H is for... Hove; and Human kindness

I still need to tell you about the other bits of Knit Nation and Fibre-East, and the Knitted Maze at Saffron Walden; but while this is still fresh in my mind and I'm making the pics available for Hove Daily Photo; What I Did on My Holidays.


Wibbo and I had an absolutely lovely day at the cricket at the Sussex County Cricket Ground at Hove on September 1 - watching Durham bowl out the home team and then have a bit of a bat themselves. We were at the second day of a 4-day match (which Durham won. Yay. Yes, I'm partisan; Durham's Riverside/Emirates ground is about 5 minutes' walk from my old primary school and less than 15 mins from my parents' house... But ahem. Hove.)


Not knowing what we were doing, we walked right round the ground (the entrance is near the block of flats to the left) and sat ourselves at ground level. (Sadly, there isn't a corresponding JETS stand at the other side of the stadium but that's because the local T20 team is the Sharks.) This was actually lovely - very peaceful, and a couple of sections' seating was in blue-and-white deckchairs - and we absorbed much additional cricket knowledge via the chaps (and they were mostly chaps) in front and behind us.

At lunchtime, the spectators occupied the outfield, and whacked tennis-balls about. Hugely encouraging number of boys and girls, mums and dads with bats and balls. I understand this is pretty standard practice, and it must be a huge encouragement to want to play on the ground...

And proof it's never too soon to start.

In the afternoon, we moved to the SHARKS stand; which turned out to be only marginally less atmospheric but a much, much better way to watch play. And to observe favourites as they fielded on the boundary.

Paul Collingwood!

Monty Panesar!

Callum Thorp signing autographs! This was a feature of all the boundary fielders - the Durham ones were slightly mobbed but then of course they would be; presumably the keen kids have all the Sussex ones already...

There were seagulls...

There was knitting...
And there was a somewhat inevitable seagull-on-knitting incident. Suffice to say this project is registered on Ravelry as the Seagull Poo Socks.

It was a lovely day and I hope we'll do it again.

In fact, it's only posting this which reminds me it took five hours to get home afterwards due to some mindless wazzock wandering about on the lines at Thornton Heath. Scenes at Victoria, after I staggered off the train nearly 2 hours late, were insane; one woman screaming "this is just unacceptable!" in a cut-glass accent, over and over and over again, as I tried to get through the throngs of people hurling themselves against the barriers... OK, she was obviously a bit of a Special Snowflake; but I hope Mr Anonymous Trespasser was happy with his evening's work.

Otherwise, though, my faith in human nature is currently at a bit of a high. I managed to lose a very lovely knitting bag on a train the Friday I started my week's holiday, complete with Jan's half-finished birthday present (I should say this was a second attempt, the first having come out too small despite blocking), several Addi needles and my little toolkit box; and reclaimed it the following Friday after understated heroics from the lost property chap at Cambridge station.


And then on the train between Brighton and Hove on the intervening Wednesday, I texted Jan and then promptly left my phone on the seat - it was retrieved by the conductor and we collected it at Brighton station that evening before knitting due to Brighton station being really sensible and texting Jan with the information on where it could be collected... Finally (I thought), I bought a fantastic bargain pair of purple suede Hotter boots while in Norwich with Rosie and due to a moment of extreme excitement in a second-hand bookshop, left them there. An hour later, I got those back, too.


I thought that was the end of it. However, sometime between Tuesday night and Wednesday morning the Bug went missing, and turned up finally lateish on Friday night just before I started printing flyers; and on Thursday afternoon I had a meeting with a colleague, after which she left her knitting bag in a public area, and retrieved it on her way home...


I know there's some horrible stuff out there. I've travelled through areas hit by the riots and there are some mindless thugs around; I listen to the news. But sometimes you just need a reminder that most people are honest and kind, and I've had that over the last couple of weeks.

G is for... Gothenburg; or Knit Nation Part the First

So... it's been a while since I posted anything but book reviews. Which is not to say knitting, travelling, spinning, working, etc. etc. hasn't happened; but somehow there just hasn't been time to note anything down.

However; after the recent trouble and violence in London, I thought I'd bring you some of the wonderful London weekend which was Knit Nation 2011. For me, the weekend started on the Thursday evening, with a trip to the National Portrait Gallery, a meal at Rossopomodoro and most importantly a chance to introduce two friends, who previously knew each other online but hadn't met. Franklin and Gavin are both knitters and leading lights of the Archers group on Ravelry. (That's a packet of Duchy Originals shortbread with them; you had to be listening to the Archers in January or February, otherwise it's a long and pointless story)...

