Ordre et beauté

Absolutely not a description of my life today; which went something like

• wake up looking like something from Shrek due to ludicrously swollen eyelid - remnant of something-or-other incurred during the folk festival which has decided to make its presence felt again; listen to splashing rain, decide to get bus rather than cycle-train-cycle; miss bus, which arrives early; go home and potter about for hour and a quarter until the bike ban no longer applies; cycle-train-cycle; arrive wet at work and discover first meeting started 35 minutes earlier; a new low for professionalism there, then...
• at lunchtime, go into town on employer-provided bus (no complaints there, certainly), pay in cheque, buy Optrex, attempt to get new watch strap in market (nope; watch/phone vendor replaced by T-shirt stall), attempt to find out why mobile no longer working (nope; Vodafone shop currently inhabited by workmen having lunch), buy copy of Knit Today (first issue*), go to usual uninspiring-but-quick pub for lunch, wait half an hour while reading Knit Today*, get refund for forgotten order, buy sandwich, go back to work
• go home via station, which has two broken-down trains clogging platforms, a fatality and broken points down the track, every train on the board cancelled at one stage and an "emergency service" for local stations provided, onto which the damp and huddled masses stream; but then the inevitable tacit commuter-leperdom-for-cyclists treatment prevails while I attempt to extricate my bicycle up the line... the scene at the home station, when the two people guarding the doors stand with their backs pressed against the 'open door' buttons staring into the middle distance, is particularly fine... you'd think they've been rehearsing... Tom Stoppard would have been proud.

*am not going to comment on Knit Today in the light of the rest of this; maybe I was just in a bad mood and it wasn't that bad. I'll have another look at it tomorrow.

So. Something much nicer. Last Saturday.

Jan and I set off, fired with Cultural Zeal, to go to the Tiffany at Somerset House. We started off at the British Library. The café at the BL has a lot to recommend it, if you're stuck in the Kings Cross/St Pancras area for any length of time. You don't need a BL card to get into it (or the bookshop), the sandwiches are good, it's quiet and civilised, and you get to stare at books from the Kings Library while you're at it. You can give, and open, presents in relative privacy and coo over them for a reasonable amount of time. And you can knit (Jan demonstrates)

and finish and blog socks.

Those are books from the Kings Library in the background, but Jan's photo is much better.

Anyway, les Baudelaire - basta! - they're finished, they're really lovely, I'd do them again no problem, they're easier than they look, and I wore them for the rest of the day (it was, frankly, not very warm on Saturday, and they sort of went with the rest of what I'd hesitate to classify as an ensemble)...

Obviously all that kulcheral proximity had worn us down; a simultaneous decision was made to ditch the plan and go to Loop because we'd not been there for a bit... I picked up the latest IK, a pair of purple 3.25mm Swallows to replace the one I snapped last year, an Addi for St Brigid and a skein of undyed Opal sock yarn because I belately realised I'd dyed up the one I offered as a prize in the Hanging Garden KAL. Phew. But got out of there without further temptation.

So that's the beauté part of this post; apart from this last one: EJ has already blogged the mouse; but here he is in his new habitat, surprisingly unfazed by surrounding cats... Bless. And as ever when I get something handmade, I end up picking him up and and just looking at him every so often... The urge to say 'Look, my friend made this for me!!!' on the bus on the way home from Ely was very strong, but I quelled it on the grounds that People Just Don't Understand.

Now. Ordre.

I'm trying. Here's The Stash. It fits into 12 large storage boxes (at the moment; I've rounded most of it up from around the house) and I'm now trying to bung it onto a spreadsheet... Most of it is odds and ends; I need to learn to crochet ripple stitches...