Outdoors Knows It’s Pretty

You’ve still got time (just!) to enter the Wool And The Gang yarn giveaway! Just head over here…

Meanwhile, I’ve been all over the place – knitting a bit of this, crocheting a bit of that, drifting from room to room, bumping into members of the household whom I’d forgotten existed… “Great uncle Mortimer! Heavens, I haven’t seen you since the Great Tidying Up of ’96! How the very devil are you, ol’ bean? What’s that you say? Huh? Oh. What, that cupboard there? The one with the hefty lock on the door? Oh gosh, I’m sorry. Very sorry. I might have got a tad over-enthusiastic towards the end of the Great Tidying Up… I must say though, you’re looking remarkably chipper for a chap who’s been locked in a cupboard for twenty years, existing on a diet of gnawed wood and roof-leakage. Kudos to you. And what’s that you say? Oh, this thing? It’s called a mobile phone: they’re quite common now. Come, allow me to introduce you to the modern world. First, we’d better set you up with a Facebook account…”

I blame the weather.

Seriously, it’s been nuts. One minute it’s simultaneously snowing and hailing – snailing, if you will – and the next minute, I’m applying suncream to the twinnage using a trowel. Nuts, I tell you.

Still, the blossom’s been good this year.

And we’ve just reached that point when the baby lambs venture away from their mothers’ sides and all try to hang out in the cool gang. If you’re a lamb, being cool involves gently head-butting your mates and occasionally scampering up a small hillock. Oh that social hierarchies could have been that simple and scalable when I was a teenager.

There really is lots and lots of blossom. There’s summat wonderful about the loveliness and hope of all this fresh unsullied new life, don’t you think? (Let’s just forget about the existence of hay fever for a wee minute.) I know you’re supposed to feel such optimistic sentiments when you see a newborn baby, but I reckon that blossom has the edge when it comes to not screaming or puking in your hair at 3am.

In Japan, according to my friend who lived there for a while, they have a whole festival day devoted to the first appearance of the cherry blossom. It’s a big deal, apparently. Frankly, I’m with the Japanese on this one, but I’m lacking the courage to phone up my boss and say, “I’m not coming in to work today, because blossom.”

Anyway. I’ve written before about the cherry-growing heritage of this village in which we live. There aren’t many cherry orchards left here now, but in the one that’s near my house, there are sheep/lambs wandering amongst the trees. Not only does this promise the magical combination of yarn and luscious cherries as future products, but also it’s a traditional approach: the sheep keep the grass/weeds down, and their poo helps fertilize the cherry trees. Organic production at its best.

And its cutest:-

You can’t move for wildlife around here at the moment. And even the light feels optimistic and fresh:-

Indoors, too, there are flowers. My good friend gave me these beauties when she came to discuss the knitting/crochet book that we’re writing together. Which reminds me, I really should get on with some work on that…

(And I had so many knitting/crochet progress photos to show you! Ah well, next time.)