You should definitely read this book

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Post ﹟72 – In which I lament the fact that 72 is not a square number (but at least it is twice 36)

Here is a post to show you the rest of the squares, I was really hoping it would serendipitously turn out to be a square numbered post but it was not to be.  There isn’t much else to say about squares apart from here they are so I thought I would witter a little bit about some other stuff in between in case you are fed up of looking at squares.

Fantastic by Julie Yeager

The camera is playing silly wotsits so I took these pictures on my phone but I seem to have not framed these very well, I’m sure they all fitted on when I took the photo but I deleted it off the phone when I imported them to the computer so I can’t check and the squares are all organised in piles now which took me ages to decide so I’m not moving them again to redo the pictures. A bad workman and his tools and all that…

Fall Blossom by Aurora Suominen

This week I have mostly been listening to Jingle Bells (played somewhat inexpertly but improving rapidly) on the clarinet. Normally that would drive me insane what with it being only February and having a tendency to acquire earworms but when it is Small playing somehow it just makes me grin and turn into that really annoying parent who tells everyone how wonderful their child is. I think it is because I have been trying to get him to learn an instrument for years, we did a little bit of piano but it doesn’t really work when your mother is your teacher. I think he finally agreed to have lessons at school chiefly to shut me up about it but so far (one week in!) he is really enjoying it and I love hearing him play something he has worked out from the music himself even if it is not very seasonal.

In Like a Lamb, Out Like a Lion by Margaret MacInnes

In an effort to try and sort out the chronic grumpiness before it becomes terminal I thought maybe I should try to think of some things that I am grateful for or that are positive about being here so as a brief interlude from the squares here is the view from the rock pool (translation for the people at home – a swimming pool made of sea near some rocks, not a rock pool full of crabs and seaweed and small children with fishing nets) that is walking distance from school where I can sit with my knitting or a book and throw the children in to play, (I have even been known to get in myself on special occasions) and is somewhere that I can’t imagine ever going after school at home.

There are bits of purple shells on the bottom and sometimes fish and it is quite nice there especially if you can find a time without too many other people! There, enough being positive back to the squares:

Lise by Polly Plum

There are only two of Cat’s Claw, I thought about making a third one to get thirty-six squares but it was probably the least interesting one to make because you have to do a big plain square for the middle and then do the claw bits over the top afterwards so I decided to do something different for my extra one.

Cat’s Claw my Margaret MacInnes

These are the odd squares, I’m glad there was only one Tropical Delight because it was really fiddly, I had to keep rewinding Hercule Poirot in my headphones because I missed a bit while I was reading the instructions, I do like the spiralling petals near the middle though. Eternal Braid is not in the original instructions but I wanted to add an extra square to make the blanket a square, 6×6 overall instead of a rectangle, 5×7. It looks a bit like an eye, it’s not meant to particularly in the pattern but I’ve been reading A Series of Unfortunate Events with Tiny and kept thinking about the VFD eyes so the colours sort of came out in that order.

Tropical Delight by Susan Stevens, Sweet and Fair by Julie Yeager, Moroccan Window by Heather Gibbs and Eternal Braid by Chris Simon

This is the suggested layout of the thirty-five squares. I have been messing around with them and they definitely fit the bed better with thirty-six but I also realised I will probably have to do a couple of extra rounds on each one to make it fit properly otherwise it will be a little bit short of the right size.

I spread them all out on the floor and proceeded to try to do an insane sudoku kind of thing where the rules are arbitrarily defined and also a bit fluid – I didn’t want any in the same row or column that are the same pattern and I didn’t want any next to each other that are too similar in colour. This is what I finally came up with. I put the four odd squares in the middle (that is why I needed an extra one instead of another Cat’s Claw) and then listed the others as more-or-less-round, approximately-square and vaguely-X-shaped, the X-shaped category is the loosest one because I need to borrow one from each of the other categories to make up the numbers. They are in diagonal rows by category, except for the ones in the middle and except for the two I borrowed which are on two of the corners. I think I have managed to follow the rules about rows and columns. I know the Cat’s Claws are diagonally opposite the other way but I couldn’t make it work otherwise.  Oh bum, I have just noticed that some of the other X-shaped ones are in the same diagonal row where they shouldn’t be. I’ll have to swap those!

