I do not think that I am likely to write very much tonight, and tomorrow is Saturday so probably not anything at all then.
It is not that I am too busy in the taxi, or even that I have had such a dull day that I can hardly bear the recital of it. It is simply that I have had enough. I have had quite sufficient words for one week and I think I would rather get on with my knitting.
I am knitting a cardigan. It is a very simple pattern, because I am a bit of an idiot, but still not simple enough. I have been knitting in the taxi for the last few nights, and at the end of yesterday evening thought that the Knit Two Purl Two bit at the bottom seemed awfully big compared to the one adorning the lady in the picture. This bit, for those who don’t know anything about knitting, imagine that, is the peculiar rib bit with which it seems necessary to hem all knitted garments. I had originally put this down to the lady, whose cardigan looks enormous, presumably being a Size Eight and me being almost twice as big as that, but in the end I thought that it really did not look right and returned to re-examine the pattern.
I discovered that I had not been paying proper attention when I first perused it in the night-time taxi dark, and the instruction was not for k2p2 for four inches, as I had imagined, but for four centimetres, so it is wrong already and I have hardly even started.
I am not impressed with this, we are out of Europe now and I do not see why we still have to have their ridiculously tiny measurements any more.
I am not going to unravel it. It will just have to be a massive rib at the bottom, I don’t suppose anybody will stop me in shops and comment on it. If it turns out to be really weird I can just give it to somebody for Christmas, somebody who will have to pretend to be surprised and grateful and then hide it in a drawer. Or I could make Mark wear it. He would not notice if it was made of ribs.
It is very unlikely to be finished before this Christmas so nobody needs to panic just yet.
I have had a day of cleaning things, before I came to sit on the taxi rank. You will not be surprised to hear about this, because I have been cleaning things for days and days now, and I am jolly well sick of it, but we have got a new central heating system still in bits all over Lucy’s bedroom floor, and it has been very messy indeed just getting it that far, I can tell you.
The point of the plumbing is that we will have free hot water pumping all around the house all of the time. It will be heated either by the stove, or the divorce solar panel, or by an immersion heater powered by the windmill that Mark has got in his shed now that I have made him take it out of the conservatory. Mark has had to think about it very hard and the house is littered with home-made heat exchangers and manifolds and bits of multi-dimensional piping. Mark says that if it works it will be such a radical system it will be completely unique, certainly on our street, but there is no surprise there I suppose.
I like the idea of having radical plumbing.
I will like it even better when he has finished and we have got the whole lot cleared up.
He has been at work today but he has gone home to do a couple of hours’ more plumbing before he comes out to drive a taxi.
I made him some dinner and left him to it.
I am going to stay here and get on with my knitting.
