I had a great time. But I’d better polish off the New Yorker first.

I’ve calmed down. I still think all that I thought before about the stupidity and insensitivity of publishing such a cover, but I’m much less worried about the effect on Obama, because

a) the world-wide furore will have alerted pretty well everybody before the issue reached the newsstands, and to a considerable extent, will have neutralised the effect;


b) Obama himself continued to behave in that cool, presidential way;


c) And contrary to what the editors of the New Yorker may think, it wasn’t funny. Dukakis in his tank and Kerry in his wetsuit were both more than a bit comical. But they’re still not laughing at Obama.

I gather – we still haven’t had our copy – that the cover goes with an article about the Politics of Fear. New Yorker covers don’t usually relate to anything inside. I wonder if it has ever happened before. I wouldn’t have objected to the cartoon embedded in the article.

Enough of that.

Vegetables

We’re moving into production mode, and after having a very happy 24 hours there I’m now worried about getting back before things get away from me. I had taken supermarket ready meals with me, but in fact, on Wednesday, lunched on sautéed courgettes and steamed potatoes (Red Duke of Yorks) and an injudicious amount of butter. After such a feast, all other food tastes second-hand and derivative.

Two of the windowsill-grown courgettes are going full steam, with the third not far behind. (The fourth expired in the May frost.) The four directly-sown plants have got plenty of buds. They’re parthenocarpic (!) so as soon as we’ve got flowers, we’ve got courgettes – we don’t have to wait for the ladies.

And the peas are in bloom. The mange-touts will need to be picked promptly to keep them in production, like the courgettes. And we’re not scheduled to go back for nearly three weeks, when Helen gets here with her boys.

The first of the opium poppies to bloom turns out to be a gorgeous double one (here rather wet). The others, so far, are singles. I wonder if Afghani farmers can just stand there and watch their fields fill up with poppies, unsown. Probably not. Still, they must be an easy crop.

Here are the serried ranks, lined up as for a school concert. A famous salad potato, Pink Fir Apple, behind. Then orach, beetroot, “magic chard” – I’ve thinned the row and brought the thinnings back – and beans. The beans are trying, anyway, but what you mostly see is gaps in-filled with Sutherland kale and a foot of Italian lettuce.

Other

No time to talk about knitting – not much has been done, anyway – but look at that for a Kirkmichael postcard. They come in batches, like Vogue Knitting Books.

I am quite profoundly distressed by next week's New Yorker cover. (No link – you can easily find it if you haven’t seen it yet.) Is this the image that will sink Obama, like Dukakis in his tank and Kerry in his wetsuit? How could they do it?

It’s not just any old magazine, either. The New Yorker and I go back a long, long way. My mother occasionally wrote for them – nothing to get excited about, maybe half a dozen pieces in all, but that’s six more than a lot of people manage. She once had a letter from them saying “Mr. Ross liked your story very much.”

It was always in the house, has always been in my life. I remember reading John Hersey’s “Hiroshima” when it came out (whole issue with no cartoons) and Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring”; Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery”, Capote’s “In Cold Blood”, growing old with John Updike, and quite recently being introduced to William Trevor and Alice Munro and Jhumpa Lahiri.

We subscribe, and give subscriptions to each of our four children. No small expenditure. James’s wife Cathy made me very happy a couple of weeks ago by telling me that she had taken out a subscription for her father.

I can see the point of the cartoon, of course. What I can’t see is how people so intelligent and sensitive could have thought it was a good idea to use it. It might be about right for the cover of the Harvard “Lampoon” if they have pictorial covers. But the New Yorker…

It’s too smart by three-quarters, is the trouble. A normal political cartoon – it is only quite recently that they have appeared at all on the cover of the New Yorker – makes fun of the perceived faults of the target. I might, for example, draw a cartoon showing Senator McCain as an irascible old man alone in the Oval Office trying to get to grips with a computer. This cover appears to be along those lines. That is how it will be remembered. I shouldn't have to explain this to David Remnick.

Gretchen, you are a ray of comfort on a very dark day. I can’t get your Obama contribution onto our thermometer directly, but I have matched it, so you’re there in a sense.

Other

Before we get to knitting, I’ll just say it’s been fun hearing from people who know Robin Lane Fox as an expert on Alexander the Great. He recently acted as historical advisor to a movie about Alexander, and required as part of his fee that he be allowed to ride, as an extra in the film, with Alexander’s army.

Knitting

I got the feet pretty well done last night of the first rank of dinosaurs on the front of the sweater.

My friend Helen with Chronic Knitting Syndrome is coming for coffee today. We have much to discuss: knitting lace triangles, DVD players, new computers, why the sea is boiling hot, and whether pigs have wings.

Vegetables

The current plan is that I will go to Kirkmichael tomorrow and stay overnight by myself. A rare treat, eagerly anticipated. I should be able to bring back some small beets and perhaps some courgettes, and some sorrel for one of Mr Fox’s recipes. Blogging will resume on Friday, insh’Allah.

Not much accomplished, scarf-wise. Still, it was a pleasant respite.

And a not-wasted day. I think I’ve more or less got hold of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and await this week’s events with some interest. There is a good article in today’s FT – I found it on Real Clear Politics – from which I learn that Fannie and Freddie actually invented (it had to be somebody) the securitisation of mortgages from which much of our trouble stems.

Shetland Knitting

I had a message from Gladys Amedro’s son Guy saying that the Shetland Times is preparing another edition of his mother’s book. That’s good news. It is a good book, and she was a most important link between the traditional Shetland knitters and the wider world.

She was meticulously careful to eliminate error, and it sounds as if Guy is continuing in a way she would thoroughly approve. He remembers his father inserting an erratum slip into remaining copies of the 1996 reprint, but doesn’t have it. If any of you do, please let me know and I’ll pass the news on. (I am surprised that the date is so recent.)

I may have answered his question already, though. There is an error in that edition, in the pattern for the “Fine Lace Scarf” which is a reduction of the preceding pattern for a “Fine Lace Stole”. On page 35 is says to repeat rows 35 to 58 “a further three times”. But after the centre of the scarf, the instruction on page 36 is to work as rows 35 to 58 three times.

I knit the scarf in qiviut for my mother, and didn’t notice the discrepancy until I was blocking it. Since the book had obviously been produced with much care, I wrote to Mrs Amedro c/o the Shetland Times. She rang me up within the week, to apologise.

So that could be the mistake on the erratum slip.

VKB

Number 13 (autumn, 1939, the last of the pre-war ones) sold for £13.50 on eBay last night. A ludicrous price. I would be embarrassed to tell you what I paid for my copy, so I won’t. Has the bottom fallen out of eBay in general, or just out of the VKB market? There were no bids whatsoever with 45 seconds to go, so I put in a tenner just to encourage the seller.

Gardening

Thank you, sister Helen and Mel, for encouragement on the French tarragon front. I will try it next year. Re-reading the article, I see that Robin Lane Fox says that his own plants got through last winter, at least. I can always protect them with sawn-off plastic water bottles.

The Saturday Financial Times ranges widely, Kate, and we regularly read it. I have long admired Robin Lane Fox from afar. He is an Oxford don, specialising in Alexander the Great and in the late Roman Empire. I have his book “Pagans and Christians in the Mediterranean World from the Second Century A.D. to the Conversion of Constantine”. His previous books are listed at the beginning:

Alexander the Great
Variations on a Garden
Search for Alexander
Better Gardening

I reached the hoped-for dinosaur feet yesterday, and feel confident that I can allow myself a day’s scarf-knitting. You’re right, Kate, (comment, day-before-yesterday) that finishing is going to take some doing, but you’re speaking to one who has not only knit KF but who had a whole Kaffe Fassett Phase. I’m not afraid of tidying ends – but I must ensure I’ve got plenty of time. What I hate is last-minute scrambles.

Shandy, the historical examples in the Christoffersson book I mentioned yesterday come from a variety of museums – so many that I think it would be worth nipping in to any museum you find yourself passing. The Nordic Museum, Stockholm, sounds particularly easy to find, and the Museum of Halsingland, Hudiksvall, would appear to have a particularly interesting collection. Have fun! (I envy you your manure.)

Sandy, Mrs Obama hasn’t got her scarf yet. The idea is that Theo will present it to her husband on the day they get their picture taken together, Theo in his Obama-electing gansey. It couldn’t be long now.

Yesterday

“Piecework” turned up, and I enjoyed it. Should I subscribe? There is scarcely room on the shelves for another magazine. (Don’t tell the Flylady – I never throw a knitting magazine away.) The only other copy I’ve ever seen, I think, is the famous one with the wedding veil Bridget Rorem knit for her daughter, including the lace alphabet she devised. I often refer to it.

