Spring Travel

The day of the Summer Solstice seems appropriate to sit down and publish a travelogue of my springtime season of travel. My Moon Diary, a pagan calendar Bob orders from a shop in Glastonbury every Christmas, tells me the time of the Solstice was 2:51 am, which means the Solstice was yesterday for you in the States. The BBC tells me that 18,000 people gathered at Stonehenge to watch the sun rise at 4:52 am. Sadly, clouds blocked the sunrise from view.  More important though is the opening of Wimbledon yesterday, and for the next two weeks, the heart of the nation will beat to the rhythm of the games, sets, and matches of the tennis court.


Suffolk and Essex


Our first spring trip to Ely was reported in my previous post. A week later we were back in East Anglia, this time in Suffolk, looking at the venue where Susan will be married in May next year.  Bruisyard Hall is a Tudor manor house, that was formerly a convent of the Franciscan Poor Clares, founded in 1364 for wealthy women where now where else to go, a situation medieval women often found themselves in. At the Dissolution, Henry VIII granted the manor to one of his supporters, and early in the 17th century the current owners acquired the manor.

The village is much older since the parish church has a superb Saxon tower.

A Tudor barn next to the Hall is being converted into a stunning wedding venue right now. We were all impressed with the beauty of the design and the careful work being done to match new construction with Tudor framing.

The Tudor Barn

The wedding venue

Waiting until next year

Bruisyard is in Benjamin Britten-Peter Pears country, so we headed over to the concert hall at Snape Maltings where the Aldeburgh Festival is held every June, right now as a matter of fact.

Art and Nature at Snape Maltings

Then we headed over to the pebble beach of the North Sea in Aldeburgh to see Maggie Hambling's controversial Scallop Shell sculpture. The piece commemorates Britten and is placed on the beach where he walked.  A small subset of local people despise the work, and it is regularly defaced with paint splashes and graffiti.

We stayed overnight in Ipswich, and for some reason my camera stopped working in the middle of the day so there are no photos of the wonderful medieval buildings in Ipswich, nor of the grounds of the fantastic Christchurch Mansion Museum with its eclectic collection including a extensive work by two local Suffolk boys, Thomas Gainsborough and John Constable.

On the way home, we stopped off at three churches in Essex that were treasure houses of medieval carving. My camera returned to action for a bit in the late afternoon so I was able to capture a little bit of what we saw.

A squirrel and other animals at Lawford, Essex

Grotesques at Great Bromley, Essex

Wales

One problem in this country is that nearly all the national holidays are grouped together in a few springtime weeks. Easter is a 4-day weekend with Good Friday and Easter Monday, the first Monday in May is the Early May Bank Holiday. This is apparently quite a new holiday, brought in during the 1960s by a Labour government wanting a celebration to match the Socialist May Day holidays in much of Europe. Finally, the last Monday in May is the Late May Bank Holiday. Recently there has been discussion of shifting the Early May holiday to the autumn because at the moment there is only one holiday, an August Bank Holiday, between May and Christmas. The leisure and travel industry would love to extend the annual vacation season into the autumn with another three day weekend. That discussion was immediately quashed when the Labour opposition accused the Tory government of political motives in canceling a Socialist holiday.

We have spent most Easter weeks renting a National Trust cottage in different parts of England, but this year we decided to forgo the expense, until a few days before the holiday was upon us, when we looked at each other and said, "What could we have been thinking!" Bob trawled the Trust's website and found a cottage in Wales that was just a delightful place to spend a week. The hamlet of Cwmdu is owned by the Trust, and the Georgian terraced parade includes 3 cottages, a shop and post office, and a pub. The shop and pub are subsidized by the Trust and run by the community.

The Cwmdu terrace and our front door

Our charming living room

The view from our front window to the pub garden

We were staying in central southern Wales so we took day trips west and south to visit sites of interest.

