Comfort Knitting

As you can see, Mungo's sweater is nearly done, and I'm pleased. Four more knitting days before we go south for Christmas -- I may even finish. Certainly I'll have a picture to send him to prove that I'm nearly there.

I had a very kind message yesterday -- unsigned, and it arrived in one of those Blogger anonymous comments which I think I can't reply to -- about yesterday's gloomy post. Many thanks, whoever you are. She suggested knitting a Fair Isle sweater with all the colours of winter, as Meg Swansen once recommended. Not a bad idea.

Last year around this time I happened to be between projects and happened to spot a picture in the paper -- in an article about scarves -- of the delectable actor Tom Baker wearing his Dr Who scarf. He was Dr Who. I've mentioned him before.

So I knit a Dr Who scarf of Shetland jumper-weight oddballs and sent it off to Peking. It's cold there in the winter. And as I was knitting I thought, how comforting this is, I must do it every year. This year, I started a little thread on the Knitlist about Comfort Knitting and had some interesting replies. There was a consensus in favour of knitting something red. I am sure, for me, it also has to be something relatively easy -- no lace or cables. And something cosy.

I chose Fergus' orange Wallaby and Mungo's beautiful Koigu deliberately as this year's comfort knitting, and they have been of some use. And now that I know that Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) is something that people have and that gets discussed in the Sunday papers, it behooves me to shut up about it.

On the other hand: on Friday afternoon, as we were coming back from a successful Christmas shopping session, my husband had a small health scare. He was fairly all right that evening, and fine yesterday. But the fact remains that we made a vow 47 years ago, solemnly but with high hearts, to stick together "till death you do part". And God is going to call in his marker one day, sooner rather than later. We're not likely to have another 47. This thought obtrudes more some days than others; it's always there, and worst in the dark.