You’re right about the Nancy Bush shawl, manic knitter – it’s striking, and it’s got lots of nupps. I suppose I will buy the book when it comes out, for the sake of the completeness of my shelves, but there’s lots of other lace knitting I want to do before I tackle nupps.

Franklin’s article is called “Needlework in a Pennsylvania Mining Town” (Smock, PA, where his grandmother lived when she was young). It’s good, and so is the simple lace edging he designed to suggest a row of “coal patch” company houses in Smock.

Vegetable-growing

An unexpected bonus turned up yesterday – my favourite gardening writer, Robin Lane Fox in the Saturday Financial Times – turned his attention, as all too rarely, to vegetables. A whole article about things I need to know – how to grow my new friend sorrel, and how to cook with it; an interesting new plant source; some things I needed to know about tarragon (the Real Stuff isn’t frost hardy, so how does my sister grow it in CT?); and finally a recipe for pasta del giardino made primarily with radishes (of all things) which will prompt me to grow some of them next year.

All in one newspaper article!

Fox is an ancient historian of some distinction, as well as a gardener. It was from him, in an FT article years ago, that I learned that rabbits won’t eat courgettes. It’s perfectly true, and I’ve never seen it in print anywhere else.

No Piecework. Maybe today.

I did the ribbing for the front of the dinosaurs. Today I should get through the first of the wretched pattern bands, and maybe introduce some dinosaur feet. Tomorrow I think I’ll take the day off and knit a scarf.

That covers that topic.

I’ve never said anything about my new book, “Vatid, Troid, Vamsad”; more comprehensibly, “Knitted Jackets from West-Estonian Islands”.

It’s a bit of a slim vol for the price. What you get is some truly wonderful photographs. No charts, no patterns. A translation is interleaved. Nancy Bush’s book “Folk Knitting in Estonia” doesn’t go in for jackets – it’s all mittens, gloves, and socks. Could jackets be confined to the islands?

I don’t think – will I be shot down in flames for this? – that Estonia has much to add to the story of Scandinavian knitting, which it strongly resembles. Britt-Marie Christofferson’s “Swedish Sweaters” is perhaps the book I’d put tops: it’s got great historical pictures, with charts of the stitch patterns, as well as good modern designs.

Piecework, when it arrives, will contain a pattern (I think) from a forthcoming book by Nancy Bush about Estonian lace. I’m dubious. Estonian lace involves nupps, and I do not think nupps are ever going to be quite me. But I’m eager to have a look. And nupps, at least, as far as I know, are unique to Estonia. Thank goodness.

Non-knit

A Scotsman recently went to a fund-raising breakfast for Barack Obama in highland dress. Despite police, security guards, bodyguards and metal detectors, he got within stabbing distance of the candidate wearing his sgian dubh in plain sight, tucked into the top of his hose.

I have never understood Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Maybe next week’s Economist can explain. But I know that what has happened this week is terrifying. I suppose what the idiotic Mr Gramm was trying to say was that we have nothing to fear but fear itself. Somehow, he didn’t make it sound quite so good.

Today maybe Piecework will come – she said she was sending it second class. Sally, thank you for the warning about Borders (yesterday’s comment), and thank you for commenting. Maybe you’ll inspire me to find the energy to get out to a City Knitty meeting. I’m pretty sure the Piecework I’ve bought on eBay is the one I want (with Franklin in it) – I’ll let you know soon, I hope.

On the subject of eBay but not of knitting, I’ll be bidding soon for this postcard, trusting you people not to push me up too far. The great thing about postcards of Kirkmichael, of which we have quite a few, is that they all look just like Kirkmichael in 2008. The river is very low in this one.

Well, here are the dinosaurs. I’m quite pleased, not least at the prospect of casting on the very last piece today. It’s coming out slightly smaller than the specified dimensions. I’m doing the eight-year-old size, aiming for Helen’s youngest son Fergus who is six.

It’ll have to be firmly blocked anyway, to smooth out the stitches. And at the worst, the judges won’t judge it on whether or not it fits Fergus Drake. I’ve still got Alexander’s two sons in reserve, so to speak (=smaller than Fergus). Helen and her boys will be here early in August so we can try it on before the Games.

A dull morning, literally and mentally.

I went to Ravelry, first time in a while, and wandered about looking at what everybody else doing. Some nice messages from people. I need to get back to lace. I went to the Schoolhouse Press and found nothing new.

Dinosaur-wise, I should finish the current, final pair on the back of the sweater today, perhaps even finish the back. Pic tomorrow, whatever. There are 16 dinosaurs altogether, the current ones being nos. nine and ten. Every job gets a bit better when you pass the halfway point.

And dinosaur-knitting has something in common with lace, in that every row one toils across adds a perceptible and significant something, however small.

Comments

Mary Lou, I hugely enjoyed my virtual trip to Lampedusa’s Sicily. Thank you for that. (And I was interested to see that you, too, have uninvited opium poppies in your garden. I talked gardening with Alexander last week – he says he doesn’t have them, over there on Loch Fyne.)

Jane-Beth, thanks for the news that Borders at Kinnaird Park has “Piecework”. One needs a serious newsstand, and my normal wanderings don’t include one. I try to avoid Kinnaird Park whenever possible, but it can’t always be done.

Odds and Ends

eBay is offering another early VKB – No. 13, autumn 1938, 380044662666. It comes from the same seller as the recent No. 9 (which fetched only a miserable £11.27) – so I entertain a faint hope that she may have some more in the drawer. She’s operating in the territory where lurk the five I still want.

I bought (I hope) the current issue of Piecework through eBay yesterday, for the sake of Franklin’s article and lace edging. A report will follow.

I got an email from Interweave this morning about their hurt book sale. They say they do it every year, but I don’t remember another one. There are some very good things on the list, selling at half-price, although I don’t think there’s anything I want that I haven’t already paid the full price for.

I had a really nice message from Ron yesterday (faithful reader in Mexico) asking what knitting software I use. It’s Carole Wulster’s Sweater Wizard, and I like it a lot. You can download a demo. I used it most recently for the Araucania sweater I’m knitting in Kirkmichael. There are a couple of basic-pattern books on the Interweave list just mentioned. I hesitated over them for a moment, but I’ve got (and regularly use) Vicki Square’s “Knit Great Basics” and I’ve got the Sweater Wizard, and I don't see why I should want anything else.

Knitting

I’m nearly finished with the legs for the third and final tier of dinosaurs on the back of the sweater. This week should see me embarked on the front. The end is, rather distantly, in sight. Picture soon.

Comments & more Kirikmichael

I’m sorry to hear about the rabbits in Essex, Shandy. We have been remarkably free of disaster so far this year, except for the caterpillars that stripped the gooseberry bushes. No rabbits or sheep or deer or mice, and nematodes really do seem to have helped with the slugs. There aren’t even any cabbage white caterpillars on the kale – why not? – and the birds seem to be sparing the red currents. Some tsunami of gardening misfortune must be gathering somewhere.

James and Cathy drove up to Kirkmichael a couple of hours ahead of us. They stopped at Tesco in Blairgowrie on the way and bought, amongst other things, the two chairs you see James and Alexander sitting on in the picture yesterday. My husband and I do not go in for sitting about, but everybody else made good use of the chairs all week.

Here are James and Cathy, supervising a bonfire.

And Rachel, on the west lawn.

Here we are. It was a most happy week. The weather, in this uncertain summer, was Not Too Bad. Friday, the day that Rachel and Alexander were there, was splendid. We went out to lunch at the Strathardle Inn to celebrate Rachel’s 50th birthday, ate and drank well, and sat over the table until 4 without being made to feel we were de trop.

James bought his son Alistair a good air rifle. They went out in search of rabbits and succeeded in shooting one – which, after all, I am glad to say, they left where it fell instead of bringing it back to form part of a Jamie Oliver recipe.

And quite apart from our dear middle-aged children, it was a great joy, in this summer when visits to K*rkmichael have been so brief, to watch things happen in my vegetable garden. Instead of leaping out of the car and rushing around the corner to see what-has-happened-since-last-time, I was able to rush out the door as soon as I was remotely decent in the morning, to see what had happened overnight.

The courgettes started blooming on July 4. The first flowers are all boys of course, but things are moving fast and I would hope for some tiny courgettes next week.

The beans are climbing up their poles. Tender beans are always more than a bit of a gamble with us, but some years – and why shouldn’t this be one of them? – we get a good crop in September. Maybe I’ll start them on the windowsill in April next year, since that technique has been so successful with courgettes. The difficulty is that the interval between the last frost of one winter and the first frost of the next, is so brief, and there can be – as so far this year – so little real summer heat between those two dates.

