Hestia and knitting

The knitting of socks has progressed to the level that I can actually help another friend when she is stuck in her sock pattern. This is something of a miracle, given my own querulous and profanity-filled beginnings when socks were knitted inside out, turned to felt by the dog, needles fell out resulting in horrific attempts at picking up stitches, frogging (see? I've even got the terminology) back to the first sad little slip knot stitch.  Yet I have managed to knit half a dozen pairs of socks, even one pair for Sonshine and his massive man-feet.

Knitting and knitting patterns have become my new drug of choice.

I look at a sweater in a jewel-bright colourway and think YES, this is for ME! And have come to realise the insidious power of photography in marketing. It's not just the sweater, is it? You ache to BE the person with THAT life-style in the photo.

The current pattern of choice involves a glorious purple and green mix that immediately reminds me of a Next sweater that EVERYONE was wearing in Glasgow in the 90s. I think there must have been a fire sale of them in the Sauchiehall Street store. Oh how I loved that sweater!  Look, I even have a photo of me wearing it!

It is sobering to thing that I am now older than my mum was in that photo. Jesus. Pass the red wine.

Anyway, I look at the photos in the pattern and realise that the model wears the most stunning colours for her hair colour and that even the few props have been carefully curated to help sell the dream of 'this can be YOU if you JUST BUY THE PATTERN AND KNIT THE SWEATER'.

But as we all know, there is a chasm of time (sometimes an enterknitty lol!) between buying the pattern, buying the yarn and knitting the sweater. And rarely does the final, finished item look as polished as the one on the pattern because, well, you are not a professional knitter,  creating for a pattern photo shoot, are you? 

Oh that nonchalant pose against the counter-top in a gorgeous cardigan knitted in the colours of an expensive box of chocolates - milk, dark, creamy - the model's creamy skin, the nut brown hair gleaming like a race-horse's flanks, the artless mug of coffee (in contrasting colour mug) clutched in tastefully be-ringed fingers. I suddenly realised, I don't really want that SWEATER, I want that LIFE. 

I am, I confess, an advertising executive's DREAM - a permanently unsettled woman with disposable income who thinks that if she keeps trying something new she will eventually alight on the thing that becomes the switch to a happier life.

Perhaps the realisation that a new jumper will not turn me into a new person will be the key, the switch to a happier life? 

In the meantime, there's a purple and green sweater to be knitted. 

Hestia at 61 - warning: contains Gaelic

Back in 2012 - those halcyon days where nobody dreamed that a cough in the supermarket could shut down your internal organs and have you hospitalised - I decided to challenge my dislike of Scotland's native Gaelic language and try learning it via resources in my local library.

As with most things I start, it fell by the wayside almost straight away because I wasn't immediately brilliant at it. TBF it didn't get off the starting blocks because Gaelic is a very difficult language to master from books - sounds and letters don't correspond the way they do in other languages.

Fast forward to 2019 and the year when a cough COULD shut down your internal organs and have you hospitalised and I took up Gaelic on the Duolingo app.

Reader, I stuck with it for over 1,000 days - did the introductory course twice and completely fell in love with the weird little fucker. One thousand days - that Duo streak lasted longer than my marriage. 

I have since had a 15 week zoom class with other furrow-browed natives as we plough through the slenderising, the lenition, the irregular verbs and downright contrariness of Scottish Gaelic - and made new friends into the bargain.

From there we undertook a mammoth 30 week session with our indefatigable tutor Pàdruig Moireach. I loved it, but, by Jimminy - it's a hard language.

Even when that set of lessons rolled to a close, a little bunch of us decided to soldier on and we bought a few more lessons from Pàdruig. But what were we aiming at? Why were we putting ourselves through the hell on earth that is the Genitive case, the 16 words for 'the' and coping with no words for yes/no?

Reader, we decided to sign up for our Nat 5 in Scottish Gaelic via E-sgoil (online tutoring). Last year it was about £70 to take your Nat 5, this year? Nearly £400.  The £70 figure was, of course, subsidised and the £400 is what it costs to sit a Nat 5 (a Nat 5 is what we in Scotland used to call an O-grade). Just think of all the O-grades we sat back in the mists of time, with no thought that they had to be paid for, somewhere.

We started last week - just a getting to know you session really - because the onboarding process was not without incident, but we all seem to be online now. There are over 30 of us taking our Nat 5, which can only be good for the future of the language.

Why am I putting myself through the hell of another exam? 

