Lassoo-ing my Toes

 

 

 

Tuesday saw me at the doctor's surgery to meet my physiotherapist who, in common with everyone I've ever met there, was very pleasant and blessed with a sense of humour. I could tell though that she wasn't overimpressed by my walking with crutches technique.

 

Anyway she poked and prodded and asked questions and it's really all good news, because the injury is healing well and I've been lucky not to have very much pain or any complications. We also had a bit of a chat about how the accident might have happened in the first place and she managed to reassure me that I don't have a nasty muscle wasting disease, just weak muscles round my ankles.

 

She ran through some exercises with me which are designed to loosen my tightened calf and get full rotation back into all the joints in my foot, which are laudable aims, and the reason I try not to mind too much that they're painful to do. I don't mind pointing my toes down like a ballerina (ha!), and lassoing my toes with a dressing gown belt and pulling my foot towards me is quite hilarious, especially when coupled with cries of Hey Ho Silver! But rotating my feet hurts and my ankle aches when I walk now.

 

We also talked a bit about balance and how and why the accident might be affecting that. I had to say that the thing that was mostly affecting my balance at that point was the picture on the wall behind her, which I've put at the top of this post. (Well you didn't want to see a picture of my foot, did you?) I had to avoid looking at it as best I could throughout the consultation, because if I do give it more than a fleeting glance it  makes me feel giddy and sick. Which is not a good thing.

 

 

 

Gone!

 

 

 

For those who might be wondering - Magnus Merriman went back to the libray this morning. I made a heroic effort yesterday and finished it. It was a great relief finally to reach page 308 and see 'The End'

 

I'm not saying it's a bad book, because it really isn't but what I am saying is that it's not my sort of book. It's a comic novel, and  in conjunction those two words  tend to strike fear into my reading heart. It may be a gender thing; I never really understood why people thought so highly of Tom Sharpe, or indeed Kingsley Amis, but plenty did and do. And most of them were male.

 

I did get the occasional smile out of MM, but not often enough to make the experience of reading it an enjoyable one. Or to encourage me to read any more Eric Linklater.

 

But it's another block on my quilt that's got filled in. As it happens it's one of those unsightly blocks that you place on the edge of the quilt and then on the side of the bed away from the door so that the casual observer doesn't see the eye watering colours and garish pattern . And  - you see that acid yellow, badly placed stripe? That represents the way Linklater, and all those who have written about this book, wrote about Rose. If ever a book needed a bit of feminist critique applying to it, it's this one.

Out and About

Once they took off that heavy cast I was able to thnk about actually leaving the house and going somewhere other than hospital, so at the weekend I suggested to the OH that we might take a short trip to the nearby village of St Margaret's Hope. This was not in order to stroll aimlessly round the streets but to visit The Workshop, and admire its Christmas displays.We had been invited to the official 'launch' of this, because it's where OH sells his jewellery mainly, but on the night I couldn't face venturing out in the dark and the cold and the wet, so we didn't go. I had a good snuffle round on Saturday morning though, a nice chat to a couple of folk we know, and a very short walk in the fresh air and sunshine.

 

On Sunday I was able to get to Church for the first time in weeks. We worship at St Magnus Cathedral in Kirkwall and it's on a slope, has steps up to the doors and you can't park particularly close to it. Hopping along to and then into it with my cast on hadn't been an option. It was good to be there again, and talk to people I hadn't seen for a while although I was rather surprised at how many asked if my broken ankle was the result of OH giving me a kick. My own joke of choice when I meet people who have had a fall is to say something along the lines of 'that will teach you to take more water with it', but the only person on Sunday who came close was the Minister(!) who asked if it was a 'drink related injury'.

 

It did me a lot of good to get out, cheered me up no end. Doubtless the blue skies, blue sea and sunshine helped.

The Sunday List

Five things that made me smile this week

1  Two e-mails from Son No 1

2   A Skype call from Son No 2

3  Having my cast taken off and replaced with ankle splints

4  Glimpsing basking seals from the car window

5 Walking round the house, just because I could!

Faffing About or Why I will always have too much wool

I have quite a lot of wool. In a way this is not surprising since I knit a lot. On the other hand I often think  if I knit so much why does my pile of wool not get smaller?

(And yes, the obvious answer would be that it's because I buy it quicker than I knit it, but then I've hardly bought any this year, because honestly, when you look at the plastic boxes full of yarn, you have to think that really I will never need to buy any more wool ever. In my life. And from a purely logical, non-knitting point of view that would undoubtedly be true. Knitters however  know that  this is not the way the world of knitting works.)