Courgettes don’t like the frosts either, but I think they are able to make use of the if-y weather in between more successfully than tender beans. (Broad beans, which we love, are not tender: they are, for me, the easiest of all vegetables to grow and the difficulty is to resist planting half an acre of them.)

And, what? oh yes, knitting.

I am getting on well with the Araucania sweater, although this pic isn’t very good. It’s perfect Strathardle knitting, easy on the mind and the fingers. And last night, when we got back, I finished the second rank of dinosaurs – the half-way point, dinosaur-wise – and embarked on the next separator pattern. Maybe I’ll establish another line of little feet today.

Here is a picture of pure happiness (mine): the brothers Miles.

Look what Elizabeth found! It’s a video of last year’s Games! It captures, amidst much else, the essential tedium of the day. Sam the Ram makes a brief but easily-recognisable appearance. I’m there too, later on, very briefly, in a group of prize-winners. I’m holding the Glen Isla shield, which unfortunately obscures the image of Dolores on my sweatshirt. My granddaughter Rachel is standing in front of me, to my right (the viewer’s left), with the Mandy Duncan Cup which she won for the best entry in the children’s sections.

Wonderful!

Although it's a bit disappointing that none of the rest of our party appears. There were dozens of us, literally, as it was our Golden Wedding celebration. The camera must have been deliberately avoiding us. In the opening sequence, as the local baronet leads the pipe band over the bridge, you can see the old Kirkmichael Hotel behind him. It is now self-catering apartments and we filled the entire building, that weekend.


Health-and-safety will no doubt soon forbid baronets to go about with drawn swords.

All went well yesterday on the dusting-and-bed-making front. All that remains to do is the spare room itself, and a quick passage of a mop over the kitchen floor wouldn’t come amiss. Then attention can be turned to food.



Thinking of that reminded me that it would be nice to make Jamie Oliver’s “Pappardelle with wild rabbit, olives and marjoram” one evening. That depends on success in the field. Rabbits should be rather tasty just now, the spring litters grown to rabbit-hood but not yet tough and stringy. I can do all the herbs from my garden, too, but I don’t grow olives or pappardelle.

Renewed thanks for encouragement with the dinosaurs. They went well yesterday, too – I’m halfway up the next pair. If today affords normal knitting time, I might even finish them.

I heard promptly from Get Knitted, and my “Franklin’s Panopticon” yarn is ordered. It won’t be soon, she warned me – they’re not due to send an order to Lorna’s Laces for a while, and Lorna’s Laces are never quick to fill an order. If, as you suggest, Angie, the yarn won’t actually be out for a while, that’s just as well. I’m happy to wait, anyway. I am inspired by the knowledge that it’s on its way probably more than I would be if it were actually coiled around my ankles.

If all goes well, my grandson Alistair will be bedding down here in the computer room tomorrow morning, and then we’re all off to Strathardle. So perhaps no blog for a while. See you soon.

P.S.: I found this in the NY Times yesterday, in my insatiable reading of presidential-campaign stories: “Perhaps the thorniest question — what to do about Bill Clinton, who friends say continues to refight the bitter primary fight — has yet to be raised by either side, advisers said.”

“who friends say” is right; it shouldn't be “whom”. Not many people know that – I’ve seen that construction wrong in the Economist.

I made a good start yesterday at dusting little-used parts of the house and setting up beds. Much remains to be done. They’ll be here tomorrow. I also made a grid on a piece of waste paper and wrote “chicken” in the square representing Sunday lunch. It’s a start. I’ll get some salmon tomorrow and take it to Kirkmichael on Saturday to be smothered in sorrel sauce that evening – that’s another square done. And make some soup to welcome them off the plane from China.

Did you see Karen’s wonderful comment yesterday? – not only did she provide a link to a Jamieson’s page where you can see the Trellis Jacket I have in mind for Franklin’s Panopticon yarn, but she also did the arithmetic and figured out how much I’d need. I ran the problem past Ann Budd’s “The knitter’s handy guide to yarn requirements” this morning – Helen gave it to me as a first-foot present – and got a very similar answer. Karen was calculating weight, Budd works in yardage, which I averaged-up a bit to allow for the fact that garter stitch consumes a lot of yarn. So the coincidence was encouraging.

I added a skein to-be-on-the-safe-side, and emailed Get Knitted to see if they can get it for me. So that’s a step taken.

Having mentioned the Baby Surprise yesterday, I remembered that there is an adult version. I can’t find the Woolgathering offprint which I know I own, but it doesn’t matter because it’s in “The Opinionated Knitter”. I think the Trellis Jacket will be neater.

Thank you for the kind words about the dinosaurs. Yesterday I got the next separator-pattern done, and started in on a new set of legs. I hate the separator-pattern the most. It looks so easy, but three of its seven rows are three-colour and proceed with agonising slowness.

VKB

I haven’t mentioned the Vogue Knitting Book for a while, not because I’ve lost interest but because EBay has been most unforthcoming. Number Nine is on offer at the moment – 380039805704. I’ve got it. I’m sure it’ll sell for peanuts since I’m not in the contest. The seller says “probably 1940’s”, forgetting, I suspect, what happened in Britain during that decade. It is in fact autumn, 1936.

I have mentally promised Senator Obama a nice donation when one of the five I’m still missing appears – and now that I’ve made the promise in public, maybe I'll see some action.

Shows what reinvigoration combined with tooth-gritting can do for you: there will be 16 dinosaurs in the end, and I’ve now finished six of them. They go quite fast once feet get merged into bodies.

I don’t think my repugnance for this job has anything to do with the Home Industries Tent judges, Stash Haus. After winning the Glen Isla Shield last summer with Sam the Ram, there are no more heights for me to scale. And I haven’t much hope anyway, this year, because the schedule clearly says “sweater with motif”, not “sweater with 16 motifs”. They tend to stick to the letter of the law.

But one feels one is doing one’s bit for the community by competing – it’s a pretty small affair. At the very, very least, the more entries there are, the more the winner will have the satisfaction of beating. I’ll enter “three potatoes” and “collection of four vegetables” in the same spirit.

Yesterday’s internal monologue, apart from questions of what to feed all these people so soon to be with us, concerned what to do with Franklin’s Panopticon yarn. The Bog jacket? A shawl? (My husband said once, of me in one of my shawls, that it made me look like a crazed social worker.) Socks, no, too small. For a couple of hours I settled on the idea of an EPS sweater in sock-weight yarn, decide about the yoke when I get there.

But I began to worry about how I would look in such a garment. Just because it looks great on Dolores – see link – doesn’t mean it would do the same for me. That’s why these super-models earn so much money.

The current fave is the Trellis Jacket from Jamieson’s Shetland Knitting Book 3. (There is some good design in those books, according to me.) I don’t dare show you for fear the copyright police would come round, but the general idea is mitred garter stitch knit side to side. Think Baby Surprise. I did a day of learning how to use handpainted yarns at Camp Stitches once, with a designer whose name you’d recognise if I could remember it. Ginger Luters? Maybe. And what I remember is, get it off the horizontal. It’s good advice.

The one in the book is striped with lots of different colours. I’d use the shape and let the Panopticon yarn do what it wanted.

Maybe I’ll go ahead and work out quantities and get in touch with Get Knitted. This jacket would required worsted-weight which would get the job done relatively briskly.

I feel newly invigorated. Let’s hope it lasts.

I must! have! some Franklin’s Panopticon yarn, preferably at once. Of the UK stockists, Get Knitted looks promising, and is already on my Yarn Sources list. I’ll write to them today. Sock weight? Lace weight? Or even worsted? I’ll have to decide that question first. But it’s a most exciting proposition.

“Vatid, Troid, Vamsad” has turned up. It looks interesting, although a bit of a slim vol for the price. My husband bought a book last week about public art galleries in 19th century Britain of which the same can be said, and he’s pleased to have it. I’m not worried. I'll report more fully later.

Family

It was odd and very pleasant yesterday to spend the day remembering what I had been doing fifty years ago. Rachel was born quite early in the morning. I was back in the ward in time for a great big plate of sugarless porridge. I eat it every morning these days, but found it entirely unmanageable that day.

Someone came around selling newspapers. I bought the Express, and have it still. This was the horoscope for my new little person, and it still seems to me fully worthy of the Delphic Oracle.

(And perhaps a bit odd – a significant number of Express readers will have had birthdays that day, and some of them will have been memorable birthdays, 21st’s or whatever. The astrologer hadn’t thought it through.)

