Winter draw(er)s on

Well....it is cold and wet and windy outside. Loverly high summer day. (Yes, ok, it is only a week or two since I was moaning about the extreme heat. And that is the trouble, we never, or rarely, have a chance to get used to anything. I remember (ugh - extreme nostalgia warning) the long hot summers of '75 and '76, when we had day after day of dry, warm weather, and we all slowed down to a sensible pace, and kicked back and enjoyed ourselves. We, living in Cumbria at the time, even used to go swimming in the lakes after work....ah, those were the days.

To add to my joie de vivre, The Backache is back. Having cleared up completely for a few days. I spent a couple of hours at my Tuesday morning Book Group, where we spend half an hour catching up on doings, half to one hour talking about the book and then a variable amount of time talking about anything and everything. This time it was the shoot to kill policy, which of course, set us off. Sadly, the chair I was using was deeply uncomfortable, and now I suffer for it. Damn.

It will get better. It will get better &etc.

In an attempt to distract myself yesterday, I picked up the scarf. Bad move. Just why the f... do people knit lace? OK, so I have twenty five stitches on the needle, which can grow to thirty one according to the pattern. Six of these are the garter edge. Its a ten row pattern, but every WS is purl. So every RS row, I make mistakes. What a complete waste of time and energy. The pattern is such that I will never in a million years learn even one row at a time. So, I am going to grow up and abandon it. I will still use the yarn for a lace scarf, but find a four row pattern that I have some hope of remembering. Otherwise, there will be no enjoyment in it at all for me, and what is the point of that.

That is one reason why I get so annoyed by the knitting snobs. Yes, nothing but garter stitch is boring in the long run (less so if using one's own very nice handspun). Yes, I do believe in learning new stuff, stretching oneself a bit, developing skills and so on. But we are not all the same, and can't necessarily do the same things, and all this superiority - oh I am so clever, look at the complicated patterns I can do! - gets Right Up My Nose.

Bah, humbug.

gw