Snow! (part 2)

Dusty Springfield lion (left by the house's previous owner, I hasten to add):


The icicles are still growing...

Snow!

Knitted decorations!

Not content with making Captain Jack a knitted stocking (and finding some chocolate mice to go in it), I've also knitted a star. This might not sound much, but it's very exciting - it means I have finally learned how to increase and decrease stitches properly!


Anyway, I'm very glad it's finished, as the small girl is desperate to put her Christmas tree up on December 1. We've already made little paper birds to hang from the branches - and if the weather stays cold and snowy this weekend, I suspect there might be some craft/glitter work going on (as well as some sledging).

A-ha!

No, nothing to do with Alan Partridge. Think 80s synth-pop instead...

After many, many years of waiting (so that'll be *mumble* years since I was 10), I finally got to see A-ha in concert on Tuesday, at the Newcastle Arena, before they retire for good. Here's the Arena beforehand (can't you just smell the anticipation of hordes of middle-aged folk?)


I don't think there was anyone under the age of 30 in the audience, but there were a surprising number of blokes (several of whom knew all the words, and were dancing and waving their arms about). Lots of leather jackets, but not many leather wrist bands (a la Morten circa 1987).

And here's the band onstage, complete with a rather snazzy video wall, which they made good use of:


I think it was probably one of the best gigs I've been to - for a start, I knew all the words to every song, and there was the added bonus of the soundtrack to my teenage years being played in front of me. I'd not heard some of the songs for years (I have the albums on cassette, which isn't wildly practical these days) - and had forgotten how magic things like Manhattan Skyline were.

Knit one, purloin several

I'm definitely at the simple end of the knitting spectrum. Over the last couple of years I've managed to make two bags, a ballet wrap (which took *ages* due to the increasing/decreasing stitches nonsense), a hat and a baby blanket. I can cast on, cast off, knit and purl - and that's about it. Anything more complicated than knitting two stitches together has me scratching my head and reaching for the manual.

So I was really pleased to be sent one of the latest books by Quadrille: Simple Knitting, by Erika Knight. Finally, I thought, I might have something to help me decipher those evil knitting patterns, and give me some nice ideas for projects that are not blanket-shaped. (My last project was a cot blanket for my baby niece, who arrived three weeks early...cue some late night knitting sessions).

The book is beautifully photographed, and has some excellent (large and clear) line drawings which illustrate the techniques required. My favourite bit is definitely the stitch library, which shows you in detail what the different stitches look like when worked up into a test square. As I never really know what moss stitch or whatever should look like when I'm making it, that's going to be very useful. I also love the glossary of knitting pattern terms and abbreviations - there's no way I'll ever remember what k2tog tbl means when I come across it. I thoroughly recommend the first half of the book - it's ideal for people like me who know a little bit, but really could do with some help.

Where the book falls down for me, though, is in the projects section. There's just not much there I'd like to make - frankly, life's too short to knit a dishcloth, even if it is in moss stitch. My other gripe is that quite a lot of the projects tend towards the expensive, even if you do ignore the yarn suggestions - one of the cushion covers, for example, uses 6 balls of wool. Even if you do find them in the charity shop at £3 a time or on ebay, it's still not particularly cheap. I dread to think how much 28 balls of Rowan Classic Baby Alpaca for the stripe throw would cost.

However, I do like the rag bag (made with strips of fabric) - it's at least (a) cheap and (b) not in ecru or beige, the dominant colours of the book. And it's one of the simpler patterns - there's 10 that are relatively easy or for beginners - the rest rapidly get more complicated, involving socks, cabling and fair isle (but not all at once!). I might get that far by 2020...

The verdict? Well, I like it, but with reservations. I suspect there are better books out there to inspire people who have never knitted before - but for those like me who have a vague idea what they're doing but need a bit of help along the way (and who love ecru cushion covers), this would be quite a good place to start.

Scary

I've been trying to do lots of new, exciting (and/or terrifying) things over the last couple of months. I figured now that M was at school, I'd have a bit more space to give some new things a go. So far that's included:

• playing netball again for the first time since I was 15 (sadly, it now takes rather longer to recover from a training session than it did then)
• buying a mountain bike, and zooming along some very level forest paths
• going to see a couple of radio shows recorded for the Radio 3 Free Thinking festival
• going to a speedmatching event run by the lovely people at the Media Trust, and meeting some amazing local charities
  

Coming up over the next month:

• I'm going to the Newcastle Arena to see A-ha play their farewell tour (they'd better be good - I've been dying to see them live since I was 10)
• on Friday, I'll be giving a seminar to a group of academics about editing and proofreading journal articles
• I'm heading to a workshop to learn how to make knitted Christmas decorations
  

Phew. I'll be either thoroughly exhilarated, or completely terrified by Christmas...

