A (very belated) Happy New Year

This new year is galloping ahead, and I have not sat down to record life in London once this year.

 Christmas has gone.

 

Santa and Rudolph are exhausted and looking forward to a three season nap.

But the Welcome Bears have refused to give up their Santa hats claiming the exceptional cold weather merits exceptional measures to stay warm.

London has mostly been dominated by its weather. The coldest winter in 35 years, I believe was the determination. Certainly the coldest in the 12 winters since we moved here — although to be precise, my 11 winters, since last winter I was in Hingham doing grandmother duty, and that was a cold snowy winter by London standards too. By New England standards the amount of snow and the temperature lows in London were not remarkable, but icy sidewalks made the outside world treacherous for nearly a week.

 

The snow began at night.

 And in the morning our street looked like this.

 And the back garden was a winter wonderland.

The snow has gone, but every day we are greeted with rainy, grey winter gloom.  Although the day lengthens a minute or two every day now, so sunset is already nearly at 5:00 in the afternoon. Groundhog Day is of course an ancient holiday marking the halfway point between the winter solstice and the spring equinox. The pagans celebrate Imbolc, a festival of lights to honour the Celtic goddess Brid, keeper of the home fires, apparently. Conveniently, the favourite Irish female saint St Brigid (died c. 525)— or sometimes St Bride — has a feast day, smack dab at the same time as Imbolc. We have a St Brigid's cross made of Kildare reeds — she was abbess of Kildare — that has protected us for 35 years. Sadly it fell apart last year as the reeds are a bit old and dried, but I was able to push it back together into a respectable cross, so I hope it will continue to keep us in good stead. Just as conveniently, the Holy Family presented themselves in the Temple in Jerusalem at the same time, giving Christians the festival of Candlemas to celebrate — more lights, candles, etc. to help wake up the earth.  Candlemas never made it to Catholic New York City, but St Blaise did. On the day after Candlemas, my Catholic family trooped to church after school to queue up to have the priest at St Gregory the Great bless our throats by crossing two candles (unlit!) under our chins and mumbling a Latin phrase. When I say my Catholic family, I mean everyone but my Lutheran father, but I just had the worrying thought that he died of cancer of the esophagus. Perhaps I should check if any Catholic churches still perform these proto-pagan rituals.

The New Year Resolutions are going pretty well. I spent the end of 2009 organising my yarn stash, finding forgotten treasures, winding skeins into balls with my new swift, joining many too many Ravelry groups, and setting out projects for the month. I did finish several of those projects.

 

Mittens for Lavinia.

The checked pattern makes them nice and warm because the strand running behind gives them double thickness. The yarn is the lovely Wensleydale Longwool from Yorkshire.

Mittens were the theme of the month here.

A Ravelry group for Fingerless Mitts offered this free pattern for Cupcake Mittlets. The yarn is a hand dyed one I bought in Devon last summer in a lovely colour mix whose subtlety does not photograph well. And the pattern looks pretty shapeless. You can just about see the thumb on the right. My friend Martha told me the fingerless mitts are so popular these days because the majority of the population who wander the streets texting and phoning are not impeded from the steady pursuit of communication. For us incommunicados, grabbing the transit pass was made easy too.

 

The Selbuvotter Mittens are much more impressive in a photograph. I bought the book years ago at Halcyon Yarns in Maine. Teri Shea, a University of Washington Museum Studies grad student interned at the Nordic Heritage Museum in Seattle, and as a research project studied the mitten collection associated with migrants from the Selbu district of Norway. She charted dozens of mitten designs and published the book. She runs a Ravelry group to promote the book and knitting the designs; that was a good enough prod for me to join. I used a rather fine shetland yarn that I saw in the window of a haberdashery in Copenhagen and bought because it was bargain priced.

 
And finally, I finished this wonderful scarf from a truly wonderful book Knitting New Scarves by Lynne Barr. Last autumn, a quilting group member brought it to a meeting, and I immediately ordered it from Amazon. The number of projects I love in this book will keep me busy for years. This yarn bought years ago is from Wool in the Woods which I see from googling, no longer exists, except perhaps as part of Cherry Hill yarns.

The pattern is called Aria, and Lynne Barr says she was inspired by the seaweed Laminaria.
 

