Friday 19th June - I received a cable!

(I've pinched the blog title from Ang!)

 I remember visiting Porthcurno in Cornwall, on the beach below the Minack open-air theatre and seeing the curiously small and insignificant hut where the huge, vital trans-world undersea cables came in;

Oh my, this brought back memories of watching a play as the sun set into the sea, a fishing boat slowly making it's way across the horizon...

The sea really was this colour, the sand really is golden....

The hut is at the head of the beach. We trudged up the sand to see the massive tarry cables emerge up through the floor, and continue to the office (now a museum) at the top.

But I digress. It wasn't that sort of cable...

I was momentarily baffled that she had only sent one photograph of the squares in the write-up, but she had created two the same. I love tracing the paths of the different strands in cable knitting. 

It's a nice shade of green, very soft wool with good stitch definition so the cable really stands out. 

The flat gift is an interesting guide to a textile exhibition she went to at Blickling Hall with fascinating pictures and information. 

I sent her a square from one of my favourite patterns for knitted squares;

You cast on enough stitches for two sides, and steadily decrease at the centre until you are left with only three stitches, which you knit together. The thing to watch out for with this version is you do a double decrease in every other row... you have to keep track of where you are and what you are doing! It's not as easy as marking the centre with a stitch marker, as the centre stitch is involved in the double decrease (slip 1, knit 2 together, passed slipped stitch over). I call this 'mindful knitting' and not entirely relaxing! 

(For 'mindless knitting' I  mark the centre and do a single k2tog after the marker on every row. Not as tidy, but with fuzzy yarn like this who can tell?)

The pattern actually called for Liquorice Allsorts stripes;

but I used self-striping yarn and let it do its thing. Two ends to sew in instead of many.

I've kept the pale square and sent Ang the darker one; it looked a little neater.

Finally, another flashmob. Clearly a setup, but still brilliant. The 'flute' player, Michel Tirabosco, is amazing. 

Thursday 18th June - Four bags and one box gone!

Yesterday we did a quick round trip - Aldi, to leave a box of books that I'm selling back to World of Books in the in-post lockers, and the British Heart Foundation to leave four bags of bric-a-brac and other stuff - some books WoB wouldn't take, a couple of school bags (when did I stop teaching? when did my daughter leave school?) and oddments of china. Gone, gone, gone!

We use the British Heart Foundation because it has a space at the back entrance where you can stop easily for dropping things off. I always ring a charity shop and check first to save a wasted journey as sometimes they can't accept donations for some reason or another. This time they seemed very pleased at the idea of four bags coming their way, so that was good.

I've another box of books ready to go to WoB now. That will make six boxes and bags to charity by the end of June, so I'm back on track for the 'two boxes a month' New Year Resolution. 

It occurred to me that the money I get back on the books could go some way to feeding my own book-buying...

....

Today was a cardiology appointment (all's well, no changes) and I had found out that there was a Little Free Library near the clinic premises. So we detoured there as it was on my list of places to visit, with a couple more Wob rejects and a Judi Dench biography to leave as a swap. Or just leave.

But we were out of luck;

It had been taken down on 9th June for repairs. Ah well, I'll put the books in the next charity shop bag. 

 

   

Tuesday 16th June - in and out of the garden

In view if the possibility of building work starting perhaps maybe at the end of the month, we're getting a bit more focused on clearing the garden, moving plants and pots and ornaments down to a place of safety at the bottom of the garden.

Today Vicky-the-gardener came, and as she is bound and determined to rescue a rose, we cleared the space around it so she could try and extract it from its spot in the patio.

BB went out to help... I joined just in time to see him do a sudden backwards roll down off the patio steps, waving the main stem of the rose in both hands and scattering earth from the rootball. Judging by the 'ow' it wasn't a soft landing... fingers crossed he won't be too sore tomorrow. 

Vicky has replanted the rose. We'll just have to see if it survives. 

Meanwhile I've quite a few of the flowers and buds in a vase to enjoy.

Monday 15th June - where's the cat?

