Reading the Past

The economic recession has claimed many victims. The first phase saw people losing jobs, companies going bankrupt and banks folding. Experts say that this first wave is over. Signs of economic growth are visible in the financial sectors. We are now living through the second phase: spending cuts have to be made. This is all very textbook Keynesian economic theory and I recommend reading up on John Maynard Keynes (quite apart from being a significant economist, Keynes was also part of the Bloomsbury group alongside Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster and Lyndham Lewis) if most of the current financial news leaves you confused. Spending cuts hurt. Before Christmas, many of my physicist friends were shocked when spending cuts to the tune of £115m were made in the science research sector. When I graduated from university in Denmark some seven or eight years ago, I saw what huge spending cuts will do to scientific research. It was not pretty. My then-department went from being autonomous with at least six new PhD students every year to being yoked together with five other subjects and get one PhD student every other year. The departmental restructuring made for some interesting cross-pollination, but also for disastrous academic results.

And so I learn that Kings College London may have to shut down its Palaeography department in order to meet budget targets. No restructuring, no "let us marry you to Library Science (however awkward) or maybe History or how about Archaeology?" and no shuffling the cards. I am not just saddened. I am shocked. KCL is the only place in the UK to have a Palaeography department and, I believe, even the only place in Europe.

Palaeography, the study of ancient handwriting, may sound like a very obscure subject - and really it is an obscure subject - but it is also incredibly important to scholars. Printing being a very recent invention, most available written material was done by hand and scholars need to be able to decipher handwriting. You get different writing systems (think Cuneiform), different alphabets (think how different the Phoenician alphabet looks to the Latin alphabet) and then different ways of interpreting the alphabets through writing. Pre-printing, many European kingdoms would have their own way of combining and forming letters - Johanna Drucker is particularly good on this, if you want to read more - and some handwriting is only intelligible to specialists who have studied handwriting traditions of a particular area (South Germany, for instance). So much material is now being made available by library specialists, but now I wonder who will be around to read, understand and disseminate this material.

(If I had know that Palaeography existed as a discipline when I started university, I would have ended up in a very different place to now. As is, most of my knowledge is filtered through print culture, so I apologise for any glaring mistakes)

In Her Soft Wind I Will Whisper

Lady on the left? My great-grandmother. She would have been ninety-four today. The photo was taken in the early 1950s outside her cottage and she is with two of her sons, K and T.

I have several photos of her; my other favourite is from the 1930s when she was approached by a travelling salesman who wanted her to become a hair model. I presume she shot him one of her withering glances. The photo shows her with long, gorgeous hair. I was told it was chestnut-coloured. The photo is black/white.

I was lucky enough to grow up around her. She minded me when I was pre-kindergarten and I spent most of my school holidays in her cottage. Her cottage did not have running water until I was maybe seven or eight and never got central heating. I can still envision her sitting in her chair in front of the kerosene-fuelled stove. She'd knit long garter stitch strips from yarn scraps and sew them into blankets. I think she was the one who taught me to knit. She was certainly the one who taught me how to skip rope.

Happy birthday, momse. We may not always have seen eye to eye, but we loved and understood each other. And I still miss you.

Title comes from this beautiful farewell song (youtube link). Post reposted from 2009 with Momse's age amended. I continue to miss her.

The Accidental Woman

One of my favourite places in Glasgow has to be the Botanic Garden. When I first moved here, we lived less than three minutes away by foot and I always made a point of walking through the Botanics whenever I was walking to or fro work. Nowadays we live slightly further afield and my journey to work takes me another route, so I only get to wander around the Botanics on my days off. I like visiting often, so I can keep up with what is happening: that tree has lost its flowers, the little robin is nowhere to be seen, the cocoa plant has a new pod etc. And in winter, the greenhouses provide great knitwear photo opportunities! Yes, 'tis my own Feather & Fan shawl. Apparently these shawls are like salted peanuts: you cannot have just one.