Games, games and more games

The nice people at Random House sent me another book to review this week. It's not a kid's story book this time - but a compendium of games, aimed at all the family.

365 Everyday Games and Pastimes is written by two brothers, Martin and Simon Toseland. It really does contain 365 games - everything from seasonal specials for Christmas or Halloween to games for long journeys or children's party favourites. The games had to be practical, easy to learn and need a minimum of equipment to be included - so the most complicated thing you require seems to be a cricket bat.

The instructions for each game are pretty clear, though for some of the more complicated ones it would have been useful to have more diagrams. There's some line-drawn illustrations scattered throughout the book, but more would certainly help, and might lift the design, which is on the dull side. In fact, that would be one of my major criticisms of the book - that the retro theme on the cover isn't really followed through in the design and layout of the inside - which is surprising, given the recent success of retro books like The Dangerous Book for Boys.

There's a reasonable index, and the book is well-written - but not exactly compelling reading. A little bit of humour would probably have gone a long way, and maybe enticed people to read on further than they would otherwise have done when searching for a particular game or category. It's very definitely a book for adults too, which is a shame - I think a lot of 10-year-olds would be put off by the dryness of the text.

But, having said all that, it does have an excellent collection of games. We'll certainly use some of the card ones (we can never remember the rules to anything), and give some of the car ones a go.

Spookeh!

Actually, not quite as spooky as this (taken at the Science Museum in London). The lightbox tables in the cafe are really weird.

Mildred Hubble, eat your heart out

It was spooky dressing up day at school today if you were in the reception class. The playground was hilarious - small witches, pumpkins, skeletons and vampires everywhere you turned. But what I found a bit sad was the fact that all the costumes were obviously bought, and really elaborate. I don't remember this as a kid at all - when we had to do Halloween costumes for school or Brownies they were all homemade - you were a ghost in a sheet, or a witch with a black cape and a paper hat. I know people don't have as much time these days, but it's a bit sad that the ingenuity has been lost.

And anyway, we didn't have the requisite £10 spare to spend in Sainsbury's or in Tesco. So M went as Mildred Hubble (from the fantastic Worst Witch book), in decidedly homemade attire. To follow our example, you'll need:

• some school shoes
• stripy tights (these are M's school tights)
• a grownup long-sleeved black top (this one used to be Orb's, before it shrank in the wash. We later customised it with some gold star stickers)
• a red sash (this one is a piece of ribbon I was bought for the Jubilee in 1977 - it's red with white and blue stripes! It's amazing what you can hoard for 33 years...)
• a witch's hat (I caved on this one, and bought it for £1.99 in Sainsbury's - I figured a paper one probably wouldn't survive a day at school)

Total cost: £1.99. Total time to make: about 10 minutes, by the time we'd found all the bits and pieces in various wardrobes and boxes. Bargain.

Cat in a lunchbox

This is what greeted me at 5am yesterday morning, as I blearily lurched around the kitchen before catching the early train to London. Little blighter...what you can't see is that she's actually sat on M's lunch, as well!

Cycling

A busy week

On Tuesday, I made some rash and wild predictions about how I would get to the allotment this week. Sadly, that just hasn't happened yet. But all is not lost. While procrastinating, I've found these eclectic yet edifying links:

• How to make a chunky snood (my next knitting project, I think, once the baby blanket is finished - only another six rows to go!).
• The Ride journal - beautifully illustrated articles about cycling. Not sure about the content, but the visuals are amazing.
• How to make a cake in a cup (this could come in very handy).
• A gallery of spoilt hens (we're deliberating over whether to have hens on the allotment - and this might have persuaded us).
• Teacake bags!
  

Gardening ahoy!

It's a funny old thing being a freelancer. Sometimes you're stuffed with work - so much so that you end up working all hours and juggling six projects. Other times you're much quieter - and then the guilt kicks in that you should be doing more, along with panic that nobody will employ you ever again. There doesn't seem to be a happy medium.