St David's Cathedral

The birthplace of St David, Wales's national saint

At the National History Museum:
A traditional Welsh farmhouse with a beehive stone pig sty on the right

And here's the pig

A reconstructed Saxon village

Bluebells, the favorite spring flower

A historic church painted with bright artwork to recreate the interior
of a newly decorated medieval church

Not all religious art is erious

Noah's Ark

Dylan Thomas's Boathouse in Laugharne

Our bear Barley paying tribute at the grave in Laugharne

And to Caitlin too

The Gower Peninsula

Bob reading at Cefn Bryn, Arthur's Stone, a Neolithic tomb dated at 2500 BC

Georgian resort Aberaeron 

There were also some worthy sights nearby. The nearest town was Llandeilo with an ancient history. The parish church named for St Teilo has two Saxon carved cross heads that date from 900.

We also learned that the important Saxon illuminated manuscript we saw last year in Lichfield Cathedral, called the Lichfield or St Chad Gospel, spent much of its early life in Wales where it is known as the Llandeilo Fawr. The Gospel was written in the 8th century, and donated in 820 to the church where it remained until the late 11th century when it was transferred to Lichfield, probably as a gift from a Welsh prince to a Saxon King. The Llandeilo Church now has a computer generated copy of the gospel on display.

Not far from our cottage was the remains of a Premonstratensian Abbey built in 1185 in Talley.

We were quite sad to leave the little cottage for the trip back to London, but the Royal Wedding was about to get underway.

The Wedding

We didn't have a full week in Wales because I insisted we had to be back in London for The Wedding. And we were so glad to have made that decision because the festive atmosphere was pervasive and contagious. Even grumpy republicans quieted their criticism for the occasion.

We watched the pre-wedding departures and arrivals at home on TV, and stayed with the TV through the vows. Then we hopped on the Tube for the West End, following in the footsteps of the main events just after they happened.

A surging crowd leaving the Embankment

A very English picnic in Victoria Embankment Gardens

A real guest leaving the service holding the full-size programme

The crowds around Westminster Abbey

The balcony at Buckingham Palace

When we returned home in the late afternoon, Bob was so enthused, he insisted we order a collection of commemorative pottery. I insisted they had to be made in England, preferably in the traditional Potteries towns of Stoke-on-Trent which is the basket case city of a once thriving industry now outsourced to cheap production in Asia. That limited us to Burleigh (saved from another bankruptcy by Denby) and to Emma Bridgewater, whose line was very nearly sold out by the afternoon of the wedding.

Emma Bridgewater's Mugs, in two versions, with their wonderful boxes

. . .and her Plate

. . . and Bowl

Burleigh's 3-piece set based on their traditional pheasant pattern

The happy weekend was capped by a reunion dinner with a childhood friend who I had not seen in some 30 years. She always loved to be in the middle of a party, and she couldn't resist a chance to be in London for a royal wedding, and her lovely husband surprised her with a last minute ticket. We splashed out for a super meal at Richard Corrigan's restaurant in Mayfair.

Thumbs up to Facebook for the reconnection, and I hope they return soon for a longer visit.


Cambridge and London

Mid-May we trooped up to Cambridge to see Susan be awarded what we refer to as her "fake MA." One of the things we learned when Susan went up to Cambridge is that a perk of an Ox-bridge BA is that 6 years, or maybe 7 years, after matriculation, you receive an automatic MA, with no study required or payments made. These degrees can be appended to your name as MA(Oxon) or MA(Cantab). Both universities of course offer and award prestigious graduate degrees which do require both work and tuition, but those degrees are MPhil's and DPhil's.

Conferment of degrees, fake or not, was adopted 800 years ago and is called the Congregation of the Regent House. Guests and graduates file in and out of the Senate House every 45 minutes, as each college or group of colleges is given an allotted time slot.

The Senate House designed in the 1720s by architect James Gibbs

The ceremony is conducted entirely in Latin with endless bowing and nodding between the officials presiding. The degree candidates are introduced by the head of their college to the Vice-Chancellor, or his stand-in, they kneel, offer their hand, receive a blessing, rise and nod conspicuously, then file out of the building.