 

Take yesterday as a good example of how things do work in the  world of knitting, or at least the corner of it which I inhabit. Mind you taking yesterday, which was Friday, involves us first  in a visit to Thursday and a Sock Disaster. See how already it's getting complicated?

 

I haven't been knitting socks for long so I'm not hugely experienced. I do know which size needle to use and how many stitches to cast on for socks for me (56) and how many to cast on for the OH (60). And as I was making a pair for brother-in-law for Christmas I thought I would make it the same size as I do for OH since he and this brother have much the same sized feet.

 

On Thursday evening I finished the first sock of the pair. I had made the foot rather longer than the pattern seemed to suggest because any idiot could see that the suggested length was too short. I then called OH to come and try it on for size. I am pleased to report that as far as foot length went, it was just fine. In other dimensions though it was a bit lacking. It was tight on the leg, it was particularly tight on the foot, and all in all my happy certainty that for a man's sock, unless it's for Peter Dinklage or Robbie Coltrane, you cast on 60 stitiches went for a Burton.  

 

Now at that point I had a choice. I could have tried the sock on  and if it fitted appropriated the pair myself. I could have cast on sock 2 in a bigger size, resolving to reknit sock 1 to match when I had finished sock 2. Or I could have pulled out the sock I had just finished and started again.

 

I daresay I know knitters who would each have opted for one of those alternatives. I also know a lot of knitters who would have done exactly what I did, which was to put the finished sock and all associated paraphernalia into a project bag and resolve to start knitting  something else entirely the next day.

 

So now we're at Friday (again). Overnight I had decided what I was going to knit, always assuming that I could find it and get it out, while ensuring I didn't rebreak my ankle - and yes, a lot of my wool is 'stored' under the bed,  how did you guess? And as it happens I managed to retrieve what I was looking for, which was 6 balls of Rowan pure wool 4 ply in a shade Rowan call eau-de-nil. The wool came along with two suggested scarf patterns; a lace one and a cable one  and was a 'gift' several years ago when I briefly joined Rowan International.

 

Now if you're wondering, the reason I didn't knit it up at the time I got it  was that  I couldn't decide which pattern to use. That was because in those days I hadn't knitted any lace and didn't think I could cope with the lace pattern without making lots of horrible mistakes and maybe abandoning the thing half done and totally demoralising myself in the process. Alert readers are now asking why then I did not simply use the cable pattern, or am I perhaps  rubbish at cables as well? And the answer to that is that no, I am not rubbish at cables; in fact I am quite good at them, if you can describe yourself  as quite good at something as mundane and uncomplicated as knitting stitches slightly out of the order they are on the needle to make them twist round one another. And that dear readers  is the main  reason that I didn't knit the cable pattern. It was described as 'an alternative', which meant to my mind that the lace was the 'real' pattern for 'proper' knitters and the cable one was a cop out for the less skilled. I didn't want to think of myself as copping out, or indeed as less skilled,  so I decided to put it all to one side until I could cope with the lace.

And other wool and other projects and indeed a grandchild came along and I haven't thought much about this particular wool since then. Until Thursday night when I thought perhaps I could get that Rowan wool out and knit that lace scarf now. So that was a decision.

Then on Friday morning I looked at the pattern and saw that it wasn't a scarf so much as a huge cowl and lovely though it was cowls aren't that common in the UK and I couldn't think of anyone I could give it to. I wondered about just knitting it as a scarf, but that would have meant working out a border for it and I wasn't convinced I could do that. So then I looked at the 'alternative' cable pattern; because now I wouldn't see that as copping out, but even though that was a scarf and not a cowl I didn't like the beginning or the end of that. It looked like it might curl up which isn't a desirable attribute in a scarf really, although better than curling in, if it comes to it. Ask me how I know!

OK, then. So now I needed a new pattern suggestion. Ravelry is the obvious resource for pattern snuffling and I took myself off for a browse. I didn't put many filters on my search which I suppose explains why, from being sure I was going to knit a scarf I suddenly found myself looking at adult cardigans.  Nice cardigans, and I could do with a cardigan. And toddler dresses. Beautiful, soft little toddler dresses that I would have loved to put on a daughter. If I'd ever had a daughter. Should I make msyelf a cardigan? Even though the colour isn't really me. Some of them looked interesting to knit. Perhaps I should do one of these little dresses, never mind the fact that I don't know anyone with a little girl the right age. Or there again I came here looking for a scarf pattern and there are about a gazillion to choose from.

It's the curse of the modern age, too much choice. I got up knowing I was going to knit a specific scarf with a specific pack of wool and by 2 in the afternoon I was unsure of what I was going to knit and what I was going to do with it when I had, and I hadn't knitted a single stitch.