I was interested to see from the Express, when I got it out yesterday, that the 23rd of June fell on a Monday in 1958, as I thought I remembered. Fifty year intervals couldn’t always work out so neatly.

The Beijing Mileses will be here soon, for a briefish holiday. They can’t come for the Games – the 4th Saturday in August, as always – because they conflict with the wretched Olympics. Ketki is about to take her sons to NY to reacquaint them with grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins they haven’t seen for awhile. Alexander, temporarily bereft, plans to join us in Strathardle for a couple of nights to see his brother, and Rachel has happily decided to come too. It’ll be fun. We hope to go out and have a delicious country hotel lunch as a belated birthday party.

Knitting

I have established the legs of the first pair of dinosaurs without further mishap. I don’t think I can abandon this project, so the gritting of teeth is the only alternative. But perhaps I will cast all caution to the winds and knit something with Franklin’s Panopticon next.

Today is Rachel’s 50th birthday.

We’ve had another contribution (and another match) for our thermometer – you know who you are, and it was much appreciated.

Stash Haus, thank you for your sympathy about my knitting slump. It happened again yesterday – I finished the border pattern and embarked on the first set of dinosaurs. The tyrannosaurus is taller than the other one (stegosaurus?) so it starts three rows in advance. I did those rows, and discovered as I started attaching yarn for the other dinosaur that I had reversed the main colour – started the tyrannosaurus in the colour meant for the other one.

I toyed with the idea of incorporating this switch as a Design Feature, thought better of it, and ripped the three rows out. But I can’t take much more of this.

I think a lot of my current trouble stems from knowing what I’m going to do next, and next after that. One of the pleasures, for me, of one-thing-at-a-time knitting, is turning over in my mind what’s coming next, and in the final days getting yarn out, or ordered, or whatever is necessary. I am always surprised when I read – it often happens – of knitters who finish something and don’t know what to do next.

But at the moment, I’m boxed in.

Whatever. These troubles are minor compared to the horror of moving house. Stash Haus, you have all my sympathy. I like the sound of the place you’re going to. Now that we’ve got the internet, who needs traffic lights?

Unst

I actually floated the idea, when I was a more active member of the Heirloom Knitting group than I am now, that Sharon might lead a group to Shetland. She said she wanted to stay home and work on her next book. Would there be some way to apply gentle pressure? The trouble would be, that dozens of people would want to go and she would soon find herself a full-time tour guide. But it’s a dream worth dreaming.

I think I am sinking deeper and deeper into the Slough of Despond, at least as far as knitting is concerned. But Mel and David are safely married, and the Drummond Place Garden Party was all the jollier for taking place in the rain. I knit only a row or two yesterday – I’m half way through the patterned border at the bottom of the back of the dinosaur sweater. I am of two minds as to whether to continue today, or knock off for some pleasant scarf-time.

Two of the newspapers we read celebrated the solstice yesterday with articles about Unst, the most northerly inhabited point of the British Isles. Neither mentioned knitting, which is roughly like writing about Champagne without mentioning sparkling wine, but one was good enough to cut out and keep anyway. There used to be a radar station there, watching for Russians. When it finally closed, the island lost half its population.

I strongly suspect I’ll never get to Lake Van, or to the Sicilian village which inspired the fictional Donnafugata, but I still cling to the hope of seeing Lerwick one day, and going on to Unst.

We’ve had another donation to our Obama-thermometer, after a long drought, and I’ve matched it.

The Longest Day

If I’ve got it right, today is David’s and Mel’s wedding day. I wish them every happiness. And I'm looking forward to dozens of pictures, and news of whether or not that final kilt ho’ went through the ceremony toe-less.

Vegetable- and fruit-growing

No disasters, plenty of disappointment.

Our beloved Keswick Codlin has set a very poor crop of apples – my first thought was bee-less-ness, but I’m sure my husband is right to blame frost. Although the vegetables, a few yards away, are fine, except for four or five decapitated beans. The weather forecast last night, after we got back, mentioned the possibility of frost in highland glens. For a planet in the grip of global warming, it’s rather late in the month.

Some caterpillar has stripped the gooseberries. I love gooseberries, and am useless at growing them. American Gooseberry Mould is the usual enemy. I am also absolutely useless at spring onions, which are meant to be as easy as radishes. They will not grow for me.

Almost everything else is getting on rather nicely. I tasted some orach as I was thinning it, and was pleasantly surprised. Most “unusual” vegetables are somewhat bitter. Orach isn’t, it fact it’s rather interesting.

However, unlike CT, London, – where Rachel’s husband Ed has started bringing artichokes home from the allotment – and Musselburgh, there’s nothing to eat yet except lettuce. We ate some of that.

The greyish leaf behind the lettuce is an opium poppy. They alight on cultivated land as unbidden and as enthusiastic as pussy cats seeking a lavatory. I have pulled up dozens, but I always leave a few because they are so beautiful.

Sorrel is doing splendidly, and I am ready to venture on a sauce. I wondered whether to bring some back here, but the weekend promises to be mildly fraught, so I decided in favour of taking north next time whatever is to be coated with the sauce.

Knitting

I’m within four or five rounds of finishing the ribbing of the Araucania rugby shirt. I probably said that last time.

Here in Edinburgh, I discovered last night that I had ribbed too far on the front of the dinosaur sweater, on too many stitches. I had cast on the number I was supposed to have after the post-ribbing increase row. This is typical of the slapdash way I have approached this entire project. I ripped it out and started again, and am now starting the pattern band underneath the first set of dinosaurs.

Today's knitting will be severly curtailed by the need to put in an appearance at the annual Dr*mmond Pl*ce Garden Party, unless the Good Lord gets me off with rain again this year.

The need for the swallowtail coat of a beautiful blue has been postponed from early October to a vague Somewhat Later. Maybe I’ll slip in a month of Princess-knitting when these blasted lizards are finished.

One more day here, after all – my husband wants to finish off a piece of work. The weather is a bit grim this morning, although dry here in Edinburgh – the forecast is slightly better for the rest of the week. Three times in the last few days, the national weather forecaster has mentioned the possibility of ground frost here or there, with the insouciance of a man who does not try to grow tender vegetables in Perthshire.

How many of us seem to be vegetable-growers! I don’t think you have to cost in your labour, Fishwife: the question is, how much can your unpaid efforts ease the family budget? Looking at your inspiring pictures, I’m not surprised that your answer is, quite a bit. And considering that we can give ourselves 50p credit or so every time we sprinkle parsley or chives on something, maybe it adds up to more than I think.

But we all agree that the real point is the sheer happiness of doing it, with the wonderful taste a close second. I heard an “old Chinese saying” once to the effect that if you want to be happy for a day, get drunk; for a week, kill a pig; for a month, get married; for life, make a garden.

Here are my doorstep peas – a good number of pods forming. These are real peas, not mange-tout, so I’ve got to keep them watered and hope they plump up.

(and the picture seems acceptably sharp: a relief.)

Sheep, etc.

I managed to miss all the excitement about Shrek the Sheep, Moorecat. (I am very well informed about the American presidential election – most of the rest passes me by.) Thank you for that.

Donice, it’s good to meet someone who has seen “The Edge of the World”. Sharon Miller agrees with you that it’s a good film – with knitting, I gather, although no lace – and it’s available on DVD, she says. I horrified Helen of Chronic Knitting Syndrome fame the other day by telling her that we don’t have a DVD player.

…and knitting

Tamar, yes, Sharon says a good deal more about the gathers. The point is that instead of mitering the corners of the borders in a traditionally-shaped Shetland shawl, you knit them straight (working in from the edging) and then in the final rows, before starting the centre, you decrease a quarter of the stitches. That way, you don’t need to worry about incomplete patterns and matching motifs (although I always think mitred decreases look nice whatever the pattern is doing). This depends on knowing that your yarn is as “forgiving” as Shetland.

Reading this, and Chronic Knitting Syndrome’s blog, leaves me very impatient with my laceless life. I finished the second dinosaur sleeve yesterday, and cast on the back, but it’s a long way home, and two more non-lace projects loom: the swallowtail coat of a beautiful blue, and Ketki’s Calcutta Cup ’08 sweater.

Good progress with the scarf, which makes splendid, mindless weekend knitting (and the yarn is great on the hands). I return to dinosaurs today with renewed vigour.

(A bit fuzzy, like the most recent dinosaur picture. Something wrong with camera?)

