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So Jae over at Some Knitting Required (she of the beautiful Peacock shawl) was doing a Pay it Forward post, and I happened to be amongst the first three to comment! Yay! So now it’s my turn. So here it is, Cmd + C, Cmd + V:
I will send a handmade gift to the first 3 people who leave a comment on my blog requesting to join this PIF exchange. I don’t know what that gift will be yet and you may not receive it tomorrow or next week, but you will receive it within 365 days, which is my promise! The only thing you have to do in return is pay it forward by making the same promise on your blog. So, leave me a comment if you’d like me to Pay It Forward.
We’re off travelling tomorrow, and for once I am not carrying my laptop with me. *Gasp* But knitting is planned and a book or two. Also keep your fingers crossed that I get to see the inside of a craft store. It isn’t a very long trip…
Ruth’s book is now available in downloadable and hard copy formats. I’ve seen the prototype hats in person and can vouch for their scrumptiousness 🙂 Run over there and get yourself a copy! The patterns are all done sideways, not the usual top-down or rim-up.
Also, we are sailing away on a holiday tomorrow, so here are my wishes for a happy holiday for all my friends and readers!
Not exactly, but that’s how it feels sometimes when I read the Lord Peter Wimsey books of Dorothy Sayers. I found a cache of them at the library, and read three in a row a few weeks ago, and got two this time around. Currently I’m reading Busman’s Honeymoon. The books are such good fun! Wimsey is a gentleman like Bertie Wooster, and even has his version of Jeeves, but is obviously much cleverer. Also, I found a reference to a quote from Alice (Through the Looking Glass) which my sister and I use regularly, paraphrased, “You couldn’t deny it if you tried with both your hands.” To which Alice tries to argue, “I don’t deny things with my hands…” “I didn’t say you do, I said you couldn’t if you tried!” (more or less). Which is unbeatable logic, don’t you think?
The Dowager Duchess says of her (elder) daughter-in-law: “She couldn’t have said anything nastier if she’d thought about it with both hands for a fortnight.”
My sister and I were also gratified to read somewhere about the Changing of the Guard at Buckingham Palace, that it happens every other day. You need to find out in advance whether it is happening on a particular day or not. The White Queen tells Alice she can have jam every other day, but when Alice asks if she can have it the next day, she is told “Today isn’t any other day.” You can’t argue with that one either. My sister tells me in her Red Bus tour of London, the guide used the same phrase about when some attraction was open and no one seemed to have any questions about it.
No wonder though, that I think my mom and I were very lucky we wandered towards the Palace on a day that did happen to be an “other day”, although perhaps during the English summer, the Changing happens every day?
for a chance to win some very nice stuff: Jane’s 300 post contest. All you have to do is tell her something weird about yourself. That can’t be very difficult, can it now? 😀 I’ve been wanting to knit my own version of that bag since seeing it in Knitting Daily.
Thank you for posting about it, Andrea!
she is found!!
She was hidden in a box being used as a TV stand, which had been properly sewn up by the MIL in a tablecloth. There were some items of yarn-thread related effort as well. This crisis has for now passed.
Thank you all for your support!
The Ian Rankin I read (Black and Blue)… I had to keep reminding myself this was Scotland, not the US. I kept feeling the gritty atmosphere was in North America. Don’t know if I’ll read another immediately. They need a different sort of mood.
Then I read Reginald Hill’s Arms and the Women. Had a sort of surreal atmosphere, but on the whole, I enjoyed it. Ellie gets a bit more sympathique.
Read Ruth Rendell‘s From Doon with Death, her first Wexford mystery. On Ravelry someone was saying she likes to read series in order, but on reading this, I feel quite happy not to have come upon it first. The characters seem as though they haven’t grown into their skin yet. Reading Wolf to the Slaughter now, and the impression continues. I agree that as the years (and books) pass, people change, and it might be that Rendell deliberately changed them (“grew” them). But Wexford in the latter book sounds like Andy Dalziel, not the mellow man I usually picture him as, plus he isn’t even a Yorkshireman 😉
Stephen Fry’s got a blog now and it needs concentration and a clear mind. Erika alerted me to it, I still haven’t made up my mind whether I should subscribe to it or not. My attention span isn’t what it used to be… His “blessays” are long and intellectual.
I have an odd approach to earning money (and spending it). Since I freelance, each article I edit has a price on its head. So I tend to think “I’ve earned Rs 1,500 over the last two days, which pays for the new cellphone I had to buy after my last one met an untimely end after a fatal encounter with azelastine, my nasal phus-phus.” Sort of seeing the trees too much and not the wood so much. Also, while I like the security of having a solid 5-figure amount in the bank, once I withdraw cash from the ATM, it’s like water. Somehow the real paper never feels as important as seeing the numbers in the account balance sheet. Why do you suppose that is? I find it very odd whenever I think about it.
Anyway, in England they give you back every single penny of your change. In fact, as soon as we arrived at Heathrow, I tried contacting an acquaintance who’d said he might be able to pick us up. I didn’t realise you had to prefix a zero to a mobile number even if it was local (you don’t in India), so my first couple of attempts were unsuccessful, and after the second try, the coin-operated phone actually returned not just my £1 coin, but an additional 10p coin. So funny! But then of course I got through to my contact (who couldn’t come anyway) and although the call only took 50p, the machine swallowed the whole £1 so overall I made a loss.
