Injury Time

I thought the tragedy should be captured in majestic black/white and adorned with a Photoshop effect. Yes, it is my left wrist. No, I cannot knit. Yes, I'm icing it and am booking a doctor's appointment today. And I'm typing this entry with my right hand only which means blogging is really slow and annoying. Instead I'm reading and I'm very glad that I got the new Scarlett Thomas book out of the library instead of paying real money. I will tell you why when I can touch-type again.

Update: "bruised tendon" and I "need to watch the activity level". My doctor muttered something about I should have gone to A&E back when my injury first happened. Cough.

Ghosts in the Library

Mooncalf wrote a blog post today which hit home. "I have looked through my books," she wrote, "and I need to get rid of some of them." Almost four years ago I uprooted myself from Denmark. I packed twenty-four boxes and my suitcase, and I moved across the North Sea. I moved from my own two-bedroom flat to a flat I shared with others. Most of my belongings languished in unopened boxes until Other Half and I found the apartment where we now live. Twenty-four boxes. Fifteen of the boxes were filled with books.

In my Copenhagen flat I had a wall of bookshelves and the bookshelves were packed. I had books stacked on the window sills, on top of chairs and, yes, on the floor. I had books in the attic too. In other words, I had to choose between my books: which ones were important enough to go on that journey with me; which ones could be replaced; which ones were unimportant enough to simply be given away?

I bought small stickers and started sorting my library.

Green sticker: you will come with me, you are part of me, we will never part. Yellow sticker: I need to think about us; it is complicated; will I find you again in a dusty secondhand bookshop? Red sticker: sorry but we are over; it's not you it is me; you are replaceable; what was I thinking?

I left eighty per cent of my books behind me when I moved.

Regrets? I have a few, and not too few to mention. I gave away books I never thought I would read or re-read and now I often find myself running my finger along the spines looking for that Angela Carter novel I once began but never finished. There are huge gaps where Henry James and Charles Dickens used to reside. I really regret getting rid of my literary theory course books because I had some fabulous marginal notes and now that my brain is wasting away, I would love to curl up with Plato and those marginal notes.

And do not get me started on why I brought a standard paperback edition of James Joyce's Ulysses with me, but got rid of all those Georgette Heyers I have had to re-purchase. Self-delusion, I think.

Nowadays my library has mingled with Other Half's. We have a lot of Iain Banks, Douglas Coupland and William Gibson where once I had very few or none. We are running out of shelf-space once more (I have a cunning plan called "two-books-deep shelving") and I despair at Other Half's tendency to not put books back where they belong (I try to keep our fiction books alphabetised by author and under each author by date of publication).

And I feel haunted by books past because when I am standing in front of the bookshelves, I keep looking for the books that got away.

Time-Travelling

First, a link: this Cat & Girl comic strip made me chuckle quietly. Grrl travels fifteen years forward to meet her future self. 1990s Grrl is underwhelmed by 2010 Grrl. And I chuckled quietly because I saw myself. Having said that, I am mostly the same person I was fifteen years ago. I am older with a few new scars and bruises. I am also a bit wiser, less sociable, and more forgiving. I like the same things I did fifteen years ago (books, computer games, cake, my bed, old Hollywood musicals, vintage clothes, typography, Eurovision, and dogs) but I have added new things (my gawjuss Scottish boyfriend, yarn, coffee, philosophy, and matching colours). I think my 1995-self and my 2010-incarnation would get along just fine, although I bet my 1995-self would be appalled at my hairstyle (I just had my hair cut this past week and I am appalled).

In fact, almost fifteen years ago I made a deal with a good friend (who I miss dearly over here in Scotland). She would cook me a fancy three-course dinner if I wrote a book. Now it could not be just any old book - it had to be a special kind of book. My friend did not expect me to write an academic treatise nor did she want me to write a big literary sensation. She wanted me to write a frothy piece of Regency Romance.

I have read a lot of RRs - they are my comfort foods, my security blankets. I grew up in a household devoted to the weeklies' feuilletons, our local library's stash of Jalna-like books and, of course, Barbara Cartland (who I blame for my youthful infatuation with Lord Byron). Later I discovered Georgette Heyer who may be frothy but never nauseating (unlike Cartland). Today I go through phases: I may read a lot of RRs over a few weeks but then several years pass before my next RR frenzy. These phases usually coincide with stress, feeling homesick or going through a rough patch. Comfort foods and security blankets, indeed.

Could I write a passable RR? I think I could come up with a suitable plot involving, say, a Scottish laird's daughter who is sent to London for the season - on the way she meets a dashing highwayman who happens to be a notorious rake settling a wager. Add a couple of dogs, a duel, a dollop of gambling debt and a waltz at Almack's and I think we have a winner. Now all I have to do is write the darn thing and that fancy three-course dinner will be mine, MINE!

.. My younger self would be tempted, my 2010 self will probably just make the three-course dinner and skip all the writing.

In other time-travel-related news, Doctor Who made me cry this week with an episode about Vincent van Gogh, of all people. Your mileage may vary - the episode has divided fans in various online fora - but I took a great deal from it about beauty, art and life.

Completely unrelated: Congratulations are due to SoCherry who is on her way to becoming an honest woman and to Paula who ran a charity race today. Two of my best friends here in Scotland and they keep on amazing me.

With A Slice of Cake & Heaven

I could not resist showing you a proper photo of how my Harmony cardigan is progressing. I finished the last bit of lace today, so it is all stocking stitch (and sleeve shaping) now. I have trawled Etsy and eBay for some suitable buttons - I know I am only halfway through the first of five pieces, but I have my eye firmly on the end result. I am thinking along the lines of these buttons or possibly these - I will start rummaging through my button boxes(! - it is true. I now have more than one big button box) once I have an idea of just how ornate the cardigan itself will look. Oh, I love planning.