It's something to aim at. Look at me, fearlessly ending a sentence with a preposition at my age! Gaining (one hopes!) a Nat 5 will show a standard achieved. Another tick on the sheet of life achievements.

I turned 61 last month and it was a lot harder to bear than turning 60. When you turn 60 your life is full of glittery cards and balloons and lunches out and people congratulating you and promising that life really can get going now.

At 61 there is a lot less of that. The caravan has moved on and there is no denying that we are over the crest of the hill now. Hell, there was even a report last week saying that there is a huge jump in the aging process at 60 (that's bollocks btw, I've watched videos that better interpret the statistics!). It would be SO EASY to take my foot off the gas pedal and just potter into my dotage - a little bit of gardening here, a little bit of watercolour there.

But I don't want that. I want to keep my brain active and my body moving. So what if I've become utterly invisible? I'm going to find a way to play that to my advantage.

I bought myself a new pair of running shoes for my joggy walking.
I got most of my hair cut off.
I am studying for a Nat 5.
I am looking after my physical and mental health much better these days.

Re-invention isn't the preserve of the young. And you don't need to wait until Hogmanay to make changes in your life. A Sunday night is as good a time as any.

If you want to change, you just start from where you are. I am minded of a quote from Twyla Tharp, the genius choreographer who writes so brilliantly about creativity:

If you are at a dead end, take a deep breath, stamp your foot, and shout 'Begin!' You never know where it will take you."

What are YOU going to do to get out of your dead end?! 

Hestia is baking scones. And binning them.

I am very partial to a fruit scone, with clotted cream and strawberry jam. Very partial indeed *pats tummy* but also rather keen to cut down on processed foods. I would, I decided in a fit of culinary madness, bake my own scones.

How hard could it be? 

Reader, the first couple of times they were gorgeous! Light as a feather and I felt my full Hestia-potentiality might AT LAST be realised. If this is what I could do with plain flour with added baking powder, how marvellous might my scones be if I actually used SELF-RAISING FLOUR?! At this point you may laugh hollowly at my naive, beginner's optimism.

Thus I purchased a small bag of self-raising flour and set to work. 

I baked a batch on Friday (Tartarus was away for the weekend with his boyfriend) and I thought I'd have a little bout of domestic goddessness.  Not only did they refuse to rise, they remained resolutely doughy inside.

I would also like to tell you that I put the failed scones straight in the bin, but they actually went straight into my tummy. Cue stomach-ache, but not enough to make me put the rest of the scones into the bin. I am a waste-not-want-not kind of a gal.

Anyhoo, yesterday (Sunday) I finally gave up and put the final scones into the bin.

Today, Tartarus is BACK (from the NI road racing) with a vengeance and doing all the housework that his slut of a partner failed to do (correctly. Or just failed to do. Which is more likely). I would, I thought again, make him happy with me by making scones. This would prove that I was good for something.

Wrong.

The scones again failed to rise and I just took their pale, flat, flabby bodies from the oven, let them cool down and tipped them straight into the swing bin. He said nothing, but I felt as if my failure with the scones was just confirming to him that I was indeed generally fucking useless.

Actually, I'm being pretty unfair on him. He DOESN'T think I'm useless. I can practically promise you that as soon as I am out of his eyeline he doesn't have a single thought about me at all.

Which I hope one day to play to my advantage in some as-yet-unforseen way.

I digress! Back to the scones. I don't know what I did wrong. My hands are cold. I barely touched the mix to draw it all together. I remembered all the ingredients .... I wonder ..... My wondering took me back to the kitchen (now cleaned up by the Mrs Mop that is Tartarus after any kind of break: see any kind of post that I made after any of his trips abroad for work) and lo! I hauled out the flour. And. Yes. You guessed it. I have been using the PLAIN flour and not the self-raising flour.

I'll have another go this afternoon with the right flour, but am not looking forward to telling Tartarus that I know where my mistake was made. If anything will underscore what a useless bit of humanity I am, it is admitting that I have used the wrong flour - not once, but twice.

Promise to post pix of some DECENT scones. Assuming that I make some!

Hestia and Spring

I am hesitant to say this, just in case Mama Nature decides to throw storms or snow all over the west coast in a fit of pique, but today feels a bit like Spring.

It's just coming up to the Easter weekend and yeah, it feels quite nice outside really.

Feeling Nice Outside means that I have to don my gardening jacket and get out there and do something in the garden. Which isn't really fun because the soil is still bloody cold to work with.

Anyhoo - I had to get four plants into the front garden before they reported me to Monty Don for cruelty (been waiting - in the kitchen - to be planted for a fortnight) and so today was the day for getting them in.