No photography is permitted in the Senate House, and my camera, or perhaps something I did inadvertently, made my post-ceremony pictures very wonky, but it is the best I have.

Susan Buhr  MA(Cantab)

Susan is currently studying and paying for a real master's degree from Birkbeck College at the University of London and has just been awarded a fellowship to pursue a doctorate at the University of Leicester.

The next day, to move from academic to wedding mode, Susan and I went to the Sunday morning Columbia Road Flower Market to see what flowers appealed to her.

In the end the beautiful Sweet Peas won our hearts

Paris

Conveniently, Bob had to be in Paris on business on the Thursday and Friday of the week before the Late May Bank Holiday, so we were able to have nearly a week holiday in Paris—at least for me since I did not have to work on Thursday and Friday as Bob did.  We took the Eurostar on Wednesday night, and since it was business, our hotel was in La Défense, the Canary Wharf, or the Wall Street, of Paris. Planners once talked about "human scale" buildings and development. La Défense is as far from human scale as one can get, but certainly impressively monumental.

La Defénse Arch

Canyons of glass . . .

. . .but in the middle, a garden with flowering dogwood, my favorite tree,
left behind in New Jersey because they don't grow in Massachusetts or London

The French bastion of business is built over a huge military cemetery

I spent my two "working days" shopping. On Thursday, I went to Marché Saint Pierre, the discount fabric district at the base of Montmartre.

Metro stop at the base of Montmartre with Guimard's Art Nouveau ironwork

After that I was so caught up in the world of fabric, I forgot my camera entirely. I had great luck in the discount shops where a cotton "coupon"—a precut of 3 metres — cost 10 euros for the most part.

On Friday, I went to the big department stores Galerie Lafayette and, my favourite, Le Bon Marché.

Galerie Lafayette's central Dome

The Dome's stained glass roof

Detail of the painted decoration

Friday night, we moved to a hotel we booked through hotels.com that was the most wonderful hotel we have found in Paris. On a tree-lined street a block from the Luxembourg Gardens with a fantastic old fashioned bistro next door. We hardly moved for the remainder of the weekend!

That's not entirely true. We went to a Redon retrospective at the Grand Palais and a medieval music concert at the Cluny Museum.

Walking through the Tuileries

Doing what the locals do. Lounging in the Luxembourg Gardens on a Sunday

We returned to London on Monday relaxed and well-fed.

Chichester and Salisbury

This past weekend we headed to two of our favorite small cities to see museum exhibitions that we did not want to miss. Both Chichester and Salisbury have fabulous cathedrals, but we had no time for them this weekend.

The Pallant House in Chichester has a fantastic collection of British art housed in an old house that has recently been extended with a new wing with excellent exhibition space. We were there to catch the Robin and Lucienne Day exhibit. Lucienne's fabric and Robin's furniture set the model for post-war modern design. Molded plastic stacking chairs and waiting room benches are just part of the interior landscape for us all, but once upon a time, they didn't exist until someone designed them.  There was also a exhibit of illustrations by Mervyn Peake, best known for the Gormenghast trilogy of books. Pallant House also has the best museum restaurant in England, and we were lucky to secure a table for a great meal.

We had pretty awful weather with high winds and driving rain squalls, but we managed to find three wonderful churches open on the drive from Chichester to Salisbury along the Portchester Ridge with broad views across Portsmouth and the English Channel. Well the views would have been much better without the stormy weather.

The Saxon Church at Boarhunt, Hampshire

The interior at Boarhunt

Sunday morning we had breakfast in the coffee shop at Salisbury Cathedral, and wandered around the lovely Cathedral Close waiting for the Salisbury and South Wiltshire Museum to open at midday for the Constable and Salisbury exhibition. John Constable's name is associated mostly with his birthplace in Suffolk and with Hampstead, but he spent important time in Salisbury too where he was patronised by the Bishop and became close friends with the Bishop's nephew and namesake John Fisher. Constable painted the cathedral and the landscape around Salisbury, including nearby Stonehenge, on his visits. The museum has collected paintings, oil sketches, watercolours, and drawings made during these visits. As a student of Constable's Hampstead work, it was interesting to see the places he visited in between his Hampstead sojourns. 