We’re hoping to go to Strathardle tomorrow for a two-nighter. The weather forecast is showery all week, just as for David and Mel, but I can thin my orach in the rain if need be. I also need to make up some beds for the Beijing Mileses who will be with us towards the end of next week. I wonder if James has ever seen the “simmer dim”. It’s wonderful, even in Perthshire.

There was one of those articles about Living Frugally in the Independent on Sunday yesterday; pretty silly. The Royal Horticultural Society, no less, was quoted as saying that you can save £1000 a year by growing your own vegetables. Well, maybe Batman and Robin could, if they gardened a couple of acres in Sussex. I doubt if I “save” £50, and I wonder if even the Fishwife’s wonderful allotment “saves” £500. I garden for the joy of it, and for the taste of a freshly-picked pea.

“The Lerwick Lace Shawl”

Shandy (another vegetable gardener) says in yesterday’s comment that a sheep left unshorn eventually sheds its wool, and would be easy to roo. The difficulty seems to lie in explaining that to the sheep.

Sharon cites a movie by Michael Powell called “The Edge of the World”, made on Foula in 1936. He also wrote a book about the making of it, “200,000 ft: the Edge of the World”, Dutton, ’38. He describes just the sheep Shandy is thinking of: “…some cynical-eyed matron, whose mass of dragging, tangled wool, half on, half off her back and shoulders, gives her a horrible similarity to the leering semi-undress of a mid-Victorian brothel and show that she has avoided rooing for two seasons and will be got into a kro only over your dead body…”

The technique for rounding them up on Foula, apparently, was for the old men and the children and the women, in small, pre-arranged groups, to “feign an aimless sauntering nearer and nearer the sheep who watch this pretence with deep suspicion”.

Sharon says that Foula still has a tiny population today, perhaps as a direct result of the film.

And, yes, Shandy, she says that the wool rooed from the neck is the finest and was reserved for lace.

Tamar, I wonder if you should relax about using a credit card on the Internet – although I agree you’ve got to keep a very close eye on things.

Sharon’s main discovery about technique is on the first page of text. Her antique shawl was knit from the borders inward and “where the border joined the centre there were a lot of erratically spaced groupings of multiple decreasings. I first took this to mean that the knitter hadn’t finally chosen her centre till the last moment and had done this radical reshaping then to allow for the new pattern….But finally I realised that…this gathering was most likely to be…actually pre-planned: demonstrating a rarely-mentioned method of shaping fine lace borders that I now appreciate was used frequently in Shetland….I believe this simple advance could only have been used due to a thorough understanding of the unique nature of their wool’s dressing qualities.”

A good start on the Tilted Blocks. I have added some stitches to take account of the finer gauge of the yarn I’m using. I think I’ve got it about right. One forgets how dense garter stitch is: this is going to take a while. But the first block is done – the rest of yesterday’s knitting time was devoted to winding a skein. Now if I can master the technique – this book is full of techniques – for adding new stitches at the edge, we’re in business. Pic tomorrow.

“The Lerwick Lace Shawl” is a delight. Sharon has (beautifully) restored an antique Shetland shawl in her collection – she doesn’t give its provenance, and probably doesn’t know it. And then figured out how it was knit, including some discoveries about technique which she modestly says are “rarely mentioned”. I wonder if they have ever been in print before.

She provides a full pattern, or patterns, and an interesting discussion of yarns old and new. There seems to be a new yarn about called “Shetland Supreme” in natural undyed colours from Jamieson & Smith (Sharon stocks it). Maybe we’ll have to forgive J&S, somewhat, for the Shetland Jumper Weight colours I believe they’ve dropped.

There is an interesting “sampler” on page 16 where she shows how to test all your choices for a shawl, centre, border, edging, in quick and comprehensible form, to get an impression of the whole.

There are fascinating historical pages at the end. I knew about “rooing”, where wool is combed from a sheep with the fingers, rather than cut. I hadn’t thought how superior the product would be – the staple up to 2” longer – and hadn’t known what a violent process it was. Sheep don’t care for being roo’ed, and make some effort to be somewhere else while it is going on. There is a good picture of a recently-roo’ed ewe on page 31.

And I loved the picture of the “plantie crubs” on page 29. Sheep can go wherever they like. Vegetables are grown in pens.

Miscellaneous

The BBC said this morning that Senator Obama has been filling sandbags in Iowa, and added that he is senator for that state. Sort of thing they ought to get right.

There is a picture of Cindy McKean in today’s Sunday Times with a different diamond lapel pin – this time it seems to say “USMO”. She must have a whole box of them.

Late, this morning – I have just retrieved our car from an expensive service and MOT test. Very expensive. At least we passed.

I finished the last sleeve-dinosaur, and would have finished the sleeve but for some frogging due to a mistake somewhere in the final tyrannosaurus’s neck. That’s far enough along to allow myself a weekend of peaceful scarf-knitting.

The whole secret of motif-knitting is the strategy involved in deciding when to carry a colour along so that it’s in the right place for the next row, and when to attach a new ball instead. I am re-acquiring the hang of it.

Sharon Miller’s “The Lerwick Lace Shawls” has arrived, and will obviously repay study. I long to get back to lace knitting.

I’m glad you liked Leekscriadan, Gretchen and Shandy. I kept going back there yesterday and clicking on “Gallery” and revelling in it.

Heartened by your encouragement, I went ahead and wrote to our lawyer yesterday. Alea jacta est, as someone once said. I don’t know how one sets about buying a field, but he’ll know. It is part of an estate, listed in the particulars as a separate item, but if someone wants the whole lot, that’ll trump any offer we might make. I know that agricultural land has shot up in value recently, like houses – I don’t know whether it has shared in the fall. I’ll keep you posted.

(Google’s brilliant software for reading my mail and running appropriate advertisements alongside, came up with this the other day, when I was writing to our children about the field. The stuff of dreams.)

Back to knitting…

This is the link Emily put in her comment yesterday, to a new 50% silk-and-merino version of Koigu. Those colours really ought to glow. I was disappointed with cashmere Koigu last year, you will remember, but the disappointment taught me something about cashmere. Have a look at Emily’s blog for the most dazzling display of multiple-WIP’ery I’ve seen for a while.

I’m nearly finished with the final sleeve-dinosaur. I would hope to polish that off today, and maybe even finish the sleeve. “Tilted Blocks” has worked its way to the top of the mental list for the weekend scarf. I’ll have to decide soon.

Something is wrong with my Internet Service Provider this morning, or else with BT broadband. Terrifying. I will have to print this out and throw it into the Firth of Forth in a bottle.

I’ve embarked on the 4th and final sleeve-dinosaur. I am glad I did it this way: the dinosaurs are getting better and smoother as I proceed. I wish I’d taken more trouble about buying yarn.

I have pretty well -- but not quite -- decided on “Tricorner” for the weekend scarf. Quite a few of the scarves in “Knitting New Scarves” are based on essentially the same technique, forming flanges and then dissolving them back into a tube. I did it, and enjoyed doing it, when I knit the Linked Ribs at the end of last year.

Non-knit

The internal monologue I mentioned the other day, has been concerned, this week, with the possibility of buying a field, the one containing the famous haugh. If I ever get on-line again, I’ll put in a link. (That’s a link to the April archives – if you want to pursue the matter, it’s April 17 and subsequent.)

Our little house and its fields once supported a numerous family. The fields go eastwards from the house towards the river Ardle: the Stubble Field, the Plantation (where my husband grows his trees), the Raspberries, the Island. These family names refer to characteristics long, long out of date. There’s no stubble now, no raspberries, and the Island is dry-land all the way. The haugh would be the next field, after the river, and buying it as a gift for our four children would be an anti-inheritance-tax move. I gather in the US you don’t go in for inheritance tax much, but it’s a big problem here for anyone who owns a house.

I have consulted our children who have reacted with indifference or bewilderment except for Helen in Thessaloniki, who wrote this:

"I think that the more (land) the merrier. The fact that the field in question is an extension (albeit separated by the Ardle) of our land, is a definate plus. We can build a foot bridge and create a Miles dynasty theme park complete with reinactions of the planting of the plantation and banks of fake snow with urchins dressed in tattered Fairisles traipsing back to a bowl of gruel in an Historically Preserved Burnside.
Land is the answer to everything. Greeks, all Greeks, have bits of land here and there all over the place and I think its a great thing to hand on to one's children/grandchildren especially if it adjoins the new Blairgowrie-Kirkmichael expressway."

I’ve had a busy morning.

I learned yesterday, perhaps in the bulletin of the Knitting and Crochet Guild, that Sharon Miller has published something new – so I’ve just ordered it: “The Lerwick Lace Shawl”. It is a deconstruction, I think, of an actual old shawl in Sharon's collection. While I had the credit card out, I went on to order “Vatid, Troid, Vamsad – Knitted Jackets from West Estonian Islands” from Meg.

