Ghost World

With great joy comes great heartache, so my great-grandmother always said. One of the hardest things about being an expat is that I am far away from people who matter very, very much. My dearest and best friend and her boyfriend visited us last week. I was overjoyed to see them arrive and I was unsurprisingly miserable when they left again. But we did have a lovely week together.

Highlights included watching the ever-changing skies over Loch Lomond (pictured left), having an afternoon pint of local brew in The Falls of Dochart Inn (out of tourist season significantly less Brigadoon than I suspect it'll be in high season), doing the obvious Monty Python jokes at Doune Castle, buying yarn at New Lanark, playing Munchkin in the evenings, having a tremendous dinner at Fanny Trollope's and .. just hanging out with some of the best people I know.

Of course I was also working my usual hours and trying to deal with paperwork, so things were slightly less relaxing than it could have been. I also miss our guests in a raw, unsettled way. Still, I feel nourished and ready to tackle what is ahead.

What is ahead? I am heading to London for work next week, so I need to prepare myself for that. I also have a couple of patterns to write and a lot of things to finish. Somehow I have also talked myself into a rather big homemade Christmas present that needs to be finished by early December.

Ulp.

Finally, and wholly unrelated, I went down to Occupy Glasgow's camp yesterday and I had to laugh out loud when I saw a sign saying "Daily Mail, We Don't Respect You Either". How marvellous.

The Truth About Magic Loop

Ever since I discovered the Magic Loop method, I have been a convert. Not only do I knit everything on circular needles but if the pattern calls for knitting in the round, I will invariably use Magic Loop rather than seek out double-pointed needles. I confess that my love for circs has very little to do with current knitterly trends, but rather that I like knowing I have all the needles I need at hand. I used to spend hours searching for that elusive fourth DPN but no more. But using my circular needles for Magic Loop comes with a price. My needles do not last very long. The needle tips are not the problem; the cable is.The method puts an awful lot of stress on both the joins between the tips and the cable, and the cable itself.

I once bought a cheap set of circular needles off ebay. Friends did so too and are still knitting with theirs. The cable on mine snapped within a week. Then I bought some Pony Bamboo circs which quickly became my favourites (yes, above the much-praised KnitPro needles). They had a lovely grip to the surface which made them perfect for knitting with slippery fine yarns as well as thicker, coarser wool. The tip itself was slightly blunt which I actually tend to prefer for lacework and the cable was beautifully supple. It took three years of constant use before the cables started snapping - then within two hours this past week both sets of circs had cable-malfunctions.

I began looking into possible replacements. Sadly Pony no longer makes the exact same needles, so I opted for some wooden Addi needles out of curiosity. I wanted a strong cable (for obvious reasons) but I also wanted the friction you get with wooden needles. I did pause before placing my order: being a lace knitter I'm particular about the join between the needle tip and the cable and regular Addis irritate me with their annoying tiny little bumps.

Why not Knit Pros? I own and I adore my KnitPros. Their cables are very strong and the tips is simultaneously smooth and 'grippy'. However, I do have that annoying tendency to misplace things - KnitPro tips included. As I could not find non-interchangable circs in the required sizes, I had to look elsewhere.

I have a lot of things in the to-do pile and I have a lot of things in the almost-finished pile. Hopefully my needles will be with me soon..

Whatever Makes Her Happy

Pictured: everyday life in Casa Bookish. I am knitting. He is solving the cryptic crossword.

As for my knitting project, it is something I have been meaning to knit for years. I bought some pseudo-Malabrigo Worsted about three years ago, then Ysolda Teague released the Snapdragon Tam pattern and I just knew I was going to combine the two someday. But like most of those certainty-projects I have simply been saying "one day" for far too long.

I needed to knit something that was all about me after having done so many work-related projects recently. I cast on whilst heading north and then I pursued my project in a very fulfilling leisuredly manner. This means I have not had a set rows to finish every day, I have not picked it up at set times, and I have not come to groan at the sight of it. This is a satisfyingly selfishly slow knit.

(Insert Händel's cry of Hallelujah here)

I did worry (and continue to do so) that I shall run out of yarn. I took to Twitter to ask plaintively whether people could sooth my nerves (they could) and then I looked at my projects page. I made a Snapdragon out of one skein of Malabrigo Worsted just last year. They say your memory is the first thing to go.. but just to make sure I have also weighed the hat-in-progress and measured that against the remaining amount of yarn. Because I can get that obsessed about knitting.