I finished reading Jonathan Coe's The Accidental Woman yesterday. Coe is one of my favourite contemporary authors and his What A Carve Up! is a brilliant dissection of Thatcherite Britain while I push the very affecting The House of Sleep on most of my friends. The Accidental Woman was Coe's debut novel and owes more to Coe's admitted obsession with experimental stylists like Alasdair Gray and BS Johnson than any of Coe's other books. From a technical point of view, The Accidental Woman is actually very good. The narrator decides to take an average, dull person, Maria, as his subject and the resulting novel is really about the narrator's attempt to construct "a novel", the writing process and the struggle to fit Maria into a conventional novel. The novel leaps confidently back and forth between the primary narrative and the behind-the-scenes bits which is rather astonishing considering this was Coe's first novel. However, the technical feat does make the book feel very dated (in a 1980s-high-on-metafiction sort of way) and the novel itself is deadly dull. Anyone teaching narratology might get a kick out of it, but, really, most people would do far better to read Coe's later books. They are equally well-constructed but also have the added benefits of plots, interesting characters, humour and political outrage.

Oh, and I watched the recent RSC/BBC production of Hamlet last night. I have seen several productions/versions of Hamlet in my time (that's what you get for the double whammy of being a Dane and studying English) and quite enjoyed the newest version despite a very, very, very hammy Ophelia. Oh, and I liked how the newspaper had headlines written in Danish..

The Catcher in the Rye

J.D. Salinger has died. I wonder what unpublished works he has left behind?

She Comes Scattered

Just a little peek of my just-off-the-blocking-board shawl. It's beautiful, it's warm and it's mine. Sorry. I notice how my projects travel by colour. I had a green phase last spring/summer, then recently I have knitted a lot of blue-ish purples and pink fuschia, and now I appear to gravitate towards rich reds. I hope I will never have a pastel phase. I do not think I'd be able to keep my sanity. Anyway, proper photos to come this weekend after Official Photographer and I manage to have a full day together. Official Photographer called me this morning to let me know that Crowded House will be touring the UK this spring and that tickets go on sale tomorrow. I have written about this before, so it suffices to say that Crowded House provided the soundtrack to most of my life. I connect places I have lived or been with their songs, and although I no longer listen to them on a regular basis, they are "my band". For one glorious moment I contemplated seeing every Scottish gig, but then I checked ticket prices and also remembered that I will be on my way to West Yorkshire for work reasons when they play Aberdeen. If you had told me ten years ago I would have to forego seeing Neil Finn live for matters involving sheep, I would have thought you mad.

Anna has written an interesting post about her relationship with "things", crafting and feminism. I enjoyed reading it. You may too.

Waiting for Spring

When I cast off a shawl last night - more on that later - I noticed that my left wrist was acting up. I have hyper-mobile joints and sometimes I forget that I have to "stiffen" my wrist when pushing against or carrying things. These past few days I have been doing a lot of pushing and shoving at work - and now my left wrist is acting up as a result. I'll need to uncover some bandages later and perhaps even scale down my knitting activities. Woe. But, yes, I have cast off my third shawl of 2010. After finishing this Feather and Fan Comfort Shawl and knowing that I would wear it, I cast on for another F&F shawl in Marks & Kattens Fame Trend in colour 651 (a sage-brown-red combo). Again, a very straightforward knit and I really love the colours. I much preferred Fame Trend to the very disappointing Drops Delight - Fame Trend is softer, the colour combinations are better and I much prefer the evenness of the resulting fabric to the substandard faux-Noro-esque Delight.

But I think I am definitely ready to move away from knitting multi-coloured shawls out of sock yarn.

My next project is a pullover from the new Rowan magazine - the Spring Summer 2010 one. Relax is a casual lacy jumper designed by Sarah Hatton and knitted out of Summer Tweed, a silk/cotton yarn, in a lovely red shade. I'm slightly concerned about how my wrist will cope with the yarn as I know from experience that knitting will cotton will hurt my hands. Hopefully the 30% content of cotton won't tax my hands too much. I'm excited about this one as I tend to knit mostly big, woolly garments and I'd love to have a pretty red jumper that I can wear throughout the year. I plan on wearing it with layers - long-sleeves black tops for spring and autumn and a little black camisole during the three days of summer we'll get. In my head I can also see it working with a teal corduroy skirt I have. Fingers crossed.

Thanks to the lovely girls at Go Fug Yourself, I spent the morning looking at ice-skating routines. Having watched Johnny Weir skating to Lady Gaga, I can die a happy woman. Growing up in Scandinavia, I watched lot of ice-skating and have always loved its mad combination of gymnastics, showmanship, and ever-looming possibility of bone fractures. Oh, the Winter Olympics cannot come soon enough.. (and I am planning to knit my very first pair of socks for the Ravelympics).