John Fisher's House in Canons Row, Salisbury,
now a pre-pre school for girls

Salisbury Cathedral from an angle painted by Constable 

This local museum had an extensive collection of costumes and of local cultural and natural history including an interesting room about Stonehenge, and another on Old Sarum, the original Salisbury settlement. We realised we had never been to Old Sarum, an Iron Age fort continuously occupied until the early 13th century when the inhabitants demolished the Norman cathedral in favor of a new cathedral in the valley below, and the whole town moved down the hill to the present location. By mid-afternoon we were hungry, and our Michelin Pub Guide directed us to another excellent meal, where we arrived 5 minutes before the 3 pm food cut-off. Our usual experience is to arrive 5 minutes after the cut-off. Old Sarum was still on spring hours, and there we missed the closing time by 5 minutes, but we were still able to walk around the outer ramparts, and also the weather had cleared into a glorious sunny day.

The ditch at Old Sarum

The view of the "new" cathedral in Salisbury from the site
of the "old cathedral" on Old Sarum

The view from Old Sarum

And that completes our springtime travels.

A Day Out

I haven't been getting out much lately. Monocular vision, poor depth perception, and no peripheral vision on the right hand side closes in the big world of outdoors and makes it a slightly threatening place. People and kerbs and steps keep looming up out of nowhere.

Last Saturday was such a lovely spring day, I wanted to be out, but not necessarily out walking the whole day, so we drove off to spend the day in Ely, about 70 miles from London in the fenlands of North Cambridgeshire. We are cathedral junkies, and Ely was one of the first cathedrals we visited when we were new in England. We had been back once or twice, but not for many years.

The Fens are the marshy lands of East Anglia and Lincolnshire, that were first drained by the Romans, and then seriously drained in the 17th century by wealthy land owners using Dutch technology to create rich agricultural land from the drained peat bogs. Before the drainage, the high land areas were often referred to as Isles. In the early years of Saxon Christianity, St Etheldreda, a local princess, founded a monastery at Ely in 673. Her monastery was destroyed by the Vikings in 870, but rebuilt a hundred years later as a Benedictine house. In 1066, the Normans came and conquered, but they did not conquer the Saxon stronghold of East Anglia for another four years. When the Normans conquered, they built castles and cathedrals as quickly as they could to secure their foothold. Ely Cathedral was begun in the 1080s.

The West Tower

 This is the north side of the cathedral showing the exterior of the special spaces within the cathedral in the photos I took on Saturday. From the right is the edge of the West Tower where you enter the cathedral. The nave behind it is 248 feet long. The nave ends at the Octagon, built in the 14th century after the Norman central tower collapsed in 1322. To the left is the North Transept which was begun in 1080. Finally, the large Gothic window to the far left is the Lady Chapel, the largest Lady Chapel in England, added in 1349.

Here is Bob in the South aisle of the nave. The rounded Norman arches with the alternating columns of solid drums and carved piers.

The exterior walls of the nave are filled with Victorian glass that shimmered beautifully in Saturday's sunlight.

The interior of the Octagon roof with the light pouring down into the crossing.

The arches around the Octagon are carved with heads and with scenes from Etheldreda's life.

The North Transept is quite plain, but the symmetry of the rounded arches is elegant.

Except for the painted 15th century Hammerbeam ceiling with the flying angels that appear in two rows along the side edges of the ceiling.

The Lady Chapel is a stunningly beautiful space.  By the 14th century, the Cult of Mary was well established, and every church was adding a space devoted to the Lady who could intervene with her Son to grant the prayers of the faithful. From the first photo above, you can see the Lady Chapel was separate from the main building, connected by a narrow vaulted aisle. The fan vaulted ceiling is dotted with beautifully carved and painted bosses. The  transition into Gothic Chapel with narrow piers and huge windows creating a light filled space in contrast to the dark mysterious space of the Norman Romanesque cathedral interior must have been a religious experience itself.

