This and That

That was quite an exciting cricket match – if the phrase isn’t too much of an oxymoron – that ended in Madras yesterday. I am proud to claim that I am one of Sachin Tendulkar's legions of fans. It was a real Casey-at-the-bat situation, there at the end, except that this time, Casey didn't let us down.

What puzzles me a wee bit about Mr Madoff is how he was able to fool European banks and fund managers. I can see how a pleasant and utterly plausible guy could suck in funds from rich New Yorkers. He was one of them. But all those people over here -- Scots and Spaniards and Frenchmen -- in their blue suits, dark grey for the ladies, busy reducing the world economic system to chaos by their incompetence, should have known what a rat smells like, and clearly didn’t.

That was a good story about GWB and the journalist’s shoes. There was a big Americans-out rally on the streets of Baghdad recently, and I thought then that they are beginning to behave like a free country. Nobody ever threw shoes at Hitler, or Saddam Hussein.

Real Life

Helen Chronic-Knitting-Syndrome and I didn’t eat our holiday lunch yesterday after all – she woke up not feeling well. We’ve rescheduled for Thursday.

I did a strenuous circuit of post offices instead (the Sorting Office to collect a package, the real Post Office to send packages off) and got quite seriously winded. I think I have lost a lot of puff in the last year or so. I sank down in John Lewis’s yarn department to recover – they have a chair – and looked at the latest Rowan magazine, no. 44 I think.

I don’t think I’d browsed it before. There are some good things there. But the cost, £10 plus, is too much for my stomach, at least at the moment.

Later I went to the Christmas department and bought wrapping paper and gift cards that look like knitting. The paper is the same pattern as the card illustrated here, with the colours reversed. My husband thinks that no one will notice, and he could be right.

They’ve also got little knitted Christmas tree ornaments. I was particularly taken with a tiny pair of Nordic mittens. Maybe…

Comments

Shan, I agree, it’s the woads I fancy from Renaissance Dyeing, too. (Please follow the link to Shan’s blog and read about her hard life. Feeling old and winded in John Lewis’s yarn department comes further down the list.)

Judith, I’m glad you like the new version of the Amedro “Shetland Lace” book. That cover flap with the abbreviations is indeed useful. That book is the only one, I believe, to use the old Shetland terms “take” for k2tog and “cast” for YO. I think we all, in some way, memorise each row of a lace pattern as we go along. I always found that using those terms made it easier.

Jean Shrimpton: yes. Was she perhaps the first super-model to make us feel that we might under some unimaginable circumstances succeed in looking like that? Whereas Barbara Goalen and her ilk were clearly impossible.