. It did give us the chance to look around the old town whilst it was quiet and empty, but by the time we'd spent 6 hours wandering around in the increasing heat we were wilting slightly. Our cunning plan only to sleep for an hour in order to avoid getting out of sync and not being able to sleep later also came to grief, as we returned to the hotel in the evening to find that the Greek Communist Party were holding some sort of festival in the park outside the window. Not that it kept us awake for very long, mind.


However, the following day proved to be much more successful. We knew that it was possible to cross from Corfu to Albania and take a day trip to the ancient site of Butrint, but we weren't quite sure how. At breakfast in the morning, though, we bumped into a chap who was working in Albania (though actually from Kidlington!), and who not only allowed us to share his taxi to the port (and blagged us onto the hydrofoil in spite of the fact that we hadn't got tickets in advance as we should have), but also put us in touch with a retired school teacher in Saranda, who, for a small consideration, hired a taxi-driver and acted as our guide for the day. As a result, we not only made it to Butrint,


but also to the Ottoman town (and UNESCO World Heritage Site) of Gjirokaster,


and most importantly for me, into the mountains along the Greek border to the village of Sotira, where both my dad's parents were born.


Driving in Albania was a bit of an experience, but the driver was very good and, since every car in Albania seems to be a Mercedes, it was accomplished in relative comfort (and with the temperature at 39 we were definitely glad of the air con). Perhaps the weirdest thing about the whole experience, though, was the landscape: incredibly high mountains either side of a completely flat plain, and hundreds and hundreds of concrete bunkers everywhere. Across the plain they were strung out in lines barely 100m apart (the lines of little white dots in this photo are all pillboxes).


The only downside to this packed schedule was that, with the boat back at 5pm we had to do everything at a bit of a run, with the result that we didn't really get to see anything in detail. We basically sprinted around Butrint and Gjirocaster before leaping back in the car and setting off down increasingly tiny roads to Sotira, which according to Vangel, the guide, is locally known as the village that only has sun for 6 hours a day even in the summer, because the mountains on either side are so high. Despite having quite an impressive church and school-house (both we were told built with money sent back by people who had left the village to work abroad) Sotira is tiny and almost entirely empty these days. The few locals who were around were very friendly, Greek-speaking and happy to talk to me, but unfortunately, the aforementioned mountains meant that when I texted my dad to tell him where we were going, his message telling me which relatives to ask after and where the house Papou used to live in was, only reached me as we cleared the mountains on leaving. Nevertheless, finally getting there was definitely the highlight of the holiday to me, and having discovered that it really wasn't all that hard, perhaps one day we can go back for a bit longer.


Back on Corfu we spent another couple of days trying to see a bit more of the island. Unfortunately we spent rather more time than we'd bargained for looking for the place we'd booked to stay on the Tuesday, until finally, having established that the contact phone number had been cut off, the fax number indicated it was in a different part of the island to where the address said it was, and no one in the area it was supposed to be had ever heard of it, we gave up and found somewhere else. We spent a fair bit of time exploring the villages up in the mountains most of which still seemed to be quiet and picturesque, with some lovely traditional buildings (a novelty for us since we're use to Zakynthos where the 1953 earthquake flattened pretty much anything earlier), but although the landscape around the coast was beautiful, the amount of development and tourism meant that I couldn't help finding myself continually thinking "it must have been so much nicer when mum and dad came 30-odd years ago". On the other hand as the 4-wheel drive hire car struggled to drag us up the (really quite impressive) Pantokratoras mountain I was quite glad that we weren't doing it, as my parents did, on an unmade road in a Wartburg estate with a 900cc 2-stroke engine and 5 people in the back! Not all change is necessarily for the worse.

Finally, having packed as much as possible into five days we hoped on a little jolly plane with propellers and flew down the Ionian, via Preveza and Kefalonia, to Zakynthos, where we spent a week and a bit at The House* doing the exact opposite - i.e. practically nothing. We pottered about doing a few odd gardening and diy jobs - putting up some guttering, planting some plants, and creating a compost bin out of an old water barrel (on my mum's insistance I tried to decorate it using some acrylic spray paint left over from some other job but the result looks rather like a floral dalek) - mostly, however, we went swimming twice a day and lay around reading and sleeping. Most enjoyable.


The new extension makes a big difference to the general aspect of The House, especially from the outside, though inside it is still a little on the "basic" side since the floors need retiling and the walls replastering. But at least this year the bathroom had both a door and a wall, which is better than the last time we were there, when rather weirdly it only had the door. We also got to take advantage of the "solar water heater" my brother had rigged up when he was there the month before, which meant warm showers after swimming for the first time ever. Sadly however, autumn arrived in the form of a Biblical-style deluge towards the end of the week and there was no longer enough sun to make it work, so we were once more reduced to begging warm showers from family friend Christina down the road. The cascading rain also washed away all my carefully planted seeds, rushed off the roof so fast that it completely bypassed the newly installed gutters, and came up through the floor in the back room having been successfully thwarted by the new roof and retaining wall from taking any of its more traditional routes into the house. Ho-hum.