 He stayed hidden in the weeds all the time we were out on the patio with BB's proper tape measure, my sewing yardstick/metre ruleyard, spare bricks for marking out edges and pavements chalk.

We were trying to fathom out how to arrange the steps down from what will be the new patio, without encroaching on the garden. Tricky, as the patio is only 2m deep from house to garden, and because of the slope of the ground the garden edge of the patio will be about 45 cm above ground level. 

Chalking the lines makes everything so much easier! That pillar of bricks, 45cm tall, marks the height of the floor of the extension. 

This sketch is just part of the patio area. We worked out that if we have a drop from the extension doors to the patio of around 10 cm - a shallow step - we can do three steps in an L-shape, each having a rise (or drop - depends which way you are going!) of around 12 or 13 cm.

Aki the cat put up with all this happening around him... perhaps he was muttering 'there is no cat' and hoping we hadn't seen him.

There's a rumour that work might start soon... I'm not holding my breath...

...

It's been a bit tough this week but I have persuaded, pushed, cajoled and bribed myself to get 3,400 steps each day. 30 days times 3,400 steps comes to 102,000; just over what I'm aiming for...

I need to get started on the rest of today's steps...

.....

I gave started reading an old copy of a Young Adult book by Madelaine l'Engle called 'Prelude'. One of the characters, a woman who was a concert pianist but badly injured her shoulder in a terrible car crash was playing this Gigue in G by Bach, from his French Suites. There was a time when I could just about get through it, but never as well as Andras Schiff here!

It's such a joyous piece. 

Sunday 14th June - Prayer of st Richard

 This is one of the hymns used today at zoom church. The words are st Richard's. He was a 13th century bishop of Chichester, and is celebrated on 16th June, Sussex Day.

The prayer seems quite modern today...

Saturday 13th June - listicles

 Listicle

In journalism and blogging, a listicle is an article that is structured as a list, which is often fleshed out with additional text relating to each item. A typical listicle will have a title describing a specific number of items contained within, along with subsequent subheadings within the text for each entry. The word is a portmanteau of list and article.

(Here I started down a rabbit hole... there are novels written entirely in the form of letters, could one write one in the form of listicles?)

Back to the here and now, I reckon my blogs are nearly all listicles; a variety of topic headings and then a few sentences to expand further.

Like this paragraph!

...

My father's flat isn't selling (yet, always add 'yet', to imply that any day now there will be a queue of people aged 55 or over and needing assistance to maintain their independence, all desperateto buy it). We've started to notice flyers from other estate agents appearing on the doormat when we go to check. They make me think of vultures.

I don't know any estate agents socially. It's rather hard to work out what they are doing for the fee... like spiders, spinning a Web and then just waiting to see if anything turns up...

I'm pretty certain that none of these companies are my friends!

The whole 'how can we sell the flat' issue nakes me want to hide... like Archimedes the owl meeting Wart, the boy who will become King Arthur in T H White's 'The Once and Future King'

I shut my eyes and say 'There is no flat'. Of course that doesn't work, and sadly neither does 'There is no me'. Life just isn't the same as fiction!

...

Eating noodles is always a messy business. We gad noodles with teriyaki salmon and various bits of vegetable; the last of the broccoli, the remains of the asparagus, the dregs of the packet of frozen green beans, a few rather dessicated spring onions... tasted a lot better than I've made it sound! We sat opposite each other forking up noodles and slurping the straggly ends, or chomping them off with our teeth. Not a meal for invited guests!

It reminded me of this passage in Cranford, by Elizabeth Gaskell, written in 1850, about how their rigidly correct ladies ate their oranges;

Miss Jenkyns did not like to cut the fruit; for, as she observed, the juice all ran out nobody knew where; sucking (only I think she used some more recondite word) was in fact the only way of enjoying oranges; but then there was the unpleasant association with a ceremony frequently gone through by little babies; and so, after dessert, in orange season, Miss Jenkyns and Miss Matty used to rise up, possess themselves each of an orange in silence, and withdraw to the privacy of their own rooms to indulge in sucking oranges.

Maybe we should have taken our dishes to eat our noodles in separate rooms?