The Chapel walls are ornately carved along the arcades along all sides. Look closely though and you will see that every face or head has been carefully chipped away. There must have been a thousand heads in this chapel, gone forever, thanks to the iconoclasm frenzy of Thomas Cromwell's Dissolution troops. Thomas has never been one of my favourites because of this destruction. When my reading eyesight went sour, I had only finished the first section of Wolf Hall, and was feeling quite sad for him. When I get back to reading, I will remember these missing heads however.

England's cathedrals do pride themselves on being living monuments, and most of them have examples of contemporary religious art.

The Lady Chapel at Ely has had this modern Mary for several years, but the new metalwork reredos was just installed earlier this year. I am warming to Mary, but this posted sign indicates not everyone feels the same way.

Looking through my photos, and the new book we bought about the cathedral on Saturday has made me realise we are way out of practice with our church tourism forays. We missed so many treasures on this trip. Perhaps it was because it was the lure of the beautiful day outside or perhaps it was the lure of our next stop at Topping & Company, one of the best bookstores in England. (We had been to the Bath branch several years ago, but never to Ely's branch.)

After time well spent supporting a local independent bookseller and a superb lunch of codfish cakes for me and sausages for Bob in the garden of the Prince Albert . . .

. . . We headed to the Oliver Cromwell House . . .

where he lived with his family in the years before he went off to protect England from the King and the Papists, instead of bunking off with the rest of his Cambridge cohort to Massachusetts to found towns like Boston and Hingham and Braintree and Needham and Ipswich and so many others. (It can be very confusing to drive around East Anglia if you have previously lived in Eastern Massachusetts.) I guess that's why there is no Ely, Massachusetts. The Cromwell House devotes a little bit of their display to the question of Hero or Villain? But their answer is clearly Hero.

The House included a very interesting short film on the draining of the Fenlands. As an MP, Cromwell was an advocate for his constituents forced off the land by the enclosures and the drainages. So we headed over to the local history museum for more displays about traditional agriculture in the Fens. Another weekend, we will go back to visit the agricultural museums that explain the technology of the drainage systems that still keep the land from returning to marshy waterland.

A lovely day out. Next weekend, we head back to East Anglia to look at a possible wedding venue in Suffolk.

A Year Out

What a year!
In one week, in the month of March, one year ago my world tilted a bit.

Megan was visiting with her two children, and I was worried that she was ill. No, she was just very newly pregnant, and now we have a second granddaughter, the lovely Trixie added to the world.

Susan was compelled to quit her job at the local museum because a triumvirate of the museum head and two trustees were interfering with her projects and unfairly impugning her abilities. She was offered a new job the following week, and another when that one ended. Unfortunately, museum work tends to be part time and short term, linked to specific projects and grants, so she is still chasing the elusive permanent job. Whilst she was dealing with unfair employers last year, she was also reconciling with a boyfriend after a short break-up.  Last month they became engaged, and now we are planning a wedding for spring 2012.

Bob was made redundant to cap off that week a year ago. Miraculously he was offered another job despite his advanced age. During the interregnum of unemployment from June to October, we discovered the joy of free time, but were reminded of the joylessness of no steady income.

Going forward to another week last year, this time in October, when Bob was preparing to begin his new job, and I was preparing to travel to Massachusetts for six weeks to help Megan with Bibs and Bobs and the baby about to arrive, I went to the local Vision Express for some much needed new glasses. The eye exam indicated a problem in my right eye, was followed by a visit to my primary care doctor, and quickly followed by an examination at the ophthalmology clinic at the local hospital. I had a hole in the macula of my right eye. There is surgery to repair a hole, but no flying allowed for 6 to 8 weeks after the operation, which would have left Megan high and dry with almost no notice. So we decided to schedule the surgery for my return in December.