Then I proceeded to the American Embassy where I am currently struggling with the absentee voting application form. This involves downloading a new, superior version of Adobe Reader. Nothing is simple. I hate Adobe Reader anyway. Yesterday I ordered a shirt from Cafepress – a golf shirt (I like to have a collar) with a simple “Cats for Obama” logo.

Yesterday in the Scotsman we had an article about the two women one of whom will be First Lady in the foreseeable future. We have a lot of such articles, and there must be a dozen in America for every one here. In this one, Cindy was pictured wearing a lapel pin in which “McKean 2008” was spelled out in what must, surely, be diamonds. I had one of those thrilling moments which I think can be termed a “frisson”: we could actually win this one.

Back to knitting...

There is an interesting article in the bulletin of the Knitting and Crochet Guild about the cataloguing and classification of knitting patterns. (Not easy: I’ve got all my books in LibraryThing, but haven’t even thought about listing the patterns.) The author seems to have worked out a system for herself, and dreams of a “national collection” to which we would each add our patterns – not parting with them, but allowing them to be catalogued and scanned and added to the master system.

It sounds to me an idea worth pursuing, requiring much time and energy. Unfortunately, the article just peters out, with no information even on how to get in touch with the author.

As for actual knitting, I have reached, indeed nearly finished, the first set of dinosaur legs on the second sleeve. Legs are the worst.

One of the relatively rare mornings of complete blankness, probably because yesterday’s internal monologue was about something other than knitting. I’ve finished the first sleeve – left the stitches on hold in case I want to pink up stitches at the shoulder and do a three-needle bindoff – and started the second one. Should reach a dinosaur’s feet today: the legs are the worst.

Photography flatters the work so far. Stitches are uneven. But careful finishing – it will take fully as long to tidy the back as to knit it in the first place – and blocking should help.

I hope to be livelier tomorrow.

Comments & Miscellaneous

Tricia, thank you for the link to the Si se puede socks – they’re far too complicated for me, but I joined the Knitters-for-Obama group on Ravelry while I was there. Maybe I’ll have to bore them with the tale of Theo’s gansey: wait till we get the promised photograph. It was sort of exciting to find that Anna Zilboorg is an Obama-ite too. The pattern is hers, and free after you've made a donation to The Cause.

Now I need to order a tee-shirt and set about arranging my absentee vote. It’ll be cast in NJ.

Helen, we need to talk about lovage. I used to grow it but, as I remember, never used it. I am keen to increase the space given to perennials, and if I’m thinking of the right stuff, lovage is rather large as well. But how does one set about eating it?

There’s an essay about smoking by David Sedaris (a favourite of mine) in the May 5 New Yorker. “Given my reputation as a strident non-smoker, it was funny how quickly I took to cigarettes. It was as if my life were a play, and the prop mistress had finally showed up. Suddenly there were packs to unwrap, matches to strike, ashtrays to fill and then empty. My hands were at one with their labor, the way a cook’s might be, or a knitter’s.”

Knitting

Here are the dinosaurs – rattling along nicely, as you see. I should cast off this sleeve and start the second today. If things continue at this pace, I will certainly allow myself to start another New Scarf next weekend.

I didn’t take a picture in Kirkmichael, but the knitting proceeds. I’m still doing the ribbing, in the round, for an Araucania shirt-type sweater for myself. Love the yarn, love the colour, and I’m nearly finished with the 2 ½” of ribbing. Picture next time.

I am full of joy and hope on the political front, and knitting is going well too, but today’s blog is about vegetable-growing.

The ratio of Good News to Disappointment has never been so high at this stage. There is disappointment: something didn’t come up, there are gaps in another row, something came up all right and is now standing there with its hands in its pockets, whistling, instead of moving forward.

But in general, things are looking good. And the rabbits haven’t got into the enclosure (yet) – it was just about this time last year that Peter and his cousin Benjamin tunnelled in and made off with the ’07 pea crop.

Three of the four courgettes I hand-reared in Edinburgh are going great guns. (The fourth has disappeared entirely.) I even think I can detect flower buds forming. The seeds planted in the open ground in mid-May have come up, and are working on their first true leaves. Maybe I’ll have a glut this year, like a real grown-up vegetable gardener! The Fishwife has given me Elaine Borish’s book “What Will I Do with All Those Courgettes?” I took it down from the shelf for some happy moments of anticipation.

My courgettes are called “Striato di Napoli” and will accordingly be striped. They should show up well in the Collection of Four Vegetables I hope to enter in the Games.

And look at the orach!

The packet said to sow thickly as germination was uncertain. I took that as a polite way of warning me that it wouldn’t come up. I don’t expect much in the way of taste – I found a book that says it was much eaten in the Olden Days, but as soon as proper spinach was introduced, everybody switched to that. It’s a big plant: it’ll need more thinning soon. It, too, should show up well in the Collection of Four Vegetables. My brother-in-law has persuaded me that the judges like colour contrasts.

And sorrel! I put in three plants at the end of April, as you remember. They flourish, but they’re delicious – I need more. So I planted some seed, expecting failure because sorrel is perennial and perennial seeds tend not to come up for me. But they have: I’ve got two little rows of sorrel.

Here are the herbs:

And the climbing beans, interspersed with nasturtiums, a salad ingredient and a useful source of mock-capers in their seeds. Last year I couldn't even grow nasturtiums.

Here’s a general view.

There are three possibilities – apart from the absence of rabbits – why things might be going so comparatively well:

1) I tested the soil last autumn and decided we needed lime, so I applied some.

2) Slugs are a mostly unseen and terrible enemy. My notes from previous years are full of references to salad things that never appeared at all. This year, I went at the slugs with nematodes. They are microscopic somethings-or-other which one buys – and they’re rather expensive – in the form of a beige powder to be mixed with water and watered in. The nematodes then burrow into the soil (it is said) and attack the slugs. Sounds awful, but it’s regarded as organic. I did that in mid-May.


3) Maybe we’re just having a good year – so far.

Never mind politics, or even dinosaurs – it’s vegetables! today. The weather isn’t half bad, so far. This is the exciting one – the June visit, with everything in place. What has come up? What has been eaten by whom?

We won’t be there long – I should blog again on Sunday, maybe even Saturday. But it should be long enough to tidy up and weed and decide what to do about the grass.

There might even be enough lettuce to enhance a sandwich.

As for politics, I could wish last night had been more decisive, that Senator Obama had won both states. Still, this will have to do. I enjoyed it the more for knowing that you might have been there, Mary Lou.

It will be interesting indeed to see who turns up as V.P., Stash haus. Trouble with Mrs Clinton, she’s Old Politics and rather obviates the message of change. Also I gather they don’t like each other much. Also she’d bring Bill along.

I am sorry that we’re hearing so much about sexism as the reason for Mrs Clinton’s failure. I would have thought, personalities apart, that racism was a much higher barrier.

The big breakthrough was surely JFK who proved that the President didn’t have to be a WASP. We were in Northampton, MA, for that election, and I can remember people saying how distasteful it was to vote for an Irish Catholic.

And knitting. I’m not happy with the dinosaur – too many loose-looking stitches where colours are added. I’m about at the point where the legs are being joined together in the body and I may be happier after another inch. I will retreat with relief – if there’s time for any knitting – to the Strathardle Project for the next couple of days, a dusty pink Araucania rugby-shirt sort of sweater for me. A couple of rounds of ribbing were done, months ago.

The last time (for a while) that I’ll start a blog entry by remarking that it’s Primary Day. I hope the rally this evening works; it sounds ambitious. Kathyinjuneau, that’s a wonderful comment you left on Sunday’s blog. I am absolutely sure, from the efficiency with which Obama’s campaign has been run, that he’ll be a great administrator. As for the rest…

The dinosaur sweater has finally started. I realised as I was casting on that I have plunged into this with a reckless lack of preparation, so I changed my mind in mid-cast and started with a sleeve. That has the additional advantage that I can feel my way back into intarsia. The judges – this is to be my Games entry this year – will certainly look inside, but they may not turn the sleeves inside out.

The simple little pattern which you see emerging, is hellish, because there are three colours in a row. Somewhere I’ve got a ring-gadget I can wear with channels for various yarns to go through. I’ve used it on the rare occasions I’ve done Scandinavian knitting, which occasionally strays into three colours, and I’ll need it when I repeat this wretched pattern on the body of the sweater.

