Wednesday 22 June 2016

Hobbling with intent

It is quite difficult to keep off your feet. It is about a month since I suffered this minor fracture and it seems that bones heal slowly. It is not nearly as painful, but has modified whatever tendency towards friskiness remains in this ageing frame.

Never mind. I have this morning swept up the broken glass left by the garbage collectors and my being is suffused with feelings of civic virtue. And I have phoned Bruce, who from time to time comes and does the accumulated repairs in and outside the house. I finished another wrap for the knitting/crochet group's rather impressive tally of wraps (aka hand-knitted/crocheted blankets).  And the alpaca jumper which has been under construction for - could it be almost a year? approaches completion. Once that is done, I can have a go at another jumper, of which I did the first row, ooh, maybe a year ago? One must always have projects on the go, and the stash of wool in my chest of drawers presents lots of challenges.

Some gorgeous blue mohair yarn - which has been biding its time for perhaps 20 years -  I know I have had the yarn before we moved from Old to New Parliament House - is now a jumper, knitted for me by a relative of one of the knitting group, so it does indeed seem as though, overall, national productivity has risen. And all of us in the knitting /crocheting group intend to keep it rising.

And I am reading a lot. Yesterday at the library I picked up a novel by Lynn Truss, and started reading it, but I don't know - it does not seem to work. So far. Perhaps fiction is not really her forte.

Thus disappointed, I picked up Dorothy L Sayers' Gaudy Night, which I first read years and years ago, and have continued to re-read over the years. But my copy, published by New English Library, Hodder and Staughton  has an editing failure. Harriet Vane, the heroine, is sending a reply to Lord Peter Wimsey's latest marriage proposal, which commences as a single Latin sentence, 'starting off dispiritedly, 'Num...? a particle which notoriously /expects the answer No.  Harriet, rummaging the Grammar book for polite negatives, replied, still more briefly,  'Benigne '-  but  this edition, doubtless produced  by either some idiot sub-editor or by an auto-correct function has substituted 'Benign'. and indeed,  my typed Benigne has just been auto-corrected. Aargh!

I hied me off to my local booksellers. Neither had the book in stock, and the second shop told me that it was in the process of being reissued. I bet the publisher will not pick up this egregious error.

I am restless. All this sitting around is frustrating. More briskness is psychologically necessary. And I want to GO somewhere, not merely hobble slowly somewhere.

Instead I will strive to finish the alpaca jumper. Not much remains to be done, except shape the neck, and this, alas, requires careful stitch counting. Then, of course, it has to be put together, and the edging done. Seize the day! Come the day!