Beach

A couple of weeks ago now, Princeling, his mum and I decided we should thumb our noses at the wind and rain and general signs of coming winter, and arranged to go to the beach.  It was a Sunday and by good fortune a window of quite nice weather opened briefly for us. Nevertheless, Tom and Molly weren't really up for slightly chilly messing about on the beach activity, so they stayed snuggled down on the sofa for a cosy Sunday afternoon, which is pretty much just how I found them a few hours later.

It was quite a little walk to get to the beach, but the boy didn't make too many bones about it, only mildly demurring that the beach might be 'trop windy' (anyone who says bilingual children don't mix up their languages has clearly not met the ones I've known). He's a good walker but as often with little kids it's the boredom factor that can be the problem, but once the sea was in sight he was off ahead down the steps,

'Hurry up!'

'How to amuse them today?'

There was long jump,

which his mum joined in.  I just took the photos.

Then there was timed running: see how long it takes you to get to that rock and back (the equivalent with an athletic six-year-old of throwing a stick for a big energetic dog)

On your marks...

get set...

Go!*

Which rock?

Some other people had a real big energetic dog, who was enjoying playing with seaweed,

we didn't try this with Princeling, though he picked up quite a lot of it, along with bits of driftwood, reed heads and other items of vegetation. Iso objected to the idea of bringing smelly seaside stuff back in the car, but we negotiated, held onto the driftwood ('que le bois?') but left the seaweed in the car park.

We scrambled on some rocks, for which I needed my hands free so didn't take any pictures, and we made seagull noises. A sand angel was made,

and there were smiles all round. We agreed we should try to do it more often, as you always do.

~

*Yes, I know it's glaringly obvious from the footwear clues that these photos were not really taken in sequence.

Tom's hot stuff

Well, I finally finished Tom's red Lang sock wool scarf.  It just went on and on; sometimes I was knitting with it wrapped round both our necks, and from time to time asked 'are we there yet?'  But he just kept replying 'no, make it longer!'.  I felt like Rex Harrison's pope Julius to Charlton Heston's Michelangelo, amended to

'When can I make an end?'
'When it is finished!'

At last I came to the final section of grey on the second skein (I love that word, wool and geese, two of the loveliest things the world has to offer), and if it were to end as it began that had to be it.  I washed and blocked it, hoping that would widen the rib a bit, which it did slightly but not very much, though it made it more supple and amenable to being stretched and opened out anyway. There was enough left to make a fringe, which took quite a while too.

then it had to be trimmed. After that, I wetted the fringe and tried Elizabeth Zimmerman's trick of whacking it very hard while wet on the edge of the sink.  This had the interesting effect of making all the separate fine strands curl and cling together into chunkier cords, probably in terror at such violence.

It really is absurdly long, but he seems pleased with it,

 the extra length, he says,

can always be wrapped around twice.

Anyway, while I knit, or put on tassels, he cooks.  Inspired by Rick Stein, it must be said, he is coming over all Indian flavoured.  This one was a great success, in my opinion:

I love curry, and I love mussels.  What could be better then, than curried mussels?

I'm not talking about the pathetic teaspoonful of curry powder the moules frîtes places stick in the poaching liquor and charge an extra euro for, which generally passes for curry and therefore daringly exotic in French terms (and often all shoved under the blanket heading of créole, whether from the French West Indies, Pondicherry or Africa), but a really well blended light curry sauce, with onion, garlic, chopped fresh tomatoes and ginger as well as a good dose of chilli and other freshly, and quite coarsely, ground spices, reduced and brought to high heat, then the mussels cooked in it.  Bloody delightful; some wedges of lime and slices of cucumber to freshen it up and some naan bread which I buy and freeze on the rare occasions I see them.  And beer, of course.

This one wasn't quite so photogenic, but tasted pretty good too.  Chicken, pullao rice and Bombay spiced potato (with mango chutney on the side).  He is also making proper ghee by clarifying, simmering and straining unsalted butter; this meal used rather a lot of it.  If we go on like this we'll both be needing great big scarves to cover our great big tummies.

In fact, studying more authentic cookbooks, it becomes apparent that a lot of real Indian food is in fact quite dry, as this was (though the ghee helped offset that...). Coming as we do from the land which (allegedly) invented chicken tikka massala, we find we rather like a bit of extra gravy.  There was just enough for me to have as leftovers for lunch the following day, and I took the liberty of adding some tomato passata and a drop of light cream, which worked very well, though I didn't tell him I'd done it till later.

