Look! A Yule Pig!

My gran sent me a pile of knitting patterns from her ladies' magazines. I always enjoy looking at these patterns. Many are reprinted patterns from yarn companies' leaflets, but they are recent reprints and often patterns I would not have had access to by virtue of being in another country. I have never made any of these patterns, though. Until now.

Just look at those POTHOLDERS! Yes, fair isle potholders with traditional Scandinavian Christmas motifs (a Yule Pig! a Yule Buck!) with crocheted edgings! I'm terribly excited by these super-Scandinavian potholders and I have the urge to buy some Rowan Handiknit Cotton right this minute!! Exclamation Mark!

(Sanity? What sanity?)

My gran also sent me various craft kits for Christmas decorations. It's a bit early for me to get crafty but I predict that next Saturday will be spent at the dining table with scissors and superglue. I'll be making kræmmerhuse (stitching not included) and julehjerter whilst scoffing gran's peppernuts and IKEA's pepparkakor. And Dave will be somewhere else because he always bit nervous when I go into full Scandi-Christmas mode.

Unrelated: stay tuned for a finished object. My Byronic Percy Shawl is currently blocking and it's very, very pretty (and very orange).

Under the Covers

In the early '00s the blogosphere was very different to what it is today. The number of bloggers was very small and everyone seemed to sort-of-almost know each other. My friendship with Stuart of Feeling Listless goes back to this adamic age and this morning Stuart wrote about another blogger who I had actually forgotten existed: Ms Belle de Jour. Yes, she of the lucrative book deal and the Billie Piper TV series. To recap: Ms Belle de Jour was a high-end prostitute blogging about her work and her life. She was a good writer, was clearly smart and educated. Like most bloggers at the time, she was anonymous, but interestingly she kept her anonymity even when she landed the book deal and the Billie Piper TV series. People tried to guess her identity: Was Belle de Jour a real person? Was she actually Toby Young (the implication being that no female prostitute could possibly write so well)? Or was she some other published writer having a bit of a laugh (again the same implication as before)? It seemed as though everybody was suddenly Belle - I even had emails asking me if I had invented her because, you know, I was reading the same book as her. I never knew that reading Jonathan Coe singled you out as being a potential sex worker.

And now The Times has finally revealed the identity of Belle de Jour. Yes, she is real and she is "a curvy size 8 with a fantastic figure" and, oh, a research scientist.

This unveiling is a twist which feels incredibly dated to me - it goes to show just how blogging and the whole damn blogosphere has changed in the last four or five years.  Blogging has gone democratic: you get personal blogs, corporate blogs, politics blogs, mom blogs, fashion blogs, car blogs, book blogs, gadget blogs, travel blogs etc. Blogging is no longer something you do on the sly - bloggers will link to their Facebook profile, Twitter feed, Skype ID, Ravelry profile, del.icio.us account, Flickr account and LibraryThing profile (and probably a dozen other social networks with which I am currently unfamiliar). Secrecy no longer intrigues; openness appeals.

Tellingly, when Stuart posted the news about Belle de Jour to MetaFilter (itself an online community dating back to the early '00s), the reaction was rather muted. Some had never heard of Belle, others shrugged a bit and most of the attention was given to the way the mainstream media had broken the story. We have become so jaded.

Thank You For The Roses

(probably not something you'd want to watch with children around or at work)

Off one of my all-time favourite albums, In A Bar, Under the Sea. I love this song.

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.