After an even earlier start than usual on the Friday morning, I got to the reception desk with SarahAbroad and signed up for all my classes. All very smooth and efficient - thanks, Jaq!

The first full-day class was the Gothenburg connection - Bohus Stickning, with Susanna Hansson who was a superb teacher. Bohuslan, the area where the knitting was done, is north of Gothenburg. What I liked was that the focus was very much on the social justice element of the Bohus project, and also the emphasis that this is not folk knitting, but a completely new style of couture knitting which was intended to compete with the likes of Ralph Lauren and Nina Ricci in the post-war period. Garments commanded very high prices, and knitters were paid enough that in some families, the balance of financial power was shifted from the man to the woman of the household which caused some contention.

Meanwhile, while listening and looking at slides, we started knitting wristlets in the Blue Shimmer pattern. The yarn is lovely to work with - you could really feel the angora content and it was incredibly warm.

In the second half of the day, Susannah spread out the wonderful collection of Bohus garments she'd brought with her, and we all looked, touched (with gloves, of course!) and photographed. What I love is both the colour combinations, and the way these interact with the texture in Bohus (which includes purl stitches on the front of the work, unusual for colourwork), and the gently felting angora content, to produce a wonderful blur of colour...

Susannah explained the construction (no steeks, seamed, cardigans worked back and forth in 20th century style, not the traditional cut-and-edge style in Fair Isle knitting, small couture-type buttons).

We had a show and tell at the end - lots of wristlets. Mine are destined to become the cuffs for a pair of gloves, probably fingerless. One was completed later that day, the other is underway again after a bit of a break for other projects!

One of the best things about the charity Bingo night on the Saturday is that one of my classmates won a fabulous Bohus kit, which was a fabulous coincidence given the numbers of people playing on the evening - congratulations, Elaine!!

More from Knit Nation, Fibre-East and another event soon - I'm on holiday this week so may have more time to sort out photos...

2011 books, #66-70

The Blackstone key, by Rose Melikan [audiobook]. Read by Jane Collinwood. Rearsby, Leics.: W F Howes, 2008.

In 1795, Mary Finch sets off from Cambridge to the Suffolk coast to visit her wealthy uncle and end a family estrangement. However on the way she encounters a man dying after a coach accident who is carrying a watch very similar to one she inherited from her father, and with her uncle's initials. On arriving at White Ladies, the uncle's estate, she finds her uncle has died. The plot turns to intrigue, the Napoleonic wars, contraband and espionage, and rattles along very nicely. I'm not a great fan of historical novels, but this one doesn't overdo the period details while making it clear that this is a very different world.

Body work, by Sara Paretsky. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2010.

Another extremely good VI Warshawski novel. I like the way Paretsky is allowing VI to age naturally - although her instincts are still to go and tackle the bad guys, she's also extremely aware she's not in her thirties any more! This time she also has a grown-up niece to contend with, and a client accused of murdering a young woman outside a nightclub. There's also a strange elusive character called the Body Artist who performs naked onstage and allows people to paint her (possibly the least convincing part of the setup, but vital for the dénouement). Despite the unlikeliness of one or two elements of the plot, Paretsky's writing makes this very difficult to put down.

The Oxford murders, by Guillermo Martínez. New York: Penguin, 2006.

This was a present from a friend in Toronto; a quick, fascinating read. A visiting Argentine postgraduate mathematician finds his landlady murdered in her Oxford living room - the landlady is a former Bletchley Park employee, and a note sent to one of her friends, also a mathematician, indicates that this is the first death in a series. There are some good twists and turns along the way, and some very surprising reversals towards the end, which make this a little gem of a novel.

Bones of betrayal, by Jefferson Bass. London: Quercus, 2009.

A new-to-me author although I've seen these on the shelves in libraries a few times, and will have to see what we have in the village library. In fact, not a single author - it seems that the books are largely written by Jon Jefferson but from information provided by Dr Bill Bass, a forensic anthropologist who runs a facility called the Body Farm depicted in the novels, where studies in decomposition are carried out. In this book, the body of an elderly nuclear scientist is found in a frozen pond; the cause of death, a pellet of iridium-192 found in his gut, puts everyone in the autopsy room in danger of death and makes the pathologist carrying out the autopsy critically ill. Trying to discover how and why the scientist was murdered leads to another body, and into the history of the Manhattan Project and the Oak Ridge Nuclear Laboratory, along with discussion of the ethics of nuclear bomb research. Very well written, and the subject matter is fascinating; you do care very much about the characters by the end, too.

