It's not an omen

Just a selection of photos I like from August. I was going to say they aren't representative of the month, but maybe they are.



( and six more )

Once upon a time Florence and Zebedee (though they were probably not called Florence and Zebedee back then) lived with some different humans. Given that both cats were confident and healthy, we can be pretty sure that the First Humans cared for them and treated them well. Then, for reasons we'll never know the First Humans moved away and left F&Z behind to fend for themselves in the garden. A kind neighbour rescued them and took them to a cat rescue, but the rescue was already full to capacity so they were passed on to Avon Cat Rescue, the lovely place from which we've been adopting cats since 1987.
We saw their pictures on line, their age (about 8 months) and sprang into action. We had to wait for them to be neutered, but once they'd recovered we could liberate them and bring them to their Forever Home.

( pic spam )

That's yesterday's photo of the day. I thought I'd post it now because in 66 minutes we'll be leaving for Heathrow and then to Delhi. I don't take my laptop on holiday and can't embed Flickr pics using my phone, which limits what I can share while I'm away and my incentive to post.

It's the first time we've travelled as a fully retired couple and the difference it makes is enormous. The extra time and headspace available for planning and logistics transforms everything, as does the knowledge that we don't have to be back for work and can just toddle off when we feel like it. The newly acquired 5-year visas for Indian are also a huge gift.

See you later, lovelies.

Last Friday I had a pneumococcal vaccination. When I got to the treatment room, the nurse told me I'd had one before. I expressed doubt, but she confirmed that she'd checked my record as the vaccination is not normally offered in the UK until one turns 65 (and then as a one-off). I am not yet 65. I had it for the first time in 2015, when I was even more not-yet-65. It turns out that people classed as vulnerable get the jab early with 5-yearly boosters, and I do indeed tick a couple of vulnerable boxes. The record shows that I was not invited for my first booster.

Afterwards, the significance of the years struck me. There's no wonder that I don't remember a thing that happened in 2015. That was the year that my father died, right in the middle of my busiest annual work period, with a deadline looming and a whole lot of work piled up and going horribly wrong (for reasons). It was also the year that my long-undiagnosed diabetes got so bad that my body went into starvation mode and my brain couldn't function properly, meaning that most of the things that happened to me left not the faintest trace of a memory.

I'm used to having a unreliable memory. I'm great at data - if you need phone numbers, postcodes, long credit card numbers, or the average lifespan of a red blood cell, I'm your girl. If you want to know what I did last week, or where we went last time we visited India then I'll be directing you to my Instagram account. I blame a lot of this on my mother who, throughout, my childhood rewrote events - repeatedly - to fit whatever narrative she wanted to live in at the time. If your trusted adult can't be trusted, accuses you of lying about things you know happened, and yells at you if you tell the wrong story, it is very obviously the safe course to stop remembering anything that can be disputed. I can vividly recall fabrics, designs, colours, textures, tastes and smells, but I have no recollection of friends from junior school. My brother remembers my friends and their names, but I thought I was solitary and largely friendless.

The memory gaps from 2015 are more profound than any others; there's truly nothing there at all. The things I do remember are hyperreal, dreamlike, technicolour, like jewels scattered across Vantablack velvet. I remember a week of wading through the chaotic paperwork my father left, a visit to the funeral director, the funeral, a trip to NorthEast India, being perpetually cold, another trip to India and scattering my father's ashes in the Ganga. But mostly, the year is gap.

My first booster vaccination should have happened in 2020. Of course. The reason that one didn't happen seems obvious. That year I remember the morning walks, I remember it being sunny all the time, I remember abrinsky walking round and round the garden as a one colleague after another vented all their despair and distress to him, I remember being too stressed to think clearly or to work a full day, I remember emoLucy cat dying, I remember learning a friend had died, I remember hating video calls, the anxiety of trying to order groceries online, the forbidden nature of hugs. But again, there's a great deal that didn't stick.

2025 is not going to be a gap year. I'm here, working really hard at being present in all things.

( things that are not exceedingly long cats )

The most exciting bit, though, was another fabric sale at the local scrapstore. I love the scrapstore and I love the fabric sales in particular. It's such a great feeling to grab enormous quantities of treasure, pay very little, and know that I'm contributing to charity and doing my bit to keep scrap out of landfill. So much Good Stuff in a single act. And this time I took a friend who hadn't been there before, someone I needed to catch up with. Double the pleasure.

Belated. I was poorly (with a cold. I'm fine now). I forgot.



( mostly small plant life )

It's ages since I last had a cold, years since I had an absolute classic, sneezes all the way, kind of cold. I unintentionally did the thing where you engage in strenuous exercise early on and the virus intensifies but is shortlived. I might do it deliberately next time, because a couple of horrible days in bed are probably better than two weeks of dragging misery.

