Perhaps the strangest chapter I've ever read

 It's been blowing half a gale and chucking it down with rain all day today, so the furthest I have been is the compost heap!  Best to be inside looking out at it.  

This morning I was sat up in my sewing room, trying to select the best half square triangles for the table topper.  Some I unpicked and added an off white material to balance the design as I had sewn all the charm pack together using the off white print I had to balance the designs, until running out. Now I have unpicked a few which used up the plain fabrics -  green/yellow/lilac/dark red - and combined with some off white I had at home.

I was looking across to the woodland and desperately wishing for the first hints of green.  The Sycamore by the edge of the orchard has tiny green leaf-tips so perhaps more leaves aren't too far away.

Whilst watching the racing, I blew the dust off my Seaside Topper bobble hat and started the brim - which I should have worked first, but clearly wasn't paying attention at the time as I began it when Keith was so ill.    I will just sew it onto the top, no probs.  The wool I had bought from Wonderwool (with the pattern and John Arbon Devonia wool to knit this) for the brim was Sirdar and it kept breaking apart - I have about 6 knots in it so far.  I forgot to buy a 2nd 25g of it for the pompom so will try to match it.  I cast on too tightly first off, so had to rip it off and start again.  I need to do ten rows of stocking stitch. Hope to manage that today.  I have been trying to find a matching pair of buttons for Elderberry Bunny's eyes but despite having bought a couple of big bags of various size and colour buttons a few years back, finding a pair is difficult, and none in brown or black.  I can't find my big tin of buttons off clothes, which are nearly all brown, grey or black.  Into the cupboards tomorrow . . .

Now the title today refers to the chapter in Robert Macfarlane's book The Old Ways, which I have been listening to on Audible in the car.  I had only read perhaps half the book, so thought it would be nice to treat myself to it to listen to.  It is Chapter 8 - Gneiss.  Perhaps it isn't so much the content or subject of the chapter as the character, Steve, that it is written about.  I have to say he wouldn't be my choice as a partner in life, as no way could I live with this: (turn away if you are eating a meal or don't care for skeletons and remains).

"On the south-astern coast of the Isle of Harris, in a three-house village called Geocrab, behind a fuchsia hedge, in a chilly thin-walled workshop, hanging by a meat hook from a rafter is a human skeleton.  Its 206 bones are held together by sinews of braided sea-grass, which, as they pass through the vertebrae, are knotted alternately left over right and right over left.  Stitched onto the bones are patches of meat cut from a dead calf, which together form a rough over-body.  At the time of their first sewing - when they had been recently preserved using a solution of formaldehyde and sodium fluoride, administered with a horse syringe and prepared according to a mix-ratio perfected by the members of a mid-1920s zoological expedition to the Amazon - the meat patches were still plumply muscular."   The Old Ways, Robert Macfarlane, published by Hamish Hamilton, 2012.  This chapter continues writing about Steve and his artistic endeavours and ideas and he sounds a most unusual person.  His end game plan for this skeleton is to take the top off of a giant boulder, hollow it out, hang the skeleton inside and then put the top back on.  An idea so challenging it sounds almost impossible.  

So, with this book, I am realizing how humdrum my life is by comparison, and my utter ignorance about some of the people and places Macfarlane mentions. At least I am on the same page when he writes/speaks of Edward Thomas and am completely linked up and educated about his poetry, prose and character.

Anyway, spare a thought for Tam tonight as she has been at the Hospital with Rosie since lunchtime, as Rosie has a very bad limp (swollen knee) and the GP thought it needed checking out as she had been sore on that leg before.  I hope that nothing nasty has been found . . .