The bone thief, by Jefferson Bass. London: Quercus, 2010.

The previous book was one with the first chapter or two of the next book at the back, so as this was a two-pack of books (thanks, Wibbo! I'll bring them down when I next see you!) I went straight on with it; particularly as one of the more important human-interest elements of the previous book was left in limbo! This one takes up six weeks later when the characters are still dealing with the damage caused by the radiation leak. However, a routine job - the exhumation of a body to obtain a DNA sample for a paternity suit - turns into a mystery when it appears that the body's limbs have all been removed prior to death. Later, a woman dies of a virulent infection when she is given a piece of contaminated bone in a spinal fusion operation. Brockton is recruited by the FBI to investigate the world of black market body parts, and put in touch with sleazy Ray Sinclair. Meanwhile Glen Faust, R&D director of a medical technology company, is also interested in the Body Farm's work, donating a CT scanner and research funding. Because of the secrecy involved, Brockton can tell nobody, and realises he is risking his professional career, the respect of his colleagues, and perhaps his life. Again, very tautly-plotted, and written with a great deal of humour.

2011 books, #61-65

This body of death, by Elizabeth George. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2010.

In contrast with the Kate Atkinson, this intertwining of improbably coincidental stories is, in the end, just annoying. I keep reading because I like Barbara Havers; there's just enough Havers in this one to keep me going, but I can understand why this one has provoked exasperation in Elizabeth George's fans. There's a parallel narrative which is allowed massively too much space and detail for the eventual connection, and a very unsympathetic senior female police officer as a major character. I ploughed through this one but never warmed to it.

Harry Potter and the deathly hallows, by J. K. Rowling [audiobook]. Read by Stephen Fry. London: Bloomsbury, 2007.

A re-read (or first listen) in preparation for seeing the film, as I'd largely forgotten what had happened in the first half of the book/seventh film! Fry's reading is, as ever, masterful, and the book definitely bears re-reading.

Mortal remains, by Kathy Reichs. London: Heinemann, 2010.

Tempe Brennan is called to the scene of a death which looks like autoerotic asphyxiation; the problem? the victim supposedly died in Vietnam in the late 1960s. The father of the Vietnam war soldier refuses to accept the DNA results, and the story is complicated further when other unidentified bodies turn up, some unclaimed Vietnam casualties and some in the present day, mauled by sharks off Hawaii. While I enjoyed this one - Reichs has wry moments which keep you reading - I had two problems with it. The first is (the Ellery Queen Problem) that at least part of the eventual dénouement does depend on medical knowledge which hasn't been exposed to the reader before this, so there's a slightly "not fair" element. The second is that there seems to be a rule that Forensic Examiners Have At Least One Irritating Female Relative or Nearly-Relative, and this one is played out to an annoying extent here.

Angel with two faces, by Nicola Upson [audiobook]. Read by Sandra Duncan. Rearsby, Leics.: W F Howes, [n.d.]

The second of Upson's Josephine Tey novels; this one set in Cornwall at the family home of Tey's friend Archie Penrose. Penrose is also an inspector at Scotland Yard, which comes in handy when he returns home for the funeral of a friend, only to find that there are suspicious elements to the death. Somehow this one doesn't work quite as well as the previous novel, partly perhaps because both Tey and Penrose are outsiders in a tight-knit community so some of the opportunities for extracting information are somewhat forced. However, the style is still very much Golden Age writing, and the reading here is extremely good.

Body line, by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles. London: Severn House, 2010.

It's a Bill Slider; really, no extra comment needed. Puns, Porson's malapropisms and general bad jokes and wordplay abound, alongside a tightly-written, compelling plot. A supposedly very successful, wealthy, womanising doctor is murdered in his flat, but as Slider, Atherton and the wonderful DC Connolly investigate, the facts seem to slip increasingly through their fingers. One of the things I love about these books is that Slider now has a happy, successful home life, friends, and family. My only peeve is that there must have been something in the water a couple of years ago - the business behind the crime being committed seems to have been used by several crime writers published in 2009/2010 (I wonder if there was a pub session at the Harrogate Crime Writers' festival!) - I'm sure "oh, no, not again" wasn't the reaction Harrod-Eagles was going for. Still totally worth reading, though.

