Treasured

When I talked about independent bookshops and Glasgow, I mentioned that my neighbourhood has several excellent secondhand bookshops. This is my favourite: Voltaire & Rousseau just off Otago Street. Sometimes I even think it is my favourite bookshop in the entire universe, full stop. As someone whose idea of a good time is digging through piles of old books long out of print, unsurprisingly I once went on a date to Voltaire & Rousseau with David, now my live-in partner. But the bookshop is an acquired taste. On the photo you can just about make out its first room - the £1 room - and it is symptomatic for the entire shop. Books are vaguely sorted into categories and then shoved into ramshackled shelves or stacked on the floor. Last time I was there, I dug through an entire box of literary criticism hidden behind a ladder. The main room is similarly organised/disorganised. This is not a place you go if you want to find one specific book. This is a place you visit to find books you never knew you needed - and you go frequently to keep up with what is in (visible) stock. I think it's a slice of heaven on earth.

A few links for your perusal:

• The Human Genre Project: "..a collection of new writing in very short forms — short stories, flash fictions, reflections, poems — inspired by genes and genomics." They are actively looking for contributors, so if you have a short story or a poem kicking about, do take a look.
• Adipositivity (NSFW) "..aims to promote size acceptance (..) through a visual display of fat physicality. The sort that's normally unseen. The hope is to widen definitions of physical beauty. Literally."
• From KnitWit: "..I love the reclamation of knitting from a largely private, domestic sphere and drafty community halls where it is too easy to ignore,to be a more visible social activity"
• And from the Domestic Soundscape, an amazing post on the connections between earth, animals, spinners and knitters. I cannot choose which quote to pull because the entire post had me going "yes, yes!"
• Finally, the last in a triptych of related knitting posts: the much-linked Golden Fleece? post by Needled/Kate in which she looks at the (rather absurd) notion that Scotland equals cashmere. Warning: this post will teach you things about EU law and textile history. She even suggests you read Walter Benjamin.

Meanwhile, I'm not quite sure if I have a cold, if I have the flu or whether my body is just playing tricks on me as per usual. I'm off to bed and I have a few Georgette Heyers (bought from Voltaire & Rousseau) to keep me company. Have fun, kiddos.

I Am Aware Of My Own Mortality

The other day I tried on a wedding dress. Now before you all start screaming with joy and gushing - hold on for a minute and let me explain.

Principles is yet another UK clothes chain in deep financial doo-doo. It sells really nice stuff, though, and I went into one of their closing-down sales to have a gander. And I saw this which looks more like a 60ish mini-dress than a tunic. And I thought to myself: "If that no-good man of mine ever asks me, I'd want to wear a slightly hippie-ish 60ish inspired tatted-lace dress, wouldn't I (with these shoes)?" Sadly it was very shapeless, being a tunic and not a mini-dress.

Seeing my partner's facial expression when I told him? Highlight of my day, I tell you, highlight of my day.

And deep down it all felt a bit weird too.

Also in the "oh dear, I'm getting on in years" vein, several people around me insist on spawning. This has resulted in me spending several traumatic minutes combing the Ravelry database for acceptable baby knitting projects. So far I have found these patterns: Lucille (a vintage-inspired cardigan), Autumn Leaves (a simple cardigan with a patterned yoke) and the super-cute Fiona's Top. Clearly I need patterns for stuff that boys can wear too. Any recommendations?

Finally, todays' "neighbourhood" photo was taken yesterday at the North Kelvinside Meadow, a green space just two minutes away from our flat. The meadow is a disused space which has never had any housing on it and has been out of use since the 1970s. Local campaigners are now trying to persuade Glasgow City Council that we need to turn it into a meadow rather than flats. Cue guerrilla gardening!

Between Days

Blog silences happen when un-bloggable things are happening. So, bloggable things in quick recap form:

• I'm reading a lot of Georgette Heyers at the moment. I'm on my third in less than a week.
• I've cast on for Helga Isager's Pine in a new Scottish handknitting yarn. I will have to rip it out as I started the brioche stitch section last night at knitting group and Something Clearly Went Wrong.
• Wimbledon is in its second week and I'm really enjoying the coverage. I have always loved watching tennis - not just Wimbledon - and it makes for great knitting TV. Andy Murray is the homegrown hero, but I'm finding it slightly difficult to warm to him as he's of the Agassi school of tennis and I've never been a huge fan of that particular style.
• And I also watched a bit of Glastonbury coverage on Auntie Beeb. Blur were fantastic (surprisingly so as they never were the best live act out there) and made me super-nostalgic for my youthful days.

Back to un-bloggable things.

Hello, it's Me Again

I have had the strangest weekend ever. Okay, maybe not ever ever, but it was strange. We went up to Aberdeenshire and strangeness ensured. I'm home now, thank heavens. My partner, Dave, is away at Dr. Sketchy's and it's quiet here. I have ripe plums waiting for me and I am enjoying having bare feet. It's the small things, you see. Two things, though, before a brief spiel about another Finished Object (pictured left):

1) Yes, I speak excellent English. This is not the result of me having met David and lived in Scotland for a few years. You do not need to compliment me on how fast I've picked up English. And do take note when I talk about having lived in the UK on and off since the mid-90s and having a degree in English. This means I'm not an illiterate foreigner who moved here because Scotland is flowing with milk and honey. Yes, really, I get that my English is surprisingly good for a non-native speaker. I KNOW THIS. I DO NOT NEED YOU TO KEEP TELLING ME.

