I've finished the race. (The race mentioned near the end of THIS post, in case you're wondering what on earth I'm blithering about.) Inspired by your generous donations to pancreatic cancer research, I did it. I ran 1084 miles of a wiggly route from Land's End to John O'Groats. (For non-UK folk, that's the bottom left hand toe of England up to the top right nobble of mainland Scotland.) Actually I ran the distance along the tracks/paths/roads of south Oxfordshire, but the people - or Continue Reading
Hiatus
A confession: I've been neglecting my knitting. This is problematic when you're a knitting blogger. The yarny hiatus is temporary, and it's partly because we've reached peak season in the veg-growing calendar. My coping strategies for covid, cancer, Brexit, and perimenopause are all pretty similar: grow as much fruit and veg as possible, drink wine, go running a lot, and laugh in the face of adversity. Oh, and - usually - knit or crochet too, just not these past couple of weeks. It's the Continue Reading
Ramblings
Oh yikes, has it been that long since I posted? Apologies. Let's pretend that my absence was due to Very Worthy And Important Stuff, rather than the truth, which is that I was struggling with post-cancer-treatment side-effects that made my right arm medium-useless for a while. Fortunately, I was still able to walk and run in pretty places around here. This is Thrupp Lake on a crisp November morning:- Since I wasn't able to knit very much, I didn't feel as though I had a great deal to share Continue Reading
Home
It's good to be home. The NHS has done its wonderful best, and the first surgery went OK, I think, although I can't comment because I wasn't really there. A chunky cancerous lump was ripped from its moorings and taken away to be frowned at, or fed to the crocodiles, or exorcised, or whatever it is that they do with these things. (Look, I'm a clinical psychologist - I don't deal with the physical stuff so I don't know, OK?) I'm home and I have yarn, and I've spent the last few days Continue Reading
Would You Like A Hefty Discount On Some Hand-Dyed Yarn?
Sitting down to write this post with knitting and wine beside me is the most normal thing that I've done for a while. I hate the word 'normal', along with the word 'should' - as my patients rapidly discover when I ban both abominations from their vocabularies. But whatever on earth normal is, these past few weeks have not been it. (This whole year hasn't been normal, of course, but you've doubtless noticed that. And if you haven't, then I really don't want to be the one to burst your Continue Reading
2020 Vision
Well, that was a very 2020-ish sort of week. Oh, for those heady days of innocence, way back when nobody would have understood what the above sentence meant. Right now, you probably wouldn't even be surprised if I told you that the neighbourhood had been invaded by hordes of opera-singing purple mega-ants, or that a sinkhole had opened up under Twisted Towers and had swallowed all of my yarn. Fortunately neither of these things has happened... although given that it's 2020 I should probably Continue Reading