Life is sweet.  And savoury.

Seven years, one thousand posts.

Well, here it is: today is the seventh anniversary of my first ever post here, and this is my one thousandth post.  It's been good.

I shall continue here, much as ever, though it must be said things have changed a bit.  In essence, blogging is still an important part of my life, but not quite as important as it has been.  It's easy to lament the changing times, blame Facebook, regret one's lost readership - or waning commentariat, in fact my stats and followers are still pretty much as good as ever they were - or apologise for one's own lack of motivation.   I know full well I simply don't put the effort into reading and commenting on other people's blogs or even replying to comments on mine; I've become a rather less sociable blogger, so I really can't grumble about anyone else's levels of attentiveness. Often I do still read, reflect on, am charmed, interested, (mildly)annoyed and generally enriched by what others have to say, but I don't end up responding to them in comments.  I don't know why I've lost the will to do so, I am sorry about that.  The corollary of this is that I'm really not so disappointed or depressed when I receive less response myself, which is surely no bad thing; I'm not sure one should be too reliant on strokes from others for one's moral and spiritual well-being - though be assured I always like the strokes very much!

I'm not sure that the Facebook explanation works as an explanation for a decline in blogging activity really.  When FB did their floatation thingy a year or two back I seem to remember a few pundits saying that it was in fact too late already: the fascination with sharing all of one's life on-line through that particular conduit was already in decline.  Many of my fellow bloggers, I know, largely eschew FB.  I do wonder, based purely on my own experience, if many of us just find that we've more or less shared and told most of what we want to share and tell and are now returning to our ordinary 'meat-world' (anyone remember that rather gross and dualistic expression?) lives, albeit enriched, enlightened and grateful for the people and things we've gained here.

Conversations are still clearly going on though, but perhaps I'm just not feeling so much like talking any more. And perhaps the knitting, in my case, expresses something of a need to return to something more concrete for a while. I do that reading back over one's own stuff thing quite a lot (bet you all do too!) and often get a touch of Jonathan Swift's 'Oh what a genius was on my when I wrote that!' feeling, which is a mixed pleasure, but it's still all there anyway.


For me, the discovery and sharing of photography was always one of the most important things about blogging, and I've really enjoyed that.  But while I'm sure I'll continue to take photos sometimes, of particular things or when I feel inclined, I no longer automatically pick up the camera anywhere and everywhere.  Occasionally I regret this, when something unexpected and serendipitous presents itself, but often I've a sense of being liberated from the necessity to document and make art of anything and everything, and of the time spent reviewing and editing images - though of course when I was more involved and interested in taking the photos, that wasn't a chore but an eagerly anticipated pleasure, nevertheless it was time consuming and difficult to keep up with.  Also, and seriously this is not fishing for compliments or self-pity, there is so much really excellent photography, from people with skills and equipment far beyond what I can acquire, that the excitement that came in with digital cameras initially, whereby everyone could produce quality images with little outlay or training, has inevitably faded somewhat; the world is awash with beautiful photos, it grows harder to add anything significant to that.

Yet, even early on, it occurred to me that one day I might find I was doing it without the camera, framing and seeing and appreciating the visual beauty everywhere without the need of a pictorial record, as I didn't before, and I think perhaps that is what has happened, to a point.  Likewise, I am seeing and appreciating the world generally better for the experience of blogging, without necessarily having to impose the demands, on myself or on others, of actually blogging about it.

However, as I said, I'm not stopping.  I think we all have to go on, or not, as we see fit.  The best blogs, to my mind, and many of them have been going quite a bit longer than I have, do so very largely for the blogger's own benefit, to record and reflect on the things which are important to them, without undue concern as to whether they are becoming repetitious or trivial, whether they're as good as they used to be, or even whether anyone else is paying attention.  I flatter myself in believing that some of my posts are quite useful or informative: there's still a kind of sporadic conversation going on on a four year old post between commenters, usually anonymous, who sailed on the Aztec Lady in their youth: every now and then someone is relieved to know they didn't imagine the existence of a chocolate spread called Nutch; lately a chap on holiday in this area told me he'd found  the post on the painted church at Morieux helpful, and the stats on the one about chestnuts indicate that I may still be forestalling people from eating conkers, or at least providing some diverting illustrations to Hopkins.  I try to describe the place where I live, and those I visit, in (English language) terms which I hope are appealing without being bland and rose-tinted.  I was gratified to see in the on-line visitors' book at Kerbiriou the names of a couple who I know had, by chance, used some of my blog as a guide to this area when they were staying at our friends' gîte a few years ago, which may have been coincidence but they may have followed a link from here.  I hope I can go on doing this kind of thing from time to time, and if the occasional poem still comes to me, I'll still post that as well. and who knows, things wax and wane in importance in life, I may find a renewed purpose here yet.

