A Day for Finishing Things

That's what yesterday was. 

I finished a pair of socks. This was the third of the five pairs I'm wanting to do before Christmas, and the first skein knitted up from the wool I bought in Pittenweem in September. These are for me. And although they're  a bit more colourful than I usually go for I like them. 

I also (finally finally) finished what has been my 'current' jigsaw puzzle for absolutely ages. I cannot imagine, looking at it, why I ever thought it was a good idea to buy it. Not only are there multiple images of the same thing on there but the pieces do not all interlock, a large number of them simply adjoin with sloping edges, which is an absolute nightmare. This one was finished yesterday evening, re-boxed this morning and is already in the library/charity shop pile. Later this afternoon I shall look out a puzzle that I know I will enjoy doing, I feel  deserve it, after fighting my way through this one.

The day was sadly rather too short to allow me to finish the latest Saturday Slaughters book from the library crime readers group. This is sad, because I would dearly have liked to have it finished and out of the house. It's  The Memory Wood by Sam Lloyd, and if you enjoy stories about young teenage girls being kidnapped and tortured it will be right up your street. Otherwise I would suggest you leave it alone. 

100 Books to Read Poster NO 21

 

And this was My Man Jeeves by P G Wodehouse. I know lots of people who find Wodehouse hysterically funny. I never have. However this was on the poster so I got a chance to see if, in the decades since I last read anything of his, my taste in that direction had changed. It had not. 

This is a book of short stories and I think is the one in which Jeeves and Wooster were first introduced. There are also a couple of stories about another Wooster type, although one who likes golf,  called Reggie something. Possibly Pepper. 

I still don't find these clever, except in a very mechanistic, Whitehall farce kind of a way. I still don't find them funny ether. What I do find is that, under a false cloak of 'how-dim-are-men?' they are deeply deeply misogynistic, and that leaves a very unpleasant taste.  

I might have left this as  neither a hit nor a miss, on the grounds that of its type its quite good, its just not my type of thing. But the misogyny I'm afraid takes it a very very long way  into Miss territory. 

Baking Subscription October

 

Blueberry and Lemon Biscotti. I've never made biscotti before, largely because I had no idea how to do it but  also because I'm not their greatest fan. 

I have to say these were a great success. There was quite a lot of hanging about the kitchen/oven, waiting for them to bake, and then cool, and then crisp up on both sides but it was worth it. They came out just right; light and crisp and crunchy.

I left out the supplied poppy seeds because, since  neither the OH nor I like them  it seemed silly to include them. There was also some icing sugar because you were supposed to ice the biscotti. I don't recall ever seeing an iced biscotto, not that that means much because I don't go round looking at them, but anyway we decided that we didn't need the extra sugar hit involved so they are icing-less. 

I would make these again, and I might even flirt with variations - apricot and almond? cranberry and chocolate chip? we'll see. 

100 Books to Read Poster No. 20

 Hurray! one fifth of the way through. It has to be said that I am getting through the books more quickly since a) the Ph D got finished and b) lockdown. 

Once again the graphic, in so far as it is supposed to relate to the title of the book,  rather defeats me. I mean you look at that picture and start trying to think of a famous-ish book called 'Message in a Bottle' don't you? 

But it is Bill Bryson's Notes from a Small Island, a description of a round (parts of ) the UK trip which he took just before he and his family decamped to live for several years is the US. 

Where to start? I listened to this rather than read it, because it and another poster title appeared in an Audible two for one sale just as my monthly credit dropped in in September. I left a rather snotty review of it on Audible, mostly relating to the shortcomings of the narrator who seems to think that people from all the Celtic nations of the British Isles speak in a fey tone with a generic accent hovering somewhere in the middle of the Irish Sea. This is very far from being the truth. Why do we even need to still be saying this in 2020? 

This was not however my only gripe. Time was when I devoured any new book by Bill Bryson, since I was sure that I would learn a lot and laugh a lot at the same time. In later years I have stopped buying his books or watching him on TV because I thought he had turned into a Miserable Old Git. But listening to this I discover I was wrong. Bryson has always been a Miserable Old Git and previously I either did not recognise this as the fact that it is, or I cared less than I do now. 

Honestly, does he ever stop moaning? He can moan about anything; people, accents, trains, roads, hotels, the weather, shops, modern life in general, you name it, Bryson has moaned about it.  

In view of the above, and given that if I want moans I can do my own, no-one is going to be surprised to learn that I have designated this a miss. 

What is it about cowls?

The OH doesn't think much of cowls. I don't know what he's got against them, I've certainly never ventured to make him one to wear so it's not the result of an unhappy experience. Maybe he just thinks they're a weak non-manly excuse for a scarf. 

I on the other hand love them. And while I'll admit that part of the reason is that they're fairly quick to knit and a good use for one ball of rather nice yarn in a weight unsuitable for socks, there's more to it than that. 

I'm not good with scarves. I'm OK with the woolly ones you wrap yourself in when the weather is cold but drapey, accessory type scarves I just can't get away with. It's a bit like flower arranging, some people drop a few flowers in a jug and its art. I drop a few flowers in a jug and they just look wrong. Too few. Too many. Too unbalanced. And it's the same with scarves. Some people can 'do' them. Some people ie me, can't. And this is where the cowl comes in. 

Cowls come in all sorts of sizes. There are the wider ones that fill in the gap at the top of a v-necked  jacket or coat. Also useful for pulling up and protecting ears if it turns chilly. I even have one that did duty as a hat one cold evening in Stockholm! There are narrower ones which basically hug your neck and instantly take away the severity of a dark or round necked top (when you're my age round necked tops tend not to be a good look.)And there are longer ones that are basically loops and they look like an artistically draped scarf All i all they're a really versatile little accessory. 

