The full title is ‘Waiting to be rescued from the planet with two suns’; the eponymous suns being represented by two pieces of red bubblewrap. I showed admirable restraint, I think, in resisting the urge to pop the bubblewrap…er…suns. The spaceship — an impromptu piece of quilling — looks like a smile, don’t you think? Let’s hope the astronaut family manage to get away safely. [Space fans, click on the image below to see it right bigly. ]
Bloggers beware: your intended audience is not always the same as your actual audience, at least according to an article on writing styles that I read recently. Writers such as Chaucer and Shakespeare, for instance, were easily understood in their own times because they were actively writing for a contemporary audience. Readers today, however, often have difficulty with them.
I can’t even begin to imagine what Shakespeare’s audience would make of some of the stuff in the blogosphere.
As an example of the above point, here’s what happened to me this morning at breakfast. Halfway through my coffee — and while still waiting for my nutty cereal to absorb enough milk so as to be soft enough to chew without breaking too many teeth — I picked up a copy of the Faber Book of Reportage (dog-eared paperback, ed. John Carey, 1987), which fell open at page 398. There, in a brief introduction to George W. Steevens’ account of the attack on the Atbara, it notes that “Kitchener had been appointed Sirdar (Commander-in-Chief) of the army in Egypt in 1892″.
The only time Shana and I had seen the word ‘Sirdar’ before was as a brand name on balls of wool. And even though we knew Kitchener was the face on the ‘Your Country Needs You‘ World War 1 recruiting posters, we had never before heard his name associated with the title of ‘Sirdar’.
The history of Sirdar wool website has the full story:
In 1880 the original spinning company was established in Ossett by the Harrap brothers, Tom and Henry, originally using only wool fibres.
By 1934 the company was being run by Tom’s son Fred and he decided that the future of the business should be dedicated to spinning hand knitting yarns and selling them directly to independent retailers. Consequently he needed a strong brand name and chose Sirdar, meaning leader, after Lord Kitchener’s appointment as Sirdar of the Egyptian Army.
Although 1066 — and the dates of other key World War 2 battles — have always been taught in schools, I don’t remember being taught anything about Kitchener during my own schooldays in the 1970s. But presumably the reason for Sirdar wool’s name would have been easily understood in the 1930s. Sirdar wool, back then, could have had no way of knowing that a bigger war was still to come and that the importance of some of the names that meant something to Fred Harrap would fade into relative insignificance. Who knows? If Sirdar had been rebranding their company fifteen years later, maybe today they would be known as Spitfire wool.
Our copy of the Harrod horticultural catalogue arrived in this morning’s post, and I was soon lost in vivid descriptions and colour photos of such wonders as walk-in fruit cages, wooden obelisks and long-handled forks.
This catalogue is a daydreamer’s delight. It’s educational, too. If it teaches you nothing else, at least it’ll prove whether you’re an optimist or not — and it looks as if we are; after all, we don’t do much gardening at the best of times, and yet even in the middle of winter, when the slugs have all turned to ice cubes and the ground is as hard as a fishwife’s stare, we can still fantasise about what we might do outdoors this coming summer. (Most likely, it’ll be our three usual gardening jobs — mowing, weeding and grumbling.)
We might even treat ourselves to a pair of Swiss army secateurs. The tagline on one Felco ad — ”most professional’s favoured brand of tool” — caught my eye first: it’s probably not most professionals’ preferred choice of where to put an apostrophe. Having said that, a good pair of secateurs will do a much better job when it comes to pruning (or even to chopping of bacon into small pieces in readiness for the occasional omelette, for that matter) so we’ll just have to overlook that apostrophical howler for now and concentrate on choosing the best tools for this year’s gardening jobs. Unfortunately, secateurs remain fairly low on my list. The number one garden tool this year, I predict, will be a hammock! Gotta go now. If anyone wants me, I ‘ll be in the garden having a snooze.
Just in case you think we do nothing all day except twiddle about with bits of string, here’s my latest effort on the Etch A Sketch. In case you’re not familiar with the original, it’s a version of Edvard Munch’s expressionist classic, ‘The Scream‘. Go on, admit it: you’re lost for words, aren’t you?
Never having been a member of the Scouts, maybe I always felt I’d missed out on an important life experience. Whatever my motivation, once I’d bought a copy of Des Pawson’s ‘Pocket guide to knots and splices‘ a few years ago, I set about making up for lost time by tying knots in anything I could find that was even remotely knottable. As a result of my over-enthusiasm, I have several pairs of old shoes whose laces I still can’t untie. I’m just waiting for Des to bring out a pocket guide to getting out of a tangle, but he seems in no hurry to write one.
This week, though, I did finally manage to tie one of Des Pawson’s more fascinating knots: a four strand crown sennit. The book shows it tied with four different coloured cords, but I managed it using just two kinds of parcel string. For anyone who doesn’t have the book yet, here’s how the knot should look from above. I’ve also shown (at the end of the post) what you get if you do a lot of crown knots. If you’ve ever fancied making your own skipping rope, now’s your chance.
Des Pawson’s little handbook contains several knots that are normally used by rock climbers. I’ve practised some of these, too. If anyone’s feeling brave and would like to try abseiling off the balcony outside Frumplington Towers, I’d be only too happy to try out some of my knots on their climbing ropes. Leave us a comment to arrange a suitable time and date. Oh, and remember to take out lots of life insurance; I do still sometimes put left over right when it ought to be right over left. Nobody’s perfect, though, are they?
