Transition

After a few nights of waking at 3.00am and feeling chilly I've accepted that it's time to put the doona on the bed. (Wikipedia tells me, by the way, that 'doona' is Australian English for a continental quilt. I've always known that there's a confusing variety of terms for this article, but hadn't realised that 'doona' was distinctively Australian).

With a temperate climate such as Sydney's there are few markers of the transition from one season to another. In late summer the leaves of deciduous trees gradually wither and turn a dirty brown - they don't mark the approach of winter with a glorious display of colour. When I was growing up in an inland town where seasons are more extreme, ANZAC Day (25 April) was the time to pack away your summer clothes and bring out your winter ones. But nowadays, particularly in Sydney, there is not a great difference between clothes you wear in so-called winter and those for summer. Most of my clothes could aptly be described as trans-seasonal.

So, taking the doona from the cupboard, choosing a cover, and snuggling into it at night has a particular significance. Cooler weather (comfortable knitting weather) is on the way and, with great relief, I can bid goodbye for six months or so to summer humidity.

and there was light!

My elderly apartment building has been under major renovation for the last sixteen months. Anybody who lives in an old house knows that they fall into disrepair without constant attention. If you live in an old building that was built 110 years ago for purposes other than human habitation, such as a factory, then you know the additional complications of ensuring that the charm of the original structure is preserved while meeting current safety and maintenance standards. Many 'Grand Designs' can attest to how such projects gobble time and money. In my building, lintels above the large windows were repaired or replaced, window sills were rebuilt, cracks were repaired and stitched, wholly new windows were installed and the building coated with a waterproof membrane. My side of the building was the last to receive attention. In May, scaffolding was erected along the wall outside my windows and was then covered in blue netting to ensure the safely of people using the street below.



Not only was the view of trees outside my window obscured, it was like living in an aquarium of blue filtered light. Worse was to come. The metal bars supporting the lintels above my windows were found to be badly corroded and in need of replacement. The builders erected a wall of plastic sheeting about a metre inside the apartment so that they could gouge out the rusted bars and rebuild the lintels.



Fortunately, the workers were efficient and the lintels were replaced in a couple of days and the plastic wall dismantled. Later the windows were replaced and internal repairs around the windows were completed. Eventually, after all the apartments on the eastern side of the building were done, the blue netting was removed and the scaffolding dismantled.



There was light! I've always thought of myself as someone who is relatively unaffected by the physical environment in which I live or work, but there was a wave of physical relief the morning I made my way from the bedroom to the living room to find the light had returned. By now the internal touch-ups to the paint have been done and my blinds re-hung. My living room has been fully restored.

My community

I must confess a rather eccentric fondness for the NSW Strata Schemes Management Act - not for the legislation itself which like most legislation seems clumsy, opaque and confusing to most laypeople - but for what it tries to achieve. I think it is inevitable that as populations grow and as infrastructure to serve sparse populations becomes more and more unsustainable we will have to find ways of living in closer proximity to one another. That's where the Strata Schemes Management Act comes in. It tries to set out a fair and manageable way in which people can live together - amicably - in shared spaces. It enables people to own or rent their own private living spaces, but regulates how the shared elements - gardens, swimming pools, lifts, exterior walls and roofs, services such as plumbing and cabling - are jointly owned and maintained.



There are horrendous stories about the evils of living in blocks of strata scheme apartments - pettiness, disputes among neighbours, legal action, failure to repair or maintain the building. But I've now been living in such a block of apartments for more than a quarter of a century and, across that time, we've had few such disastrous experiences. Some of us who've shared the apartment block for many years work quite hard and consistently to cultivate an ethos of sharing and tolerance. We've never employed a managing agent for the building and I think that this has increased the sense of shared responsibility - that decisions about the common good are being made either by the neighbours you know or by yourself if you're involved in the executive committee.

But from time to time all of this can be a lot of hard work.