Which has of course all been leading up to a picture of my latest cowl, finished just before the pink and grey socks. 

Well, that was quick ....

Remember that I said I had cast on a sock during the men's French Open Final? I finished them yesterday. And this despite doing all the usual things that I  do during the day, plus starting the reading for a new course I am doing in the New Year and going out to the hairdressers yesterday afternoon. (And thank goodness I did because who knows what will be happening to hairdressers once the First Minister has made her most recent announcements this afternoon? We don't want the hair gong back to the state it was in after lockdown!) In a spirit of optimism however I made appointments for the OH to have is hair cut next week, and for my own pre-Christmas hair-do at the beginning of December. 

Meanwhile back to the socks. This is the second ball of the Pairfect yarn my sister bought for my birthday., and these ones are deffo for me. The pink is very bright, but the grey balances it out and anyway, what's wrong with a little neon pink? 

A picture? But of course. 

Ma foi! ....

.... and other exclamations registering half amusement and  half exasperation. 

It was wet yesterday afternoon so our plans for a walk went out of the window. That being  so I decided to do something I haven't done for years, which was to sit down and just watch a tennis match. I used to do that when I was student age, but somehow over the years it began to seem a waste of time, and although I have made resolutions sometimes recently to watch Wimbledon from the beginning through to the end, I never have. Time to waste however seems to be something many of us have in spades right now, so I settled down to watch the French Open men's single final. 

[When I say 'just watch a tennis match', after about 20 minutes I did look out a needle and some wool and cast on a plain sock. Because there is a lot of time in between points and between games and they spend a lot of time replaying the previous point and it's amazing how much  of a plain sock you can knit during this dead time]

When I started watching I thought I was indifferent to who won. In so far as I have followed the men's game over the past decade it's been a case of a) Murray playing - want him to win. b) Federer playing - want him to lose. c) anyone else playing - not bothered. However I realised quite early on in this match from my reactions to the play that I actually did want Nadal to win. And he did, so that was alright. In fact he won really easily but there was some great tennis along the way, so that was fine. 

If the playing was good the same cannot be said of the commentary. So irritating was it that I wonder if it was the inanities of commentating, rather than feeling I had better things to do with my time that led me to stop watching tennis in the first place. I certainly spent a fair bit of my time arguing with the commentators and correcting the stupid stuff they said. I know there's no point, they can't hear me, but it's just instinctive. And it made me feel better. 

Some of my 'favourites' were 'Djokovic is made of rubber'. Er- no. 'That game was a pivot point in this match' said when Djokovic finally won a game after losing six in a row. He then went on to lose the next four. Some pivot, eh? And 'that shot is a classic. Like Catcher in the Rye, that's a classic  - that's lasted for an eternity'. I don't know quite where to start on that one, but I'll just point out that Catcher in the Rye was published in 1951. I don't think seventy years quite counts as 'an eternity' - unless you have been forced to sit and listen to tennis commentary all that time, in which case it might well qualify. 

 

100 Books to Read Poster No 19

 

In the words of a once much loved and now disgraced children's entertainer 'Kin you giss what it is yit?' Absolutely no prizes for realising that it's Pride and Prejudice. And of course I have read it before multiple times,  but the poster gave me a good excuse, if one were needed, to read it again. Austen famously once said that it was 'too light and bright and sparkling', but after the downers that were Dissolution and The Secret History it struck me that light and bright and sparkling was exactly what I needed. 

I treated myself to Penguin's new clothbound edition before reading. I have a set of Austen's completed novels which were bought for me by my parents for a birthday many years ago, and I'll never get rid of them but the texts were not prepared with any academic rigour. The new Penguin edition is based on the definitive R W Chapman text, and although there was nothing new germane to the plot I did glean a few things that I hadn't known before. There is for example quite a more detailed description of Pemberley than I'd previously met with - especially the grounds - and I also discovered that the Bennets had a butler. Who knew? Well, anyone who had previously read the Chapman text obviously, but I hadn't. (And I don't remember a butler in any of the recent adaptations that I've seen either., so perhaps their writers had not gone back to the original text.) It might seem a small thing, but actually it immediately elevated the Bennets into a section of society I hadn't previously thought they belonged to. A whole new perspective on all sorts of things. 

The other novels in this edition will naturally go onto my Amazon wishlist, and meanwhile Pride and Prejudice was, of course, a hit. 

A Perfect Pair (of socks)

 

So this is magic. You buy a ball of yarn, follow the instructions on where to start both your socks and no matter what size you are knitting(allegedly) they turn out to be a perfectly matching patterned pair.

My sister discovered this yarn line a wee wile ago and did some very pretty striped socks in it, so when it was my birthday I asked her to buy me some as a present. I'm still rather surprised that it works, but I do have a second ball she bought me so I can try it all over again. 

Finishing off Fife

Time to round up our last day away. We went to a place called Brooksbank Walled Garden; we'd never heard of it before but there were several leaflets for it in the cottage we rented and we're suckers for a walled garden. In fact it's not just the walled garden, they have  a rockery and a woodland walk and also a national collection of narcissi; not that the narcissi were in evidence in August. It must be a great place to go in the spring though.

That said, even though there weren't many flowers about and they had had to put in various restrictions due to corona virus, we had a really lovely time there. The weather was glorious and so we had our second al fresco lunch in a row, and I bought some jam and some chutney that they make on the estate. And I took a shed load of pictures. 

That's a fairly random selection, but it gives an idea. It was a lovely day, in fact looking back it was a very nice week. Which is as well since it seems likely to be our last holiday for a while.