I keep thinking of the quote from Arcadia – ‘In an ocean of ashes, islands of order. Patterns making themselves out of nothing.’ If I try to lay them out randomly then I look at it and keep tweaking them until they follow some kind of rules again, I don’t think it’s quite what he meant but the words keep jostling in my brain. It’s a beautiful play, it has maths, fractals and chaos, landscape gardening, tortoises, a Broadwood piano, rice pudding and it is very funny. Tom Stoppard puts a lovely rhythm into his words, like Victoria Wood and John Finnemore. I think with clever writers it is as much the particular words they use as much as the sense of what they want to say that makes it a pleasure to listen to. Not sure what Mr Stoppard would think about being put in the same box as those other two though…

In other news, Tiny’s blanket is coming along nicely, I’m having the same sort of thing imposing rules on myself about the colours for the squares in this one even though they are supposed to be random. She loves it and keeps stealing it to play with which makes it a bit hard to carry on with. You can see from the selection of her artwork that is pinned to the end of my shelves why this particular pattern appealed to me to make for her. She does occasionally draw other things but I like these ones, they are nice and bright and remind me that God is watching out for us.

I told you before that I had trouble with startitis. I didn’t have any knitting on the go (except for a pair of socks but they don’t count and a couple of things that are hibernating and I will finish some time, they don’t count either) and this yarn was my birthday present last year which I have been itching to get going with, I will tell you about it properly next time. I managed to wait at least until I had finished the squares, I am pretending that doing the extra rounds and joining them all up and the border don’t count so that I am allowed to start a new thing, I mean the whole blanket is practically done, isn’t it?

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In which there is a well travelled cardigan

As previously mentioned I’m not that good at making the same thing more than once, the second one goes slower and slower and quite often stalls. I am an advocate of the two-at-a-time sock method for this very reason.  People sometimes say I should make things to sell but aside from the time-spent to price-that-people-would-pay ratio being an issue there is the problem that I find it really boring to repeat things (although for some reason squares for blankets don’t seem to fall into this category but don’t ask me why!) and for me the point of making stuff is to enjoy the making not to be a machine churning out lots of the same thing.

So when my mum asked me to make a cardigan for her the same as one of mine my heart sank, just a teeny bit, not very many people could get away with asking that but she’s my mum so she is one of the ones who can. She wanted it to be the same size too which also filled me with dread a little bit. I’m never great at getting the tension right on things, I’ve just got better at admitting when something isn’t going to fit and ripping out to start again and when I made the original cardigan I started it then realised the tension was not quite right, was too lazy to start again and decided to knit the 36 instead of the 34 because the drape of the fabric was ok and it turned out perfectly (it is my favourite cardigan, I wear it when I am nervous and have to look a bit smart or when I am pottering around in my jeans or over the top of my pyjamas sometimes and most of the time really) so the chances of duplicating this feat seemed pretty slim. Plus I didn’t write down what size needles I used in the end because I wasn’t expecting to make another one!

But she is my mum so I organised the wool with her, measured her very carefully and worked out she is not as tall as me so to leave out the extra length I had added into mine and that she is always cold so she might like long sleeves and said I would give it a go but it might take me a while. I managed to knit the whole thing whilst guiltily thinking I should take some proper pictures for the blog and then ploughed on with knitting it anyway because I was enjoying it so much so these are pictures that I took quickly on my phone just to send my mum some proof that I was really knitting it and not getting distracted with my squares. The pattern is Ysolda’s Pumkin Ale which has a really unusual construction and Ysolda is one of my favourite designers so maybe that is why I managed to knit it all without flagging, her patterns are always fun to make and the little details like the i-cord bind off on the edge and the way the cuff is joined on make them look really professional and I love it when there is no sewing up to do. When I wear mine I occasionally get a random knitter sidle up to me and say, ‘Did you knit that? It’s an unusual/interesting/beautiful/insert adjective of choice here pattern’ or ask me how the pattern works. 

I just spent an hour trying to get WordPress to arrange my pictures in a gallery – nicely but not too big and with the descriptions showing and it seems to be able to do one or the other but not both so here are all the pictures in one column because that is the only way I can get it to look tidy and display all the waffle so sorry it makes the post very long but I’ve had enough of it now and I’ve got some squares to make. Oh and some Smalls to play with before the sea of Lego drifts so far that I can’t reach the kettle. Maybe I can do both at once…

UPDATE: Also I just noticed if you are viewing it in an RSS feed thingy then the descriptions might not show up so have a look on the website instead, there should be a sentence or two to go with each photo but I don’t care enough to try and make it work properly any more!

