Pre-Holiday Panic

It has been a week of woe in Casa Bookish. A possible burst water pipe, a plumber missing in action, parcels also missing (prompting a vaguely panicked last-ditch shopping expedition today) and a tonne of other mishaps great and small. To round it all off tonight I accidentally snapped a key-fob made for me by a dear friend. At that point I sat down in the hallway and laughed hysterically. At least my last(?) knitting project of 2010 has turned out nice. My twee winter hat is currently blocking over a plate and I'm actually wearing the matching fingerless gloves as I'm typing this. I love the mitts: they're pretty, wintery, warm and soft. I'm also loving how much colour they mitts and hat provide - this is very much appreciated in a miserable Scottish winter when everything seems to be a shade of grey.

The River Kelvin, December 19, 2010.

I am running behind on everything, though.

I am yet to writing Christmas cards, yet to make some gingerbread cookies to bring with us to the big Christmas family gathering, yet to finish my red cardigan, yet to do all the necessary household chores, yet to conquer the mountain of work I need to do before Christmas, yet to finish re-reading Atwood's Oryx & Crake so I can take The Year of the Flood with me on holiday, and .. oh, I make life so difficult for myself sometimes.

At least I accomplished quite a few things today: paperwork, laundry, xmas shopping, snow-emergency-xmas-dinner-buying, present-wrapping. Check, check, check! I am also rather relieved I decided against handmade presents this year.

Also: I really miss my Danish family and friends because .. well, it's Christmas-time and the season for missing my dear ones.My mother is having a big birthday this Thursday and it is pretty hard that I cannot be there to celebrate her. I knew some things were going to be tough when I decided to move to the UK and this is one of them.

Onwards and upwards. I'll finish some paperwork whilst listening to Ella Fitzgerald singing Christmas songs and I have assorted Christmas candy next to me to help me along and things will work out fine.

Deep breath.

Canvas

Christmas came early this year. I just received this beautiful collographic print in the post. The sender? My artist uncle, Preben Andersen.The photo does not pay it justice as you don't get the wonderful play between print and paper so evident in real life.

I grew up in a working-class family in rural Denmark, but ours was a weird family. Everybody seemed to be creative one way or another. Some of my uncles set up their own 'beat combo' in the mid-1960s which led to much heartache among the local teenage girls. Others became more interested in visual arts and crafts: murals, collages, sculpture, pottery.. Of course my family still obsessed over football results and popular music, but there was a definite and pervasive sense of self-expression and creative exploration which I recognise in myself.

I grew up with paintings on the wall and frequent visits to galleries exhibiting works by members of my family. I inherited a big pile of art history books from my great-grandmother's brother (who had been a farm labourer as well as a painter). I recall one summer when I spent days in my great-grandmother's backyard trying to use a hammer and chisel so I could carve out a sculpture from a cheap piece of concete.

I never knew my upbringing to be different from everybody else - that is, until I started school and other kids did not make their own Christmas decorations, their mums did not knit them jumpers in mad colours, and their parents much preferred reproductions of famous paintings (Monet's water lilies, in particular) to no-name oil paintings by weird uncles. It was a rude awakening but thankfully I did not reject my unusual upbringing. I just .. well, I'm still a crafty, creative, slightly odd person, am I not?

I paint too.

Well, I used to paint. I have sold a couple of paintings over the years, never made enough decent paintings to stage a real exhibition and currently I live in a space which does not lend itself to splashing acrylic paint around. I miss it, though I know I am not particularly gifted; I just love colour - one of my first art loves was Wassily Kandinsky unsurprisingly. I am also shacked up with an art school boy who is a creative, slightly oddball and colour-obsessed man. They always say you end up marrying your father - I did not have a father but I had a huge number of creative, slightly oddball, and colour-obsessed uncles. Draw your own conclusions.

Finally, just two quick links to two of my favourite artists/paintings. I grew up with figurative art but I fell in love with abstract art very early on in my life.