But the story does have a happy ending because I finally decided to make the Falling Water Scarf, which is a pattern on Ravelry I have often looked at and thought about knitting. And, if I've done the maths right, there should be enough wool left over to make a little dress as well.

So that was a result. But I lost five hours of knitting time to all the faffing about. If I'd just got up and cast on I could have been a ball of wool down by nightfall.

Good News

Today I went to the fracture clinic, expecting to have my current cast taken off and a new, weight bearing one put on. Didn't happen. They took the old one off, right enough, x-rayed the ankle and then decided to send me home with just a brace, which I can wear with a sock and shoe. And I've to potter about at home, watching for swelling and I start physio next Tuesday. I couldn't be happier about it, bar the unlikely scenario of a fairy godmother, a magic wand and instant healing. And joy of joys, tomorrow I get to stand in the shower.

Colouring the Blocks

I sent the OH out to the local library ten days ago. Despite being generally well educated and even though I have an M A in Highlands and Islands Literature I have always been conscious that I don't have the grounding I'd like in Scottish Literature generally. So I'd spent some time checking the on-line catalogue against a reading list and, given that the Orkney library is a local library and not attached to an academic institution, there was a gratifyingly high hit rate. He came back with a pile of six books, and since I had cautioned him against it, not all were about Edwin Muir. (Not surprisingly, since he was a local lad, there is a lot of material abour EM in the library.)

 

I spent the next five days reading in a way I haven't read for years; totally immersed and oblivious to everything else. It was so exciting. And gradually over those and subsequent days and courtesy of another trip to the library by OH, and the patience of the library staff who must be getting very familiar with certan areas of their stack I started to feel better. It was as though when I started the whole field of Scottish Literature was spread out like a patchwork quilt but nearly all the blocks were white and there was no  overall pattern visible to me. Gradually, as I read, some blocks got filled in. Some of the ones that were already coloued changed as my perception of a writer changed. And a dimly discernible pattern began to take shape.

 

And now, with a firmer footing, I feel confident about giving my reading a narrower focus. For the present I don't want to read any more extracts from Catherine Carswell's Open the Door! I don't want to follow any more discusions about the meaning of the end of Nan Shepherd's The Quarry Wood, or about how ironic, or not, is the picture of the eponymous hero of Robin Jenkins' Fergus Lamont. I certainly don't want yet another male perspective on Stella Cartwright, the Muse of Rose Street.

 

I will come back to these writers and the critical debates that surround them. But for now, it's time I think, to go back to the poetry; to the poets I already knew and to the ones that the last couple of weeks have introduced me to or changed my mind about.

 

It seems a long time since I declared to my A level English teacher 'Well besides, I don't even like poetry'. A long time, and I've come a long way.

Yesterday was not a Good Day

I've been generally quite surprised by the way I've stayed cheerful over the past 4 weeks. I've never thought of myself as particularly positive in adversity, good with uncertainty or even patient, so if you'd asked me before this happened how I would cope I'd have said 'Badly'.

But in fact, apart from the odd day, it's been fine. I suppose it's helped that after our busy and noisy summer I was wanting some peace and rest and one way to make sure you get that is to be stuck at home with a broken bone.

Yesterday though I woke up and the first thought that came to me was 'I'm sick of this cast and I'm sick of havingto hobble round on crutches, I just want to be able to get out of bed and walk around the house without thinking about it'. And the negatvitiy stayed with me most of the day.

I did manage to shake it off towards evening and do some work on a piece of cross stitching, charting and sewing, which made me feel better. Pictures after Christmas! There are a few craft projects about destined for Christmas presents whose recipients drop in here and I don't want to spoil any surprises.

The other good thing about yesterday was that it was the last day I had to inject myself with a blood thinner. I won't be missing that little evening ritual - except in a good way.

Competitive Baking Part 2

So there  I was suffering withdrawal symptoms from the Great British Bake-Off and immobilised at home and I came across a link to Den Store Bagedyst, which is the Danish version. Apparently Bake Off is going global - who knew?

 

Actually if I could have got the link to the Swedish one to work I would have watched that instead since I would have had a chance of understanding some of what was said, but I couldn't, so the Danish one it was. And in fact the program is so formulaic that it hardly matters, it's easy enough to follow.

 

It was interesting to see how closely it resembled the British Original, but in one respect there was a radical difference. There were still  three finalists in the last program, but instead of all three competing to the bitter end as in the UK, in Denmark they lost a competitor after day one. Now in the UK, when someone is told it's their time to go they generally manage a brave albeit watery smile, thank the judges and presenters for a wonderful time and give the remaining contestants a big hug while wishing them luck.