That's when the problem with the National Health Service began. We have never had any problems before, but scheduling surgeries seems to be a big problem. The December date was cancelled, which I was glad about because I didn't want to interfere with Christmas, in favour of an early January date, which was cancelled on the day before the surgery for a mid-January date, which was also cancelled on the day before for a mid-March date. By this time I knew I had to turn to private care through Bob's private health care policy. So mid-March, four weeks ago, I had the surgery done at England's top eye hospital by the world's best retinal surgeon.

The outcome is still not determined because the recovery is long. A bubble of gas is left in the eye to hold everything in place so the retina can heal, and the bubble dissipates slowly over 6 weeks. At first it occludes all vision in that eye, then it starts to "fall" or rise, since the optic nerve reverses what we see, but it bounces around like a balloon, and light shimmers off of it, so really it is just terribly annoying. My working eye lets me do things, but my binocular vision is terrible, as is my depth perception. I can't sew, but knitting is okay as long as it's not too complicated, hence all the knitting I have been doing. Reading small print on a page is uncomfortable very quickly, but reading computer screens with large backlit type is good, hence all the time I have been spending on-line.

A year of waiting for things to fall into place, and for the most part everything has fallen into a good place for everyone, so I can only feel happy for that, but somehow I feel a bit exhausted from never quite knowing what to expect next. I don't often remember dreams, but I had a dream last night where I got out of bed and left the flat, left the building, and to take a walk around the local streets, when I realised I had not brought my pocketbook, so I had no keys, no way to get back home, and I kept telling myself what a stupid thing I had done. Somehow, I did get back into bed (it's a dream), and I told myself that I would not have this problem again if I simply decided to stay in bed forever. When I woke up this morning, I lay there thinking I shouldn't get up because for some reason I was supposed to stay in bed forever. I was tempted to try it, but then I didn't feel quite exhausted enough for that.

Is it April already?

The Knitting Resolution has been going exceptionally well. Here are some projects finished since the last update at the end of January.

A Hanne Falkenberg kit bought in Copenhagen 5 years ago. A sort of Elizabeth Zimmermann Baby Surprise variation knit in two halves. The cast on rows are the front, back, and bottom edges, knit in garter stitch with decreases until the sleeve edge is reached. The neck yoke is added at the end, after the sleeve is sewn together from the shoulder to cuff, and the two sides are joined together along the back edge of the cast on edge. 

The Einstein Coat, a pattern by Sally Melville, knit all in one piece in the best Elizabeth Zimmermann tradition. The yarn is a heavy bulky Rowan yarn bought by the bag from Liberty when they still had great yarn sales and Rowan yarn was worth buying, early in the century. I have no memory of what I bought it for, but it is the same yarn as the Red Felted Jacket, so maybe I was going to make another one.  My friend Sunny made the coat the winter Christian was born, and I have always admired hers. I am very happy with mine. It's comfortable and it fits.

At the moment it is a neck cowl, but it could still turn into  a cushion cover. It began life as  a baby sweater from the Norwegian Dale yarn company. Despite using the proper yarn, needles, and size directions,  I eventually realised it was big enough to fit a teenager. I love the colours, and the amount of work that went into stranding the design with so many colours made me regret admitting defeat, but I knew I would never have the ambition to carry on with it.

This is literally a little bit of fluff. When London's first modern yarn shop  opened in Islington in 2005, Susan and I were on the doorstep on opening day. We were not as impressed as we had hoped, but we were both taken with the this fluffy pastel yarn with black specks. Very Vintage.  I bought pink; Susan bought mint green. The pattern is by Teva Durham in Scarf Style, but mine looks nothing at all like the original because of various mistakes I incorporated into my version. This is the first time I used short row shaping, and had no clue what I was doing. Fortunately the fuzz hides all mistakes. I'm not sure where or when I would ever wear this, but I still love the soft fuzziness.

,

This is a real Mobius strip cowl. I always thought they were just the result of deliberately twisting the stitches when knitting in the round, the mistake everyone makes inadvertently once and discovers the sock cuff has a serious problem. But no, a real Mobius strip, mathematically speaking, has only one edge, and to do this knitwise requires nearly impossible contortions of needles and stitches, that also make the initial knitting decidedly difficult. Add to that my unwise decision to use a silky soft Chines bamboo yarn that splits very easily, and this was a project from hell.  Yet an excellent project for hiding mistakes because at least half of the cowl is hidden at all times.

