Being Mrs C

Working in the rain

Sunday was another WWA working party. After his operation Mr C wasn't able to join me, but after a few days indoors I was looking forward to being outdoors and doing some physical work. It was chucking it down with rain, so there were only four of us there in the end - should I read anything in to the fact that it was four women braving the elements???

This week we were clearing out an area next to the bird hide on the edge of the butterfly garden. The plan is for this to be an area full of Michaelmas Daisies, but at the moment it's rather overgrown with various other plants and the soil is still full of rubble from when the area was used as a dumping ground. Despite the rain we made reasonably good progress though in a couple of hours as the before and after photos show. 

Before

After

The cuppa we had whilst sheltering in the bird hide after finishing our work was certainly very welcome (and nice and warm!)

London Bookshops

I love books and book shopping (just in case you haven;t already guessed from reading this blog!) There was a fantastic book related article in tonight's thelondonpaper detailing some of London's unique bookshops. I've written before about Daunt Books which is mentioned in this article, but mention is also made of Persephone Book's shop which I have been meaning to visit for ages (ever since reading about it on yarnstorm's blog). 

It's quite funny that when they recommend one book to buy in each store the one for Persephone is Miss Pettigrew which I loved when I read it. 

Time to plan some more book shopping, and maybe Christmas will make a good excuse!

Michael Palin's Diaries

When ever I go into town I can't help but go into the charity shops, just in case there's a bargain there with my name on it. I had to go into town on Saturday to pick up some more medication for Mr C. It was only supposed to be a quick trip so I limited myself to only popping into one charity shop, but I chose my favourite, the Scope shop in St Albans.

I'm so glad I did as I managed to pick up a copy of Michael Palin Diaries 1969-1979: The Python Years for a grand total of £6. I was thrilled. Both Mr C and I have been wanting to read this for ages - and now we can! The book's in fantastic condition with only a couple of small scratches on the dust jacket. What a perfect find. Really looking forward to reading this.

Treasure in my own home!

It's almost embarrassing to admit to this, but I've just found some books that I'd forgotten I owned!

A few years back I'd bought a load of Penguin Classics and the green and white Penguin Crime books at a local charity shop. I knew that I'd kept them all when Mr C and I moved house about four years ago, but couldn't remember seeing them since. The other day I pulled a travel guide off the shelf and realised that there was a whole second row of books behind it. Oh the feeling of excitement at that point!

I'm particularly looking forward to reading the crime fiction (especially Margery Allingham and Joesphine Tey) but all of them should keep me in reading material for a fair while. I've made a start on Jane Austen's  Emma. 

I'm not really sure how, but somehow I managed to get through my whole secondary school education here in the UK without ever reading any Jane Austen. It's almost shocking. Even more so when I now hear that my old school has named one of its boarding houses after her. I've since read Sense and Sensibility (and seen the film version) and Northanger Abbey and I have to say that I loved both of them. I'm finding Emma a bit hard going at the start, mainly though because it's so different to the last book I read. I'll let you know how I get on though.

Dream blanket?

I've been having some very strange dreams over the last few weeks. In each one Mr C and I are both old and sat in a cold room in what must obviously be our home. There aren't many possessions around, but I'm somehow charged with making the whole place feel more homely. I go out and buy things from the charity shop and make curtains for the window and find a little jug to put flowers on the table in, but in these dreams we're both sat there freezing cold in the evening listening to the radio.

Every time I've woken up from this dream I've felt the urgent need to somehow make a blanket to keep us both warm. When looking at what to take with me to the hospital to keep me busy I came across four balls of yarn in my stash that I've always been meaning to make some sort of a blanket with. When I saw them sitting there in a bag this time I just knew what I had to do.

The "design" is based loosely on one I found in a Rowan magazine. Quite simple in that you knit strips and then sew them together to form the final blanket. Most of the sections are simply stockinette stitch, but other blacks are made in basket stitch (which I hadn't done before, but looks lovely). The yarn is James C Brett's pure merino that I picked up at a closing down sale at a small yarn store in Retford about a year ago. I have now idea if I'e got enough yarn, but for some strange reason I don't seem to care about that at the moment!

I started knitting whilst sitting at the hospital with Mr C waiting for him to be taken down to the operating theatre. The basket stitch second section was started and progressed whilst sat nervously waiting whilst he was in theatre. The soft pink third section was started as I sat on the sofa with him yesterday afternoon watching WALL-E as I hoped that there wouldn't be too many funny bits as laughing causes him pain right now.

I'm not sure when the rest is going to be completed. There seems to be so much to do right now and time is flying past. There are certainly memories already attached to this blanket though. And interestingly I've not had that dream again since casting on. Strange.

