The clocks in the UK went forward last night for Daylight Saving Time, and of course I’m wrecked. It’s like having seasonal jet lag. Every year I find myself wondering if even summer is worth all this grief (this being what my old Latin grammar teacher called ‘a question expecting the answer “no”’). Experience teaches me that for the next couple of weeks I shall greet each day like Frankenstein’s monster on the slab, while Margaret stands over me with electrodes, waiting for a lightning storm and shouting “Give my creature life!”
The Last Snowdrops of Spring
The time change isn’t the only reason I’m knackered just now, though. I was down in Cumbria on a business trip last week, a wearying 800-mile round trip. Highlight of the journey was a visit to Sellafield, Europe’s oldest and largest nuclear site, some 650 acres on the beautiful Cumbrian coast. It doesn’t generate power any more and is used primarily for reprocessing and storage, as redundant buildings and plant are gradually being decommissioned. It’s big in three dimensions, some of the silos tall as cathedrals.
The church from across the river
It’s big in the fourth dimension, too. My profession is cultural heritage, and already places like Sellafield seem to belong to Britain’s past, like those ruined abbeys from the Reformation, crumbling monuments to a faith which once dominated the world and which now seem unimaginably out of reach. “History is now, and England” as TS Eliot said, even if it looked like the future just a few short years ago.
Budding hydrangea
But then, lack of sleep always tends to send me into philosopher mode. There’s no real cure but to wait till my body clock adjusts, tempting though it is to set the alarm for about an hour before the dawn chorus, then go out and shout at the trees to see how the birds like being woken up early for a change. Meanwhile, an urgent question: how exactly shall I spend all this daylight time I’ve saved…?
You get it back at the end of the summer, but not at a useful time of day.
A completed sleeve, cuff and all! Maybe it’s just the color, but I think that is one of the nicest looking sweaters I have seen on your blog.=
Thank you Tamar! It’s one of the classic Wick patterns that matches the really fancy Hebrides patterns, I think, and deserves to be better known. The colour is the ever-populate Frangipani sea spray, which sets it off a treat.
That IS a gorgeous sweater, one of the most intricate patterns. My fingers would be throbbing!
Hi Lynne, I find a little and often is the best way. The really hard part is keeping the pattern correct when you’re switching between front and back every other row on the yoke!
That is just stunning! That gives me brain ache just trying to imagine keeping all those patterns in correct sequence per row!
Hi Lois, I use a 5-barred gate system to keep track – though on this pattern I used a 7-bar gate, since the cables are every 7th row. At the start of each cable’s new “gate” I write the row number above the first bar. That way I neve lose track (though holding a ruler against a pattern chart to read across each pattern row is not without its challenges, I admit!).