It’s been a week with appointments and cancellations, though only one of each. The appointment was for day case surgery to remove a small brown patch. This had once been two tiny moles, but over the last ten years had changed to become one larger, paler spot with a different surface texture. I’d seen a consultant a few years ago and was prescribed some cream to treat this and other patches, but this spot was not affected. At the last appointment, the consultant prescribed a different cream, but that didn’t work either. At the follow-up appointment, she recommended that the spot be removed. This is what was removed last week. It’s been sent for testing too. I should hear shortly, but I’m not concerned.
Hospital Stairwell
I haven’t had surgery since my wisdom teeth were removed, so in a way this was a new experience. Then, there had been a stay in hospital and general anaesthetic. This time, I walked to the hospital, was shown to a ward, and knit socks while I waited for the surgeon, who bounced in a while later, preceded by murmurs of “he’s coming” along the corridor. His first remark was not to ask after my health, but to say he admired my shoelaces! (They are dyed the colours of the rainbow, bought to replace boring grey ones.) He explained the procedure and left.
Infrared Landscape
Shortly thereafter, a young nurse escorted me along the winding corridors to the operating theatre. The surgeon, a nurse, and someone I assumed was the anaesthetist were already there. More shoelace admiration occurred as I got on the bed. I was covered with a sheet, the lights blazed on, and I clamped my eyes shut. Local anaesthetic hurts more if you see it being injected. The young nurse sat by my side, and the operation began. Her sole purpose seemed to be to chat, distract, and keep me calm. I only felt from some pressure, and the op was soon over. When I opened my eyes there was a huge dressing on my arm.
Infrared Hawthorn
A few minutes later I felt well enough to sit up, and the nurse escorted me back to the ward. Another nurse made me a cuppa while the discharge letter was prepared, and then I walked home. As with the dentist, the anaesthetic seems to spread further after the filling is done; part of my hand went numb until ten hours later, when the numbness abated. The wound was not painful even then. A few days later, I took the dressing off. There’s a large area of bruising surrounding an inch-long wound which has been closed with dissolvable stitches.
In the gloaming
And the cancellation? The Covid & flu jabs were moved forward to next month.
Having a large portion of my arm under a bandage has not impeded the knitting. The division for front and back has been reached, and I’m zipping to and fro on the back. It’s getting to the stage where it feels heavy and bulky on my lap, but at the same time the weather is cooler so it provides some extra warmth as the nights drawn in.
I returned from my sojourn in southern parts on Friday afternoon. It was a long trek, entailing overnight stops in Stirling, Southport, and Cheltenham. The final stop was Cornwall, where I visited a friend near St Austell for a few days By this time I was just happy to stop moving! As my friend no longer drives, we took advantage of my visit by doing errands in St Austell – weighing the dog at the vets and picking up some bulky items.
Wallace Monument from my hotel window
At the end of my visit, we filled the car with bamboo, corks, tools, music, music stands, and our luggage to drive to Woking, where we both attended the same bamboo pipes workshop. As well as taking my friend, the bamboo and other items were to be transferred to their new keeper, who also attended. Everything packed into the car neatly, with ample space to see through the back window.
Bamboo in Cornwall
The four and a half days of the course were both intensive and relaxing. Days were filled with lots of playing (on bamboo pipes of course), making pipes, enjoying the delicious meals, and socialising in the evening. We were a small group of just over a dozen, and most had been on many pipe courses before at this venue. Most attendees came from the UK, but one came from Greece, another from Switzerland, and two from the Netherlands. Two regulars from the US couldn’t make it this year. On two evenings we had ringing sessions using handchimes borrowed from my handbell group. They loved it, and could have played for hours!
Moving a Piano
Some of us did steal a few moments to visit the nearby shopping area. Once two of us ventured to a local supermarket to get snacks & nibbles for evening socialising. Another day, two of us went to a chargepoint to charge her car. She’d just picked it up a few days previously but hadn’t used a public chargepoint; she asked if I’d go along for moral support. We passed the time while it charged at a coffee shop across the road.