The fabric of much of our building is more than a hundred years old - quite old by Australian standards. It was one of the first warehouse conversions in Sydney and has all the problems and expenses that repurposed buildings often have - nothing is modular and everything has to be purpose-built; the windows are all irregular and different shapes; the building was never constructed for domestic purposes and so requires work to adapt it to current standards. Just now we need to do a lot of very expensive work on the building and I've been part of the group scoping the project and costing it. We put together a very comprehensive document about the needed work and the options for payment, leading up to an informal meeting of owners to discuss the project and costs. I was dreading the meeting. I knew that the proposals would be very difficult for many of my neighbours to manage, and though rationally I accepted that there were few options, I dreaded facing my neighbours' distress and possible anger.

But I should have trusted them. No-one was cheerful, but after discussion almost everybody accepted the inevitability of the work that needs to be done, and even thanked the committee for the work and thought they'd put into the proposals. The 'we're all in this together' ethos prevailed. We still have to face the formal meeting at which decisions will be made in a week or so, but I'm now much more confident of a communally agreed outcome that will enable the work to be done. It's good to be reassured that groups of people can be trusted to act for the communal good, even if it is at a cost to themselves individually.

Yet another small pleasure

Between my enthusiasm for having storage wherever possible, and the high ceilings of my new apartment, I have lots of shelves I can't reach without a ladder or something else to climb on. So far I've been making do with chairs and stools, but since moving in I've had a fantasy of the perfect set of steps - small, unobtrusive, but, because I don't want to store them away and have to drag them out of storage when needed, elegant enough to leave them in full view without being offended by them.

I'm not a keen shopper, so I hadn't really been purposefully searching for them, but I had been keeping an eye out whenever I was near a shop I thought might be possible source for the perfect steps.

Yesterday, with my old friend, I visited one of my favourite Sydney shops, Great Dane. The shop sells Danish furniture, both refurbished originals from the 1960s and modern furniture with echoes of that period. It's where I bought my small cabinet a couple of years ago. While my friend was not quite fatally attracted by a vintage leather sofa, look what I discovered...



The perfect set of steps. They're such a lovely design, with the extended 'handle' to give stability while you use them. And they fold flat so you can store them against the wall or even hang them from a simply designed bar that can be attached to the wall. They could even be used to display objects or textiles as they were in the shop.



The Stepladder is designed by Danish designers Benedicte and Poul Erik Find, who also seem to specialise in safe rocking horses for small children.

And just to make this small pleasure even more perfect it was given to me as a housewarming present from my old friend. The stepladder will have so many welcome associations as I use it.

Picture this

Most of this morning was spent hanging paintings and other decorative things on my walls.



It's almost exactly two months since I moved into my new apartment, and this task has been hanging over me all this time. I haven't really felt settled, or able to invite people around, as paintings and other works were propped precariously against walls or still stored in a carton in the living room as I decided what I wanted to do with them.

With nothing hanging on them, the walls of the apartment looked so pristine and the lines of the paint finishes beautifully neat and angular. There was such great attraction in the minimalist aesthetic of bare walls that I seriously considered leaving them that way. But my paintings and wall hangings of various kinds have been gathered over years and remind me of people and places. Most of the paintings, etchings and works on paper I have were done by artist friends or people I've known well - discarding them would have seemed like discarding part of those relationships.

As for most things with this move, when in doubt I consulted Heather. We spent a very pleasurable few hours a couple of weeks ago trying out all sorts of combinations and deciding what could go where. Then this morning the picture hanger came to do his thing. It seemed like a great indulgence, but the pictures have been hung just where I wanted them, the damage to the walls is minimal, and the picture hanger had a ladder that enabled him to do the high hanging safely.

I winced as the drill punctured the wall for the first hanging and doubted (yet again) whether I was doing the right thing in reintroducing so much potential clutter to my space.



But the instant the hanging was done - seventeen things in all in my small space - I felt so much more at home. I am much more comfortable surrounded again by the patterns and images that have been part of my life for so long. An added benefit is that many of them have been reinvigorated by their new neighbours or new locations or the background of different colours, and I'm seeing them afresh.

Reluctantly, I have to admit that a neat, minimalist aesthetic is just not me.