This odd ball scarf began as the Linoleum Dishcloth,  a pattern from Mason-Dixon Knitting, and distributed free on Ravelry. I wanted to try the slip-stitch  technique.  I still don't understand it, but I liked it, and loved it in my favorite colour combination of red and yellow, so I kept knitting beyond the dishcloth square into a full scarf with the slip-stitch linoleum pattern at the borders and a simple checkerboard around the neck. The yarn is Brown Sheep's Cotton Fleece. The original pattern was designed for Peaches and Cream Yarn, perhaps the last cotton spinning company in North Carolina, now put out of business by Wal-Mart. Rest-in-Peace Peaches. Burn in hell Wal-Mart.

And now for a few new pieces.
Trixies' booties which match the sweater I made when she was born.

Easter Eggs for Megan and the grandchildren to use to decorate an Easter tree. The easy pattern is from the wonderful Purlbee website, and knit with Yarn Yard hand-dyed sock yarn.

And my very favourite Easter chick with his mini eggs, also from the Purlbee website. The yarn is mohair from the stash, bought in Boston in August 2007 on the occasion of Bib's first trip into Boston, and Megan's first trip as a mother, and maybe my first trip as a grandmother. 

How I Spent My Week

The title could be how I spent my month since it is the last day of January, and I have not posted at all during the month, but frankly, it hasn't been a month to remember fondly, so I don't really want to memorialise it.

I did pull myself together for some serious "let's start the new year off right" resolutions. I sorted through my side of the bedroom clutter and have held to the resolution to put clothes away instead of making piles 'to be dealt with later" — usually much later when they topple onto the floor. I also sorted through cookbooks, admitting to the fact I never look at half of them. Limited shelf space should be the limiting factor for collections. So there are piles to take to Oxfam.

Every January, Bob and I say we really should go to the cinema more often, and then we go once or twice during January, often find ourselves disappointed, and that is it for the remainder of the year. True to form we have been to two films this month, The King's Speech and The Social Network, and we loved both of them. With that encouragement we will now see if we follow up with a film in February, finally breaking the January-only cycle.

I am most proud of finding the courage to pull out into the daylight, all of my unfinished knitting projects or objects (UFOs). A few were finally frogged — knit-speak for ripping it out — or as the frog says, ribbit, ribbit. The remaining 24 UFOs were sorted into piles on a spectrum of "this can be finished in 30 minutes" to the infinities projects that will stretch into eternity — e.g. the granny square afghan of the 1980s.

This week I finished the 30 minute projects:

A bag that needed lining

A felted bag that needed lining and a button closure

Everyone should spend their days padding hangers . . .

. . .unless they are knitting dishcloths (from a Ravelry pattern). Although in this case I used wool, felted it lightly and made it into  a hot pad instead.

An exercise in learning Domino Knitting that I accepted would never go further. I also threw this into the wash to felt lightly, discovered that the geometric arrangement of attached squares let me sew them into this shape which probably has some topological name. I decided to simply call it my Shetland Artifact since I made it from Jamieson and Smith Shetland wool, bought at the shop in Lerwick when we were there. 

But the next day, this little fellow emerged!

The disastrous coat, knit nearly ten years ago, when I began knitting again.   The sleeves were too long, so I cut them and hemmed them, but it never fit, was too heavy to wear, did not have pockets. Last summer I threw it into a hot wash and a hot dry, and miracle of miracles, it came out as a perfect felted jacket! All it needed was a new button. The old button (see green bag above) was too large for the shrunken buttonhole.

And finally, this week I made marmalade. From organic Seville oranges in the mayonnaise and peanut butter jars. It would have been smart to get some jars before actually cooking up the marmalade. And from some old blood oranges and lemons in the Kilner jars. Now we just have to remember to put marmalade on our toast to use it up.