The change in the weather did finally spur me to do some knitting though, since up to then the many projects I had brought with me had been languishing in my bag untouched, being altogether too woolly for handling in warm weather. Concentrated knitting in the last couple of days on Zakynthos, on the 6 hour bus journey to Athens, and on the flight on the way home allowed me finally to finish the Bluestockings for my mum, though not quite in time for her birthday.


So far, however, I'm ashamed to admit that that remains my last FO. At least my last knitted one. Part of the reason for not immediately starting something else is that, the weekend after we got back I went on a mosaic-making course and started making a name-plate for The House. The original plan was to complete it in the weekend, but it soon became apparent that that wasn't going to happen. As a result quite a lot of weekends and evenings were subsequently devoted to cutting and sticking tiny bits of tile. But I'm quite pleased with the result.


Since then I have been faffing about trying to decide what to make next and casting things on and then frogging them in a desultory manner. Hopefully sooner or later normal knitting services will be resumed. Must do better.

*For some reason, amongst our family, the small and (until recently at any rate) slightly decrepit building on Zakynthos where we tend to spend only a few weeks a year is generally known as 'The House', despite the fact that a) it is it much less like a house than any of the other houses that we actually live in all the time, and b) it already has a name, albeit one based on a gratuitous pun (see above).

Space, Time, and Probability

We have a slight problem with space in our house: it is a very small house and, in spite of the fact that there are only two of us, we have a lot of stuff. However, we also have a minor problem with time: we both work full time and so weekends tend to get eaten up by all sorts of dull but necessary activities like housework.

This weekend being a long weekend however, we should in theory have had ample time to do something about the space issue and still have a bit of relaxation. Specifically we decided that we would finally get round to boarding the loft, making extra storage space for some of the stuff currently residing in what is rather grandiosely known as "the study". This is something we've been meaning to do for absolutely ages, but somehow never got around to.

So the plan was as follows:

Saturday - go out and buy loft panels; board the loft; have a relaxing evening.
Sunday - (am) reorganise spare room shunting things which take up a lot of space but are hardly ever used (like my thesis) into the loft and creating lots of luxurious space; (pm) do various small jobs - C. to cut lawn, me to finish and block the "probably jumper" which I've been working on for ages.
Monday- go out for the day and do something nice and have dinner to celebrate my finally passing my driving test.

That was the theory. In practice it went more like this:

Saturday - Oversleep. Think about doing the loft but then decide that the weather is really quite nice and we should take advantage of it. Reschedule loft for the following day. Drive (with me at the wheel) to South Stoke just south of Bath, setting satnav to avoid motorways since I don't feel ready to attempt them just yet.

Satnav extracts revenge for the snubbing of its beloved motorways by sending me down several single track roads on 15% hills. Arrive white and shaking at destination. Have quite a pleasant 9 mile walk taking in part of the Foss Way, marred only slightly by a small amount of rain, being set upon by cows, and me falling into a ditch halfway round. Have the best pub food of the year at the Packhorse. Return home.

Sunday - Oversleep. Extract assorted detritus (our own and the previous occupier's) from loft, including mystery items 1


and 2

along with 7 vol. set of 1970s DIY manuals giving instructions on how to do everything from macrame to marquetry. Spend some time debating which of the fantastic bathroom designs to follow next time we redecorate.




Deposit assorted detritus (not including manuals which far too much fun to part with) at tip and drive to Abingdon to purchase loft boarding. Discover shop in question only has boarding for lofts with joists closer together than ours. Scour Abingdon for alternative boarding and draw a blank. Realise that it is now 3.30 and I am supposed to be meeting a friend at 5 to go to see the Garden Opera Company (arranged a month before). Revise plans for following day to include boarding the loft in the morning and various gardening/knitting tasks in the afternoon followed by slap-up dinner.

Monday - Wake up at 6. Decide it's too early to get up. Oversleep. Rush to Oxford and purchase appropriate boards then do excessively extravagant supermarket shop in preparation for gourmet bank holiday dinner later. Return home. C. disappears into loft; I decide I'll have to cut the grass myself as C won't have time to do it. C. comes out of loft to announce that the gap between the roof trusses isn't the same all the way along and boards will have to be cut to size. Realise have no C-clamps to hold boards onto cutting bench and it is now too late to go and buy any. Spend the rest of the afternoon impersonating a C-clamp by twisting into various bizarre contortions in order to hold bits of wood still while C saws through them with a handsaw having tried and discarded any number of promising-looking power tools. 6pm, still cutting; give up all hope of making complex dinner and decide to have simple baked fish instead. 7pm, second-to-last board; realise we've cut it upsidedown. Recut board with great difficulty since what is left is a funny shape and almost impossible to get a grip on without C. accidentally cutting my arm off. 9pm, loft is now covered in boards; everything else is covered in sawdust. Abandon all hope of dinner and set about clearing up. C. puts assorted detritus back in loft while I fail the basic IQ test which is "put the power tool back in the correctly shaped dent in the box". 10.30pm pizza and pink fizz for supper. Too tired to knit.

Where does the time go?

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....