2011 books, #56-60

The God of the hive, by Laurie R. King. London: Allison and Busby, 2010.

This follows on immediately from The language of bees - it's almost like one novel chopped in two. Another tremendous thriller, with a wonderful character in Robert Goodman.

One of our Thursdays is missing, by Jasper Fforde. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2011.

I didn't enjoy this one as much as I was expecting - somehow, it's got even more meta-meta-textual and has sort of disappeared in a puff of its own cleverness. I haven't been in the "all these novels are the same" camp, so Fforde trying something different with the Thursday series wasn't entirely welcome... There are a couple of very good one-liners though - the idea of giving advice on how to deal with "Robert Pestons in the wainscotting" was funny.

Shark music, by Carol O'Connell [audiobook]. Read by Regina Reagan. Oxford: Isis, 2007.

This was a good sound thriller which plodded along quite nicely - but to be honest, if it hadn't been a reasonably decent reader, I wouldn't have carried on with it. I don't find Kathy Mallory particularly appealing or convincing as a main character, and it should have been more tightly edited to shorten it considerably. I'd try another of this authors on audiobook with another good reader before I give up on the series though.

Memorial day, by Vince Flynn. London: Simon and Schuster, 2005.

Another in the Mitch Rapp series; this one takes a sharp and somewhat unpleasant turn into the post-USA PATRIOT Act world. Previously we've seen Rapp as an assassin but a man with a strict code of honour - here, working for the CIA, he's both involved in, and keen to justify, torture as a means to an end.

Started early, took my dog, by Kate Atkinson [audiobook]. Read by Nicholas Bell. Rearsby, Leics.: WF Howes, 2010.

A Jackson Brodie book, set in Yorkshire where Brodie is investigating the background of Hope McMaster, a New Zealander trying to trace her birth-parents. At the same time, a middle-aged security guard and ex-policewoman buys a child from its uncaring mother in the street. Stories become intertwined, sometimes slightly implausibly so, but as with Atkinson's earlier books, a series of disparate characters whose lives should be entirely separate are brought together by fate. I found the very ending slightly disappointing, but definitely worth going along for the ride.

(Just an aside here, caught up with the television version of earlier books in the series on iPlayer, and although Jason Isaacs wouldn't have been in the frame for Brodie in my imagination, I thought he did an extremely good job; I have to admit to being a longstanding Isaacs fan. I was disappointed with the Edinburgh setting for the first one, as Atkinson did such a brilliant job with Cambridge geography in Case histories.)

2011 books, #51-55

The jury must die, by Carol O'Connell [audiobook]. Read by Cristine McMurdo-Wallis. Rearsby, Leics.: W F Howes, 2005.

I got about half a disk into this and realised I'd had it out of the library before, remembered all the characters - but then had no idea what happened in the end! I'm hoping it was one I couldn't renew and had to return unfinished! I gather this one is also known as Dead famous in the US. There are some fascinating characters in this, including Johanna Apollo, a psychiatrist and hunchback, in witness protection since she was part of a jury which found a radio shock-jock not guilty for a crime he almost certainly committed, and since the jury members began being systematically murdered.

South: the story of Shackleton's 1914-1917 expedition by Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton. Kindle edition.

This is a completely fascinating and frequently quite gruesome account of Shackleton's ultimately failed journey to the Antarctic, frostbite and all. Although not one you're likely to want to read while you're eating - too much mention of eating partially-cooked seal blubber for that... Shackleton first covers the part of the expedition he was on, including the loss of the Endurance to the ice, and then takes his men's accounts of the other aspects of the expedition (there was the exploring party, and another party at the other side of Antarctica charged with providing supplies for the exploring party when they got to their goal). The first part of the book is absolutely riveting, as the climate ultimately becomes the winner and the goal becomes survival. However, Shackleton is unstinting in criticism of the landing party at the other side, who waited much longer to be rescued and lost three men - you do get the impression that he's unwilling to give the credit for good management to anyone else. There's a great deal of pathos, too, in the fact that when the explorers finally reach land in South Georgia in late 1916, they want to know who has won the war, and have no clue that it's still going on; and also in the fact that they all signed up, and lost as many men in the last year and a half of the war as they did in three years of endurance on the ice.

I went for the free Kindle edition, but there are many of these at different prices - I'm assuming the more expensive ones have maps.

The darkness of bones, by Sam Millar. Kindle edition.