So, with much appreciation for all the friendship, kindness and encouragement, here's to the next seven.  I'll try to get round you all soon, and leave some comments!  I shan't be doing daily posting this November, as I've been posting pretty frequently lately anyway and have quite a bit of knitting to get done by Christmas.

Here are a few odd photos from the last Morlaix trip, which didn't quite fit anywhere else, just to finish on.

See you all soon.

Fire, rescue with quinces, Mashrou'Leila

1: The radiators are barely coming on yet but we feel chilly and damp.  The beginning of November justifies the first fire of the winter, and our day and our mood lift enormously.

2: B the German Doctor discreetly hints by e-mail that the Quiet American might like an excuse to take a breather from family responsibilities. An hour or two later he is on our doorstep with a box of quinces, and needs very little persuasion to sit by our fire for a little and talk about Indian food.  Grandchild worship is wearing a little thin, it seems; our house is quieter.  I don't quite know what I'm going to do with the quinces, but they are making the back extension smell very nice.

3: My recent, limited, forays into Arab indie music have also yielded Mashrou3Leila.  Lebanese, sometime students of the American University of Beirut, some boys and a girl, an openly gay lead singer, I don't understand what they're singing about, and it may be deceptively political and serious, but it seems fun and lively, and as a lover of aubergines, I couldn't but respond to this:

~

Hamburg parsley, epistemological exoticism, and a thousand colours

1: Hamburg parsley: a very poor germination of the seeds means I only have four plants to show for it, but I pulled one today and roasted it with some carrots and leek and an undersized and barely ripe butternut squash.  I've never eaten it before; it does indeed resemble, as Jane Grigson described it, 'an underprivileged parsnip', but the flavour and texture are not much like, and certainly more delicate.

2: My big brother Phil gave me a book he'd written when we met earlier in the month.  It's a GURPS role-playing game supplement on the subject of Atlantis. GURPS stands for Generic Universal Role Playing System, and in fact what big bro is best known for in this line is his collaboration with Terry Pratchett in creating the GURPS series for the Discworld books.  I am only a little the wiser as the the arcane nature of these activities, but I am already absorbed in the book, which is full of fascinating information on every possible aspect of the Lost City, from Plato through Madam Blavatsky and Jules Verne to modern submariners.  It's meticulously researched and delightfully, accessibly written, and it serves to remind me of  how we spent so much of our childhood, with Look and Learn comics and Jackdaw folders and wall charts and maps and bickering over knowing most about obscure things, and generally being pretty horrid little bookish know-it-alls, and how marvellously enriched our lives have been by it, even though neither of us, he by choice and I by aptitude or the lack of it, has ended up as conventional academics.

3: More knitting! The Lang Mille Colori I mentioned before, which Iso bought for me as a present when we had our knitting day out , I started making into a fairly narrow single rib scarf, along the lines of the famous Noro striped scarf as written down by the mighty Brooklyn Tweed.  However, and this wasn't my original idea but I can't remember whose it was so I can't credit it, instead of using two different self-striping yarns, I used two different ends of one colourway, so that instead of one end of the wool being at the start of the knitting and the other still embedded in the ball, both are left at the beginning and one runs out in a loop instead of an end, a topologically interesting proposition. Thus the broad fuzzy bands of colour are broken up into narrower stripes but only by other colours of the same wool.  I've no idea if this makes any sense at all, but this is the result:

(In fact at this point I'm using opposite ends of two different balls, but anyway, the principle is the same.) I've lately picked it up again since putting it aside in favour of other projects for other people with deadlines. I must say that knitting seems to be one of the only things I've ever taken up where I'm finishing things some time before the deadlines, which must be a good sign, though how long this situation will continue before I overreach myself I don't know.