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An unusual classification system

What a frightful looking beast –
Half an inch across at least…

Firstly, I apologise – things seem to be a bit spidery recently and I know not everybody likes them but they are rather a feature of this house so it is difficult to avoid them completely. Secondly, no pictures because the camera has gone away with the Man in the Shed until tomorrow (Hooray! Tomato pasta for tea, pass the rice pudding!) but perhaps that is better for the subject matter anyway…

I think the spiders can tell when there isn’t a caveman around to sort them out (see Cave Baby by J. Donaldson and E. Gravett – it’s a mouse but same principle applies) and double their troops just to make a point. I came downstairs this morning to find an enormous Fred sitting in the dining room doorway and had to evict him myself. I can catch them but I always worry I am going to squish their legs with the glass and then I worry they are going to escape just at the moment you have to lift the glass slightly to get it onto the piece of card and then when you look at them through the glass they look three times as big and then you have to carry them to the garden and the back door suddenly seems miles and miles away and then you have to do the bit where you shake the glass out and I worry the Fred is going still be in the glass when I look at it (or worse still – jump sideways and land on me) and then I run very fast back into the house and slam the door and turn round to double check that the Fred didn’t run faster than I did and beat me back inside.

There is a classification system for spiders that has been developing for around twenty five years so far, it isn’t complete yet but I thought I would tell you about it and try to increase its usage because then I won’t be the only one talking nonsense and I might get some help to fill in the missing categories… The system works by giving a name to each class of spider, they are proper names but are used in sentences as ordinary nouns e.g. ‘I don’t like the look of that Boris up there.’ or ‘I saw a Reggie hiding in that corner.’ which means I’m not really sure whether they should qualify for capital letters or not.

So in vague order of size, with descriptions and etymologies we have

Teeny tiny spiders smaller than 1/8″ – Unnamed as yet because really they are no bother and you could mistake them for an ant. How about ‘Mitch’? That sounds about right.

Emma – Larger than a Mitch but no bigger than 1/2″ absolute maximum – Earliest named class (circa. 1988 but needs verification) ordinary unscary spider so called because when I was little there was one on the wall low down near my bed and I got in a big panic and my mum tried to make it ok by saying she wasn’t scary and her name was Emma (it didn’t really work very well but I appreciate the sentiment) which probably means you can blame my mother for this particular lot of nonsense I am subjecting you to.

Reggie – Sub class – A particularly small and spindly Boris (See Boris) less than 1/2″ across with extremely fine legs that are very difficult to see. Named by a member of our Sunday school class (in approximately 2006 or thereabouts) who is now grown up and whose wife may well be reading this.

Boris – Daddy-long-legs/cellar spider – I don’t know when these were named but pre 1998 – when I was at secondary school my friend’s mum said she called them Borises because they are annoying and Boris Becker is annoying (could equally be applied to Boris Johnson).

Harvestmen – Unnamed – Similar to but definitely a separate class from Borises – Borises have a head and a body and harvestmen only have one lump with all the bits and pieces in (and legs of course).

Garden spiders – Unnamed – The ones with the pretty patterns on the back and the bottoms that are too big for their heads. The class is unnamed but the three specific ones  who build webs parallel to the path behind the greenhouse sometimes get called Enid, Ethel and Edith or similar. When they build their webs perpendicular to the path they just get sworn at. The ones inside the greenhouse don’t have a name yet.

Fred – Large house spider – the sort that is normally at least 1″ and you can hear their footsteps when they scuttle around the floor doing their nightly patrol circuit round the house. Named in 2003 – there were several who lived in the outside cupboard in Bristol and they have a very good sense of direction/homing instinct, I speak from experience… Also good at jumping, or at least deliberately falling (again from experience).

Dennis – One particular Fred who previously used to jump out at me from the storage box in the garden (Subconsciously Dennis the Menace?) but who hasn’t been seen since I posted his photo on this blog, perhaps the fame and the paparazzi got too much for him.

The rusty, metal spider who lives under the hydrangea in the front garden – Unnamed. He should have a name he’s been there several years now, he is about 10″ across and I bought him in the garden centre because he was reduced – people had bought all the other random metal animals but clearly nobody fancied the spiders and there was still a crate of them left looking sorry for themselves and being marked down so I liberated one of them.