It’s nearly the end of the year; just a few loose ends to tie up re. this year’s Christmas — better late than never, eh?
Christmas lunch went well; Shana excelled herself and managed, despite a few misgivings, to cook and — just as important — to time everything to perfection. Nothing would have been worse, after all, than having our turkey on Christmas day and our sprouts three days later.
I excelled myself, as usual, in the potato and carrot preparation department. We kept the peelings. I intend to make an art installation out of them. Anything left over will be made into soup.
After lunch, in a fine example of gender role reversal, Shana dozed while I watched Rodgers and Hammerstein’s cowboy opera, Oklahoma! Shana woke up halfway through ‘Poor Jud is Dead’, declared the whole thing awful and flipped over to Top of the Pops. That was equally awful so we flicked back to Oklahoma! well in time to see Jud set fire to the haystacks before slipping over and getting killed by his own dagger, the silly old fool.
The BBC’s Doctor Who Christmas special was only half correctly described. Yes, it was on at Christmas: but no, it was certainly nothing special. In fact, it was a big disappointment.
Thank heavens for Wallace and Gromit’s A Matter of Loaf and Death. I have to say, however, that it has put me off wholemeal Nimble for a while. Next year will have to be a low calorie year, though, at least till lunchtime. Even though we cut down drastically on the amount of chocolates, nuts and other indulgences this year, we still seem to have eaten enough to feed a small Viking army.
And if I never see another mince pie till next Christmas, it won’t be too soon!*
[* Did I really say that? Blimey, I really must have had too much.]
We might not be the greatest gardeners in the world, but we still care about Nature. Imagine my dismay, then, when I looked out this morning on our 1⁄640th of an acre and saw what last night’s cold snap had done to it.
‘Hot diggity!’ I exclaimed. ‘The frost has got our weeds!’
Shana did her best to console me, though. ‘There, there,’ she said. ‘You can always plant some more next year.’
[The Frumplingtons Garden Appeal (it’s a bit like one of those Blue Peter appeals but without the milk bottle tops) starts now. Send all the cuttings you can afford. Please give generously.]
As part of our campaign to revive some of Britain’s long-forgotten cottage industries, we recently gathered together all our macramé books and got busy with a bit of knotting. Joan Fisher’s ‘The art of macramé’ (Hamlyn, 1972) could be considered to be the bible of macramé. The instructions and diagrams are all well drawn and easy to understand.
The rest of the world, however, has moved on a bit since 1972, and some of the fashions might now be described as either quaint or ridiculous, depending on whether or not you’re being charitable toward the author. Pictured below is one of the outfits that is most definitely not quaint. Even the caption describes this veil as an ‘unusual’ use of macramé — well that’s a euphemism if ever I’ve heard one! It could still work today though. All you have to do is shorten those threads a bit, put corks on the ends and stick a cowboy hat on top and you’ve got the national costume of Australia. We have a big ball of string standing by and are taking orders now. Alternatively, if you’re really intent on looking like a wally, just buy yourself a pair of flares and grow some Mungo Jerry-style sideburns.
And that goes for any men reading this, too!
Our living room faces north, our library faces south and our artificial ficus tree (ahem…every home should have one) is halfway between the two. If we’re doing anything in the library, e.g., solving jigsaw puzzles or catching spiders, we have to draw the curtains around mid-morning to avoid being blinded by the sun. On the upside, though, we do get to see some rather attractive shadows on the wall. (Check our Flickr gallery to appreciate the shadows in full glorious technicolor bigness.*)
* I know what I mean.
We’ve had our heads in the clouds for most of the past week; to be more specific, the clouds over Brooklyn. It’s all Carol Dyer’s fault. Her picture, ‘Market days on Fulton Street‘, which some bright spark decided to turn into a 1500-piece whopper of a jigsaw puzzle, just happens to have a few dozen square feet of sky at the top (well, where else would it be?) and we’re not keen on big acreages of sky. Shana, however, persisted and got the thing finished, ignoring all my suggestions about doing only part of the sky and photoshopping the rest. (And I thought I was a technophobe!)
It’s a wonder that Shana got anywhere near finishing the puzzle at all, though, because sometime last Wednesday morning, while completing the back end of the fruit ‘n’ veg seller’s horse, Shana nearly died of fright.
I thought it was all my fault at first. All I’d done was come from the living room into the library to show Shana a picture of a flower I’d done on the Etch A Sketch. The way she shrieked (and especially the way she leaped from a seated position to about two feet in the air without the aid of rocket propulsion) you’d have thought I’d recreated Constable’s Haywain or something. I never realised I could have such an effect.
As I soon discovered, though, I hadn’t caused anything. The real reason for Shana’s sudden turn of energy was the spider who, at that very moment, was pulling himself up over the edge of the jigsaw box; the box from which, only seconds before, Shana had been choosing suitable pieces for her part of the puzzle.
Being the token man of the house, I, naturally enough, immediately took charge of the situation. From my vantage point, perched on tippy-toe high on another chair safe out of harm’s — and arachnids’ — way, I talked Shana through the fetching of a coffee jar (always kept on the kitchen windowsill in case of such emergencies), the placing of the jar over Spidey, and the final desperate slinging of both spider and jar out of the front door in the manner of an Australian fast bowler, and to heck with it if anyone chanced to be standing within range of either.
I came down off my chair by Friday. Well, I had to. Blog post to write about it, hadn’t I?