Yarns and knitting are extraordinary for provoking memories and associations, particularly the colours involved.  The chalky hues in this wool put me in mind of a couple of ceramic items I came upon at a particular time in my life: a fragment of mediaeval floor tile preserved at Muchelney Abbey in Somerset, and a small pottery pendant in the shape of a leaping salmon, small and simply shaped but with a glaze of remarkable complexity, which I bought from a young woman on the street in Killarney.  I may one day revisit Muchelney, and even perhaps Killarney, I hope so, but the little fish pendant I left behind somewhere and won't see again.

Dinan, in search of lost glasses, bag wash.

Deadline cleaving as ever, though this one is entirely self-imposed so no one but I will give a monkey's if I make it or not anyway.  In order to reach exactly one thousand published posts in exactly seven years of blogging, I must now produce one a day for the next four days as of today.  So it's really a question of making myself sit down for a short time and come up with something, just like I did when I first started, only I think I can safely say I I will not be getting up at six in the morning, plugging in the dial-up connection, making tea, going for a walk round the block, reading the first volume of À la recherche du temps perdu etc before the connection was made and Blogger Dashboard, in its dear old chunky black and blue format appeared... ah, those were the days.

So, when daily blogging calls, and inspiration falters, what else is there to do but the time-honoured and always handy Three Beautiful Things! In my preferred format of two written items and an illustration.

1:  Tom is stir crazy from resting his Rabbits' Revenge twisted leg, and decides it's better enough to drive to Dinan and eat Indian.  The New Delhi is fairly new, and the menu is good enough to assuage our yearnings. The nan breads are especially good, the right balance of puffy and light yet still chewy and substantial, and they bring us a vindaloo strength sauce, savoury and tomato-ey, in a separate dish, so we can add it judiciously to taste.  I beg a stop at Fil de Lune, get an extra ball of one I've already got on the needles to be sure, and some sea-green bouclé on clearance which I'm not 100% sure about but think I can do something nice with. It's a glorious sunny day.

2: On the way we are passing through Moncontour to go to the bank and a large elderly man in a wheelchair is stuck in the middle of the road on a very steep hill, holding up the traffic.  We pull over, Tom goes to the bank, I join in the effort to push the man out of the road into a safe parking place in the sunshine until his carers can come and get him.  Much later, in Dinan, I realise I've lost my nice new reading glasses which were hanging round my neck in a case on a string.  Did they get caught up in the wheelchair?  Who knows.  I retrace as many steps as possible, including the site of the wheelchair episode, but without success.  I call in at the retraite where the man comes from.  The woman at the reception is so kind: 'Oh he's a pain,' she grumbles about the old man,' he's always going into town and he knows her can't get up the hill again.  And you were trying to help and now you've lost your glasses!' I add that I don't know for sure that it happened then.  She promises to ring me if they do show up, but I trail home drearily and without much hope.  Tom urges me not to wait around feeling rotten about it, ring the opticians in England now, get them replaced.  All the paperwork is still together, and I find a voucher with it for 50% off if I buy an extra pair.  A quick 'phone call to the always lovely, cheerful, helpful people at Specsavers in Bishops Stortford and the request is underway and an identical pair will be in the post shortly, for not much more than the cost of the Indian lunch. Till then, I've got the older ones, which are still OK.

3: Molly is smelling rather sousty.  'Put her in the bag wash!' says Tom.  The what?  But he can't really say what it was, it's an elusive childhood memory, his mother putting a bag of dirty clothes in an old push chair and it coming back all wet and crumpled, perhaps having been washed still in the bag.  Hooray for the internet! Not only was it confirmed that such things did take place, but there is a photographic work in the Tate Gallery collection about it:

It's by Nigel Henderson, there's more about it here.  But we won't send Molly off to the bag wash really.

A plethora of plump and pleasing pumpkins, and the why I greatly appreciate Lyse.

Getting on for a month ago now, we went to the festival couleurs d'automne at Coëtmieux.  The latter isn't a large place, in the countryside between St Brieuc and Lamballe, but this fête was really quite impressive: stalls and exhibitions and demonstrations of all kinds of things, this slideshow gives just  a taster, there were apples and mushrooms and wine and cider and arts and crafts, and lots and lots of plants.

This rather sinister fellow was to be seen watching us:

Despite all the lovely things there were to seen and despite having the camera with me, I wasn't much moved to take pictures, until we reached the pumpkin stand,

where all kinds of varieties of curcurbits were on offer,

warts and all.

I was especiallly impressed that so many varieties were on display so early in the season, when my small crop of butternut were still a callow pale green. 