Sometimes you get a book which is just awful on many levels. I kept on with this with a sense of horrified fascination. It purports to be set in Northern Ireland (and is based on a child sex scandal there) but apart from mentions of Dublin, Belfast and so on, it may as well be set in Joe Pickett's Wyoming or Charlie Parker's Maine woods. The spelling veers wildly between British and US usage - "the colour of the center", for instance - and there are some quite weird malapropisms - "voyageur" for "voyeur" - and many uses of homophones (the usuals, reign/rein, breaks/brakes, tire/tyre but also some bizarre ones like begin/begging). The plot is also pretty distasteful with a lot of badly-written graphic violence which seems to be included for effect, and no sympathetic characters. Not recommended. I would say 'you get what you pay for, and it was only 70p' but actually, you usually get an awful lot more than you pay for!

Silver, by Steven Savile. [S.l.]: Bad Press, 2011. Kindle edition.

This, on the other hand, was 70p extremely well spent!

Thirteen people burn themselves to death simultaneously in public squares across the world, while announcing forty days and nights of plague and terror on the world. Shortly afterwards in Berlin, there's a sarin attack on the underground. The shadowy Ogmios unit, an ultra-secret Special Ops team, go in pursuit of the Disciples of Judas, who have declared war on the West. The action concentrates on Berlin and Rome, with a very nicely- (and geographically-accurately)-written short episode in Newcastle. Highly recommended to anyone who would have liked The Da Vinci code to have been written with skill and imagination. The heresy at the heart of this one is original and fascinating, unlike the tired old "sensation" Dan Brown doled out, and the writing is taut and well-crafted with some interesting and likeable characters. Oh, and the word "symbology" isn't mentioned once...

Brooklyn, by Colm Tóibín. London: Penguin 2009.

A Kniterati book - not one I'd have picked up otherwise, but this time that's not necessarily a good thing. Eilis, an innocent in her early 20s, leaves her home in Ireland for a job in New York organised by a friendly priest. It's a fascinating look into New York in the 1950s, and a window into a different world of constraint, and standards of behaviour, and so on - ultimately I didn't enjoy it because the great "choice" Eilis has to make is largely determined for her - she's almost a cypher, and a bystander in her own life.

E is for... many things; and F is for Feast

Well, bizarrely enough, the theme for this year's Feast was "E is for..." So I'm combining two letters here... If I'd kept up with the programme, Saturday would have been J and I'd have gone for "Jolly", which would also have worked.

So, it all started: the view from outside my front door on Friday night at about 8pm... The Bug was unimpressed. [Quick Amelia update: vet was very pleased on Saturday morning, and she can now go out, which she's loving. I loved it slightly less yesterday afternoon when she came in, leapt up onto the table and plonked her wet self down on my inkjet-printed, rather complicated, knitting pattern...]

I am a veteran. I know this is the Thomas the Tank Engine Train, as ever; while I'd rather the commercial stalls were elsewhere on the Green because of the canned music, my nephew is a Thomas fanatic so these days, I think of him while they're unpacking it...

The next morning at 9:30am when I started over to find the stall I was volunteering on, the Es were in evidence. The English Country Gardenists were next to the school's Ecowarriors

We were unthemed, sadly; but as our main organiser was told to rest up about 10 days beforehand, getting a stand together was OK in and of itself...

Now. Nothing says "Feast" like "construction of temporary bridge". At least, it doesn't in our village. We have enough 39 Engineer Regiment at home, after Iraq and Afghanistan, to do this sort of thing. Here they are delivering the equipment.

And here's the guy who drew the short straw and had to guard it all over the afternoon...

He wasn't armed or anything, and I'd have loved to have seen the people who dared to steal several tons of military equipment in front of a thousand or so people including large numbers of Army personnel, but there was probably some sort of Elf and Safety ruling which meant that if someone tried to make off with the odd huge chunk of steel and dropped it on his/her foot... (I'm actually a big fan of people not being killed at work, having been a H&S rep in my previous job and a fire marshal in this one, but the risk assessment form does seem to have gone over the top this year!)

I don't have pictures of the bridge construction, or the children running up and down and all around it afterwards; I was helping to pack our stuff away at the time. But I've seen it all done once before, and I saw bits of it this time; and my God, they're good. I realised they're trained for it, and they're meant to be some of the best in the world; but about a dozen of them take all that stuff and make a working bridge which will carry a tank in almost exactly 10 minutes flat. It's astonishing.