The Liar - Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry's The Liar had been sitting on my bookshelf for a while before I picked it up to read last week. I bought it in a secondhand bookshop a few years back along with his other novel, The Hippopotamus, and whilst I got round to reading the latter straight away, the Liar never quite made it to the top of my reading list until now.

The Liar was Fry's first novel and many describe it as being semi-autobiographical; certainly the main character, Adrian Healey bears many Fry like characteristics. The book jumps around a bit, but we see Healey as a both a public school boy and whilst studying at St Matthews College, Cambridge. Interspersed with sections describing strange acts between items of clothing in Austria (if you read it you'll understand what I mean!).

Adrian's problem is that he lies. It's seen from quite an early age, but then once he gets to university the lies get greater and it's as if the distance between them and reality gets smaller, especially in Adrian's brian. No review of this book would be complete without mention of the descriptions of various homosexual experiences that Adrian has. His first school-boy love, Hugo Cartwright, crops up again when he is at university and some of the pain of Adrian's unrequited love is made painfully clear.

The significance of the items of clothing in Austria becomes very apparent once Adrian is pulled into a world of international espionage by his university tutor, Professor Donald Trefusis. Think Cambridge spies and experience at Bletchley Park and you're spot on.

Overall I have to say that I really enjoyed the Liar. It took a bit of getting in to at the start though, but I'm glad I didn't give up on it then. Also on my bookcase is a second-hand copy of Fry's autobiography, Moab is My Washpot which I really ought to get round to reading. Then at least I may be able to better understand just how much of the Liar is fiction, and how much fact.

Home and away

Apologies for the lack of posts over the last couple of days. Mr C has been in hospital for an operation and I've been busy being the dutiful wife.

It's amazing how tiring waiting and worrying can be. There's been quite a bit of knitting, reading, tv watching and attempts at crosswords to try and keep me busy whilst waiting around at the hospital.

The good news is that he's back home now. He's not very mobile, but at least he's feeling much better. Fingers crossed that he makes a full recovery over the next few weeks.

In the meantime normal service here should hopefully be resumed.

Festive sewing goodies

My mum's quite a star!

I was explaining to her on the phone the other evening some of my (ambitious) plans for making Christmas decorations. In particular trying to reproduce one that I'd seen in John Lewis, but couldn't face spending £5 on. I was describing to her the types of fabrics that I was going to go looking for at the weekend, only for her to say "oh, I think I have something like that in my stash". 

A couple of days later an e-mail arrived in my inbox telling me that she'd found some bits and pieces and was posting a little package down to me. I was thrilled when I came home from work the next day and found a jiffy bag containing the following (and some photocopied decoration making instructions) on the door mat.

It was like Christmas had come early. Mum's had a few more years that me to grown her fabric stash, but it's certainly of the size that I aspire to!

Jellyfish hat

 

Well I've finished the hat that I was aiming to produce as Christmas present using the Patons Baroque yarn that matched what my mother in law was using to make a scarf. I had to give up on the first pattern for the simple fact that I couldn't follow the pattern and after a couple of wedges was totally lost with a completely different number of rows on the needles to what I was supposed to have!

The yarn is pretty horrible to frog though and I ended up having to give up on the cast on row when taking it back as the fluffiness had just caused it all to be caught up so much that it was impossible to separate it again.

For the second attempt I went back to a pattern for a simple two by two rib hat that I've used several times from the Stitch 'n Bitch Handbook. This is a bit of a tried and tested pattern for me, but it was the first time that I had used it with non-plain yarn.

I'm not too sure what to think about the finished result. It certainly would function as a hat, but I'm not sure I like it. With the aquatic colours it resembles a jellyfish. When I tried it on for size Mr C said that it looked like the sort of thing that 1970s synchronised swimmers wore! 

It may be time to think again about what to make or buy for S as a Christmas present...

How to solve cryptic crosswords

Crosswords fascinate me, but I have to admit that I don't really know where to start when it comes to solving them. The regular arrangement of white and black boxes and initially nonsensical clues is like a secret language to those that are members of a special club.

On Saturday night Mr C and I caught the BBC 4 repeat of the Timeshift programme How to Solve Cryptic Crosswords and it attempted to give the viewer an insight into this special club. The different types of clues were demonstrated as we were taken through a crossword that had been created especially for the programme. It was very revealing, and most of the clues did seem to make sense once they were explained, but I have to admit that I'm not sure that I would have know where to start without someone taking me through them.

On my shelves here I do have a copy of How to Solve Cryptic Crosswords that Mr C bought me a few Christmases back, complete with a weeks worth of Times crosswords (and solutions) cut out of the newspaper at the time in an attempt to learn how to solve them. 

Time got the better of me back then, but maybe it's time to try again. I guess I might be buying a newspaper again soon.