YELL !

Yell by Gemma Atkinson 

in Rowan Felted Tweed and Colourspun

immediate reassurance parcel got there this time without hitch

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Milla

After marvellous Milla from The Stitch Shop sewed up, Jane revisited her modeling days along with Jealous, the Jack Russell, aged 17. 

This sweater was another for my son - I finished up knitting it very late a few Fridays ago. 

                            *                                                                    *                                                            *

Soon after, I was knocked off my bike … had been tootling along in a cycle lane when (in a scene worthy of Tom & Gerry) suddenly the bike went on without me, handlebar attached to the wing mirror of a car and continuing up the bus lane before careening to a halt by the kerb. Meanwhile, I crashed and bounced a few different ways before settling face down in the bus lane at rush hour, where somehow I wasn't flattened by a double decker bus or a cab.

Solicitous passers-by rushed in, kept the traffic back, called an ambulance, put a jacket under my head and generally reassured me, as I lay dazed... after about ten minutes I began to realise I didn’t need the ambulance - I’m bruised and bashed but can still walk and talk and complain long and loud about the fact that I’m having trouble sitting.  And, oh, I absolutely believe I have a guardian angel.

All this occurred right across from a hospital, where I was actually headed to visit a patient already in Accident and Emergency – I'd been asked to leave earlier, and now I was back, looking to be admitted myself… even at the time I found this slightly funny...

Another good thing was when on the following day this arrived...all 674 pages ...which, as I'm a big fan, cheered me up and diverted me as I interspersed hobbling about with reclining, regathering and regrouping.

It's a great read: unsurprisingly well written and entertaining. It's primarily a loving testimonial to his family, and also offers insight into the highs, lows, stresses, strains and permutations of three generations of traveling minstrel. That family saga tracks the evolution of how popular music has reached its public over that time, and amounts to quite a serious 150 year piece of social history. It wears this dimension lightly though, as it's told in seemingly random anecdotal episodes that team with characters and events - world famous and equally obscure - artists and their songs, a myriad of recording sessions, performances, managers, club owners, television hosts, politicians and their politics, all of whom played parts in the lives of the writer, his family and their music.

It's mentioned that a focal point of the narration was 1865, the year the first edition of Alice in Wonderland was published. However this book has its own rabbit hole potential too... You'll read something, then ask yourself, "Which song?",  and begin checking it out. "Oh, that", you'll think, and unearth a few more. But that's a happy phenomenon attaching to pretty much all Elvis Costello sleeve notes, interviews and interactions, and will be one already familiar to many of his fans.

Mind you, in terms of the knitting community (which crops up once or twice in passing), I don't sense he's about to cast on any time soon, or that we'll be hearing him sing

"I used to knit just mufflers,

But now I'm having a go at socks" 

Ah well.

Do buy the book though. 

Psychogeography

At a Young Hearts Run Free event this week, Karl Whitney talked about psychogeography. To say the least I identify - once it was explained to me - Actually I’ve been identifying for decades, only I hadn’t narrowed the concept down so succinctly.  Psychogeography is ethereal nostalgia but with a specific physical expression too… your own personal Arcadia.  

Imagine you’ve stopped habitually inhabiting a particular beat -maybe you never even noticed you had - but find yourself transported emotionally right back when for some reason you return to that place or thing.  You may have a sense of melancholia about it all being different now, an awareness of getting older, a growing insight into the fact that it’s all a cycle and someone else’s world is now where ‘your’ streets or ‘your’ buildings were....

Psychogeography establishes these places as still yours - the music, the scent, the building -  all part of your unique association with that physical place or thing and that link at least can never be taken away from you. 

Yes, I identify... I also say that this mechanism works with almost anything – I think I actually tested this in an earlier entry. Right now, however, as I’m absent-mindedly looking at mushrooms growing by a tree, I'll go with my own personal mushroom psychogeography…

And I'm tuning in to the mushroom factory which is where the chips of mushrooms of my childhood emanated...(are there still chips of mushrooms?). On the way home from visiting my grandmother we used to pass the factory, and in fact the factory only existed at night for me – no recollection whatsoever of seeing it during the day.  In my mind's eye it's lit up for the Sunday night hops held there for the workers – I see fairy lights and possibly a marquee for a big night after Christmas, although that could have been sleepy wishful thinking on my part.  Hops is a word from mother’s psychogeography, by the way, covering dancing and situations where so-and-so was doing a line with so-and-so - Doing a line is hers too, and means courting with a view to marriage (as opposed to any other)(line) (just to be clear).  

Because everyone locally knew someone who worked in the factory, we'd invariably be sent home with a chip of fresh mushrooms, and their damp woodland scent would waft from the back window where they'd have been set so as not to spill all over the car. Fragments of conversation would occasionally break through my drowsing... the mushroom factory brought life, employment, prosperity to the area - my parents approved. So did I - next day we would eat mushroom soup or fried mushrooms and I liked mushrooms.

A decade or more later, and a whole trip later, a group including me went mushroom picking in a park at the foothills of the mountains - musherooms, as one friend called them.  And as I pointed out already, I was keen on my mushrooms and didn’t tend to hold back, which explained why one moment everything seemed normal, but then suddenly everything was framed in rainbows and simultaneously the funniest and most beautiful thing ….  So I was trying to explain to a bearded man in an anorak that I didn't know from adam that I'd like him to know he was emanating an amazing rainbow like a human prism, and also that in his pupils I could see the cutest little windmills... when luckily a friend with a lot more sense than me - a friend who had not eaten any mushrooms - moved me along quickly before I got in any further trouble...   

And it was actually quite true (because the sane friend bore this out later as solid fact unrelated to mushroom consumption) that, as we meandered through afforested greenery beaming our good vibrations at the birds and trees, we reached a hill where we were suddenly set upon by a yelling, yowling group of possibly eleven-year-old boys in full military kit... who suddenly descended from god-knows-where, brandishing sticks and we really did not dream this up.  With hindsight, this may well have been a local entertainment of course (and I suppose you could see why opening a portal of psychogeographical terror in the brains of seasonal menaces to feature in their nightmares indefinitely might seem quite a worthy past-time actually).

But obviously we disintegrated completely, and it was left to our sane friend to get us home in a hurry, or at least to some quiet corner where we could be left undisturbed until the horrors abated.  She led us away - four of us clinging to one of her like a litter of blind whimpering pups - and out onto the busy road, where the noise and traffic were now more horrific to us than even the small soldiers in the park..  It's a tremendous testament to her tenacity that she managed to walk us, shivering and shying at every shadow, to a bus stop, and talk us onto a bus (after first having to let several go on without us), which ferried us to a place of greater serenity and where a few hours later some kind of equilibrium was restored…

Someone said there was an unusually strong mushroom crop that year, but I never was prepared to test that as a theory or in any way stir up any new mushroom psychogeography for myself

More News

Anderson by Lisa Richardson

in Baby Merino Silk DK

Readers from the beginning of this blog may recall that what started me knitting again after quite a moratorium was a much loved little girl who only stayed around for a very short time...

Last week word travelled fast about the arrival of a little brother to join another sister in that family... in great health and growing fast...  Which spurred me once more into action.... but I had barely enough of this faintly metallic yarn for the tiniest size.... so I knit like one possessed on Friday and Saturday....  And on Sunday,  I raced to consistent knitter, Karen, who kindly put aside her own plans, and sewed up so as to hide my big shaping error that had been too complicated to undo... Down to the very last of my yarn, I tore through the collar and delivered it asap to be sure to catch this as yet unnamed young man before he outgrows the first size and moves on up the the next...  

So all pretty good news then...