That’s all the categories I can think of at the moment but I’m sure there are some beasties who don’t fit into one of these. By the way, don’t look at the ceiling just above you…

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In which we have normality

I repeat, we have normality. Anything you still can’t cope with is therefore your own problem.

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Well, here it is – dressed up for its first role as the Magic Tree, lots of leaves (not quite a billion but somewhere around a thousand by my reckoning) and some lovely fruit (you must particularly remember the pineapple and the bananas, Best Beloved) provided by the person whose tree it really is and who spent a very long time getting the pineapple and the bananas right.  And now it has been taken apart and taken away to be sung about and the space where it was looks enormous and empty and I have to get on with real life again which feels a bit sad, like the end of the holidays.

Maybe it’s time to get the knitting out again or cwtch up with a good book. I finally finished ‘Anna Karenina’ the other day, I have been reading it since August (which to put into perspective is longer than the time that I managed to keep Tiny inside me before she was born) and that is a long time to being reading a book! But I really enjoyed it despite reading it in snippets here and there or whilst being climbed on during other people’s swimming lessons or a sneaky couple of pages too early in the morning. It is about a load of people and how their lives are tangled up and what they think about things. I did write a pile of waffle about why I liked it but it was too waffley and boring and long and I remembered why I studied maths and not literature – I like books (once during reading week when I was leaving the college library with about eight novels under my arm the librarian said, ‘We’re revising hard, aren’t we?’ they shouldn’t call it reading week if it’s not…) but not dismantling them, so I deleted it all again. I thought it was a brilliant story and if you want to find out what it is about you’ll just have to read it.

A Cat, a Hat and a Piece of String

I’ve got something else for a complete contrast now which I picked up in the supermarket how-can-they-sell-books-that-cheap-that-doesn’t-cover-the-cost-of-the-paper-let-alone-pay-the-writers-anything section, it’s called ‘A Cat, a Hat and a Piece of String’ by Joanne Harris and it is a book of short stories.  I have no idea what they are about or what her writing is like, I just picked it up because I liked the title but hopefully it won’t take so long to read as the last one, I’ll let you know how I get on.

Not the End of the World

Ooh, that reminds me –  if you like short stories then try ‘Not the End of the World’ by Kate Atkinson, if I had to clear out all my books and only rescue a handful, this is one I would keep. I don’t know what it is about it (plus see paragraph above about being rubbish at describing books) but it doesn’t matter that I know what is going to happen, there is just something about the words and the rhythm of it that make me want to read it again. Although the stories are separate they all have little details which link them to the others in different ways which sort of joins it up and makes it into a whole thing (like you have to listen to a whole album in one go and not just download single tracks). And it has lots of lovely lists of words. And magic. And a tiger. Why wouldn’t you want to read it?

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In which we find a frog

We were tidying up the patio the other day and sweeping up all the slugs who live behind the lettuce box in an attempt to have a vaguely slug free environment before planting this year’s lettuce when we found this beauty snoozing underneath. The picture doesn’t really do him justice, he is beautiful and fat and round and perfectly podgy frog shaped, he also didn’t think much of having his photo taken and kept running back under the box every time I moved it.IMG_0233

He didn’t look best pleased at a) being disturbed this early in the year, b) having all his slugs tidied up that he was saving for later or c) having all his nice damp muddy nest that he had made under our box cleared away, so we sent him round the corner to the log pile with a couple of slugs and told him we would wake him up in May.

We have been reading a lot of Frog and Toad by Arnold Lobel recently (Harper Collins have published a collection with all the stories in together) I remember reading some of them as a child and am pleased to have an excuse to read them again. Frog is always jolly and sunny whilst Toad is a bit grumpy, miserable (is it possible for a toad to be clinically depressed?) and fairly irrational at times but his friend Frog is always there to look out for him. One of my favourite bits is from ‘Spring’ – ‘Toad went back into the house. He got back into bed and pulled the covers over his head again. “But, Toad,” cried Frog, “you will miss all the fun!” “Listen Frog,” said Toad. “How long have I been asleep?” “You have been asleep since November,” said Frog. “Well then,”said Toad, “a little more sleep will not hurt me. Come back again and wake me up at about half past May. Good night, Frog.” “But, Toad,” said Frog, “I will be lonely until then.”‘

Sometime it worries me how much like Toad I am…

Image source: Harper Collins

Image source: Harper Collins

So although it is really the wrong way round, seeing our rather disgruntled frog did make me smile.

