Reward for good behaviour.

I had to get up even earlier than sparrow-fart this morning (well, by my standards, anyway). Crunched out over the snow and ice at 6.40 am, unheard of for me. But a friend who lives down the road had to be at hospital for a 7.15 appointment, and needed a lift there and back, so, happy to oblige.

Anyhow, I got my reward. Just after I got home, around 7.45, I glanced down the valley, and saw this lovely sight. Definitely worth getting up for.

Vindicated!

Today, we have this:



So I got to wear these:



I love these boots; Swedish, there is embroidery on them that you can't see, they have thick, sturdy soles with a good tread and they are as warm as toast. I haven't exactly worn them a lot since I gave in to an impulse and bought them, but on days like these, they really come in to their own.

But the vindication is.....I had to make a trip in to town, and driving off our parking spot outside the house, I was sliding around all over the place. I would have been completely screwed IF I HADN'T GOT FOUR WHEEL DRIVE!!!!

Oh, am I sad or what?

OK, progress update: nothing extraordinary, plugging along. Silk crochet is a neat little bag full of balls, and I have one or two good ideas about what to do with it. Alpaca chugging along. Beading - can't remember if I have written about the Dutch spiral kit I am working on, but it is slightly driving me nuts. After a fit and start or two, I now understand the construction, fine. But I can't get a tension that pleases me, and because I have never seen this up close and personal enough to handle, I don't know what it should be. Seems to me that if the beads are all sorts of different shapes and sizes, then it is going to be difficult to get a really good tight, even tension, but I could be wrong. I'm going to stick with it and see what the finished length is like, maybe see if I can find someone around who actually knows.

Ay de mi, that's it. Time to go stash-diving (yikes!) to find fibres for a class on Thursday morning. Wonder what other goodies I will find in the depths?

Deconstruction is us

Life being technically back to normal, I turned of course, to fibre. But in reality, normality is probably a state beyond my capabilities at the best of times. So...

At my last class, on Friday, we spent time looking at peoples' UFOs. I had decided that my message was to be "sometimes that project is stuck for a very good reason. Its bad. Bin it, frog it, any way you want it. To reinforce my point I had taken along a motley rag and tag of silk crochet that had been haunting me for....a lot of years.

I really don't know what I had been thinking of with this piece. It was meant to be a randomly crocheted waistcoat. To do this with any hope of success, you need a template that is a fairly accurate representation of the size and shape you want to end up with, and then to match your scumbles to that. This I did not do. You need yarns in a group of colours that end up in some sort of coherent harmony, even allowing for a few high contrast notes. Well, that wasn't happening, either.

I eventually got it to be an alien computer's idea of what might be a fit for a human being, in that it had back, sides, armholes, etc. Beyond that....a shapeless mess. I kept thinking that I could add a bit here, add a bit there, and at the end of the day, throw it in to a dye pot, and with a wave of my magic wand render it instantly beautiful.

No. Never.

So there it sat until last Friday, when I urged my students to believe that sometimes things are never, ever going to work, and that the healthy thing to do is to throw in the towel, and deconstruct.



So that is what I have been doing, and very soothing it is too.

Web-log

I hadn't posted this url here before because every time I had checked it, there didn't seem to be much going on. I've just been back, and suddenly, a cornucopia! Sue is sharing so much with us, I urge you to explore.

Sue lives just down the river from me, and I have had the great pleasure of being one of her students, going to her lectures and exhibitions, and more. I don't claim for one single minute to be one of her successful students in the sense that I have achieved no great works of tapestry art. But I have learned a huge amount from her; and her work continues to excite and inspire me.

We didn't just do (below)

Let's get the rest of our recent trippette out of the way before returning to more mundane matters. The rest was pretty good, too. A very pleasant day with friends, again extremely cold and frosty. The DSM and M went out running, the mad fools, so we more sensible two took the car to a suitable spot, then walked across the meadow to Granchester.



Not the greatest of photos, but it's a bit....flat....around there (sorry!) This view was nice, though, kind of quintessentially English. We had lunch at The Orchard (in my case, a prawn sandwich, no honey in sight), then the DSM and I drove off leaving the others to walk back to their car. We waved an appropriate gesture at The Old Vicarage in passing, then went to have a look at the library that I had worked at when I went there for my first ever job. I didn't recognise it at all, which was just a bit disturbing.

There is something infinitely soothing and at the same time energising, spending time with old friends. It was a lovely day.

Then on Monday, we took off for Northampton and its environs on our way home. Immediately after WW2, my parents trained as pub managers, and we moved first to a small village pub, and then to a larger one on the edge of the town. That one I remember pretty well, and we actually did visit several years ago. Anyway, I fancied doing it again, and then going on to the other. In the event, we got it wrong, and although I did get to wander around the one, we left it too late to track down the other, my internet researches having gone somewhat awry. So, we will have to try it again some time soon.

