Week 10: 23 – 29 November

Is there anything more annoying than having to spend a long period of time next to someone with the hiccoughs? Well, yes, actually there is. I am now in a position to confirm that an evening spent in a flat with a defective smoke alarm beats hiccoughs hands down. You see, hiccoughs come and go – the psychological torture is caused by the constant hope that the fit has passed when it hasn’t – but, most importantly, if you wait long enough, they go. A defective smoke alarm, on the other hand, will beep at regular intervals for ever, especially when (as in this case) it is wired into the mains. (Peep! There it goes again. Peep!)

Now, you may be wondering at this point, why don’t I just climb up on a chair with a pair of wire cutters and end the misery with one snip? There are two answers to that – first of all, it’s a rented flat, and I’m pretty sure questions would be asked if anyone were to discover severed electrical cables on the premises – potentially rather embarrassing questions at that, especially if the flat ever caught fire. The other, more pressing reason is, the last time I engaged with anything to do with electricity I thought it would be interesting to insert a screwdriver into a light socket, but – and you’ll laugh when I tell you this – I neglected to turn off the mains electricity first. I think I travelled about six feet before a combination of gravity and a wall intervened to slow me down.

So, trust me on this, a sleepless night is preferable to death, even if it doesn’t always seem like it at four in the morning. (Plus I no longer have the hair to make it stand on end like Einstein’s.)

After some interesting experiments with swatches, I’ve decided to take a break from them and start the gansey proper. I’ve cast on 392 stitches for the welt, which I’ll increase by about 40 stitches when I’m ready to start the body. So far I’ve just cast on and completed the first couple of rows, which I usually do in purl to give a solid base. Then I’ll start the knit 2/purl 2 ribbing, which is happily mindless, unlike the blasted swatches (“swatches – the devil’s toenail clippings”) which required a little more concentration than I’ve been able to give them. But I’ve got the patterns for the body mostly sorted, all I have to do is rework them and try them out in – gulp – more swatches over the next few weeks, and we should be all set for the Christmas holidays (less than 3 weeks away for some of us… As my iPhone app tells me, there are 25 sleeps to Christmas, or 579 hours, 34,782 minutes, and 20,867,933 seconds. But who’s counting?).

(Peep!)=