Autumn Colour in Stirling
The few brief days at Woking ended all too soon, and so I headed up the motorways again, returning to Southport for a longer visit with said friend. One morning was occupied doing nothing, then waiting for the piano movers to arrive. My friend had given his baby grand piano away, and the donee had arranged for it to be collected. She later sent a video of her daughter joyfully playing it. The next day, while my friend visited his mum, I took the train to the Big City – Liverpool. I had a good tromp around the shops, made a few purchases, and saw an upside-down house. I’d assumed this house https://www.visitliverpool.com/listing/upside-down-house-liverpool/61389101/ was a promotion for Wicked, but further research indicates it’s an ‘interactive photo attraction’.
Rani, Queen of all she surveys
With all the various stopovers, quite a lot of knitting was accomplished. I have just started the gussets, after long inches of body. The gansey measures 13 inches from the top of the ribbing to the bottom of the gusset. With three inches of ribbing, that’s 16 inches in total. I’m pleased to be nearly halfway done, and hope I can keep up the pace!
On Wednesday, after nearly two months of planning, thinking, basting, sewing, and unpicking, I sewed the last button on the summer coat. It is far from ‘perfect’ – the back is puzzlingly slightly longer than the front – but I’m pleased with it. It fits better than the previous iteration, being more structured. While wearable, there is one flaw – there’s no way to tidily close the fronts, which billow open in the Caithness breezes. The solution – big hooks & eyes – are on the way. They’ll be unobtrusively applied behind the front edges.
There was a trip to the post office this week too, but on this occasion I went when the local branch was open. This time it was to mail contract documents for one of my brother-in-law’s properties, and a box containing my previous camera. A few years ago, I’d tried to sell it via a second-hand photography equipment dealer, but it had been returned because there were scratches on the sensor. I mentioned this to a friend, and immediately she suggested converting it to infra-red. Part of an infra-red conversion is the removal of the top layer of the sensor, so it doesn’t matter if there are scratches.
In preparation for a bamboo pipe workshop in a few days, I started printing music for the participants on Saturday. I took over the music printing for the group a year ago but haven’t needed to do it until now. It’s taken some time to get it right. I’d planned to print four A4 pages on an A3 sheet, two to a side, to make a booklet out of three sheets. The help files weren’t very helpful regarding two-sided printing, only instructing to select the appropriate setting in the print menu. What it didn’t say was that on this printer, you can’t print A3 on both sides unless it’s done manually, feeding the sheets in one by one. Nor did it say that you can’t print double-sided on A4 using the main tray – that can only be done from the rear feed. It’s been a steep learning curve, with many failed attempts, but I think I have a handle on it now.
Setting up
On Sunday, I ventured out of the house to ring handbells with the handbell team at a local church. We played acceptably and had an audience that was larger than the group itself. It was part of the UK’s ‘Doors Open Day’, which occurs this weekend each year. Museums, galleries, churches, and private historic homes all over the country are open for free. The church had asked us to play to entertain visitors.
Now that the summer coat is finished, I should have more time to concentrate on the knitting, but printing and preparing for the upcoming course has taken priority. However, I knit when I can, and progress hasn’t stalled completely. I hope to get significant knitting done over the next couple of weeks, when I’m away at the course. Regular service will resume 14 October.
The biggest adventure this past week was going to the post office. Not particularly exciting, I realise. Nearly every week, I think to myself, “I must take thus and such to the post office”. By the time I get organised, it’s Friday and the post office is shut, and the task is shunted forward to the next week, when the same thing happens again. The fallback plan is to drive to the next closest post office 8 miles away. As the parcel absolutely had to be sent ASAP, that is what I did.
The box is destined for Propagansey, which is happening this week. The parcel is crammed full of four ‘Sunday best’ ganseys and prints from the Johnston Collection. Three of the four were knit by Gordon: ‘Wick Leaf’ in navy, ‘Fergus Ferguson in cream, and an unblogged one, ‘Cumming Brothers’, also in cream. The fourth is the one just completed, ‘D Gillies’ in navy. It’s rather splendid, if I don’t say so myself, as long as no one looks at the inside. If you’re near the Methodist church in Fylingthorpe, North Yorkshire, this coming week, pop in and have a look – it sounds like Gansey Heaven.