This year, there were also Interesting Animals. (Not saying that the Dog Obedience in previous years was dull... well, yes, I am.) The library stand was right next to a little cage of meerkats. A couple of times, stroking of meerkats happened.

Snakes were also present. I couldn't quite believe the colour (and size) of this one. (Yes, it is real.)

Dragging us back into the Usual, Waterbeach Brass played, and I knitted... it was lovely. Lots of people commented on the knitting. I should have had a little placard for WWKIPD, but I didn't.

Then there was the parade... This year, instead of the Arco Iris Samba Band, we had a Cadets band - pipe and drum band. The uniforms were certainly impressive. There was a short embarrassing pause as this lot, followed by most of the children in the village, confronted the number 9 bus to March at the corner. (The number 9 bus lost.)

There were Rangers, being an Everest expedition. (I hope that if they ever do make the trip, someone points out that shorts might not be quite the thing, but some of them had an impressive number of badges.)

There were Explorers.
The big ones had plastic pith helmets. The little ones had fabulous wild animal costumes. They did their best not to skid on the huge slough of detergent "snow" left by the Everesters while they were standing in one place during the Great Bus Confrontation of 2011.

There were also Egyptians.

I love the way some people go for complete historical accuracy, and some go for 'I'm sure I have a bridesmaid's dress somewhere'... that's the spirit!

And here comes the school contingent and its Ecowarriors.

And, just because NO village procession around Cambridge is complete without a samba band - the Arco Iris conductor had evidently been working with the school...

... and it had developed its own.

There were also Elephants, but the pictures weren't great; but there was also Easter, and Eggs.

So sweet.

The weather, as you can see from these, was fine. Not as warm as it might have been, but the forecast had been astonishingly horrible; and in the end, the rain didn't fall until Sunday, which was dreadful; but as we're officially in drought, I probably shouldn't mind getting a little bit soaked going to a friend's for dinner last night...

I love the Feast. Cottenham/Rampton are having a Big Family Festival next month, with fanciness including Bob Flowerdew; but we're not so shabby; and I'm moved to tears by the parade every year because so many people put so much effort into it...

D is for... DPNs

As you can see - the 30 day blogging challenge has become somewhat theoretical. I am going to carry on with the A-Z thing though, because it's fun, and why not. With interspersed book reviews... and I'm going to try to make it semi-regular...

So - DPNs.

There are almost as many ways of knitting socks as there are people, I think. I'm in a knit-along (KAL) for Cookie A.'s book knit. sock.love. and there are people knitting on 4 DPNs, 5DPNs, one circular, two circulars, two at a time on two circulars, two at a time on one circular. Some are adapting the patterns to knit toe-up, and there are as many methods of knitting toe-up socks as there are top-downs...

I also remember being at the (sadly now closed) Stash Yarns in London when there were 7 knitters there, using 7 different methods of knitting socks, and a lady came into the shop and said "what's the best way to knit socks?" How we laughed. (And then explained why we were laughing and invited her to watch us all knitting and work out which might be best. Obviously.)

Me, I'm a fan of double-pointed needles in a set of 4 for socks. I like the triangle formation, and how stable it is.

I like wooden needles, because I'm a looser knitter and I like the grabbiness of wood. My favourite DPNs are a set of 3 (formerly 5) Colonial Rosewoods from Wibbo several years ago - I broke one, and left one on a table at work while knitting at lunch... I supplement these with KnitPro Harmony wooden needles, which aren't quite the same (and are half an inch longer) but do the job.

The only book I could find which made sense to me while I was trying to learn how to knit with DPNs was called America's Knitting Book by Gertrude Taylor (found in Oxfam in Ely, but I gather it's back in print at Amazon.com) . I warmed to this book on the bus home, when it said "If you are left-handed, you should not knit from left to right. Left-handed people write in the same direction as right-handed people do, so too, you should knit in the same direction as other knitters do, so that others will be able to help you." My grandma tried to teach me by getting me to sit opposite her and knit in the opposite direction, and it just didn't work - in the end I taught myself from a (right-handed) Ladybird book. I would love to find a copy of that book again. I have met a couple of truly left-handed knitters over the last couple of years and they do brilliant work; but I'm not sure I'd have carried on in the 1970s climate if I'd knitted entirely left-handed.