• Joan Eardley. Her Two Children is at Glasgow Kelvingrove Art Gallery and it is a punch to the gut every time I see it.
• Kasimir Malevich's Suprematist paintings.

My Big Read

Every so often I come across a list of 100 books - the result of a BBC project called The Big Read in which the British public was asked about their favourite books. The list is being circulated as part of an ongoing internet meme asking people how many of these books they have read. You know, as though this list is an authoritative and complete list of the best and most important books. It is not. It is filled with recent best-sellers, pop culture phenomena and books people vaguely remember from school. If you are searching for a good reading guide, please consider looking at these lists instead. Warning: these lists are purely aspirational and are filled with dead white men.

However, here is my personal list. It consists of 25 books not on the BBC list.  I consider these books the cornerstones of my reading life and I recommend all of them. One book per author. Feel free to share your own recommendations in the comments section.

1. Tom Kristensen: Havoc
2. T.S. Eliot: The Waste Land
3. Walt Whitman: Leaves of Grass
4. Virginia Woolf: A Room of One's Own
5. Sir Philip Sidney: Astrophel & Stella
6. Gertrude Stein: Tender Buttons
7. Hart Crane: The Bridge
8. Mikhail Bulgakov: The Master & Margarita
9. Jorge Luis Borges: Ficciones
10. Vladimir Nabokov: Pale Fire
11. Allen Curnow: Early Days Yet (esp. Landfall in Unknown Seas)
12. John Cheever: Falconer
13. Alexander Trocchi: Young Adam
14. Primo Levi: The Periodic Table
15. Alasdair Gray: Lanark
16. Jeanette Winterson: Sexing the Cherry
17. Margaret Atwood: The Handmaid's Tale
18. Keri Hulme: the bone people
19. Iain Banks: The Bridge
20. Michel Faber: Under the Skin
21. Andrew Crumey: Mobius Dick
22. Jonathan Coe: The House of Sleep
23. Jan Kjærstad: The Seducer
24. Cormac McCarthy: The Road
25. Erna Brodber: Myal

PS. If anybody looking at my list can figure out what to call or how define my taste in books, please let me know. I've tried to come up with a succinct description for years but the closest I have come is "I like small, nasty books".

Assorted Monday-ness

Using this recipe (link in Danish but worth google-translating) I baked Yule cookies on Saturday. Don't laugh, but it was the first time I ever used Lyle Black Treacle and I fell head over heels in love with both the beautiful tin and the rich, almost-licorice-like taste. Baking the cookies proved a bit of a challenge as our kitchen is poorly designed with very few places to put things, but I managed. (I still miss my Copenhagen kitchen, though. It was very small but functioned a lot better as a working space. Our current kitchen is one of the main reasons why I do not cook nor bake as much as I did in Denmark)

Sunday we decorated the cookies - D. took great delight in making aesthetically pleasing cookies whereas I just piled on the icing - just in time for the annual Yule bash in our tenement. After an hour half the cookies had disappeared along with any feeling in my toes (it was an outside do). It is usually a lovely get-together filled with carol-singing, plenty of mince-pies and happy children. This year we all just huddled around the small wood stove and hoped no body parts would off due to frost bite. The snow has disappeared for now, but it has been replaced by a bone-chilling frost. I gave up after 90 minutes and retreated to the flat with its warm quilts and hot cocoa. Brrr.

Changing the topic: lately I have been receiving a slew of emails from The Christian Coalition of America (wikipedia link). Nice, polite emails asking me to support God's legacy by using my God-given vote to be pro-family, pro-life and pro-America. Nice, polite emails filled with homophobia, anti-women's rights and a downright nasty attitude towards anything Not Christian (i.e. their version of Christianity). I have been doing a bit of on-line sleuthing and have deduced that someone must have signed me up for these emails. Deliberately. I wonder why? Was it a joke that misfired or someone who thought I'd benefit from these mails? I much prefer the former to the latter, you know. I don't like the idea that anyone of my acquaintance genuinely thought I needed to hear from the CCA.