I'm currently in a slightly quieter period. For once, it's nice - finally I have a clean(ish) house, I don't have to work every evening, and I get to spend some time with M when she comes home from school.

Look - I even got out into the garden in the sunshine, and cleared back the undergrowth!

Later this week I may even get to visit my sadly neglected allotment and cut back the chard mountain, in between the school run, cleaning the house, the laundry and ballet lessons. Actually, I might go back to work for a rest...

On yer bike

This week has been all about the bicycles.

First, M learned to ride her new Islabike without stabilisers - and proudly tootled off into Dalby Forest on her first foray off-road. We've been really impressed by the Islabike - it's incredibly light and easy to pedal, and the child-sized grips and brakes are excellent. We were also really impressed by the grin on the small child as she finally 'got' it, and zoomed off through the puddles...

Next, Orb and I decided to find a bike each too - on the grounds that M's new-found enthusiasm for two wheels should be encouraged, and that it would help us all get out and about in the fresh air at weekends.

However, it's quite a while since we've done this cycling lark. I last had wheels at university - an ancient road bike that I painted bright green, which gradually had all its useful bits like panniers and bike lights nicked. Bike theft was rampant in Cambridge - you never knew if the thing would still be there when you came back from the library or teetered out from the pub. Everyone used to turn up to lectures carrying enormous bags - not of books, but bike saddles, clip off lights and baskets.

Orb, meanwhile, sold his bike as a teenager to buy his acoustic bass...so hasn't cycled for years either. In a burst of poetic justice, he's put his Kurzweil piano on eBay to top up the bicycle fund (hopefully his bike will weigh a darn sight less than Wilma).

Anyway, after a lot of research, we picked out the ones we liked. I ended up with a second-hand mountain bike (a Trek 3700 since you ask) from eBay, which has 21 gears. Given my last bike had three, this might be overkill, although I'm quite looking forward to the prospect of hurtling down and up a few hills. I suspect I'll be shouting "wheeeeee" as I head downwards, which may not be quite the done thing...

We shoehorned my bike into the back of our car to bring home (never try this in an Audi A2, folks). Orb's hybrid, however, arrived in the post today in possibly the largest cardboard box I've seen for some time, with a rather harassed courier man staggering under the weight. Once he's assembled it, it will be excellent, but for the moment it's in the corner of the dining room in about 300 pieces. I can recognise the pedals and wheels, but that's about the limit of my bike mechanic skills.

Now all we need to find is a couple of helmets, and a means of transporting the bikes. Central Gateshead really isn't conducive to cycling with a small child, so we're thinking forests, parks...in fact, countryside of any description. Whether we can actually remember how to ride the damn things, remains to be seen...

Days out, no 3, 456

Yesterday's outing was a birthday special treat for one of M's friends, held at Walby Farm Park in Cumbria. It's not somewhere we'd ever come across, as it's a fair drive (almost an hour and a half) from Gateshead, tucked away near Carlisle, the M6 and the fells.

The farm's your standard kid-friendly visitor attraction, like many others across the country. There's farm animals, an adventure playground, a soft-play and slides inside, and even a maize maze. But I liked the attention to detail - there's lots of signs explaining the farm animals, and work around the farm - and the very non-moneygrabbing feel. Too often you can wind up paying an entrance fee, and then forking out lots more once you walk through the door for trips on this and goes on that. Here, the entrance fee was pretty reasonable (£5.95 for adults, slightly less for kids), the food/drinks/ice creams weren't extortionate, and the only extras were a jeep barrel ride across a field.

Aside from the rather fantastic indoor slides (which are suitable for larger kids and adults too, hurrah!), M loved the go-karts, and almost ran off with one of the very cute guinea pigs. Sadly, Rustle the cat would have made short work of him, so we had to leave him there. We also got pretty lost in the maize maze, and totally failed to complete the challenge of finding the Roman 'tents' hidden within. I blame the map.

All in all, it was a good day out (and it really is a full day - including a picnic, we stayed for 6 hours). Might have to go back to play with the guinea pigs...

Extraordinary measures

We hopped up to Belsay Hall yesterday (not literally, obv), to catch the last dying days of their Extraordinary Measures exhibition. Belsay's a great place to go with kids in tow - it's got extensive grounds you can picnic in, there's a 14th century castle to scramble around, and the house interior is gloriously empty, and free of tutting curators.