One of the legacies of Gertrude Taylor, though, is that she does say breezily "If you are going to knit socks without seams you will be using the four-needle method", and additionally shows all of her diagrams for both circular and DPNs with the knitter working from the back of the triangle, looking at the right side but with the wrong side facing, thus:

(This was a test knit for Erssie Major last summer; a lovely Christmas stocking in colourwork).

One of the good things about knitting "inside out" in colourwork is that the "floats" (lengths of yarn between one use of a colour and the next) are on the outside, so you're less likely to get all tightened-up...

The other thing I like about using DPNs for any circular stuff is their compactness.

Knitting is totally a matter of preference - and this is mine.

C is for... Cricket

Not very impressive, getting two days into a month's blogging every day and then stalling, but I'd originally picked C for Colour, and got overwhelmed choosing photos. So I thought I'd go for something more manageable, and topical, on this 4th day of a murky Test at Lords after the umpires have just pulled the teams off for bad light yet again.

One of my first memories of family holidays is listening to Test Match Special (quietly, so as not to disturb the neighbours) on the beach. As most of the beaches we went to tended to be in Northumberland, there weren't many neighbours. I suppose the earliest one might have been the 1975 Ashes series; but I remember Botham, Gower et al against Richards, Holding and the fabulous West Indies side which is being commemorated in the new film Fire in Babylon (link to trailer).

I'm not that technically knowledgeable about cricket - I know where the fielding positions are, and the difference between the types of delivery. I'm a big fan of Test cricket as the purest form of the art; but the World Cup was pretty exciting this time round, and as someone who grew up about half a mile from the current Durham ground, following County cricket is pretty rewarding too. But mostly, I love the fact that a sometimes slow-paced game can give such excitement, that games which ought to go one way suddenly go another and that articulate people can be so utterly passionate about it. You could probably say most of these things about any sport, but mine's cricket.

To an extent, this is actually rather like knitting, or any form of craft. You graft on, sometimes without an end or any discernible result in sight, and then have the excitement of a finish; sometimes something you start very tentatively turns out to be exactly the right thing; and then sometimes you think you've picked the perfect yarn and needles for a project and it all goes horribly wrong. And knitters and cricketers all do seem to enjoy a good tea, with cake.

I really, really wish there was the knitting equivalent of Test Match Special. Even if there's no play, sometimes especially if there's no play, the commentators are wonderful. It's almost the original of blogging or podcasting - people sitting and talking about what they're passionate about. Oh, and then you get someone like Heston Blumenthal filling in the gap this morning with his recipe for roast potatoes. Or Imelda Staunton hoving into view at teatime with a home-made lemon drizzle cake. Or Scouting for Girls coming in to do a version of She's so lovely for Mrs Aggers because she has it has her ringtone...

Go England. At the moment, it looks as if we might be heading for an honourable draw and that'd be just fine...

B is for... Books

(Before I go on about the actual theme, B is also for Bug - aka Amelia [Mealy-Bug], mentioned in the last post. She came home last night, about 24 hours before I expected her to, and seems pretty cheerful for a cat with a 5" incision in her belly. She's also, so far and touch wood, been very good about not attacking the stitches. We get the results of the biopsies sometime next week. She's sulking in the back bedroom, mainly because a) she can't go out and b) I attack her twice a day with painkillers and antibiotics, which are obviously The Enemy and I am Horrid Person. She has just come down and devoured half a very nice line-caught posh haddock fillet I'd originally put in the freezer for myself, though. [I'm sure she'd have had the other half if I'd let her.] I've been working from home today, will go in for the usual shorter Friday tomorrow, and am off on Monday - next appointment is Saturday for a quick once-over...

Thanks for everyone's good wishes.)

OK. Books.

As anyone who's read this blog over the last year and a half or so (since I started listing the books I've read) will know, I'm a bit of a reader. I cannot imagine a life without a heap of books to read. Sometimes this is slightly oppressive - even if I wished to play my severely out-of-tune piano, I can't because it has my "unread books" stacks all over it - but it offers a world of possibilities. So I thought I might give you my top 5 non-knitting books, and my top knitting book.

Non-knitting...

5. The silver pigs, by Lindsey Davis. 1989.

The first of the Marcus Didius Falco novels, and arguably the best - this sets up the series but is a wonderful historical/romantic/detective novel on its own. There are 20 in the series now and I wish continued health and inspiration to Ms Davis for many more.