It’s raining today (which is nice for the lettuce and for frogs) so I have finished jumper number two, I’ll see if I can get a mug shot of it being worn, but here it is drying off, it looks a little dark because it is soggy but you get the general idea.

IMG_0249Ooh, that means I am properly allowed to do some of jumper number three (which is really a cardigan) which I wasn’t supposed to have started before…

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In which there is a little colour and I remember about Howl

Hurrah for antibiotics! I’m feeling a lot better and can have a proper conversation without a five minute coughing fit after every third and a half word. And the garden is waking up, I spotted the first bit of colour this year (apart from the green and brown, which clearly are colours, and the plethora of plastic toys that are a more or less permanent feature but don’t count because they don’t photosynthesise) and it’s purple.IMG_0080

I haven’t done much this week what with still feeling grotty but I did manage to finish a book. I used to read almost constantly – I spent the best part of my A levels either skulking in the music practice cupboard, bashing the piano loudly and hoping they wouldn’t hear it through the wall in the next room (which was where I should have been for a maths lesson) or when I didn’t need to be in the maths department I was normally sat in the corridor there working my way steadily through the fiction section of the college library. So it is very strange to not have the time to read and when there is time there is normally too much going on to concentrate on it anyway; I’ve been reading ‘Anna Karenina’ since August which has to be some kind of record, I think that even beats ‘The Lord of the Rings’. The book that I finished wasn’t that one, I was telling someone about ‘Howl’s Moving Castle’ by Diana Wynne Jones the other day and then I realised I couldn’t really remember what happened in it so I thought I’d better read it again. It is another book (like Mr. Milne’s) that has chapters ‘In which’ things happen. One of them is ‘Chapter Six – in which Howl expresses his feelings with green slime’, there now, don’t you just want to read it to find out what all the slime is about?

I won’t tell you too much about it in case you do want to read it. ‘Howl’s Moving Castle’ is about Sophie who should be young but is old because of a curse and can do magic without realising, she talks to things and tells them what to do or to be and talks life into them without knowing she is doing it. Another character is Calcifer, a rather grumpy fire demon, who makes the castle move and the castle belongs to Wizard Howl/Howell Jenkins who is from a strange land (can you guess which one with a name like that?) and who according to Sophie is a ‘slitherer-outer’ and who according to Calcifer is ‘heartless’. It’s a lovely story, it has shooting stars, the sosban fach song, mermaids, seven league boots, the Witch of the Waste, a yummy cake shop and the castle is fantastic – it scuttles around the hillside and is somehow in four places at once which is very useful and it is a different shape inside than it is out.

I like reading, I will read most things, grown-up books are ok and I enjoy them but fairy tales are great and kids books always seem like a lot more fun and anyway who says I have to grow up?

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In which I digress

This is nothing to do with anything so far but it is brilliant so I thought I would tell you. Last time we went to the library we found a book, it is fairly surreal and everyone should read it. I love reading and silly stories and kids stories and reading silly kids stories, that’s probably a good thing as I don’t get much time for reading grown up stories at the moment because it is hardly ever quiet in our house. By the way, don’t read this post if you don’t want me to tell you the end of the story because I probably will.

The book is ‘Daddy Lost His Head’ by Quentin Blake and André Bouchard.

7345864It is about a daddy who comes home from work one day without his head, he keeps bumping into things because he can’t see. However, he can hear and follow instructions so his family sit him down quietly while they look for his head and after failing to find it they make him a new head out of newspapers which they paint and add a potato for his nose. As he didn’t have a brain to think for himself, Mum told him what to do which got lots of cleaning done and also she was pleased that he no longer snored. He is still able to do some things ‘thanks to the Super Brilliant Force of Habit’- the children take him to the toy shop, one steers him and one hides inside his jacket to do the voice and Dad can still manage to type in his PIN without thinking about it. One day he came back from work with his real head, he had left it at the office because ‘he needed all of his brain to work on a project that was Ultrasupertopimportant’. Dad didn’t remember about any of it and everyone else was very pleased because his real head had the recipe for chocolate cake and all the bed time stories in it.

The drawings are great; Dad’s paper head does look surprisingly like his real one. Quentin Blake’s drawings always make me smile (I can remember reading Mr Magnolia when I was littler than I am now and being able to picture the drawings vividly even when I hadn’t seen a copy for years). The words are fantastic and silly, I’m not sure small people understand most of the jokes but maybe that’s half the fun.