Vivid stripes; 2/3

So much for yellow and black, this one I dubbed 'delphiniums blue and geraniums red'.  The blue wool was repurposed, as I explained earlier, and enlivened by the addition of the red stripe.

I sent it to Clémence and Ralph's baby Owen, and here he is in it:

Owen is eighteen months old, I've only met him once and he was cold and hungry and a bit fed-up and not quite one year old, so he probably doesn't remember.  He lives in Scotland with his parents who are a doctor and a professor at Aberdeen university, though they've been living in Norway for the last year because of his dad's particular line of work* and he's probably more likely to grow up on Norse sagas and Apollinaire than Harry Potter or even AA Milne, though I have put in a word for Noggin the Nog. His mum tells me that he likes his slipover very much, which she calls his 'tub' which I've not heard before in that context but must be a French word for such a garment.  When it arrived he laughed and put it on his head, which is a sign of approval, and he loves bright colours and vivid stripes generally, I'm told; he's enamoured of flowers and autumn leaves, and goes to sleep holding them, and sometimes cuddles the jumper when he's tired too, which I take as a great compliment.

Clemence came originally from St Brieuc, where her family still live, and she wrote her doctoral thesis on Heather's work, which was my initial connection to her.  We correspond quite often, and she can be deceptively humouring me with chit-chat about baking brownies, knitting, yoga, Radio 4 and such like and then she'll casually throw in a phrase like 'epistemological exoticism' and I remember this is a completely bilingual French academic and intellectual of remarkably tender years (early thirties is tender years from where I'm standing) that I'm dealing with, and I get a bit star-struck and over-awed.  Happily she's also a fiercely sincere and lovely person.  

I'm impressed enough that she can do all the things she does and colour co-ordinate her baby's clothes so beautifully on demand.

* one of the several books he's written - Ralph, not Owen, give him a year or two - is a translation of with introduction to Icelandic histories and romances, which is on my Christmas list.