4. TS Eliot: the complete poems and plays, by TS Eliot. 1969.

There's just something about Eliot. It might be his Catholicism and the use of biblical language to address modern subjects; it may just be his use of language, but I find myself dipping into this collection

3. Gaudy night, by Dorothy L Sayers. 1935.

For me, the best romantic novel ever written, and the detection isn't bad, too. Sayers cracks the ice on the Wimsey/Vane relationship quite wonderfully.

2. Gods in Alabama, by Joshilyn Jackson. 2004.

Jackson is just amazing. Every book she brings out is a tour de force of Southern fiction. I think probably the best thing I can do to describe this book is to give you the first paragraph. "There are gods in Alabama: Jack Daniel's, high school quarterbacks, trucks, big tits, and also Jesus. I left one back there myself, back in Possett. I kicked it under the kudzu and left it to the roaches."

1. To kill a mockingbird, by Harper Lee. 1960.

I can't explain why my top two books are set in the American South, but there you are. I re-read this book every couple of years or so. The combination of innocence and knowingness, and a society which is so different and so much the same, always enthrals me. I don't know whether I read the book or saw the film first, but I love both equally, for entirely different ways.

Knitting

This was a difficult one. So many books have excellent techniques, and beautiful photos. But the top one, just for the eye-opener and a personal connection, has to be

Unexpected knitting, by Debbie New. [Can't find original date, in print again though]

Not the cheapest of books - but it will get you thinking about knitting as the creation of a fabric, if you don't already. This book was written by a woman with 8 children who regards knitting a log-cabin quilt using a photo of her mother, which ends up the size of a barn, as an entirely reasonable activity. There are some recipes for knitting here, and the odd pattern, but really, it's the inspiration which is the key. I've never had such an eye-opener.

The strange thing was that I first saw it the day I met Rosie/caughtknitting, on a chance meeting at the Mill Pond when we were both waiting to go somewhere else and I was knitting. She came over and introduced herself and showed me the book; and I was pretty standoffish because I was waiting for friends to turn up, and thank goodness, she gave me her e-mail address and the rest is history. Joining the Cambridge knitting group was a bit of a lifesaver at the time, and has been lovely ever since. April 24, 2004. Not difficult to remember as it was also my birthday! Nowadays, of course, I'd know what to do if approached by a fellow knitter in a public place, but it was the first time it had happened to me...

I am sure that even without that, it would be my top knitting book...

A is for... Animals

I'm doing something a bit different this month, pinching an idea pitched on Ravelry by Tinks - she's going to be taking up a challenge of blogging all the letters of the alphabet this month on her blog. Some of the letters are going to be easier than others!

This one, however, has come to mind because of a couple of events this week. First, the little Circus Tyanna has come to live on the Green this week. For a spinner, the most exciting ones are obviously the llamas - wouldn't these two make a great sweater?

There's also this extremely cute white goat which is tethered just opposite my house
and a slightly less cute goat - there are quite a few ponies but this miniature one is probably the sweetest-looking...

I'm sort of glad to have animal distractions out there at the moment, as the Bug is in the veterinary hospital until at least Thursday - she had an enormous pancreatic cyst removed yesterday and they've sent off various bits of her for biopsies. I imagine she is not amused at the moment.

No knitting to sit on, for one thing.

Sometimes, I'm just blown away by my workplace

I don't normally go on about where I work. Mainly because I suspect if my employers ever sort out a protocol on blogging, they might go for restrictive, and then I'd have to delete things.

But this Wednesday we had an Event... and I attended it!

I was on the Reserve List, so we had a slightly anxious 90 minutes sitting in a room off the Hall wondering if we'd get in or just have to watch it on the telly while feeling guilty about not doing work at the same time (I knew 15 people would have to drop out before I was admitted), but then we were ushered downstairs. In the end I was seated a long way back but only 4 places away from the aisle.

I had to do some swaying backwards and forwards to keep President Obama in sight while he was delivering his speech, but that was fine; and although the speech has had mixed reviews, it had the hair standing up on the back of my neck a few times.

The highlight for me (as well as the fanfare, which was astonishing) was his coming down the aisle, diving into the crowd (to the obvious exasperation of the clean-cut suits with earpieces) and greeting people with wit and humour. As a child of the 70s/80s, seeing him greet Floella (now Baroness) Benjamin was wonderful; and I also saw him meet Glenda Jackson MP with an instant recognition of who she was... Yes, I'm a fangirl; but I think he had many converts, too... and I've been within about 6 feet of the first US President ever to speak in Westminster Hall.