My favourite things 2

As you come through the front door of my new apartment and walk along the hallway there's now a set of five drawers that fit perfectly and glide closed. I've appropriated the top drawer for bills to be paid and keys and sticky tape and string and the bits and pieces of everyday life I don't want to lose. But the other four drawers are just for my shoes:



What a luxury. No more shoes shoved into the bottom of the wardrobe or lined up under the bed. Each drawer easily fits six pairs and, if I had enough shoes, I could probably fit another layer of shoes (though not boots) into each drawer.

It's the neatest, most organised part of the apartment...and it gives me such pleasure.

My favourite things

Yesterday, I arranged my new yarn on the windowsill to photograph it in the early morning light. The windowsills in my new apartment are one of my favourite things. I can already see they are going to be a much-favoured location for photographs.



The walls of the old building I live in are very thick and on my side of the building I have wide, flat windowsills. My previous apartment had even thicker walls, but the windows were set at the inside rather than the outside of the openings and so I had no usable sills.

Last weekend I bought some herbs in small pots and lined them up on one of the sills. The sills and the opportunities they bring are going to give me a great deal of pleasure.

Still distracted

The removalists came on Tuesday and moved everything I'd packed - mostly to my new apartment, and some of it to storage till I summon the energy to send it to my daughter in Brisbane. I hadn't quite finished packing everything before the removalists arrived and so I've had quite a few trips between my old and new apartment with a shopping trolley crammed with stuff.

But I've really and truly moved! So many loads to the garbage skips in my building's basement; so many trips to leave things at the local charity stores; but there's still a mountain of boxes to be unpacked.

The painters are in my new apartment this morning painting the old bookcases I've brought with me, so after they're dry I can begin unpacking all my books. Boxes of them. Many heavy boxes of them. Despite culling quite a few as I packed I think I'll still have too many for the space I have, so I suspect more culling will be needed. I'm torn between putting things away anywhere just to make some space, and knowing that this is a really stupid move. Anyway, I'm so physically tired that just co-existing with chaos for a few days seems by far the most attractive option.

Predictably, I have no telephone or internet connection at home until sometime next week, so I'm having a bit of a holiday from blogging and blog-reading. Maybe next post I'll be more settled.

Sold!

I've just signed the contract for the sale of the apartment my family and I have lived in for 25 years. I feel as if I should be feeling some deep and significant emotion but my main feeling so far is just relief that the process of selling is complete. It's been sold for a satisfactory price - not world-shattering, but a bit more than we were anticipating.

I now have 42 days before final settlement. That's 6 weeks to pack and sort and work out just how much I can take to my new apartment and what to do with the things I can't take. I imagine that over the next few weeks there'll be lots conflicting emotions - excitement at moving on to another stage of my life and some melancholy at all that I seem to be leaving behind.

A big day (and not only because today we have a new Prime Minister who's a woman).

Shoes & socks

I was up early today to cope with a busy morning. A visit to the local market to buy flowers for home, a haircut, final preparation of the apartment for its last open inspection prior to its auction next weekend, an overdue but wonderful visit to the remedial masseur to deal with my neck, my hips and my right heel (I hate the way my body is ageing), and then lunch with neighbours.

On busy days like this I reach for comfort clothes, which today included my favourite hand-knit socks and very battered falling-apart old Trippen shoes, much in need of shoe polish.

It wasn't till lunch-time that I noticed that



it was a great way to show off the patterned toes of my Nancy Bush Welsh Country Stockings.

June busy summary
Bunches of flowers bought 5 (well, one is a pot of cyclamen)
Number of rows knitted - socks 175; blanket 1.5 rows of 650+ stitches plus one round of 3 stitch i-cord cast-off; cardi 40
Time spent tidying up 10 hours
Films viewed 15

Guess what colour?

Yesterday after work I had a long meeting with Heather, the designer and project manager for my apartment renovation. Decisions, decisions... I don't think I've ever had to make so many decisions one after the other. Of course, many of the decisions were about colours. You probably need only one guess to know what colour will be used a lot - yes, shades of grey.

