Week 32: 17 – 23 August

It’s nice to reach the second sleeve. The end is in sight – feels like forever – so you’re motivated just to put in the hard yards and get it done. This time I’ve been helped by a couple of factors.

First of all, England have finally beaten Australia at cricket – hurrah – and won back the Ashes, after a long, hard summer of 5 test matches. (As a true Kiwi I find myself reverting to type – as the old joke says, I support New Zealand and anyone playing Australia.) And even though the games were only live on satellite TV, which we don’t get, I was able to listen to the radio commentary and knit. As Nigel said, this is real thing when it comes to cricket, and it doesn’t come much better than beating the Aussies. Mwa ha ha ha.

Secondly, and it’s probably not a coincidence, I’ve rediscovered my love of Wagner, in particular his epic Ring cycle of 4 operas, a mere 15 hours of music. The astonishing thing about the Ring, not only did Wagner write both the text and music himself (and what music), but he used old legends to illustrate his thoughts on the nature of human society and human nature. So the Ring is, in one sense, a portrayal of the world, from creation to dissolution. (To give one example of the originality of Wagner’s thinking: he devised his own creation myth, to get the cycle underway; but in it he portrayed the gods as morally corrupt, “mired in sleaze” as the saying is, requiring human beings to renew the world and offer a hope of redemption. Usually it’s the other way round.)

And of course, Tolkien, despite his denials, nicked a crucial part of his mythology from Wagner, and not from the old stories, as he claimed… (Can anyone guess what it was?) “They both have a ring in them and it’s round” was, I think, his rather testy (and disingenuous) rejection of the suggestion.

Thirdly I’ve been listening to Neal Stephenson’s science fiction novel “Anathem” as an audiobook while I knit, which has got me hooked, even though I know I’m not getting all the implications. It’s pretty heavy going at times, but at least (unlike Wagner) it’s got some good jokes.

So lots to keep me entertained while I put my feet up and knit, as the rain hammers on the roof and the howling wind rattles the windows, in what passes for summer up here. All of which explains the dramatic progress of the last few days, and the euphoria that follows the realisation that I will never, never have to knit a row of this soul-destroying pattern ever again. (Yes, all right Suzanne, I admit it, you were right! Woody Allen has a character in one of his stories who falls out of a box at the opera and lands on his head; rather than admit it was a mistake, he goes back every night and repeats it to make it look like it was deliberate… In some ways that’s not a bad metaphor for me and this pullover.)

And I’m already thinking ahead to what I can tackle next – something Scottish, of course. Something to keep out the rain…