(wow, that felt good)

2) We travelled from Aberdeen to Glasgow on a bus filled with tipsy Aberdonian mums-off-the-leash going to see Take That in concert at Glasgow's Hampden Park. That was slightly .. unsettling. I tried to doze to shut out the painful conversations behind me, but to no avail.

Finished object, then.

I was making a cardigan out of two different colourways of Kauni yarn. The idea was to make a crocheted top-down yoked cardigan (these words make sense if you are a knitter or crocheter, believe me). I finished the main bit of the cardigan, crocheted buttonbands and .. it looked frumpy. No, it looked more than just frumpy: it looked like something taken from What the Hell Is This? modelled by Monica Lewinsky. So, scissors came out and fiddled around with the fabric until it dawned on me that I was holding a rather cool top. I just needed to crochet it together and leave enough room for my big head to pop through.

Thus the Kauni top (also known as Sun Ray) came into existence. I'm rather fond of it as it warms my always-cold backside whilst leaving my arms free to do whatever my arms do. I am already planning a few more - possibly in Kauni, but definitely crocheted in the round. The photo is rather arty and doesn't show the top well, but I was having an awkward photo day and this one is at least semi-presentable.

Next: another crazily busy week interspersed with knitting and hopefully some relaxation. Ha.

Home: Refugee Week 2009

What does home mean to you? When I left Denmark in 2006, I spent the last few weeks living out of my suitcase and sleeping on friends' floors. I liked this sort of transitory existence because I knew I was moving from my old home in Copenhagen to a new home in Glasgow. What I did not know was that this transitory existence would continue for almost a year.

I moved to Glasgow with a suitcase. Twenty-four boxes and a chair followed quickly. I slept in a proper bed and I had a wardrobe for my clothes, but the place never felt like home. My keys did not work, my books were all in boxes and my name was not on the door. This is when I learned how important Home is.

If you do not have a home, you will not feel like you belong. If you do not have a home, you will not feel like you have rights. If you do not have a home, you do not feel safe. If you do not have a home, you will not feel whole.

We moved, of course, and I have a home now. We have bookcases (and need more, quite frankly), unwashed coffee mugs, internet connection, window sills with an ever-growing collection of clay pipes, a cupboard of yarn, and a view of green treetops. I have we because home is not home without David.

Moving to Glasgow exhausted me, mentally and physically, and mine was a voluntary move - I cannot begin to imagine what an involuntary move somewhere (caused by war, famine or persecution) would do to a human being.

(Thank you, Katherine, for alerting me to Refugee Week Scotland)

"Because I know I shall not know"

I have read poetry most of my life, it seems. I was a quiet Danish teenage girl who read Lord Byron and Rupert Brooke in the school library, swooning over the bold romanticism of the poets' words and lives. When I was sixteen or seventeen, I bought a slim volume of poetry. Away from school, I discovered Sir Philip Sidney, Lord Tennyson and DH Lawrence. Poetry became an escape from the clutter and clatter of my everyday life. And, yes, I romanticised poetry. Then I began University and one morning between classes I was catching up with my reading. That is when I encountered The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by TS Eliot and, although I normally try to avoid hyperbolic blanket statements, that poem effing changed my life. It was like language streaming straight in my veins and I felt drunk on poetry for the first, but not the last, time.

Let me confess: I have a special place in my heart (and brain) for High Modernism. Earlier I described High Modernism as

"that vast array of strange and deliberately disconcerting art forms which emerged in the Western part of the world around 1908-ish and which petered out towards the end of the 1930s. Shklovsky’s definition of остранение (ostranenie or ‘defamiliarisation’) describes my favourite art works so splendidly: they unsettle the readers/listeners/spectators by forcing them to acknowledge the artifice of art (and thereby making a clean break with the naturalist tradition of art)."

This is an intellectual sort of enjoyment: I enjoy the game of making meaning; I derive pleasure from understanding patterns emerging from seeming chaos. I really like poets like Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein for these reasons. I have to work to get at the ideas behind the poems. TS Eliot fits in with all this, of course, but I also derive a very raw emotional pleasure from his poetry.

For me, Eliot's poetry is about understanding life. It is about finding your own way between one word and the next, between one moment and the next. It is about being intellectually curious, acknowledging how that is both a gift and a curse, and finding methods of dealing with this. It is about fragments and meta-narratives. It is about hope and loss of hope. It is about being human. It is tough, raw, almost unbearable and yet so .. beautiful.

My favourite Eliot poem is probably Ash Wednesday (from which the title is taken). An odd choice for an agnostic woman, perhaps, but it marks the transition from Eliot the High Modernist to Eliot the Religious Poet. I have always been drawn towards liminality.