I've chosen deep charcoal grey for the bedroom and landing carpet; glossy dark grey tiles for the bathroom floor; an aubergine based grey for the laundry cupboards; blue muddied with grey for the bedroom walls and rich grey for the kitchen cupboards. There's also khaki and sand and warm driftwood and we're still debating a splash of colour on the wall near the steps - burnt orange? rich ochre? deep rose pink?

We're one week into the six week schedule and already a day ahead. So far, so good.

What a difference a day makes

After day 1 of demolition, this is what my apartment looks like:

Living room:



Where the kitchen used to be



View of the bedroom from what used to be the hallway.



What a difference a day makes!

Last night, Jody and I were able to intersperse the film festival with brief visits to knitting group, as the two venues were just across the street from each other.

We saw two films last night that Jody has already reviewed. The first, 'Women Without Men' is a German/Austrian/French collaboration, though made by a female Iranian film director. Over the last few years Iranian films in the SFF have always been interesting. Shirin Neshat, the director of this film, spent her childhood in Iran in a westernised family, but as a young women moved with her family to the USA, and then returned to spend long periods in Iran over the last twenty years. Her film is more frankly political than many films coming from within Iran, though still deeply concerned with issues such as women's responses to Islam. This film is set in 1953 when Britain and the USA joined with local forces to repress a freedom movement within Iran and reimpose a monarchical regime. The crowd scenes of demonstrations in grand Parisian-style boulevards and enclosed narrow lanes are wonderful and had me wondering just where the film had been shot (the answer is Morocco). This political focus, which I really enjoyed, was interwoven with a much more indirect and 'magical' focus on the lives of four women, that Jody's described well. This is another film (like Moloch Tropical) where the parts work better than the whole. A 3.5 out of 5.

The second film we saw, 'Winter's Bone', had already won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. It's quite a conventional film, with a strong narrative from beginning to end, and with a courageous, admirable central character whose fate we care for deeply. But it's also perfectly paced, subtly and convincingly acted and beautifully photographed and edited . The central character is a young woman, who at 17 cares for her two younger siblings and catatonic mother in a destitute, drug-ridden, isolated community in the Missouri Ozarks. It's the kind of community in which your family is vital for survival, but also brings you the greatest danger. The film's confronting and challenging, though it does have an ending that's about as happy as you might be able to conjure up in the circumstances. Probably a 4 out of 5.

June busy summary
Bunches of flowers bought 3 (well, one is a pot of cyclamen)
Number of rows knitted (socks) 125 (blanket) 1.75 rows of 650+ stitches
Time spent tidying up 7.5 hours
Films viewed 8

Before

Demolition begins tomorrow on the kitchen and bathroom - and some internal walls - of the apartment to which I'm planning to move. So, some rather boring photographs to capture the 'before' of all the planning and work.

The long, boring hallway



the living room, with high ceilings and lovely trees outside the very large windows



the kitchen, off the living room, with its very 80s laminate cupboards and tiles



the boring bedroom



and bathroom that could be in an early 80s museum with its deep blue plastic accents.



I had another meeting with Heather, the designer / project manager, today. Both of us love colour, and we have great difficulty making decisions about all the practical matters and not veering off into colour fantasies. But we are getting there. Masses of storage everywhere, and redesigning spaces to make them more interesting, but functional.

I'll keep you posted.

Two days

This blog-a-day malarky is hard. It's wearing me out. I'm too tired and busy to think coherently, but in any old order this was my day, yesterday, and my day, today.

Mondays are my non-paid-work day, so many things that can't be done on weekends get scheduled on Mondays.

I went to the dentist to have a filling and a bit of tooth that departed my mouth with the filling, replaced. One of the many bad points about aging is that your teeth wear out. Mine weren't very good to start with and at this stage of my life I think there are more fillings than teeth. For several years I've not needed to schedule check-ups with the dentist because my fillings fall out at sufficiently regular intervals to serve the same purpose.

Plumbers and electricians (the 'tradies') came to see and quote on the renovation work for the apartment to which I'm moving. The builder came to survey the scene and measure up. The designer had a meeting with me and drew up another draft plan of the renovation to be considered by the Executive Committee of my Owners' Corporation.

