Sample Fair Isle design in 4 different sets of colour (from 200 Fair Isle Designs by Mary Jane Mucklestone; Search Press)

After five days in London with Brexit continuing to take over the lives of the political journalists in the family, I got off the train in Cheltenham at 10 pm on Friday night and fell into another full on exit as racegoers, once perhaps quite smart but now dishevelled, attempted to board the train I was trying to get off. Everything was very well managed in the station, however, with plenty of stewards and a smattering of policemen to help people on their way. The station taxi rank was a little more challenging as a couple of men the worse for drink and if possible even worse for bad language, forgot the techniques of queuing, though fortunately on being re-educated on the subject got so solipsistic in their fury that the rest of us slipped into taxis unobserved.

Sample Fair Isle design in 3 different sets of colour (from 200 Fair Isle Designs by Mary Jane Mucklestone; Search Press)

Another visit to St Paul’s Cathedral for Evensong with the small person (and this time his mother as well). Happily, there was some lovely William Byrd to catch the heart and raise the spirits. The small person spotted a couple of his teachers on the opposite side of the choir stalls so throughout the service they were intermittently treated to waves of the hand of increasing degrees of flamboyance; perhaps not unconnectedly the small person wondered out loud why the choir master waved his  hands about so much! (Explaining polyphony to a 5 year old is not without its challenges, but what is life if not an attempt to explain the seemingly inexplicable.)

Book: 200 Fair Isle Designs by Mary Jane Mucklestone; Search Press)

This week I couldn’t decide on Fair Isle designs for a mauve cardigan so I gave up (see photos above for unsuccessful attempts) and started a blue jumper for someone else, hitting on a Fair Isle band that, like Goldilocks porridge, is just right. I also chose to put aside the little cardigan with a pattern of knitted leaves which I am half way through – unused to this sort of pattern I have to call on superhuman levels of concentration unavailable at the end of a busy day of housekeeping and childcare. I don’t like having several half finished projects on the go, though I discover from new knitting friends this is the norm. Meanwhile back to indexing all 7 years of the blog …