The frilly edge is done with short-row shaping slightly more visible in the photo below.

A cultural cornucopia of autumn

A generally busy week around here. Saturday evening we heard the Tallis Scholars at Cadogan Hall doing motets on death by Lassus, Gombert and Josquin, followed by Victoria's Requiem. Not a cheerful programme. We used to be fans of the Tallis Scholars, but we gave them up a few years ago when we started thinking everything they sing sounds a bit like everything else they sing. A bit boring really. And I guess we still are thinking that after Saturday night. We have tickets to their Christmas concert in December too.

Sunday was cold and gloomy so instead of doing a planned walk, we went to the Tate Britain to see the Turner and the Masters exhibit that opened a few weeks ago. Turner is not one of my favourites, and I know very little about him, except for the tons of information that permeates English culture because he is after all "England's greatest artist" who painted England's favourite painting.  A Cockney prodigy, he enjoyed besting his contemporaries and the old masters who came before. He famously added a speck of red to his seascape in the 1832 Royal Academy Show when he saw that it was hanging next to Constable's red splattered Waterloo Bridge.  This exhibit hangs the two works side-by-side for the first time since 1832. The entire show is made up of Turner paintings side-by-side with the work of artists he wished to emulate or more to the point to outshine in skill. He competed with all of the greats: Rembrandt, Rubens, Titian, Poussin, Claude Lorraine, Canaletto and dozens of other very good artists. The Tate holds a huge collection of Turners because of the Bequest to the nation that settled his estate's death duties — and the idea for the show comes from Turner in his will leaving a few of his works to the nation with the condition that Dido Building Carthage be displayed next to Claude's ...Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba in the National Gallery. The interesting thing about the show is that curator David Solkin chose to exhibit as many misses as hits for Turner's scorecard. There were some where Turner's version of another artist's subject was a clear winner, especially when atmosphere was a defining element. There were some perfectly dreadful pastiches of master works. Sadly, for me and for Bob who is a bit more of a Turner fan than I, there were some perfectly lovely paintings by Turner that paled when sitting next to a master, so we have another show where opinion of the artist declines as the show progresses. In our family that is known as the Bonnard effect, after a huge show at the Tate in 1998. We took time out from our moving-to-a-new-country chores to see the show, and Susan, Bob, and I agreed that the only Bonnard we really liked was the famous Dining Room Overlooking the Garden at the Met in New York.

On the plus side, some of the old masters borrowed for the show were well worth the price of admission (which we didn't pay because we are members), especially Rembrandt's The Mill from Washington D.C.'s National Gallery. That was one of Bob's favourites when he was in the army in Maryland and spent his spare time in Washington museums. He hardly recognised it because it has been cleaned in the intervening 35 years, which I read on-line was rather controversial since it completely changed interpretations of the work.

While at the Tate Britain, we stopped in to see the Turner Prize nominees work which has just gone on display. Why it is the Turner Prize I have no idea except he is Britain's best/favourite artist. He would have no problem whatsoever competing with these artists and winning hands down. This is the Prize that has featured unmade beds and light bulbs flashing on and off in past years. I couldn't possibly comment on any of these nominees so I will let a link do that.

And I found a new artist to admire in a room display on women artists who had a hard time because they were women. Stanislawa de Karlowska was married to the Camden Town painter Robert Bevan. The Tate owns three of her works and these two were on display.

Last night we did something we rarely do anymore. We went to see a dance performance. This is the centenary of Diaghilev's Paris company Les Ballet Russes, and Sadler's Wells' contribution to the celebration is this programme where they asked four choreographers to create pieces In the Spirit of Diaghilev.  We went primarily because one of four, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui,  choreographed a fabulous programme we saw last year titled Myth. His contribution was Faun, based on the music Afternoon of the Faun with additions from Nitin Sawhney,  and featured two remarkable dancers. Afterlight, danced to wonderful Satie piano music, was an homage to Nijinsky, danced by a solo male with a light show playing over his body movements. Quite fantastic. Those were the two successful parts of the evening.