In other news, here are some photos of a lovely pot that I have at the front door.

Crammed with goodies from Farmer Gracy (can recommend - quality bulbs for sure!) We have Blue Eyes hyacinths, tiny turkestanica tulips and the foliage for the Rasta Parrot tulips and the Pheasant Eye narcissus are all up and looking lovely.

Almost feeling like the garden could look nice this year.

Almost. 

Knitting Effin' Socks

Many, MANY years ago, my late auntie Chrissie taught me to knit. It was quite an ordeal for her because as a left-handed knitter, I SEEMED to do the right things, but my stitches were not quite kosher. She also ended up smoking about 60 cigarettes a day. But I don't think that teaching me to knit was the reason. Not the whole reason at any rate.

My late auntie Betty taught me to crochet and we used to sit up until late on a Friday night, our hooks flashing as we watched Don't Watch Alone. Which should really have been renamed Don't Watch With Your 12 Year Old Niece. It was me that ended up with the twitch after that.

Fast forward many decades are another dear now-departed friend, Fifi, decided to teach me how to knit socks. Reader, after she died, I had that half sock on my needles for over TEN years. I couldn't bring myself to go on. I couldn't bring myself to rip it out.

During lockdown I forced myself to get the sock back out and back knitting it. I had already done the tricky bit - the turning of the heel. I ploughed on for a few more rows before Nero decided that he loved the feel of real wool in his mouth and half my sock became an unravelled ball, the other half became salivary felt.

More recently, I became determined ONCE AGAIN to actually complete one or two of my craft projects and the sock needles glinted at me accusingly.

'I can't knit socks,' I moaned to the lovely Karen Wiederhold. Karen took up knitting socks during lockdown. She can churn out a pair of hand-knitted merino gents socks quicker than I can cast on 68 stitches. She has also designed patterns for all sorts of things for magazines.

'Try again,' she urged.

'I can't. I knit left-handed and it always ends up a dog's breakfast.'

Then, in a moment of supreme self-sacrifice she uttered the words that she has probably regretted most days subsequently 'I'll help you. There aren't many things that I haven't had to deal with when I was setting patterns.'

Now, reader, at this point you probably think that I got the (now ancient) denim blue sock yarn out and got started. Not a bit of it. Neither did I use any of the mysterious yarn stash that I have accumulated in a box beneath the spare room's bed. No. I did, of course buy NEW YARN.

It was lovely yarn in from one of the OPAL 4-ply ranges at the Wool Warehouse, but sadly, I don't seem to have kept the yarn band and nor can I find the receipt.

Anyway, we began. Oh reader, I wish I could tell you that it was all plain sailing this time around. Karen pulled on her Big Girl pants and led me through the long-tail cast on. Tick. No problems. Then 20 rows of ribbing (2 plain, two purl) Tick. No problem.  It was around this point that I realised that something funky was happening: I was knitting my sock from the inside out. 

There then followed several frantic and increasingly abstract concept video calls with Karen who was pretty baffled.  But she kept on gently explaining to me where I was going wrong. But it was like trying to explain Quantum Physics to a budgie. 

Several decades ago, I once pulled into a garage forecourt to fill my wee mini up with fuel. But then I realised that my fuel cap was on the other side to the pump, so I drove round the fuel pump and could NOT understand why my fuel pump was STILL on the wrong side. After a few minutes of sitting feeling baffled, the penny dropped and I tried reversing back into the pump. I was so spectacularly bad that I ended up just driving away in SHAME.

This was exactly where I was with my knitting.

No matter how many videos I watched and how many times I turned it all upside down or knitted back across a row, the bit of sock that I knitted was standing UP like a chimney, not hanging down like a ... sock.

There were tears. But I would NOT be beaten by a SOCK.  Karen persisted. She may have developed an alcohol dependency, IDK. I wouldn't be surprised ... it took a long while to sink in.

And so the months dragged on - Prime Ministers came and went, the economy plunged deeper than a Victoria's Secret bra ... but I made progress.  Sure, there were so many errors in Sock 1 that I thought I would never wear them, but, dear reader, I did get them finished!

TADAAAAH!!!!! My first ever pair of socks!

Kitchener toe! Woah - what has happened to my font?!

TADAAAAH - second pair of socks (with the original ancient wool!)

TADAAAAAAH - current pair of socks with yarn gifted to me by the patient and lovely Karen. You should check out her stuff! Pardon the pun, but I'm HOOKED!

THANK YOU KAREN!!!!