I had just gathered a reasonable harvest of photos, turned round and found myself looking at Lyse, who was right behind me.  This was a surprise and a conincidence, as although she lives in Coëtmieux and we had communicated and knew the other would be there so were looking out for each other, there were so many people there I wasn't holding out much hope of seeing her.  We instantly fell to discussing everything very intensely, while Tom reappeared and shifted from foot to foot, rather lost. Happily he was wearing his Transfiguration Waistcoat which was thus available as an object of discussion, so his presence wasn't altogether redundant.  Monsieur Lyse remained in the shadows and was not to be seen on that occasion and we regretfully declined Lyse's kind invitation to return chez elle afterwards, since we were about done and had lunched rather well, and they were only just beginning on the afternoon. 

I greatly appreciate Lyse as a fellow blogger, not only because she knits and writes in Gallo and lives round here, but because she has become a very faithful reader here.  Although I have few other much valued French speaking visitors that I know of, mostly they are bilingual or polyglots, whereas Lyse's English,by her own account, is over fifty years old from school, and she painstakingly reads through my sloppy, idiomatic and demotic ramblings to get as much meaning as she can, then applies an on-line translator to it.

To try to get some inking of how difficult and opaque this must be, I decided to put a section of text from the middle of a recent post into Google's English to French translator, which even I could see was fairly bizarre, but just to get an impression how much so, I then put that French text back through the French to English function, and this is what resulted:

I wanted to knit in the storage cycle stitch (so it is actually a flattened tube), rather than a rib, but quickly abandoned the idea of the do in double underlined the needles as much too slow. I have tried to learn magic loop with a circular needle but has decided that I do not have the right to the circular needle and i do not have a lot of care for the practice of any way, too much tinkering with the needles and cables and not enough actual knitting. And then I hit the bold idea to take one of my incredibly cheap, bought-by-the-set directly from Hong Kong, the bamboo circular needles, of the reduction in the tubular plastic cable, forgetting the bonded connection section with a specialty of the knife, and discharged the shortened cable on it. Friction held easily in place, and the resulting needle was perfect for the job, i along whistling suite and continues to go there until I have more or less lack of wool. (The link above gives an overview of all of these terms, with the exception of my technical patent shortening of bamboo circulars, if you do not know already that I am going to speak about and care enough to know).

It has proved to be very long.

Bon courage, Lyse, et merci!

Arab a capella

Well, I was going to post some pictures of pumpkins from the lovely autumn fête at Coëtmieux where Lyse lives, but then I watched Euronews, and they showed some clips from this video, a version of Bob Marley's No Woman No Cry made relevant for a Saudi Arabian audience: No Woman No Drive.  I looked it up on Youtube, finding myself to be the one million, two hundred thousand-and-something-th person to do so (a couple of hundred thousand more have done so since, as I write).  It made me laugh quite a bit, but I also thought that the chap doing it had rather a lot of charm and talent.  He turns out to be Alaa Wardi (the Saudi ingénue character on the video is part of the spoof, though not many of the commenters there seemed to grasp this), and I spent the time I could have been editing pumpkin photos watching and listening to more of his videos.  He's Persian born, lives in Saudi Arabia, has studies and records in Jordan,and is very popular in India where his maternal uncle runs a restaurant. His music is a wide ranging mixture from Middle Eastern standards, Bollywood songs, soft western-style pop, even a Pink Floyd and a Radiohead cover, a tune played very cleverly, hilariously but also melodiously on Vimto bottles, (with a bonus video where you do this yourself) and his own compositions, some with backing musicians - his band, Hayajan and others, on one song his grandfather plays the violin - and singing in Arabic, English and Hindi, where it seems his diction and expression are remarkably good for a non-native speaker.

Best of all though, for me, are his a capella numbers.  I found it hard to choose between these to post here, but decided on this one because the song sounds lovely but also because of how it breaks down all the parts and shows him making all the sounds and voices, and the quirky names he gives them.

I have to say I was delightedly astonished that anything so joyous, humorous and life-affirming could come out of Saudi Arabia (be my guest to berate me for cultural prejudice), though judging by this one which has a refrain which the subtitles translate as 'for god's sake get me a visa before I go crazy' he might have reservations about the matter himself (it's hard to say, I think it might be another parody of a certain kind of traditional Arabic popular song, it sounds fairly deliberately awful).  There's also this very funny little animation where he introduces himself, telling his story and asking for support, since the independent, on-line route is really the only way for original people like him to make their way in the world. I should imagine he'll probably do all right now, I hope so.