Best of all, though, they have the most fantastic art exhibitions. Years ago we went to the Sitooteries exhibition of pavilions, and more recently Picture House, which had the spooky Hereafter mirror which showed you images of past objects and previous visitors layered with a time-delayed ghost of yourself moving around.

Extraordinary measures was equally appealing. We loved the Slinkachu 'day trip' photographs, and were fascinated by Ron Mueck's realistic sculptures - especially the 2m tall wild man. It all had an Alice in Wonderland feel - you never knew if you would feel enormous or tiny in comparison to what you saw.

So we took our own large and small photos in the quarry gardens:



That last one's quite terrifying...

Days out, no456: Souter lighthouse

It's not quite as 'iconic' as Fraggle Rock, but Souter lighthouse is great for a cheap day out.

You have to pay to go in the lighthouse itself (unless you're a National Trust member), but there's all sorts to do in and around the grounds that's free. [I should point out, we thoroughly recommend going inside - it's fascinating. You can see the old lighthouse keeper's cottages, climb to the top of the tower and see the light, and most importantly dress up in pirate costumes.]

We like:

• visiting the vegetable garden and playing spot the vegetable
• clambering over the pirate ship and train in the walled garden
• buying ice creams in the shop (mini Milks are only 40p)
• following the cliff-top path along and then down to a fantastic pebbled beach - there's lots of scope for skimming pebbles, rockpooling and general scrambling about
  

Usually it's blowing a force 9 gale - there's lots of space for flying a kite too.

Cats, dogs and mice

The lovely people at Random House sent us Three by the Sea last week. It's the latest picture book by Mini Grey, one of our favourite children's authors. I can recite Biscuit Bear word for word, but never tire of reading it as the illustrations are so funny. (And any book that ends in a cake shop will always have pride of place on our bookshelves).


So we had high hopes for Three by the Sea. And we were right. It's another fabulous book, illustrated in the inimitable Mini Grey style (check out the brilliant book titles in Mouse's kitchen - it's her attention to detail that I love). What I also love is that the story is as good as the illustrations - so often you find that you're reading absolute drivel, even though the pictures are beautiful (Angelina Ballerina, take a bow...).

Anyway, back to the plot: three friends (a cat, a dog and a mouse) live in a house by the sea - until a mysterious stranger (a travelling salesman) shows up. He offers each of them a special free gift...but it turns their world upside-down. It's a tale of friendship, loyalty and making compromises - but without any of the schmalz that can often accompany themes like that. In fact, it's laugh-out-loud funny, both for adults and kids. M read it with me, laughed like a drain, and immediately demanded it again. And again. I can see I'll soon be able to recite this one too...

UPDATE: There's a lovely set of pictures on The Guardian website, with Mini Grey explaining how she creates her images: www.guardian.co.uk/books/gallery/2010/oct/01/mini-grey-gallery

The perfect Saturday

1. Matinee film at the Empire cinema in Newcastle

At £1 per ticket we don't really mind too much if the film isn't wonderful. Today's (Planet 51) wasn't bad - plot/characters not brilliant, but gorgeous visuals of a 1950s-style alien planet. Definitely worth £3.

2. Buns from the Chinese bakery

Bread Point, just on the outskirts of China Town in Newcastle is the place to go. £5 buys you an enormous box of buns - filled with ham/sweetcorn, sausage, Taiwanese chicken, char sui pork, pork mince and our favourite, 'peanut milk'. It's probably some tooth-rotting conglomeration of peanut butter and condensed milk but we don't care.

3. The allotment in the sunshine

Some weeding, digging up of things and picking is usually the order of the day in September. Today I dug up potatoes and beetroot, and picked yet more chard, and a huge punnet of blackberries. It was beautifully sunny, and there wasn't a slug in sight.

4. Bicycle riding

M's learning to ride a bicycle without stabilisers on. She's just about mastered balancing and freewheeling after a lot of riding up and down the street - next stop, adding the pedals back to the bike for some proper riding.

5. Strictly Come Dancing

It's back! The perfect eye candy while eating 'telly tea'. I'm looking forward to seeing what Ann Widdecombe makes of Craig Revel Horwood.

6. Making blackberry and apple jam

See 3. It was a *lot* of blackberries. There are now five jars on the kitchen worktop, gradually cooling down. I may need to try some out on some toast before I go to bed...

Caaake!

Meow!