 

And here is where we have the parting of the UK/Danish ways. The unlucky Christian, who was the one to be given the chop half way through the Danish final, didn't take his elimination quite that well. I might go so far as to say he was upset. He got up and strode out of the baking marquee swearing loudy and angrily and you didn't need to be able to speak Danish to understand exactly what he was saying. There was a lake with a pier just outside and he flung himself so energetically to the end of the pier that I rather feared he was going to throw himself off it, so great were his anger and sense of injustice. (In fairness, he was a bit of a diva, and remains the only person I have ever seen bake whilst wearing a suit under a pinny).

 

After that Nana and (another) Christian fought it out for the title by baking a wedding cake. And while I do think the wrong person won, yet again the loser, instead of  doing the British thing of shaking hands, smiling and muttering something about what a great experience it had all been, spent the remainder of the program with a face like thunder, generally sending out vibes that said the Danish equivalent of 'I was robbed'. Sadly, however true that may or may not have been, the ungracious behaviour left a bit of a sour taste. Maybe we Brits are just too nice.

 

A Good Time for Crime

of the fictional TV type that is.

 

 

 

While I haven't found the new series of Banks particularly engaging (but then again the old series was/were no better, and let's face it, casting Steven Tompkinson as the central character was a huge huge error, except maybe in marketing terms) there are two promising crime dramas on the near horizon.

 

 

Saturday sees the arrival on BBC4 of The Killing 3. While I have to confess to some disappointment in the second series, I'm still looking forward to the third and final incarnation of Sara Lund. I'm hoping that the rather too military/political concerns of series 2 will give way once more to the  domestic environment that was so central to Series 1. That series' great strength was in recording and displaying the awful outward ripple effect of the central murder of Nana Birk Larssen; excellent acting by a cast who looked like real people, as opposed to the glamorous clones who inhabit all of American TV drama these days, showed the viewer that death, especially violent death, is a diminishment and limitation of those left behind. My heart beld for Nana's parents, and her little brothers; in contrast I can remember little about the victims or their relatives, in Series 2. Incidentally as a knitter I am expected to get excited about Sara Lund's jumpers; generally though  I don't . The patterns tend to be too big.
 

 

  

 

 

Away from the night time gloom and rain that is The Killing's Copenhagen, is the sunny Seville of Falcon. I have read Robert Wilson's quartet of novels featuring Javier Falcon of the Seville Police: three were excellent,and all four absorbing reads. I'm really looking forward to watching the new dramatisation coming up on Sky; it seems to have an excellent cast, and from the trailers, there will be plenty of glimpses of Seville too.

 

 

 

 

 

And still to come later in the season is Ann Cleeve's Shetland, to which I shall also doubtless be glued.

 

 

 

The Sunday List

Five Favourite Artists

1 Carl Larsson





2 J W Waterhouse





3 Jan van Eyck



4 Diego Velasquez





5 Pierre Bonnard



and although he (just) didn't make the top five cut, 



Jack Vettriano. Because I like him too much to leave him out.

Competitive Baking Part 1

 

When we did our major kitchen refurb a couple of years ago we got two ovens. One was a combined oven and microwave and was 'his' for cooking. The other was a fancy one for baking. And that was mine.

 

I've always hated cooking, which I look upon as an infringement on my time. I  resent for example having to hover in the kitchen sticking a fork into a pan of potatoes every 5 minutes to check if they're  done yet, when I could  be in the living room reading a book.   For me cooking is like most other forms of housework; dull and endlessly repetitive. Nor am I all that interested in the end product. Left to myself I'd live on bread and cheese.

 

 Happily for me, OH made an error of gigantic proportions not long before we tied the knot, by telling someone, in my presence, that he was  'a much better cook than Anne' . Not surprisingly perhaps, he's done the cooking ever since.

 

 

Baking though is a different thing. I like baking and I'm quite good at it. In the past I've tended to stick to what I know, but I'd recently resloved to expand my repertoire and was doing OK until the Great Ankle Snap. But now that I'm immobile the path to the baking oven is open and undefended, and  OH has taken full advantage of. As you can see....

 

 

 

 

Top - Lemon Cake

 

Bottom - Raspberry Mousse Cake

 

It has to be said that the lemon one, being batter based, tasted a bit like a pancake, but annoyingly I couldn't fault the raspberry one. I don't like him baking because he never uses a recipe which irritates me, especially when the results are good. Sometimes I can be a bit of an ungrateful cow....

