I shall overcome

On the last Skipnorth trip I attempted to spin with a spindle and I was completely useless. I have decided the time has come to overcome this.
We went to a fab craft fair at a stately home on Sunday and I picked up this wool fibre for £2. Is that cheap? expensive? OK? I really don't know but Clive paid-bless him. I now have a bid in on a lovely but cheap spindle with ebay and using You Tube I will learn to spin. I really will. I hope.
I am also overcoming stash neurosis-I have some lovely aran weight cashmerino in a soft grey. I have not known quite what to do with it-Hannah was really keen but unsure. I am now using it for long slouchy socks I am knitting for a friend, myself and Hannah. I had lots of socks in this pattern in cotton that Hannah hupped to Israel. I really loved them and in this yarn they will be complete bliss-I have realised I will really enjoy using the yarn this way even if it is not quite what I originally imagined doing.

Simple Pleasures

Sometimes I have great conversations with total strangers that makes me feel that life is really not that bad.
Today I went to Sainsburys really early and the nice woman who chopped up my fish for me (makes fish curry so much easier)and I talked about instant meals. As she pointed out some of them can take up to 18 minutes to microwave and we reckoned we could get pan fried fish, salad and potatoes on the table in much the same time with out the chemicals, salt and fat. What stops people-washing a pot? facing a frypan? Very sad I am old enough to have owned a wringer washing machine in my distant past-washing a pot pales to comparison.
Anyway this made me feel on a roll.
Small diversion by way of explanation. Approximately 50,000 Israelis get discharged from the army every year and about a third go to India. Many come back to Israel a little spiritually arrogant and often woefully spiritually ignorant at the same time. Hannah met one such charm bucket who told her that chick peas are not used in Indian cooking.
I was telling my friend Julian about this bizarre level of ignorance and he pointed out that there may be some places in India where chick peas are not used. As you may have already worked out Julian has more niceness in his big toe than in my entire soul.
Anyway the checkout lady at Sainsburys was from India and I told her the story-she said chick peas are used all over India. It turned out she has a relative that runs a boarding house in India and she knows Israeli travellers well. We ended up doing cosmic Israeli traveller imitations and it was truly funny-even more so as you do not really expect to end up in fits of laughter at the Sainsburys checkout-as I say life is alright

Tea pots and other weaknesses

I got this wonderful Wedgwood Tea Set for £6.25 at our local Red Cross Charity Shop half price sale. Oh joy, even if I probably have a few too many tea pots already. I noticed this set walking past the shop after hours. I did not know what it was put I was pretty sure it was good. I am getting a nose for second hand china-we all have our skills.
My other skill is de-tangling yarn and sewing up garments. One of our knitting group has sewing up issues and we have agreed I will sew up one of her projects for some cotton yarn-love the exchange economy.
If I have a tea pot collecting thing the husband has discovered Facebook and more often than is appropriate for a man in his 50's I find him collecting Facebook friends. I really do not know where this hunter gatherer thing comes from-he is a middle class Jewish boy from Surrey.
I did mention other weaknesses. pause deep breath. No it's not drugs or some bizarre perversion with tea pots it's The Westwing-I am back at series one and intend to work my way through them all. It is this alternative Bush free fairy tale. My only justification is it is great for getting boring knitting done.

Van Morrison

I went to see Van Morrison on Saturday night with knitting friends. I took one of those very low ( i.e about 4" from the ground) camping chairs. The security guard told me I could not bring it in. I told him I had gynecological problems (not true) and therefore needed a chair. This failed to move him and he still said no. I then told him I had had an operation in my vagina. As soon as I said the word vagina he looked terrified and let me in chair and all.
Why oh why are men so scared of the word vagina?
Heterosexuals are rather keen on putting vulnerable pieces of their anatomy in them and they will use the somewhat vulgar aggressive slang for vagina all the time. Yet the word seems to terrify them-I find this bizarre.
The concert was great and we of course had the most fabulous picnic between us. One group adjacent to us had a wide range of alcohol, loads of fags (outdoor picnic concerts seem to be some sort of smokers liberation meeting) and one of those packets of pistachio nuts available at all good off licences. We took pity and offered them some hand made ginger nuts, reaching out across the social divide.
I also love going to the loo at these things-the cues take forever and you get to bond with total strangers and get their life stories. Maybe the fact that boys miss out on loo cue bonding somehow result in vagina terror-interesting thought.

