Granddaughter Number One is given to enthusiasms. Most of us are to some extent: we find an activity interesting on first introduction to it and become mildly obsessed with it for a while … until the next one comes along. So we find ourselves reading book after book by the same author, buying the same style of clothes over and over (cf the policeman Rocco Schiavone in the Italian series we have been watching constantly wearing desert boots, even when the are totally inappropriate for the weather), ordering the same food almost every time we go out for a meal or, best of all, joining a gym, paying the year’s membership fee and then not going once mid-February comes around.
But Granddaughter Number One does it to extremes. She’s done jewellery making, felting (making cute creatures out of felt), drawing very elaborate, and beautifully produced drawings which she sends to friends and relations, furniture renovation - she still has two wooden boxes, intended to be receptacle for plants in her garden, which she got half way through restoring but never quite completed or painted - and even antique sewing machines, of which she has two, lovingly restored but not quite finished. Most of these activities she comes back to after a while, attacking each with new enthusiasm.
Her latest fad is knitting, which she learnt to do as a child, this time triggered I think by her finding a rather nice set of assorted knitting needles on offer online - of course! That’s where she does her shopping. I want her to accompany me to a craft shop in Manchester but her reluctance to leave the house and catch a bus make this a difficult project. Anyway, having acquired knitting needles, she appealed to me for some yarn, knowing that I always have left-overs from knitting projects of my own. I provided her with assorted yarns and she set about knitting squares, following instructions in online sources for different types of stitches. There might be a blanket eventually.
For Christmas somebody gave her a kit for knitting fingerless gloves, the ideal opportunity to follow a proper pattern, not too complicated but demanding enough to maintain interest. Her ambition is to progress to a cardigan or so she tells me. We have seen photos of the progress of the gloves on our family messenger chat site. This morning she sent me a message with a photo of an extract of her knitting pattern and the question: What does this mean?
It was a difficult question to answer without having seen the whole pattern or the work in current progress. So we did a video call and sorted out what she needed to do. This is the second or third knitting consultation Granddaughter Number One and I have had in recent weeks. And not long before Christmas an old friend brought her knitting round for me to help her sort out how to finish a complicated woolly hat for her daughter in law. (Typically this old friend, a very amateur knitter, chose the most complicated pattern available!) I am becoming a knitting guru!
There used to be a group of knitters who met in the pub where I used to go to a poetry group meeting (another example of an enthusiasm I might return to some time). It always amused me to see the ladies, and they were all ladies, with their needles clacking away over their pints, for all the world like the tricoteuses by the guillotine!
Moving on to other matters, here’s a link to a nice cartoon representation of the life of Pelé.
Also, I was reading about birth-tourism: the practice of going abroad to give birth in order to give your child the opportunity to have dual nationality. According to this article Russian women are going to Argentina to have their babies. Argentina is a country that does not demand complicated visas apparently. However, despite the article’s insistence that Russian is now commonly heard in Buenos Aires, I wonder what percentage of Russian women can actually afford to up-sticks and give birth on the other side of the world. Not a high percentage, I would have thought!
On the other hand, according to this article Argentinians of Galician descent whose forebears went seeking their fortune in that country are now opting to return to Galicia for a more peaceful, less violent life. Galicia is welcoming them back. The article, by the way, has a lovely photo of Plaza de la Constitución in Vigo, making the little square look bigger and more elegant than it is in real life. The traditional Spanish plaza mayor is something that the fine city of Vigo lacks, in my opinion anyway.
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
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