 

The roses in the bottom picture came from my friend J, she of the cat-who-needed-to-be-fed, and they're lovely. The raspberries in the cake came from our garden, a trivial matter to most people but not to me. When we first moved to Orkney we joined the local gardening club, and I happened to mention that we were planning to grow raspberries. Huge intake of breath from several present, all of whom sagely opined that 'we would never grow raspberries in Burray'.

 

I damn well will I thought as we came away. And we did.

 

 

 

 

 

 





Warmth on the Wall Revisited

I was watching Phil Spencer - Secret Agent on TV this afternoon, and yes I do sort of blush to admit it, but what can I tell you? I'm stuck in the living room with my ankle in the air and I can only spend so many hours of the day on Facebook.

Anyway, casting his eye over yet another cluttered but sterile living room, Mr Spencer actually said 'There's nothing on these walls to give them warmth'.  If I'd thought he could hear me I'd have yelled 'Try some cheerful beige gingham wallpaper, Phil'.

Probably lucky that TV sound only goes one way.

Not just me then...

I've been reading Touched with Fire, by Kay Redfield Jamison which is an examination of the links between the creative temperament and manic depressive illness. 'My' poet wasn't necessarily manic depressive, although he may have been, and this seemed a good basic text to introduce myself to the whole area of links between creativity and mental  disturbance.

But the thing I most enjoyed was an extract from the diary of Alice James, younger sister of the novelist Henry. Can you guess who she's talking about?

'...what a lifeless, diseased, self conscious being she must have been...her dank moaning features haunt and pursue one...she makes upon me the impression of mildew, or some morbid  growth - a fungus of a pendulous shape, or as of something damp to the touch'

That dear readers was all about the great 19th century english novelist George Eliot.And while I like some of her books, and admire others, I can't help feeling young Alice has summed her up to a T. I've always thought of her as humourless and far too self engaged; glad to know I'm not alone.

Apparently Alice James' diary has been published; I wonder if it's as entertaining as this all the way through?

Goodbye To All That

A few pictures to sum up the happy summer we had with the grandchild

at the beach

out and about



a new coat

first bacon sandwich!

The Sunday List

Five Favourite Cities

in no particular order

1 Sydney

2 Seville

3 Stockholm

4 Helsinki

5 Edinburgh

Contrariwise

So if someone had said to me a couple of weeks ago 'Anne, how would you like seven weeks with a perfect excuse for not doing housework or shopping, and all day to yourself to get on with your reading and your knitting, with generous swathes of time thrown in for you to surf the net and watch reams of TV I sort of suspect my response would have been 'Bring It On'.

 

This is, in fact, exactly the situation in which I currently find myself, and it's not the unalloyed pleasure you might imagine. Of course there is the slight problem that I'm basically immobile with a sore ankle and a heavy cast on one leg. Injecting myself daily with a blood thinner so that I don't end up with a DVT isn't a barrel of laughs either. But leaving the obvious to one side, it's much more difficult than I imagined it would be to settle down and do all this wonderful stuff I normally don't have enough time for.

 

Reading - either I don't like the book or I'm too tired to take in the graphs and charts, not to mention finding Wordsworth, even in quotable nuggets, hard to take when I'm feeling 100%, let alone when I'm below par.

 

TV - remarkably I have discovered that even the best of property programs can become boring, and do you know how many repeats of unwatchable stuff gets churned out on daytime TV?  The evenings are almost as bad. As for radio - Radio 4 is shortly going to get a whole post to its pretty little self - and it's not going to be a complimentary one.

 

Knitting - second sock syndrome. And a sweater on the needles that looks like it might be far too big, but as I'm doing it in the round I can't try it on to check. Both hugely discouraging.

 

I was chatting to a friend last night and we agreed it's all because I've got no choice. If I could choose to sit and read as opposed to doing anything else I'd probably be happy curled up with the books. But as I have no choice, even the most satisfying of occupations loses its savour.

 

Contrary things, humans.

Men - How Do Their Minds Work?

So today OH had to go to town to see the dentist. Since I am still hors de combat I suggested he might look in the toyshop for a birthday present for the grandson. Good Idea he said and he came home with something.

We will leave on one side the facts that

a) it bears no resemblance to what the child's parents said would be good
b) it bears a lot of resemblance to something we bought said grandson for Christmas
c) it is so heavy it will probably cost more to post than it did to buy

None of this really surprised me.

Once I had admired present ( I know, how do women's minds work, and more to the point, why do they work like that ) I asked if he had bought wrapping paper and a card.

'No' he said 'you never said anything about getting a card or paper'.

You may infer from this that all his presents are given to him in plastic bags and that he never gets a card on his birthday. But you'd be wrong twice over.