Now for assorted randomness:

• Lifehacker gives you Top 10 DIY Food Geek projects although some of it is a bit .. I mean, "make fresh bread without a breadmaker"?! Really? Is that so new and controversial and life-changing that it needs its own entry?
• I loved David Lynch's Twin Peaks so this makes make feel so very sad.
• Everything We Know About Scotland We Learned from Romance Novels: "All Scottish men wear kilts, even when they were outlawed and even when they didn’t exist. All clans have an identifying tartan."
• I'm getting ideas above my station and I don't even have a (working) sewing machine yet! (youtube link)
• Fable III is taking over my life not-so-slowly. I'd blame it on the dog you have as an companion but, really, the combination of the Vortex and the Fireball spells is just so much fun.
• Sarah Hatton of Rowan and genius knitting design fame has her own website now complete with a knitting app for your smart phone (if you have one - I don't, actually).
• And, oh, how I would love spending a holiday here. A long holiday. A really long holiday.

Winter Wonderland

The view from the living room is usually quite nice. We have no neighbours living opposite us - just a patch of woodland - and we live on a quiet street. Today has been even more quiet than usual. A heavy snowfall has pretty much blocked the street and none of the car owners have seemingly bothered to dig out their cars for the morning commute. I do not blame them; our street doubles as a nice little hill and the idea of driving up the hill in these conditions .. no, not an appealing thought. Today the view from our living room is still quite nice - except at some point I shall have to put on a lot of layers and climb the aforementioned little hill. Brrr...

(Yes, the photo is a bit large but I found I lost all the "lovely" snowy details if I made it any smaller)

And the star? It's a traditional Danish Christmas star and you can make it yourself.

Inspired by the wintery conditions, I have begun making some wintery mitts. You may remember a previous attempt which I pulled out after some thought. I loved both yarns I used but I did not like them together. I rummaged through the stash (still unsorted and unorganised. I need to get my act together) and found some yarn I thought might work better.

This time I'm combining Noro Kureyon with some Rowan Purelife Organic Wool DK (I have plenty in my stash - I picked it up during the John Lewis clearance sale at a tres favourable price). I'm loving working with both yarns but..

..I cannot decide if this looks completely twee in the worst sense of the word (sentimental, sugary sweet, affectedly quaint) OR if this looks twee in a totally adorable 1950s way. It is a fine line, you must agree. I mean, the pattern has me knitting hearts for heaven’s sake!

I shall, of course, be making a matching beret.

Apropos of nothing, my winter coat is close to giving up the ghost. It remains warm and cosy, but the loosely woven tweed is beginning to get worn to the point of holes. Just one hole so far (which I shall mend) but it does make me ponder whether it would be an idea for the future to sew my own winter coat. Last time I had problems finding a winter coat which was both warm, practical (ack) and not butt-ugly.

Budget fashionistas (and sewers), share your thoughts and experiences with winter coats.

<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/kbookish/5238007176/" title="Twee? by kBookish, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5002/5238007176_6034536556.jpg" width="225" height="300" alt="Twee?" /></a>

The Countdown Has Begun

Christmas time is always fraught with cultural mishaps. I've learned a lot about British (and Scottish) Christmas traditions over the last few years. I have even adopted some as my own traditions: Christmas pudding with brandy butter, eggnog, Doctor Who Christmas special, Christmas stockings.. but some traditions do not translate well. I'm still unsure about fake Christmas trees in garish colours that you buy pre-decorated or the obsession with turkey. Then again, some Danish Christmas traditions do not translate at all:

Quite apart from that, I'm hoping to get the last of the Christmas baking under way this week: vanilla rings, shortbread, brown biscuits and pepper nuts. I have a hankering for klejner as well, but I've never been able to make any that taste half as nice as my Auntie Annie's..

Any cross-cultural Christmas traditions in your home - or any unusual Christmas traditions for that matter?

PS. No Christmas knitting for me this year. I have too much on my plate as is!