The London underground is totally amazing. There seemed to be so many different levels, one for each line, with each one invisible from the other. The system probably goes miles deep into the earth. I wonder how a cross-section of the ground below London would look. Some of the escalators were very, very high. Despite all the mechanisation, though, I realised not even in London are public transport systems totally friendly to the physically challenged. Not all stations have the escalators, and the stairs require fitness. Carting around my backpack (why are guidebooks and water so heavy?) I think I lost some weight. Next time I travel, I’ve resolved to go with a stronger, fitter person, who can carry around the maps and water and stuff, (and of course the massive amounts of change you acquire in a surprisingly short time). I shall only carry my camera and my enthusiasm.
Talking of baggage, I was lugging a load of it on the Saturday we returned from Sheffield to London. Since we arrived at King’s Cross by around 2pm, my mom (Can you believe she’s over 70?) suggested we should use the time to do some more sightseeing (it’s such an advantage having sunlight until 10pm – schedule all your higher-latitude travel in the summertime, it doubles your visiting hours). So there I was, wheeling the strolly, and packing my backpack, and we trudged to the Tower of London. The cobbles in that place really made it hard. Also, nowhere throughout the trip were we asked to (or allowed to) leave our baggage at the entry (except at the Dickens Museum).
I was also carrying a load of emotional baggage (colonial hangups), as I realised after we saw the Royal jewels. The sight of the Kohinoor made me want to return to India and start up a petition for its return. First, it was taken from India, and then we travel all the way and pay for the privilege of seeing it!!! Of all the nerve…
We met this Yeoman guard:
Who said his grandfather had been in the Indian Army and his father had studied in a place which is now in Pakistan. Of course, when you meet individuals, it’s hard to maintain any anger or prejudice (unlike when you think of the country or race). So we took a nice happy picture together. (Of course it was before I saw the Kohinoor).
My mom is carrying a usual bag from Sainsbury’s (she insisted on buying vegetables all the time so we could have Indian food after reaching home at 10 or 11 in the evening). Western food is good for breakfast and maybe lunch, but you start craving the salt and the hot by night time. (Except I bought a mix for Yorkshire pudding and was disappointed to find it salty when I baked it here in Cochin. Perhaps it is dunked in jam or something for eating? Odd when most of the other baked stuff we encountered in the trip was sweet).
Oh, and that sweater is my handknit. Seen here way back when. Ruth was nice enough not to fall about laughing when she saw it. (Of course she’s got the baby to think of, but you know.) Came in useful, though.
And I thought this was an interesting sight:
That er, cigar-shaped building (one of London’s famous landmarks) with the hoary Tower edifices on either side. I keep forgetting what it is called. Most of Central London, though, is still nicely older architecture and I was especially pleased that even shops didn’t deface the fronts, and were simple. Bombay would do well to follow suit.
So on the second Saturday we spent in England, we took the train back to London from Sheffield (from Meadowhall Interchange to Doncaster and then direct to King’s Cross). The taxi driver who drove us from our friends’ house to the station was of Pakistani origin and we had an interesting conversation with him in Hindi (with sort of political overtones, so not for this blog).
I love so much the sheer amount of information that is available in all the train stations and coach stations and interchanges and at the bus stops. There are route maps and bus maps and brochures. I picked up a whole load of paper, just as souvenirs. Culled a lot of it when we were packing to move from Vizag. Of course the best part was, it was all in a language that is de facto my first language. People I spoke to on the street and elsewhere didn’t seem to have issues understanding my accent either, but my mom was disappointed no one sounds like the Beeb! I explained that the Beeb accent is largely an artificial one. Ruth and Tom said perhaps some people sound like that in some parts of London, but we didn’t meet any. Anyhow, the weeks I spent glued to Silent Witness, Waking the Dead and The Inspector Lynley Mysteries on BBC Entertainment paid off and I understood the different accents quite satisfactorily. Actually, I think I’d have been intimidated if someone had sounded like the Beeb. This way, my accent was just another among a thousand others.
Not that I watched the series to learn the accents. Also the years of growing up with British writing meant I got a thrill just from recognising street and place names :D. Like unexpectedly stumbling upon this while looking for something else entirely:
That was on the way from watching the Changing of the Guard at Buckingham Palace to Westminster Abbey.
Or cutting through from Marylebone Street (after walking through Oxford Street) en route to Portland Place and seeing this board:
Almost enough to make me forget the ache in my feet (our feet ached the entire two weeks! Never have I ever walked so much in my life.)
Then for the murder lover in me (the genre of books, not the act naturally), this on the way to Trafalgar Square:
I made a lifetime of memories from those 13 days. And if I was nostalgic before the trip, now it’s like “I have to go back every year!!!”. Dreaming on…
While on the subject of language, this is the first time I’ve lived in a place where I don’t even read the script. English is ubiquitous, obviously, but I wish I could read Malayalam too. A penfriend from Cochin in my youth tried teaching me but I remember very little of it. One weekend, I shall try to locate her, as I remember her address by rote. Do you think I’ll be able to find her? It must be almost 20 years since we last corresponded. I’m hoping at least her parents will be here, even if she has moved away. I found a schoolfriend in Mumbai when we moved there, 11 years since we last met.
I think all my posts for the foreseeable future are going to be rambling ones. Stay with me if you can!
swakrta.com 