Recovery

Today marked the first day that I've been outside in about ten days. The weather was lovely: crisp and on the cusp of winter. I walked through the arboretum down to the newly opened Waitrose where I hoped to find fresh baker's yeast and buttermilk .. and maybe even a loaf of rye bread. I had to queue to get to the milk section(!) and, nope, no buttermilk and no fresh baker's yeast and no loaves of rye bread. The quest continues - although technically I am intolerant to buttermilk and technically I can buy buttermilk at an organic green grocer's a brisk thirty minute walk away from where I live. But: bah! Knitting-wise I have conquered the dreaded Chart B on my orange shawl and in my utter joy to get to the relatively easy Chart C, my brain went out the window. I have now tinkered back seven rows (not easy in splitty 2-ply baby alpaca) and am about to start Chart C again. Hopefully this time I will concentrate and not just go "Ha! Only half the rows are important now. Which row am I on again?"

I don't know how many of you watched (and thus loved) the Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog webcast earlier this year, but those of you who fall prey to anything Joss Whedonesque, you might get a kick out of the prequel, Horrible Turn, which is a fanmade prequel. I have only watched the first episode, but liked what I saw much more than expected.

And now our dreams of travelling on the Orient Express have been crushed, I have been looking into other possibilities. I'm quite taken with the idea of the Transsiberian railway. Instead of spending £3,700 on a 36-hour train trip, we could spend £5,600 on a 26 day long train journey running Moscow - Ekatarina - Irkutsk - Ulaan Bataar - Beijing. I even speak rudimentary Russian (handy and useful!). I have long wanted to visit Russia - so why not go all-out? At the moment it is not feasible for us to do this - money and work reasons - but in my head the Transsiberian sounds like much better than the Orient Express.

Ah.

The Connection Is Made

Sitting here in dark, rainy Scotland does not feel so bad, when I look at the Danish Budget for 2010. Among all the talk about a new super-hospital and whatnot, the government is now going to offer non-Western immigrants up to £12,000 for giving up their legal residency and returning "home". The Budget also includes £500,000 to mark overseas Danish cultural heritage - particularly the former slave colonies of Ghana and The West Indies. At the risk of sounding cryptic: Denmark is now what the Daily Mail wants Britain to become. In more personal news, my aunt died this week and my family attended her funeral in rural Denmark today. Although she was a distant relative of mine - I think I met her four or five times - I am very sad on behalf of her siblings, her daughter and her grandson. Rest in peace.

And while I was pondering writing about my life and how it has changed these past ten years, I have decided against doing so. I am amused to note, though, that the Noughties are bookended by me sitting in a dreich Scottish city during November lamenting the lack of double-glazing and proper heating. In 2000 I sat in Stirling (also known as "Hellmouth" - after living there I swore I'd never return to Scotland) and here in 2009 I am sitting in Glasgow. I hope to finish the next decade sitting somewhere warm and sunny. Ha.

Finally, Other Half and I watched a snippet of a BBC programme last night about the Orient Express. We decided that a jolly little train trip would be good fun at some point in the not-too-distant future and today I checked just how much such a jolly little train trip would set us back. £3,700 for the both of us for a jolly little train trip lasting maybe 36 hours and not including any extra frills. I think we may need to rethink that holiday idea.

Croak, Croak

Health update: I think I'll be okay as long as I a) do not talk, b) do not laugh and c) keep drinking rum toddies. It is a slightly flawed plan, so I have stocked up on Halls Soothers. We are also on our third day of curly kale soup - it is my first time cooking this soup which was one of my great-grandmother's special dishes and I'm happy with the result although I'm going to tweak my recipe a tiny bit to make it a bit more like my nan's - and hopefully all those fresh veg will also make a difference. Knitting update: I have stalled on the first sleeve of Dave's pullover and am seven rows away from finishing my shawl's Chart B. Onwards, ever onwards. I am still pondering NaKnitSweMoDo (interNational Knit a Sweater a Month Dodecathon) for next year although both my knitting group and my beloved claim I will grow bored and whiny. We shall see. It depends upon the stash.

General update in the form of one link: These literary clutch bags make my heart go all a-flutter although I am most definitely not a clutch bag girl. They combine so many of my loves: books, paratextuality, craft, things handmade and geekdom. Be still my heart.

Also, I'm getting a bit nostalgic about the noughties almost being done and dusted, so expect wallowing entries in the near future.