This is my beautiful button collection all in charity shop vases. J suggested I put it on the blog and she was right. I will not comment on the anal retentive colour sorting.
Three of us from knitting are going to see Van Morrison on Sat night-bliss. Going with 2 other knitters and a very tolerant partner (not mine he refused to come) means it is ok to knit-double bliss.
The son got his A level results today 2 B's and a D. I am trying to be cosmic and tolerant and nice about this not easy-he is extremely bright and not at all motivated. Something like his parents-my B+ average degree was something of a miracle bought about by the overnight essay and his father is extremely bright.

The Olympics

I got the guilts and thought that with all the money, all those people, all that effort I should really watch the Olympic Opening Ceremony.
I still felt guilty.
At one point the bread maker beeped indicating it was time to shape challah-by the time I got or back to the screen the commentator was saying that "they spent a year rehearsing that" and I missed the entire thing.
Commentators talk about these huge world wide audiences but who watches the every nano second? People drink tea, answer phone calls, use the loo and shape challah. I personally did all four.
I also became a bit Daily Mailish about the athletes on their mobile phones. They spend their lives working towards getting to the Olympics and then on the Opening Ceremony parade they talk on their phones. Now bizarre. What happened to being in the moment? Who are they talking to?
I have just finished 9 pairs of slipper socks and never want to do that pattern again.

bags and men

This is my new shopping bag knitted in very cheap Lidl cotton (doubled) and using some of my lovely vintage buttons. The bag was very easy-4 rectangles but the zips on both bags, the seams, buttons etc took much longer than actually knitting it. It does work well-it stretches out well and carries loads.

Now Men.

We had a wonderful cultural clash on Monday at aqua aerobics. The regular teacher was away and we had a tall loud male-the type used to adoring women. He failed to understand 3 things when teaching middle age women

1. We do not do 'whoo'.

2. We consider instructions to be more of a suggestion than something we have to do. In fact one of our regulars always ends up sitting on a woggle 'cycling' up and down the pool. She will do this no matter what-crashing into people moving backwards or getting ineveryones way when we do 'abs'exercises. Our instructor found this somewhat incomprehensible.

3. Popping into the pool to chat to your friend who is sort of doing the class is normal.



The husband.

If I ate like my husband I would look at doors in a very different way as I would probably not fit through most of them.

Last night he seemed surprised to find his stomach sticking out a bit. Apparently he had not eaten anything out of the norm.

So we unpicked his day's eating. Every contract my husband gets he finds a sweet thing to eat with his lunch time cup of tea. He then sticks to the chosen sugar fest the entire time he is at that contract. Sometimes it is small cereal bars-sometimes 2 crunchie bars a day. At the moment it is a daily Bounty Bar-he is maintaining himself on one a day. He also had 2 'small' Krispy Kreme doughnuts-if they are small I would hate to see his definition of a large doughnut.
He also had fried fish cakes and fried veges(?) for lunch. What makes this all intolerable is that if he manages to give up the daily chocolate bar and nothing else at all, the weight falls off.
OK I admit to jealousy.

Let the rain not stop us

We went to the Innocent Village Fete at Regents Park on Sunday.Although the whole thing shamelessly pushes the Innocent corporate image it still was a lovely day.
Lots of interesting music including the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain, great food, surprisingly good poetry and of course the knitting tent.
Sunday was a very English summer day i.e loads of rain. But masses and masses of people were there. It was sort of "we're English and we have an umbrella and can therefore go anywhere and attempt anything even if we're a bit crap at it". It was enough for me to almost forgive England for being one of the many nations who have robbed the All Blacks of their entitlement to the Rugby World Cup-but let me not go there.
The poets were great but why oh why do middle class boys doing a poetry slam in Regents Park about Freud and Jung (oh my loves I kid you not) thing that putting on a bad imitation of a black ghetto accent is a good idea. Maybe when Cameron becomes PM young middle class men will feel OK about their roots again and will dust down their old school ties lovingly kept in the back of the wardrobe behind the carefully ripped jeans and scruffy but not too scruffy tee shirts.
Anyway back to umbrellas-I could not help but notice that most of us have incredibly battered cheap small umbrellas. Maybe we need to go back to big strong umbrellas-the type your child could inherit to regain national pride. Was the British Empire built on a Evening Standard freebie umbrella? Then I had the horrible thought-there are far to many people in London now to cope with big umbrellas-we would poke each others eyes out and there would be umbrella jams on Oxford Street. Depressing thought.