Its a little seedy now, but probably actually rather better than on our previous visit. Perhaps the glorious weather helped (this didn't last beyond this point, thick fog then for miles) But this is where I did the first part of my growing up.



This is cropped and blown up, and I don't remember a pub sign at all, certainly it won't have been this one. But they are so iconic...



The name over the front is a modern rendition. I think there was one before, but I wasn't allowed to go to the front of the building, nor on to the front balcony which was for some reason considered unsafe. The back one was my territory, and the back garden, indeed beyond. All the trees (elms) have gone now, but it still looked spookily familiar.



And then, just as we were about to get in the car and leave, I realised that I was staring directly at what had been my bedroom. As my parents both worked in the pub, I spent a lot of time in there all alone with my toys. My dolls house stood immediately adjacent to the window in this view. My bed was near the dormer, just visible on the left. Now this was getting really spine tingly. This has all lived inside my head for the last fifty some years, and now here it is right in front of me.

Definitely cool.

A la recherche, encore une fois

OK, so this is where we had drinks before the dinner:



I was last in here about thirty five years ago, and I don't remember there being a carpet. It is still however, as beautiful as ever, and it was lovely to see it again with soft lighting and a pleasant warmth after the foggy chill of the evening outside.

After we had had a drink and met up with one of the DSM's old mates, who we hadn't known was to be attending, so a nice surprise, we walked out through the Cloisters and in to Old Hall for the actual dinner.



See the long table under the portraits? That's High Table, that is, and for some unaccountable reason, that is where we sat. Placement had to have been done on a purely random basis, I do realise that. I'm not getting delusions of grandeur here, despite the motley collection of lords, ladies and deans I was sat amidst. In fact, at this point, I began to feel a strong sense of surrealism, not to mention that we had wandered on to the set of "Hogwarts" by mistake. I had never been in here before, only allowed to poke my nose around the door to look at the glories within. This was in the days before the college became co-ed, and women were only able to come in as visitors with firmly-set hours of ingress and egress (excess?) at that. I was involved in a couple of discussions, and earwigged other snippets, along those lines with other women of the same vintage, and indeed, this was why many of them had not been to any of these dinners before when partners of the female persuasion were not allowed still. See what I mean about surreal?

It was, however, quite lovely. Old Hall, built around 1449, is sublime. The lighting was predominantly by candles, the food was, considering it was in effect mass catering, excellent, and the wine...never mind flowing, it was a positive torrent. It did occur to me that there were no doubt many eminent medics in the august company, and just what was their opinion on this binge, eh? We ate an extremely superior fish cake on a bed of interesting leaves with a bearnaise sauce; broccoli and stilton soup; lamb cutlets, or in our case, a slightly anonymous if tasty cheese tart; tiramisu (the only false step, and I passed); and good cheese and biscuits. The stilton was formidable. Alongside this, there was Macon blanc with the first two courses, I forget what with the main course, and claret and port ad lib to finish. I had to fight the wait staff off more than once - I had promised to be good, and I kept my word. But an excess of alcohol might have been dangerous.....

It was unreal; for us, it was like playing dressing up; but it was also very enjoyable and in some curious way like for once being a grown-up. I think this largely because it was doing and being what I watched my parents being when I was a child, following the same rules and traditions, which I have never ever been or done, nor wanted, mostly. But just once in a while, a different sort of play.....

A final photo (I didn't, of course, take any of these myself). Aren't these sublime? I did have some note cards of some of them once upon a time, I got them from Salts, a good source of interesting stuff.



Originals from the Morris factory, she said, drooling gently.

Cross

I'm going to get a rant over and done with first, before doing the more interesting stuff. But I am just so mad.

A couple of weeks ago, the DSM was lightly encouraged by others who had made the move to investigate a new job within his present company. A different project, and with the prospect of some interesting retraining that would have made his last seven or so years of work life much better than ordinary, with possibilities for all sorts of things. Last week, he had the interview, and got really excited about the whole thing.

He rang me on his mobile at lunchtime, sounding really cheesed off. The job is his if he wants it, but his present management have put enormous pressure on him not to go, for at least a year. If it were a question of leaving the company, there would be no problem, but as it is essentially the same employer, he is in a very hard place, and basically can't just say stuff it. This is where being too responsible, decent and helpful comes back to bite you, and basically really sucks.

And as they want to keep him in a somewhat limited technical role and not let him do team leading or whatever, don't give him meaningful pay rises and have lead him up the garden path about working from home, I just think they are behaving like complete arseholes.

OK, rant over!!