Perhaps today I’ll reach the feet of an actual dinosaur. I seem to remember from my previous acquaintance with this pattern that the sleeves are too long if you just follow the instructions as written. Did I leave out an entire dinosaur? Needless to say, the notes I kept are inadequate. I feel strongly, as I’ve said before, that children’s sleeves mustn’t be too long.

Once this thing is well underway, I hope to revert to weekend scarf-knitting. The one I have just dispatched to Denver for Mrs Obama was knit in Manos Silk Blend, and it is heaven on the neck. Plain-vanilla Manos is pretty silky, and the addition of 30% actual silk transports it onto another plane. I’ve got more than a skein left. It would be a shame not to carry on.

I’ve been back through “Knitting New Scarves”. I want a single-colour scarf. I’m still scared of “Drifting Pleats” which “requires your undivided attention”. I haven’t got any undivided attention. I’ve already knit and enjoyed “Linked Rib” which eliminates that one and several similar. I think it comes down to “Shag” “Tilted Blocks” or “Tricorner”.

Comment

Laure makes a good point about the distance of Lake Van from Trebizond. If we stay overnight, we wouldn’t want to be too ostentatiously luxurious in that part of the world. The very first thing we will have to do is hire someone to arrange all this – find and charter the yacht, hire the crew including just the right sort of top-flight chef – I wonder if Skye Gyngell would do it – and make the arrangements with various ports. Our stay at Lake Van will be but one of her problems.

The dinosaurs are still not cast on: I went too far with Cathy’s second sock and had to rip out ten rounds. But the socks are finished and Kitchener’d and need but a few moments’ tidying.

An unexpected flaw in the Regia sock yarn can be detected in the right-hand sock, even without the help of circles and arrows which I have never mastered. There is a very discreet knot after an olive-coloured stripe on the foot – the sequence then resumes with the right colour (blue) but the wrong shade of blue, with the result that half-a-repeat is lost.

I don’t care, because I was aiming at fraternal twins anyway, but I’d be irritated if I had been trying to achieve identical ones.

An early dentist’s appointment today may even give me time to cast on the next pair, but for serious knitting it will certainly be dinosaurs.

We spent a happy day yesterday twittering down phone- and email-lines about Theo and Jenni’s happy news. Rachel phoned my sister (Theo’s mother) in CT: the wedding will probably be early next year, in DC or Wisconsin. Theo and Jenni’s mundane future (and therefore perhaps even wedding plans) will depend a good deal on who is president of the US this time next year. It is hard to believe, just now, that the question will ever be settled.

Miscellaneous

The link Jenny provided yesterday is good on Van cats.

This is a picture of some peas I am growing on the doorstep. I’ve done salad leaves in other years, and then got cold feet about the prospect of eating all those exhaust fumes. I tried a miniature runner bean once, but didn’t get much of a crop. I am seriously hopeful this time that we might get a plateful. It’s a new dwarf variety called “Half Pint”. I planted the rest of the packet in one of the squares of my Square Foot Garden.

We hope to go to Kirkmichael on Wednesday. It would have been tomorrow but that the weather forecast is bad. If time is to be so limited, at least I want to be able to work outdoors.

Now I’d better put on a clean tee-shirt and face up to the dentist.

Stop press

This morning’s big news is that Theo and Tiger are engaged! Much joy and excitement.The picture was taken at the end of Games Day last year – that’s Ketki to the right in a KF Tumbling Blocks.

I am delighted by the interest in the pussy cats who swim in Lake Van. As soon as I’ve got my first billion, we’ll have a blog-readers’ outing: everybody welcome. We’ll charter a jet and fly to Istanbul. Perhaps we’ll spend a couple of nights there. I’d like to see the Mosaic Museum again, and the cisterns. Then we’ll find a yacht – something on the lines of the Royal Yacht Britannia would be about right – and cruise along the south shore of the Black Sea until we get to Trebizond. It’ll be fun.

No – let’s avoid airports and do the whole trip in the yacht, leaving from Leith which will be handy for you, Helen. That way we can tie up at Palermo for a while and Mary Lou and I can make our Leopard-pilgrimage.

I think the cats of Lake Van are a breed of their own, but I don’t know. I don’t know whether they swim for pleasure or for some purpose. We’ll have to find out.

And as for knitting, I should polish off Cathy’s second sock today, and cast on a dinosaur sweater.

Mary Lou, I got “Horse Latitudes” from Shan who left it as a comment on Wednesday, when I had grumbled about being in the doldrums. I used it yesterday because I thought it sounded smarter. It is funny how often that happens, hearing an unusual word and then hearing it again right away.

Well, nothing else has turned up, so I shall throw myself into the meme.

What was I doing ten years ago? Much as now, living in retirement in Drummond Place. I was peppier then – it has been interesting to reflect on how much has happened in those ten years which required a certain amount of pep. Ten years ago I was an ardent reader of the Knitlist (not that that required pep). I used to post an annual summary of what I had achieved – in 1998 I finished nine pairs of socks, it says (same as 1997). Wow! That strongly implies a couple of visits to CT to see my mother who was by then in a nursing home near my sister. Until the last two months here in 2008, sock-knitting was reserved for travelling.

When we were having (a delicious) lunch with Alexander and family in Glasgow recently, he said he had been past a hotel that morning which was having a motivational meeting of some sort. “Keep on doing what you’re doing now, and in ten years you’ll have what you’ve got now.” Or words to that effect. He and I agreed that it was a most comforting thought.

What are five things on my to-do list today? There is no such list, and my days don’t vary much. I fear to tempt providence by listing anything. I could trip and break a leg when I stand up from the computer.

1. I will soon walk across the square and buy the newspapers, the Scotsman and the Telegraph and, because it’s Saturday, the Financial Times.
2. I will plan the weekend meals, shop, cook, and wash up, wash up, wash up.
3. I hope to get on with setting financial affairs in order. The bank statements are done. Now it’s a matter of working through piles of paper on desk and floor. This item would qualify for a to-do list if I had one.
4. I’ll knit. I’m around the corner of Cathy’s second sock and speeding down the foot.
5. At bedtime, I will read aloud to my husband, as we have been doing for 50 years. At the moment we are nearing the end of Thackeray’s Book of Snobs.

What snacks do I enjoy? Cider.

Where are some places I’ve lived? Detroit, Michigan; West Allenhurst, NJ: Glasgow, Leicester, Birmingham, Edinburgh.

What things would I do if I were a billionaire? I’d like to see some energetic excavation being done on Piso’s villa at Herculaneum. He was Julius Caesar’s father-in-law. So far – and it was a long time ago – only his Greek library has been found, and it is pretty boring. He must have had some Latin books. Latin literature survives in much smaller quantity than ancient Greek (because the dark ages were so much darker in the west). Piso might have had the lost books of Livy, for starters.

And I’d arrange to travel in the greatest comfort to a couple of places I’d still like to see: Reggio Calabria, for the Riace bronzes; Sicily, for the places associated with Prince Tomasi di Lampedusa; Trebizond, for the chance of a day-trip to Lake Van where the pussy cats swim. They really do. I know Byzantine scholars who’ve seen them at it.

Alice Starmore – the Alice Starmore – grew up on the Isle of Lewis and still lives there. I’ve been wandering around her Virtual Yarn site. So she’s quite likely to be the protester I mentioned yesterday. On the other hand, the rest of her family may still be there, too, and another one of them might be named Alice.

I’m knitting the heel flap of Cathy’s second sock. I also got a lot more financial tidying done yesterday. If I am suddenly called to my reward this week or next, they’ll find things in much better order than they would have last week.

The current plan is to go to Kirkmichael next week, probably Tuesday, for two nights. I may be able to wheedle a third. The forecast for next week is not too bad. Yesterday was warm and encouraging in Edinburgh but the man said on the radio this morning that Perthshire had been the wettest place in the UK.

Walking about the city streets in the sunshine, I thought of a remark of Nanny Hawkins’ in “Brideshead Revisited”, although when I found it, it was not exactly as I remembered. She wonders why the upper classes go to London for the “season” just about now – “what they want to go to London for in the best of the summer and the gardens all out, I never have understood.”

Quite.

Blogs

I am, although untagged, rather tempted by the current meme. Chronic Knitting Syndrome and Knitterguy have done it. It might be just the thing to assist a struggle out of the Horse Latitudes.

I liked this account of the recent Men’s Spring Knitting Retreat – found the link on Joe’s blog. It reminded me of how I felt at Camp Stitches in ’99, only more so, because a man who knits is so often thought to be breaking a gender-rule. They clearly had a lot of fun together.