(That reminds me of the time that my lovely knitting partner-in-crime E. walked up to waiting staff at our local haunt and asked if she could borrow the kitchen scales as she needed to weight a rapidly diminishing ball of yarn. They never looked at us the same.)

In other crafty news, today I attended a lovely crochet workshop with Carol Meldrum. Whilst I am a deft hand at crocheting, joining crochet motifs in an orderly fashion had always eluded me before today. I'm happy to report that not only did I manage to follow Carol's instructions and join four lacy squares - I also worked out how to join lacy hexagons .. all by myself! I was a tad smug until it dawned on me that I should have learned these tricks about thirty years ago. I foresee many beautiful crochet blankets in my future - I have several blankets/scarves favourited already and soon it shall be my turn.

Oh, whatever makes her happy on a Saturday night..

Survival of the Knitter

We went on a much-needed mini-break this week. (And by 'much-needed' I really mean 'if I don't get out of this place for more than one day, I will start shouting at strangers on the street and actually bitchslap them if they keep stopping right in front of me.' Have I ever mention that I am a city girl who's not a huge fan of crowds or human beings?)

Anyway. Mini-break.

I brought some knitting and made headway into a project I shouldn't really have cast on (I have too much work knitting to do, but these past few days were me-time). D. brought some books and finished two. I only checked mail twice (good girl) and I lived on a carefully balanced diet of cheese, wine, coffee, and cheesecake. It was lovely.

One afternoon we walked from one small finishing fishing village to another. A scrambling, rambling walk of some 6 miles. Fresh air, plenty of wildlife, and beautiful scenery. Another night we had dinner at Lairhillock Inn which was spectacularly charming: it is a 200-year-old coaching inn set in the countryside about 15 minutes from Aberdeen by car. The inn had a lovely, cosy feel with its dark wooden beams and log fires - and the food was surprisingly excellent in the gastro-pub vein. Locally sourced and freshly prepared food, yum. I succumbed to slow-cooked lamb shank with rosemary mash while my serving of cranachan was so generous, I had to leave half of it.

Do I feel refreshed and ready for another stab at Glasgow life? Uhmm.. er.. we have some very important visitors heading our way next week so hopefully that'll register on the internal energy & joy metre. I just wish I could have enjoyed this view a bit longer this week -->

While I have been away, the Man Booker Prize was announced which went to that jolly good egg known as Julian Barnes (also known as the man who wrote one of the most awful books I have ever read). I have not read his book but I suspect it was the least objectionable and most save-our-face book on the shortlist. I look forward to the Man Booker 2012 long list already. To celebrate I have begun re-reading the 1990 Booker winner. It'll be my .. seventh? .. time reading AS Byatt's Possession: A Romance and like all (good) books it is able to change and grow just as I am changing and growing.

Between Byatt, visitors, cranachan and The Daily Puppy, I may just yet survive.

Thoughts on the Man Booker

I have a love-hate relationship with the Man Booker literary prize. Admittedly the emphasis is mainly on the hate but I always care. In my former life as a literary blogger, I spent many paragraphs explaining why I am both fascinated and repelled by this literary prize. I shall try to keep it succinct this time. The Man Booker prize has come to symbolise an awfully conservative view of what constitutes 'good literary fiction': realist novels, novels set in the past, middle-class novels.. It was not always so, actually. In the mid-90s Scottish novelist James Kelman won with his "How Late It Was, How Late" which was written in a Scottish working-class dialect using a stream-of-consciousness mode. It promptly became The Worst Selling Booker Winner Ever and bookshops complained loudly. The Man Booker has been reliably "safe" since the Kelman win: Graham Swift, Ian McEwan, Peter Carey, Alan Hollinghurst and John Banville. They are all reliable, steady writers who will not cause a revolution in your head and will all make great dinner party fodder.  Sure, there is always a talking point to all the books which is handy for the book group discussions, but the books are never scarily different. I am clearly not the only one who worries about what the Man Booker has become.