I have a restless brain that often needs to be doing several things at once in order to feel calm and peaceful. The best combination is when I'm doing something repetitive with my hands and something absorbing with my mind - simple knitting/stitching/crochet with a good audiobook can work well.
Knitting does fail me, though, when it's either too simple and I fall asleep (my default response to being understimulated) or it's too complex and I forget to listen to the book or reach a point where following a pattern is beyond me. (I'm not good at following instructions, though I'm not sure if it's unwillingness or inability. I love cooking but my idea of following a recipe involves replacing half the ingredients and maybe skipping a few steps - more of a guideline than a rule. It's actually fun for me that I need to convert every baking recipe I use to be gluten free. Also fun is making clothes from scraps and not quite enough fabric, or by adjusting things that don't work in their original state.)
I have now, however, discovered the perfect kind of knitting to make my brain happy, short row colourwork. It's brilliant because it provides exactly the right level of stimulation and the results are so pretty. Woolly Wormhead published a book last year that is both a manual and a collection of patterns and I'm finding it stimulating and empowering.
First of all I made a pair of fingerless gloves for abrinsky, using a pattern from the book. And then I designed a cowl to match, using what I'd learned from knitting the gloves. It's the first time I've felt confident enough to design a knitting, so I'm very happy indeed with that.





And now I'm completely addicted to this thing, so I selected a motif from the book and knitted a cowl for me too. I've been wearing it almost constantly since I finished it, and am planning a coordinating hat.





I'm hoping this newfound confidence will spill over into other kinds of knitting, so I can knit the same way I cook.

I realised this morning that this May will see the 20th anniversary of my Photo of the Day project. I'm not sure how that happened, but I think it really is an established habit now. It began as a way to improve my photography, and at different times has been a way to force myself not to miss moments of beauty, an incentive to improve my ways of seeing, and a way of grounding myself and preventing overwhelm.
I have, throughout, published the daily images in some online space, because that was also part of the deal, to overcome my perfectionism and help me learn to live with my failures. In public.

Sharing images here is a slightly longer process, involves a little more friction, and as someone whose executive doesn't always function, that encourages my slide towards apps that live on my phone where my photos now also hang out. I thought I'd experiment with sharing a weekly selection, maybe not every day's image, maybe not the same ones that have appeared elsewhere. It's a thing I want to do, would like to do, but the gap between desire and action can be a pretty enormous thing to bridge. Let's see.

Anyway, ( last week was a breakfast disco and the gulls were looking for love )

All through my schooldays I thought I'd be a teacher. Some of my favourite people were teachers. My father was a teacher. Most of the adults I witnessed doing their jobs were teachers. Eventually I thought I'd be a research chemist, but one degree later I was clear that this was another misguided ambition. I'm pretty sure now, with the benefit of an awful lot of hindsight, that my ambition should have been to become a textile historian/conservator. Next time.

Yesterday I had a play date with my textile buddies. There's just three of us left now, and it was the thirteenth anniversary of our first meeting. We were all signed up for a series of monthly workshops on printing and dyeing, a one year course that lasted for three. I worked with J on the first day, and we were meant to be paired up, ignoring rules, eyeballing quantities instead of measuring, leaping into things without stopping to think. S became part of the team gradually, even though she measures and thinks ahead and resists making things up as she goes along. We get together for play dates, for excursions, for knitting & nattering or stitching & bitching, and we always plan to make it every month, though the reality is more like five or six times a year.

In 2024 we only managed a single meeting, right at the end of January when I was still struggling with recovery from covid, and all I managed was a few rows of knitting. After that, the year got worse for me and was completely traumatic for J. In twelve months two different members of her immediate family have, on three separate occasions, been so dangerously ill that their survival was in doubt. She's supported more than one of her children through relationship breakdowns and her sister through breast cancer and managing a husband with serious dementia. I think there's more, but I forget the details. She's exhausted, profoundly exhausted and, despite being a remarkably intelligent and capable person, her brain is really not working well right now. Making arrangements and explaining things to her is a struggle. I do hope she'll get some breathing space soon to look after herself and begin to heal from all this.

I wanted to make things easy yesterday, for all of us, but for J in particular. I declined offers of contributions to lunch, and found the perfect project, something we could sit and sew whilst we talked. It had to be something requiring enough attention to be interesting, but not too much attention. I chose a little 'pinch purse' as demonstrated in this video by Arounna Khounnoraj. I printed instructions, cut out templates and stiffening and wadding, sewed little fabric 'work baskets' so I could present everything in kits. I chose a wide selection of suitable fabrics from my stash, so S and J could have the pleasure of browsing, I made sure that everything they needed was there in front of them, and I did a trial run to ensure I was competent to lead the party.

Everything worked out just the way I hoped, and I think they felt all the love I'd put into planning and preparing but, oh my, the exhaustion. The effort required to be one step ahead of two people moving at completely different speeds. The disrupted thought processes as J asked me, again and again, to remind her of the next step, to repeat what I'd just said. It's been a whole day and I'm still not over it.

Teachers are superheroes and I was never going to make the grade.

Some pics of my cute sample:



( and more )

My dudes, I went to India for the second half of December and it was awesome.

And then I came home and was struck down by The Lurgy. So Lurgy. Much dying. Wow. Couldn't get out of bed for days. Couldn't read or sleep or anything. And the heating was broken (because a mouse chewed through the cable). And we both had The Fucking Lurgy simul-fucking-taneously, so it was awful² and we were struggling to help each other through.
I have reached the stage where I can shower and get dressed, provided I have a liedown in between. Abrinsky has been working from home all day and will doubtless crash quite soon.

I have read some of your posts, you lovely people, and I do not think there were more than 1,000 of them, but DW limits the friends page to 14 days, so I have probably missed things. I hope they were not important things.