The DSM had to do a day trip (do those 60s songs never stop reverberating around in our heads?) to the north east, and felt like company on the ride. So I went along to revisit the home of my alma mater. Which has long since been subsumed through a number of administrative changes into one of the new universities but was a mere 'umble college when I was there. Didn't try to track it down.
Didn't really track anything down. Whisked in to the city centre on the wonderful, I have to say, Metro system, debouched straight in to enclosed, artificial world of Shopping. Well, if you were that way inclined. Personally, I could find very little that any sane person might care to buy. A handful of paperback novels to read on my hols (yes, I am off again), a new t-shirt, an ostrich feather and some sequins.......
You know all those visions of the future, from Metropolis to the Matrix? It has arrived.
For some unaccountable reason (called a husband, I think) I have never really visited in any real sense one of these 'ere new-fangled shopping whatsits - malls, I guess even we call them. Huge, cavernous cathedrals of commerce, but with warrens of tunnels, strange lighting and several different boothettes selling what is supposed to be food (although I was slightly tempted by Baskin Robbins.) And here I was with several hours to kill until I could reverse my journey and connect with the DSM. This could, I thought, even be fun. Having lead such a sheltered life, I had no idea of the reality.
Having in the first hour had my lunch and made my purchases, I then found myself....stuck. There was nothing remotely interesting to even look at, let alone buy. Well, the gas range cooker for £1,500, but it was a bit heavy to carry. Ditto even the towels and bedding that was pretty cool. So I wandered until footsore, and then bar-hopped. Coffee-shop hopped, actually. A retail failure, an unsuccessful citizen who remainedtotallyy unmoved by the siren calls of "buy, buy, buy."
I thought I could shop for England. And so I could in bookshops, yarnshopse, bead shops, fibre shops, even clothes shops of a certain kind. But 90 percent of what is on offer out there, even with a clear run and a credit card, leaves me cold. Why I hadn't realised it before, I cannot say. I can only think that I bought in to the glitter and never before had time to look below the surface, whisked past the temples as I had always been. Thescaless are lifted from my eyes!
The ostrich feather and the sequins....the friend that I had lunch with today blenched and refused to hear what I could possibly want them for. But fear not, these were a fibre-related purchase. I am intending to do some funky yarns with the AH lot, and these are a start on collecting materials. I am going to do Art Yarn and make my fortune. Not.
I still am not getting around to writing about cotton, and no time now, supper calls. Saturday morning at sparrow fart we are off to Cornwall, so it may well be after that, I will have sampled some more by then perhaps. But to prove that I do have a fibre life, a photo.
Not bad. Could be better, but not bad.
More later. Be good while I'm gone.
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