I actually really enjoy some of the winners and sometimes the short list throws up some interesting books: Keri Hulme's The Bone People, Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and Oryx and Crake, AS Byatt's Possession and The Children's Book, David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, Colm Toibin's The Master, and Tom McCarthy's C among others. But for every one of those books you also get Ian McEwan's Amsterdam (which blooming won) and Atonement, Julian Barnes' England, England, Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, Ali Smith's The Accidental, Zadie Smith's On Beauty and Emma Donoghue's Room. Bland literary chamber music in a world that could do with a symphony with blatant nerve.

Andrew Crumey, James Robertson, Alasdair Gray, China Mieville and Jonathan Coe have never been short-listed: too Scottish? too genre? too weird? too .. I don't know why Coe wasn't short-listed for his mainstream (and very wonderful) What a Carve Up! or The House of Sleep except maybe the novels were too angry? Too impolite?

But as you may have gathered, I read quite a few of the nominated books and this year I have read two of the long-listed books, Hollinghurst's The Stranger's Child and Jane Roberts' The Testament of Jessie Lamb. Hollinghurst was curiously bland, stifled and aimless underneath the well-crafted prose. Roberts' book started out wonderfully defiant but quickly shrivelled into inconsistent, shrill nonsense. I think the failure of Roberts' book upset me more because I became genuinely interested  by its first two chapters.

Something is adrift in contemporary British literature. I think there are genuinely talented authors writing wonderful, complex, daring works of fiction. Most of them work under the radar whilst the holy 1980s trinity of Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes and Martin Amis continue to gather newspaper inches. A lot of dross have come out of Creative writing programmes too (University of East Anglia, I am looking at you) and I often wonder whether British literature is slowly turning into English, Scottish, Irish, and Welsh literature? Regardless, we live in interesting literary times. Too bad the most high-profile literary prize doesn't really seem to be interested.

Ah, I always miss my literary blog this time of year..

Here, There & Everywhere

A couple of announcements: My Karise shawl has been chosen as a pattern for the next Old Maiden Aunt knitalong on Ravelry. To celebrate this, I am offering a whopping 20% discount on the pattern until November 30, 2011! Just cite OMAKAL as your discount code. More information in the Old Maiden Aunt Ravelry group.

I have been re-jigging my social media commitments, so I now have an open-to-all Twitter account that you can follow. If you used to follow me on Twitter, you may want to follow the new account instead. Knitterly stuff guaranteed, but I'll basically be tweeting about anything that takes my fancy. A condensed version of this blog, if you like.

(Speaking of which, I have managed to delete my entire folder of knitting blogs from Google Reader. I have tried to reconstruct my reading list of 300+ blogs but if I usually comment on your blog and you think I haven't been around lately, do let me know.)

This Saturday I will be teaching a lace shawl class at Wool 4 Ewe in Aberdeen. I think the class has filled up pretty well already, but any Aberdeenshire dwellers can check with Kathy whether she has had any cancellations. Hopefully I will see you there - and if not, feel free to drop in after the class to say hello!

So, yes. Busy times!

I have actually finished quite a few things, but I've not even made any Ravelry project pages for them, let alone managed any pictorial evidence.

This is a brand-new project. I'm using one ball of Rowan Kidsilk Stripe for a very straightforward triangular shawl.

Kidsilk Stripe is a new Rowan yarn: essentially 2 balls of Kidsilk Haze in one ball and combining shades of KSH to create lovely stripes. I've been pleasantly surprised by how much life the stripes have. Purple isn't just solid purple but has all sorts of subtle variegations. I hope my photo hints at that. I'm using the Twillight colourway for this shawl  (greens and purples) but I also really like the Cool colourway (teals and deep pinks).

And I have new specs! I was lucky enough to win a free pair of spectacles from Edinburgh-based Spectacles Direct via a Facebook(!) competition. I never win anything and I was in dire need of new spectacles, so I was very, very thrilled.

How do you like my "awkward MySpace photo pose? Ahhh, what you don't do to appease your mother when Official Photographer is at the other end of the city.

Finally, I finished reading Alan Hollinghurst's The Stranger's Child last night. It is exceptionally well-written (as you'd expect from Hollinghurst who is probably the finest stylist of his generation) but it is also exceptionally dull. I was going to write a full review but I would struggle to find enough interesting things to say.. ironically enough,  the exact same problem the book has.