I think Harmony might be keeping me company during the World Cup in football (i.e. soccer for you non-Europeans). I really liked the Olympics knit-along earlier this year, and Harmony, being both a labour-intensive project and a relatively straightforward knit, would do me just fine as a World Cup project as I cheer for the Danish football team and weep bitterly into my cold buttermilk soup when they lose.

A brief, brief interlude into Eurovision-land: I am going out on a limp here but I think Armenia might be marching towards glory. It is a tentative prediction as this year's contest is really too close to call, so call this "my gut feeling" prediction more than anything. I would also watch out for Albania (a great slice of electro-pop), Turkey, Georgia, and this year's surprise contender from Cyprus. Other pundits are leaning towards Israel, but I'm really not getting it,  while the early frontrunner Azerbaijan has come across limp and forced, so surely that is out of the running..?

Finally, there is nothing quite like being pigeon-holed with sweeping generalisations.

Also, this On the Rocks cover is one of the best Lady Gaga cover versions I've heard alongside that Paparazzi cover version (stay tuned all the way through the video - it gets better and better). Speaking of Gaga, have you read the Caitlin Moran interview? I had my own heroes when I was seventeen, living in Nowheresville and feeling completely Other, but my heroes were males writing songs from a male perspective (though Otherness arguably did play a part as core members of the band were gay). Later I discovered Polly Jean, of course, but I would have loved to have a prominent woman in pop culture playing hard and fast with mainstream gender perceptions (no, Madonna doesn't count for several reasons).

Now, excuse me, I have a date with a slice of carrot cake from Auntie M's Cake Lounge, my new home away from home.

Honey, I'm Home

I am home after three days working in Yorkshire. The sun was out the first two days and our surroundings were beautiful and very rural. During one meeting I spotted a pheasant walking about on the small hill outside and predictably enough I saw plenty of sheep, cows and even deer. I do not live far from nature here in Glasgow, but it is nice when you do not get a constant background hum of traffic. And I got a lot of knitting done during meetings, in the evenings and on my epic five-hour-long train journeys.

Harmony is working up really well. I am past the first lace chart and the rib section and well into the second lace chart. It is my sort of project, really - lace charts, fine gauge yarn and a staggering amount of knitting to be done - and I'm happy to sit knitting it.

Harmony is my only project  at the moment, though, so I will need another project to keep my sanity.  I have a gazillion ideas in my head right now (most of which involve completely  insane fair-isle, thank you Ben) but I may have to stick to summery yarns right now which limits me a bit.

I have been catching up on the Eurovision Song Contest - I was stuck on a train during the first semi-final which was heartbreaking and had to rely on text messages from Other Half ("Poland's a pervy Hungarian animated short film") which was fun, but Clearly Not the Real Thing. You can still catch me talking ESC on BBC World Service's Digital Planet but for me it is now all about the second semi-final. I have high hopes after seeing energetic songs (and Belgium/Russia) making it out of the first semi-final, so I'm hoping the trend will continue with Turkey, Romania, Azerbaijan and Denmark qualifying easily with a surprise surge of love for Cyprus. I also think Armenia will do well.

Just before leaving for Yorkshire, I followed an amazing thread on MetaFiler. MeFi is a decade-old message board and one night a user posted that two friends of his had found themselves in a potentially dangerous situation - could anyone help? Newsweek has a comprehensive look at the story, but you will want to read it all unfold on the MetaFilter site. Best of the web, for sure, and proof that social networking has more to it that celebrity tweets and Farmville..

Under the Peach Trees

Strange week.

• Finished a shawl. It is a gift, so I am not posting information or pictures before the recipient has opened her present. But it was an underwhelming knit: the pattern was horrible, the colour unlike me and it took me forever to finish. I know the recipient will love it because the shawl is so, so her and that makes it all worthwhile.
• Ripped back several rows of my 4-ply cardigan because I had mistakenly thought I did not need to check the chart. I did. Fine Milk Cotton still holding up really well despite the abuse.
• The Crowded House concert veered between being sublime (hello, In My Command), cringe-inducing (one of their new songs goes "In Amsterdam / I fell under a tram" - whatever happened to knees and kitchens? I want references to knees and kitchens back) and downright embarrassing (security guards being very obnoxious to anyone wanting to dance). And Neil Finn still sported a moustache.
• Other Half had to go to hospital due to a dodgy knee. He is fine now, but I was all over the place for about three hours. This is love feels like: one huge pool of worry.
• Finished reading John Buchan's The Power-House, a novella without a plot but a lot of sinister innuendos. It reminded me of Mark Gatiss' The Devil in Amber which I read a few years ago. This is not a compliment. In Buchan's defence, he was writing within the period.

I am now packing for my Yorkshire adventure. I borrowed Miss Old Maiden Aunt's Tangled Yoked Cardigan so I had something to keep me warm during my stay. Of course, my adventure coincides with the sudden arrival of summer but you never know about the British weather.. yes, all the stories about changeable British weather are true. I am also packing my 4-ply cardigan project and am pondering whether to bring a tiny one-skein project too (funny how becoming a Knittah changes your approach to packing your suitcase). I'm also charging my iPod (and if you have Spotify access, I have compiled a Spotify playlist for the journey).

I hope for a better week ahead. I have the Yorkshire adventure lined up, but even more important: next week is Eurovision week! I will be missing the first semi-final, but will be all hyped up about the contest nevertheless. Woot!