A Work In Progress

Remember how I angsted* over knitting my partner a pullover? I just need to do the sleeves now and I'm halfway in love with how this self-designed pullover works. David picked out the yarn himself (New Lanark Aran, a local organic wool, in the Bramble colourway) and said he would prefer a round yoke. The body was knit in stocking stitch in less than a week (hurrah! amazing what a mild flu can make me accomplish) and then this weekend I began working on the yoke.

My first take on the yoke was inspired by Danish fishermen ganseys. I loved the idea of combining Scottish wool and Danish knitting traditions, and so bands of textures travelled up the yoke. David tried on the pullover and we were both horrified by how heavy and unbalanced the yoke looked. Back to the drawing board.

The second take is what you see in the photo. I calculated a slip-stitch pattern which would work with the decreases and added stripes of leftover Noro Kureyon. The colourway may not have been the best match as some of the stripes really pop and others blend in, but overall I really like the effect. I'm particularly proud of the subtle texture of the slipped stitches. It looks really ace all the way round.

I'm thinking I might have to nick the yoke pattern for a pullover of my own, although how tragic would it be to knit "his'n'hers" pullovers?

Wardrobe Re-Fashion is hit-and-miss, but it does make me want to pull out my sewing machine. However, given that I'm still quite woozy and a bit dizzy, I should probably stay away from sewing machines.

(* "angsted" is so a real word)

Twenty Years Ago Today

Twenty years ago today my mother woke me up early. She was crying. Last time she woke me up crying, Olof Palme had just been assassinated. This time, though, my mother's tears were not angry, horrified and sad tears. She was crying with joy. The Berlin Wall had fallen. I went to school that day. My teachers cancelled all our scheduled classes and were bust talking amongst themselves. My German teacher - the great-grandson of Paul Gauguin, by the way - sat us down to watch news reports coming in from West Germany. I still recall another teacher crying in the school yard. She was part-German. Today I suspect her German family might have fled here from the East as they never visited any of their relatives until the early 1990s.

Today it is difficult to explain what life were like before the end of the Cold War. I lived in Denmark, a small country just north of both East and West Germany. Occasionally you'd hear stories about people escaping from East Germany across the southernmost Baltic Sea to southern Denmark. Occasionally you'd also hear about people travelling the opposite direction. Swedes were paranoid about Soviet submarines and Danes were paranoid about East German spies within Danish political ranks. I was just a child when it all changed but I could definitely tell something had changed. At school they stopped teaching us how to react in event of a nuclear war, for instance.

Twenty years ago today.

Thirty-Love

I have a very soft spot in my heart for tennis. Yes, tennis. It was one of the few sports I was ever good at in school and in the early 1990s I watched tennis broadcasts almost religiously. My favourite time of year is still Wimbledon time. My favourite player was a tall Croat, Goran Ivanisevic, who was maddeningly unpredictable: on good days, his tennis was stunning; on bad days, his games were like watching a car crash in slow motion. You never knew what kind of a day it would be. Ivanisevic wound up winning Wimbledon, but characteristically he didn't do so until he was well past his prime and only admitted to the tournament on a wild card.

Andre Agassi belongs to the same tennis generation as Ivanisevic, but although Agassi was a wildly popular player at the time, I never took to his game. Without going into too much technical detail, Agassi played a defensive game from the baseline relying upon serve returns and solid ground strokes (on today's circuit Scots Andy Murray plays a very similar game). He was technically brilliant, absolutely, and he had a colourful personality, but his game lacked the fireworks of players far more on the offensive (Ivanisevic, Pat Rafter, Pete Sampras, and, later, Andy Roddick).

Coloured me surprised, then, that Andre Agassi's autobiography turns out to be filled with offensive gameplay, if you will pardon the pun.

At the age of 12, Andre traveled to Australia with a team of elite young players. For each tournament he won, he got a beer as a reward. Then in the seventh grade he was shipped off to the Bollettieri Academy in Florida, where his tennis flourished, but his life turned feral. Drinking hard liquor and smoking dope, he wore an earring, eyeliner and a Mohawk. Nobody objected as long as he won matches. The academy, in Agassi's words, was "Lord of the Flies with forehands." Since the press and the tennis community still regard Nick Bollettieri as a seer and an innovator whose academy spawned dozens of similar training facilities, Agassi's critical opinion of him may shock the ill-informed. But in fact, Bollettieri is the paradigmatic tennis coach: that is, a man of no particular aptitude or experience and no training at all to deal with children.

Fascinating stuff which really appeals to my inner seventeen year-old girl who knew there was something sketchy about Agassi. Of course I'm unlikely to ever read Agassi's book (my inner seventeen year-old is torn, though) as I'm now thirty-something .. a fact that was brought home to me yesterday when I was watching the UK Top 40 and I knew exactly two songs..