If all goes well, demolition of the bathroom and kitchen will start in the next couple of days. Wow! very whizz-bang.

One of the plumbers swapped the dishwasher in the apartment I presently live in for the one to which I'm moving. I thought I'd never recover from my affection for my dead dishwasher, but in the year I've had my present one I've grown very attached. Too attached to leave it behind.

I cast on for my next pair of 2010 Personal Sock Club Socks and knitted about 6 rounds between various renovation matters.

I went to see 'Lola' at the Sydney Film Festival. This is a Filipino film directed by Brillante (Dante) Mendoza, whose previous film 'Kinatay' (Massacre) won the 'best director' award at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival. Mendoza's films are very much in the social realist tradition. 'Lola' is the Filipino term for grandmother, and the two grandmothers at the centre of this film are linked through the murder of one grandson by the other. Money, and the financial transactions necessary to bury one grandson and save the other from a life in prison, tie the film together. But the role of the grandmothers in holding their vulnerable families together is also vital. Like 'The Last Train' that I saw on Sunday, this film, with its daily struggle to maintain life with some dignity, is painful to watch. I loved that it was filmed in the rainy season when the claustrophobia of the downpours heightens the intensity of interactions and when the flooded streets of certain parts of Manila have a dreamy, ritualistic appearance. A 4 out of 5.

Today I've been at work. There's nothing much more to be said. Pleasant enough, but unremarkable.

And this evening I've chaired a meeting of the Executive Committee of our building's Owners' Corporation. I like the idea of living in a building that's managed by a group of its residents, where we all have to cooperate to ensure that our common interests are well met. Sometimes it's difficult to agree on just what our common interests are and on the best actions to take to serve these interests, but so far we've had a relatively amicable community. Just now we have a huge building maintenance project under way that's posing some difficult decisions - but even so it's going well and is nearing completion

And yes, the Executive Committee did approve my renovation plans. Now the work can commence.

I'm going to knit for a few minutes and go to bed.

Out with the old; in with the new.

Now that the apartment in which I've lived for the last twenty-five years is formally on the market there's nothing much I can do about it for the next few weeks except keep it very clean and phenomenally tidy for open inspections; buy bunches of flowers to decorate it (most pleasurable); and keep my fingers crossed that someone - or preferably two competing someones - will want it enough to pay lots of money for it.

So, my thoughts are inevitably turning to my new home. I'm not moving very far; just to another apartment in the same building. I'll keep all the things I like about where I live - particularly its convenience and my neighbours. But I'm moving to a much smaller apartment, and I'm finally having to face up to the fact that I can't take everything with me. I'm not much of a consumer. I'm the kind of person who wears clothes for more than ten years, expects electrical appliances to last forever, and feels affronted when the 24 year old dishwasher finally stops functioning. Most of my furniture is old - just old, not antique - and I feel emotionally attached to it, but I also know that not everything will fit in my new apartment. I have china and glassware and old photos I brought from my mother's house when she died, but I know that if I wish to keep these, other things will have to go. And I have to cull my collection of books by at least half - maybe more.

The smaller apartment to which I'm moving needs renovation. I'm not even sure if renovation is the right word, because everything needs to be done - a new bathroom, a new kitchen, new lighting, new floor-coverings, lots of storage. I'm sensible enough to know that I could never manage this project by myself, so there's a designer with whom I've worked before who will manage this rather overwhelming project for me. We had our first meeting yesterday evening - more than two hours in which we achieved a great deal, though there are still many decisions to be made and I have been given homework to do. We're hoping to start the demolition next week and have the whole job finished in 8 to 10 weeks.

So my head is full of tap designs and timber flooring and paint colours and tiles and questions such as 'do I need a microwave? will my sofa fit comfortably? can I manage with a (much) smaller wardrobe? 'where will the paintings hang?' and, of course, 'how much will it all cost?'

I'll keep you posted.