The first piece featured many dancers, several large TV screens with bright red machines turning and black and white stripes rippling, plus a bright strobe light that unfortunately was directed right at Bob's retina, so he had to hold his hand over his eyes for most of the piece. The TV screens were very distracting, as any neuroscientist knows, the brain is wired to watch moving impulses of light, and as any parent buying an infant mobile knows, red, black and white are the colours that can be discriminated first and best.  I have no idea what the dancers did, I watched the TVs. When we were riding home on the Tube, and I finally had a chance to read my programme notes, I discovered this piece was made by "an ongoing collaborative enquiry into the distributed nature of choreographic thinking with the Interactive Cognition Lab, UCSanDiego" — the very place Bob did his cognitive science post-doc 30 years ago!!!!!! So it was neuroscience after all.

We had gotten an e-mail from Sadler's Wells last week noting this production included "adult content" material, and that would have been directed at the final piece which included rape, sodomy, a Pope, a garotting, blood, and an electrocution. This was very much "in the spirit of Diaghilev" measured by the people walking out! But no fist fights as far as I could see. A powerful blast of incense permeating the theatre did nothing to improve my reaction. The music was a lovely waltz — my programme says Ravel's Mother Goose — so ho hum, violence and nursery rhymes, must be a commentary on our times or something.

I also finished another book this week, Gardens of Water, a first novel by Alan Drew, written when a student at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. The book has one of those Readers' Guides for book groups in which we learn that Drew and his wife took teaching jobs in Turkey, arrived in Istanbul four days before the huge earthquake hit in 1999, and lived there for three years. The latter means they were there pre- and post-9/11, never mentioned in the interview, but clearly what helped shape the text. A Kurdish family of four has been uprooted from their Southern Turkey homeland because of the PKK rebellion. The Turkish forces are of course funded and supplied with weapons by the US — it's just what we do — and the father hates Americans — it's just what they do. They have settled in a city near Istanbul, but when the earthquake hits, they lose their home, shop, and extended family. The Turkish government is unable to respond to the crisis so they rely on American aid workers to feed and house the population. These aid workers are Christians who offer succour, but at the price of intense proselytising. The novel sets up clashes in world view: evangelical Christianity in a Muslim community; traditional parents trying to maintain their values — values that are mostly abhorrent to those with Western values such as the readers of this book — but whose children are swayed by the toys and treats of the modern world; the deep distrust of anything associated with the US by the millions of people whose lives have been tragically altered by one US policy or another.  I won't be giving anything away if I say this is not a happy book.

Cold weather has arrived in London this week along with quite a bit of rain. We haven't yet turned on the heat, but we will this weekend. After spending a day shivering wearing three sweaters and my bathrobe, I finally pulled out my winter clothes and sweaters. My closet and drawers are stuffed full so that means no shopping trips for me. I find myself drawn to the window displays this season because so much of it looks familiar — 1965 familiar. The last time these cute tunics and miniskirts were around, I was the target market! There are articles in the paper about Twiggy because she is turning 60. How could she have been younger than I was? And suddenly through Facebook I am in contact with high school classmates who haven't crossed my mind in 40+ years. I seem to be simultaneously moving backwards and forwards in time.

Happy New Year

September 1 is always the beginning of my new year no matter how long ago school years ended for me or for my children. This September Bibs begins pre-school, so the cycle of the school year calendar begins again in the family. We haven't had too long a break from those calendars, as Susan only left Cambridge two years ago, but that was such a different calendar: Michaelmas Term, Lent Term, Easter Term. . .

Yesterday was the August Bank Holiday, the official national end of summer day, so autumn has truly arrived. Even the weather is appropriate with a cool breeze and fading sunshine as the day progresses, after a sunny, warm and humid day to mark yesterday's last day of summer. A summer that was a great disappointment to most of the nation. Predicting weather is nearly impossible on a small island land mass surrounded by huge and stormy bodies of water -- the Atlantic Ocean on one side, the North Sea on the other -- but the population has great faith in those who predict, and when last spring, they said a hot, break-out your barbecues, summer was on the way, the nation was ready. London's sunny southeast corner of England was not really too bad, but the rest of the island suffered endless clouds, gloom, and rain according to news reports. And experienced first-hand by Bob and I when we spent an August weekend in Devon. So now we can hope for a peerless autumn of sunshine and cool breezes.