This is the result of having to undo most of a sleeve for the cardigan I’m knitting because I stupidly thought I remembered the pattern. I didn’t.
Full-scale ripping out of knitting is called frogging, because ripping out sounds like ribbet. Working backwards in a row to fix a recent mistake is called tinking, ie, knitting, backwards.
The things you learn from me.
Today I had to go to Blackburn, Lancashire, for a doctor’s appointment and I have been plagued by an earworm the whole day.
You bet I went looking for holes to photograph but I couldn’t find any, so you will have to settle for this rather strange building facade. I don’t believe the text has anything to do with the bull’s head, which is also above the doorway of the place next door, which seems to be a night club. All very odd.
Edited to add: apparently this building is Thwaites House, which may well be the original headquarters of Thwaites, a large northern brewery, although I still don’t understand the bulls. Thwaites’ logo is two horses’ heads.
England doesn’t really do the dramatic skies, at least not in the way Africa does, but this did catch my eye. The tree is a local one, just a block or so away, and although everything else is green, it is showing only the faintest of reddish buds, even now.
This is a random bush on campus, and I’m afraid I have no idea what it is. Although this looks rather like a hydrangea, this bloom is much smaller, about eight cm across, and the bush is much bigger and bushier, with fewer blooms on it than a hydrangea would have.
I love white flowers, and loose and soft flowers, like these ones. I like things that look fairly natural and unforced, unmanipulated. Of course, having no idea what this is, it could well be some weird artificial hybrid never seen in nature, but I like it any way.
This is a little pewter object that we found in a flea market in Glasgow. We don’t know what it is, although the shape seems somewhat religious to me (although the shell is not, I suppose). It’s beautifully made, and doesn’t seem to have been used, but then, pewter never really looks used.
It’s a lovely, odd, unintelligible thing.
This is Tulketh Mill, just up the road from us, and clearly the most important building in the neighbourhood. It was a cotton mill, the largest and most modern in Preston when it opened in 1905, but it didn’t last long as such. THe cotton industry went into decline after world war one, and by the 1960s the mill had shut down. It was converted into a distribution centre for Littlewoods, a clothing catalogue company, and then in 2005 was turned into a call centre for a mobile phone company, which is what it still is. They’ve been building a kind of strip mall along the Blackpool road frontage which will house a couple of restaurants and a Tesco’s I believe.
The Tesco’s is sneaky. When we first moved here there had just been a fight to prevent a Tesco’s opening up across the road from the mill, which had been won by the anti-Tesco’s campaigners, led chiefly by the Booth’s supermarket a few blocks away. Since then, the Booths has become less a supermarket than a convenience store, doubling the amount of booze it stocks and severely limiting the amount of fresh and raw food. Personally, I’m hoping for the Tesco’s to bring some competition back.
Prescription sunglasses are one of the things I really can’t do without. I hate bright light, and even in England the sun is too much for me. I can’t function very well without glasses of some kind, so prescription sunglasses it is.
These are new, I left my old ones in restaurant in Liverpool a few months back, and couldn’t get them back. They were old, though, and the script gave me a headache, so new ones it is. These are pretty funky – they’re purple on the inside of the frame, and unfortunately, have a bit of bling on the arms, but less than most frames these days. Why does everyone assume that all women want to wear rhinestones on their glasses, anyway?
We grew up reading Tove Jansson, who my mother absolutely loved. It was years and years before I ever met anyone who had ever heard of the Moomins, but recently, they seem to have undergone something of a retro-revival. This is a coaster from a funky scandinavian shop in Bath (I also bought a moose for my key chain), and one of my favourite drawings from the books.
This is a sculpture of some Roman emperor on the rebuilt walls of the old baths in Bath. It was sculpted by an Englishman in the late nineteenth century, almost certainly using a local model, because that is an English profile if ever I saw one.
The royal crescent. With seagull. The Georgians loved symmetry, and everything had to be symmetrical. I feel rather subversive taking this sweep of the crescent from one side, with the grass looking a bit lopsided, as though the seagull might slide down to the right.