So pumpkins will have to wait until tomorrow, that's if we have any power or any internet.  The storm and gale warnings are so dire for tonight that we've decided to sleep downstairs, where at least we won't hear quite so much of it.

Stripes, 3/3, Tom's scarf

Although I mostly avail myself of all the excellent free stuff on the internet, one of the unexpected joys I'm discovering about knitting  (yes, it's true, I do rather like knitting, did I not say?) is the literature of it.  I never knew!  Some of this comes across as rather smug lifestyle porn: produced from knitting cafés full of preposterously slim, glamorous people who seem to have nothing to do but sup on dainty cakes, practise yoga and pilates, hang about the edges of the film industry and create teeny-tiny bijou sweaters and jackets from sock wool (you have to be skinny and/or leisured ever to finish a sock-wool sweater that you can get into).  But the best of it, from the chatty, quirky, witty style of Elizabeth Zimmerman, who's like a really good, funny, enthusiastic blogger, giving a vivid impression of her unusual character and way of life, addressing the reader with irony and affect, quite unlike any other writing on this subject or probably any other of the period, to Nancy Bush's remarkable, scholarly, ethnographic travelogues, knitting books can be so much more than just collections of patterns.

One that I've enjoyed lately is called 'Knits Men Want' by Bruce Weinstein. As well as achieving what I regard as the almost technomagus-like feat of creating universal patterns so that you can knit the given garment for any size person in any yarn, by a kind of matrix whereby you cross-reference the number of stitches per inch with the measurements of the person concerned, he intersperses each of these with an essays and advice about what one needs to consider when knitting things for men.  He observed from his own knitting groups that women were frequently disappointed when presenting the men in their lives with lovingly made and, as they considered them, suitable gifts, only to have them unappreciated. So as a man himself and a knitter, he decided to address the situation.  The chapters have headings such as 'Rule 1:Men Can't Fake It', 'Rule 3: Men Sweat', 'Rule 5: Not All Men Are Worthy of Cashmere', 'Rule 10: When In Doubt, Make Him Something Basic', are very funny, and while somewhat hyperbolic at times, contain some useful and interesting observations.  

It has certainly made me appreciate what a good sport and loyal husband my Aussie brother was to wear the forget-me-not blue fluffy mohair sweater my sister-in-law made for him when he went on his long pilgrimage walk last year*, since other pieces of advice the writer gives, are to avoid itchy fibres ('men are babies') and stay with subdued colours ('think under the rainbow - most men want to live in Kansas, not Oz').  Bearing this in mind, when we went into the lovely wool shop in Morlaix, I picked out a nice flecky grey wool, possibly something from the soft underbelly of a yak or similar, and offered to make Tom a scarf.

'Bit dull,' he said 'what about this?'

and selected a ball of sock wool in glowing red, russet, grey and anthracite.  It was Lang Jawoll Magic degradé,  - shade no.85.0028, if you do follow the link.  In fact his initial choice was 85.0017, and it was I who demurred and suggested there was perhaps a little too much pink and purple in it for comfort, though to judge from our friends' account of spying two notable French icons of film and fashion in Paris lately, the men's department in Marks & Spencers on my England trip, and our lovely doctor's new pullover the other day, pink and purple are cool for men just now.

The photo doesn't really do the colours justice, indeed neither does the colour chart in the link, it really is very rich and does glow like embers.  Another of Bruce's counsels is not to make scarves for men too long, but Tom says that one skein's worth isn't enough, he envied his granddaughter her long scarf, and would like this one well wide enough easily to loop round double, and as the 4 x 4 rib makes it a bit narrow, that's just as well.  And as it's sock wool, this makes it something of a work of patience, so I doubt he'll get it before Christmas, as I still need to have more than one thing on the go at once to avoid boredom. But since it's still very mild, and as he's not going for walks much since he stepped in a rabbit hole and twisted his knee (poetic justice perhaps after all the cursing of bunnies he did when they were coming into the garden earlier in the year?), that doesn't matter much either.

I promise, no more knitting for at least one more post...

* though in fact it was reported that this made him something of a 'cuddle magnet', in our other brother's words; women who were complete strangers came up to him at bars and hostelries and snuggled up to him, or at least to his jumper.

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.