Lots of achievement yesterday, leaving me feeling by six as if I’d been mowing the grass all day: more bank statements balanced, some ironing done, the scarf for Mrs Obama sent to Denver, Thomas-the-Elder’s socks to Streatham and a birthday present to Beijing.

I’m about half-way down the leg of Cathy’s second sock. I think I’ll go ahead and finish it, even if I haven’t quite achieved that state by midnight on the 31st. The toil up the hill to the post office yesterday afternoon left me near John Lewis’s – I went in and bought yarns that will-have-to-do for the dinosaur sweater, and to hell with it.

Gardening

Good King Henry: I tried it once before, Mary Lou. It’s one of the myriad off-beat vegetables which the books will tell you, “can be eaten like spinach”. See Angel’s interesting comment of yesterday. Well, I can tell you, Good King Henry doesn’t taste very good, eaten like spinach. It didn’t kill us, but it wasn’t very nice. So I pulled it all up. That must have been about ten years ago.

But I’ve decided that I wasn’t patient enough. I never got any flower shoots, and that’s what we’re really waiting for: “poor man’s asparagus”. I don’t know how I would set about “gently forcing” the shoots in the spring, as suggested in the link I’ve provided, but I’ll work on it.

Some unexpected knitting news

There was a story in yesterday’s Scotsman about a proposal to put some of those huge terrifying wind turbines on the Isle of Lewis, on a range of hills called the Old Woman of the Moors which form the view from the Callinish Stones, Scotland’s Stonehenge. It’s a dreadful idea.

But what has it to do with knitting? “Alice Starmore, a tour guide who has lived on Lewis all her life, said…” Clearly the Scotsman has never heard of her, but isn't that likely to be the famous bad-tempered knitting author and designer? Or someone else of the same name? More power to her, whichever.

I’ve finished the ribbing on Cathy’s second sock.

Still no yarn ordered for the dinosaurs, but I have made real headway in straightening out our financial affairs – reconciling old statements for little-used savings accounts, that sort of thing – in the wake of our friend’s misfortune. I found myself wondering yesterday how I used to manage to have a job and run a house with six people and a cat in it (never very well, but we stayed afloat) and now I can’t even balance a bank statement and do some ironing on the same day.

The answer is easy and obvious: two things are different now. One is the siren call of the Internet. I didn’t write a blog or solve on-line jigsaw puzzles in those days. And the other is lunch. My husband has never learned to graze, and is faintly incredulous when I tell him there are people who can do it. Lunch takes up a great deal of every day.

His sister became a great-grandmother yesterday. (She still gets very tired, but is in general doing well.) The child is a little boy named James, somewhere in Essex. Today is the birthday of James Miles the Younger, Alexander and Ketki’s son. I amused myself while doing the washing-up yesterday by trying to work out the relationship between the two little Jameses. My mother was very good at that sort of thing. They are second cousins once removed, I think. The calculation is complicated by the fact that their ages suggest that they’re in the same generation, but they’re not. Alexander and the new baby’s grandmother are first cousins.

Mary Lou, I meant to thank you for that reference a couple of days ago to orach balancing the acidity of sorrel. How providential! My sorrel is doing fine, but I went back to the source at the monthly Strathmore and the Glens farmers’ market in Blairgowrie last Saturday on my way to my garden, and there was no more. I’ve put in seeds but they haven’t come up yet. I want lots more.

Anonymous, you said the same day that life would be easier if people developed recipes for weeds. I think, in effect, that’s what we’ve done. I am making an effort to reduce the amount of hard work in the garden by extending the amount that is permanently planted: sorrel and Good King Henry and perennial herbs. I’ve put in a row of autumn-fruiting raspberries, on the Fishwife’s suggestion. Seven of the ten are doing fine and it’s far too soon to despair of the other three.

The weather is cold and blowy. I don’t know when I’ll make my next move northward. Maybe I can persuade my husband that we should go up together next week.

I think I am in some sort of spring slump, knitting-wise and life-wise.

I finished off the scarf, however: it but remains to make a package of it. My husband noticed it for the first time and said that it is too narrow. He’s right.

I also finished, and Kitchener’d, Cathy’s first sock and cast on the second with a likely-looking ball plucked hastily from the KF Sock Yarn bag. It turned out after an inch or so to be the wrong shade: all the same colours, but differently arranged. So I found the right ball, ripped out the false start, and started again.

In that picture you see the finished sock, and the Wrong Yarn with which to proceed.

And there we are. Perhaps a wander round Ravelry would inspire me.

Politics is in the doldrums, too.

I’ve just spent a busy half-hour on paper work, and brought the balancing of bank statements up-to-date, in respect for my friend’s calamity. Thank you for yesterday’s comments – I had never thought of cheques as particularly unsafe; the newspaper articles concentrate on cards. I write very few cheques nowadays, never on the fly. (My husband carries one as a back-up.) I use a debit card for purchases on the hoof, and pay many bills from home by electronic transfer.

I suspect that despite the greatly reduced volume of cheques these days, banks are less careful than they used to be about scrutinising them – they’ll just be whipped through some machine.

I spoke to C. on the telephone yesterday. She sounded much more cheerful. She has seen a lot of her bank manager lately in connection with all the business attendant upon a death, and feels secure and confident with her. She has spoken to her son in Singapore, her only close blood relative; that buoyed her up, I think.

Knitting

I’m thoroughly bored of the scarf, to use a family idiom. It’s now 5 ½ feet long. I think I’ll devote some of today’s knitting time to finishing it off. I wish it were a bit wider, but making it longer is not going to help with that problem.

When it’s done, I’ll bundle it up and send it to Theo in Denver, with the idea that he can give it to Mr Obama for his wife on the occasion of the promised photo session, Theo in his cashmere gansey in the summer heat. If the idea proves too excruciatingly embarrassing, Theo can just keep it for his girl friend Tiger.

I’ll also send a page of my untidy and largely incomprehensible notes for the construction of the sweater, on which can be inscribed The Autograph.

It will be totally impossible to begin to explain to Mr Obama how that sweater has helped his campaign. It might be worth while, though, or at any rate amusing, now that the hoped-for issue has become a real possibility, to collect the blog references to it. I could print them out and file with the The Autograph when I get it. We certainly hatched the idea in the first half of ’07, back when Mrs Clinton was “inevitable”.

And now I must order that yarn for the dinosaurs.

Let’s get knitting out of the way first, because there won’t be much of it.

I’m shaping the toe of Cathy’s first sock. Told you she has small feet…

And today is scarf-Sunday. Might I decide it’s long enough to cast off? A happy prospect! I didn’t get dinosaur yarns ordered, although I got as far as the Rowan Superwash DK page on somebody’s website – I hope I’ll be able to find it again. There is a good range.

Yesterday in K*rkmichael

I had a good day. The sun shone, almost tee-shirt weather. I bested a lot of weeds. Three of the courgettes are flourishing, the fourth, I think, has lost the fight. Nature is odd that way. I planted three seeds at each of four other stations in mid-May as usual, so if the Worst Happens there should be something to transplant into that spot.

And two of the kinds of seeds I planted a week ago have come up already – I didn’t spot them at first, but microscopic examination revealed both Cima di Rapa Sessantina (from Seeds of Italy) and orach (from Real Seeds). Orach is also called mountain spinach, and I’ve never heard of it. I can’t imagine why I ordered it. I’m looking forward to it keenly.

Spinach and lettuce from April sowings are coming forward nicely.

As I toiled, a neighbour walked by with her dog, and I leapt to my feet. It was C., the widow whose husband’s funeral I went to on April 1. I hadn’t seen her since.

She has had seven thousand pounds or so fraudulently removed from her current account in the last few days, and is visibly distressed. Who wouldn’t be? I’ve heard too many of these stories lately – C’s tale was the second for last week. The bank in question this time, Lloyds TSB, has been prompt and human and reassuring. That is not always the case.

Not card fraud: four cheques were presented, each for a large sum, and apparently from C.’s chequebook: they were printed with her name and account number, and the bank sort code. She has seen a facsimile of one of them: the signature is a crude forgery, but a forgery made by someone, she thinks, who has seen her signature.

The police seem to know about this sort of thing. They’re called “ghosts”, cheques like that. It is (not impossible but) hard to see how it could happen without help from someone within the bank. Cancelled cheques aren’t returned to the account-holder any more in Britain. And the bad guys may have known how much she had in the account – they left something there, and might not have been detected for quite a while if she had been less alert. Did they pick her in the first place because she had an unusual amount in her current account?

The bank (as always in my experience of such cases) is adamant that no employee of theirs could be involved. I trust they conduct enquires of their own on the quiet.