Late bloomer
With the summer coat, I’ve finally started stitching the buttonholes. After decided to reduce the number of buttonholes on the lapels from 22 to 16, they needed to be respaced. That had me scratching my head, trying to get the distances precise, but eventually I realised it wouldn’t matter if they were off by a few millimeters. Loth to spend time on sample buttonholes, I jumped right in on the sleeve cuffs, which have three each. After those, I worked the buttonholes on the pocket flaps. Finally, I started at the bottom of the lapels, working one buttonhole on each side alternately. The end is in sight; there are only five to go.
Today is a day all mystery novel lovers should mark, for it is the birthday of Agatha Christie, who was born on this day in 1890. According to Agatha Christie Limited, the official website:
“Outsold only by the Bible and Shakespeare, Agatha Christie is the best-selling novelist of all time. She is best known for her 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections, as well as the world’s longest-running play – The Mousetrap.”
From browsing the site, one of the ‘100 Facts about Agatha Christie’ : “She is credited with being the first Western woman to stand up on a surf board. This happened when she visited South Africa and then Hawaii in 1922.”
Fields in late summer
It would not take a Miss Marple to deduce from the photo above that progress on the gansey is slowly creeping forward. It’s about halfway to the bottom of the gusset. The stitch pattern is a welcome relief compared to the last. It’s easy to memorise and it’s possible to build up a rhythm. Rows are much quicker when there’s not a complicated pattern.
I took a short break from Sunday chores yesterday afternoon. It was for a specific reason – at 3 PM there was to be a test of the Emergency Alert System. I didn’t want to be next to a mobile phone when the alarm signal was broadcast. And it was just as well – I could clearly hear the alarm signal a floor away. It reminded me of my childhood, when on both TV and radio the fateful words “This is a test of the Emergency Broadcast System” would ring out.
The EBS was used in the US from 1963 to 1997, having been modelled on a system used in Hawaii. Its purpose was to provide the President a means to widely communicate war or national crisis, but was never used for this. It was tested regularly, as millions of Americans can attest. In 1997, The Emergency Alert System replaced it, and is more or less the same. It is tested nationally about once a year and locally about once a month.
Rain in the distance
The UK had a ‘four minute warning’ system from the Cold War up to 1992. A new system was developed in 2013, when it was first tested, but it wasn’t dopted. Seven years later, the need became more urgent, when the Covid-19 pandemic broke out in 2020. Initially, the government worked with UK mobile networks to inform the populace of lockdown rules, but then started to develop a proper alert system, which was tested nationally a year later. The system was launched in 2023 and is tested every two years. It has seen action only three times, once for an unexploded WWII bomb in Plymouth, and twice for severe weather.
View of Wick
Alert systems aside, I’m still hard at work on the sewing. I’d hoped to finish it a week ago but there has been problem solving and unpicking along the way. The back vent needed a fair bit of thought. The pattern specifies a simple slit, made by folding under wide center back seam allowances. I decided a proper vent, where one side underlaps, would look better. Internet searches provided a solution, but I did need to add a piece to the lining to have enough fabric in the right places. It works, and looks good on the outside, but on the inside . . . But that has been done, and the coat and lining are hemmed as well. It’s completed, apart from the buttonholes and buttons. I’ve made a change there too, reducing the number of buttons in order to have fewer buttonholes to hand sew.
Hoverfly on late rose
The lilac gansey hasn’t been ignored, of course. The colour in last week’s pic was off, it’s decidedly greyer. It’s another one of those colours that is difficult to photograph. I fit in a row or two whenever I can. Thursday mornings at the museum are a godsend, as apart from when visitors arrive, it’s dedicated knitting time. The patterning is more visible now, and this will continue all the way up to the shoulders.
It’s been a week with appointments and cancellations, though only one of each. The appointment was for day case surgery to remove a small brown patch. This had once been two tiny moles, but over the last ten years had changed to become one larger, paler spot with a different surface texture. I’d seen a consultant a few years ago and was prescribed some cream to treat this and other patches, but this spot was not affected. At the last appointment, the consultant prescribed a different cream, but that didn’t work either. At the follow-up appointment, she recommended that the spot be removed. This is what was removed last week. It’s been sent for testing too. I should hear shortly, but I’m not concerned.