Flowers

I'm not a Pollyanna. I don't believe that every cloud has a silver lining, and the sentimental platitude that when one door closes another door opens sets my teeth on edge. Even so, I think it's useful to try to maximise the pleasurable aspects of any disagreeable or difficult tasks you have to do.

Today my apartment had its first open inspection, prior to selling. I've been thinking about this course of action for so long that I'm quite reconciled to selling up and moving on, but there are some less than pleasant parts to this process - it's taken a lot of time and energy to make and keep the apartment spic and span, and I'm trying not to think about my domestic tastes and choices being so open to inspection and judgement by the general public.

Even so, there are small unexpected pleasures. Normally, I'm a bit reluctant to spend much money on cut flowers. But you all know that one of the first pieces of advice (wise or not) for people preparing their houses for sale is to display fresh flowers. While I'm cynical about lots of the selling advice I've received, I've obeyed this dictum with great pleasure.

Today I bought tulips from the Eveleigh markets:



I suspect they have horrendous airmiles or other environmentally unsustainable growing practices attached to them as tulips don't flourish in Sydney's climate, and anyway this is not the season for tulips grown anywhere in Australia. But they're seductively lovely.

And I still have some dusty pink lilies and grey-blue-green gumleaves that I bought last week.



I'm going to enjoy having an excuse for flower buying over the next few weeks and am already planning some purchases and variations on arrangements and placing. But I might try in future to buy flowers that are locally seasonal - too much guilt would undermine the pleasure.

Busyness

Urgh! I know it can't be possible, but I feel as if I've unravelled twice as much as I've knitted in the last few weeks. The main case in point is the Brooklyn Tweed baby blanket I've been knitting.



I've been having such trouble with the simple feather-and-fan edging. All was going well till the second repeat of the yarn-overs and knit-two-togethers. I just couldn't get them to line up correctly with the previous row. I pulled the knitting back twice to try to remedy it - no mean feat when you have around 650 stitches each round of knitting - but to no avail. In frustration, I decided the error may be with the original row of feather-and-fan, so I unravelled almost back to the beginning of the edging and then laboriously picked up 650 stitches. I'm now counting and checking and recounting and rechecking to make sure the stitches are all exactly where they should be.

Knitting has, however, taken second place to sorting and cleaning and what is fashionably called de-cluttering over the last week or so. The apartment had its photo-shoot this morning (yes, everybody does seriously talk about it as a 'photo-shoot') in preparation for going on the market at the end of this week. I don't think the place has ever been so clean. It's certainly never been as neat as it was this morning. For someone as untidy as I am, the challenge will be keeping it in this state over the next few weeks of potential buyer inspections.

And I have a cold. I almost never have colds, so I think this is my immune system telling me I'm being challenged by all the changes in my life just now. But despite the cold I feel pleased that the process of selling the apartment is finally under way, and excited about the possibilities of creating a new living space.

Seeing youself through others' eyes

Occasionally you find yourself in a situation where you see yourself or some aspect of your life through others' eyes. It's always disconcerting.

I had such a moment today. I'm trying to choose a real estate agent to sell my apartment and today one came to view it and tell me what he and his company have to offer (for a significant fee). The agent was most polite and professional, but having him assess my apartment and its arrangement and its character for their commercial value made me see it from a new perspective.



I really had to restrain myself from rushing to justify to him why the apartment is the way it is - that I've lived here a long time; that I love colour; that many of the objects and furnishings have valued associations; that I don't care about being up with the latest fashion; that it needs to be thoroughly de-cluttered (to use the current term). I had to keep telling myself that it doesn't matter what he thinks about the apartment as long as he'll put energy into selling it - that his judgment about my choices doesn't matter. But the thought of having potential buyers and real estate voyeurs traipse through, seeing the place through their eyes, is disturbing.

It's odd, isn't it, that such an encounter can make you feel insecure and defensive. Normally I'm quite content with my taste and style - well, at least content enough not to spend too much time, energy and emotion worrying about such things.

I expect this is just the first of a number of encounters in selling and moving that will make me self-conscious about my style and choices. I'm going to have to work to find a way of thinking about all this that brings some pleasure, or else it will be a very self-doubting few months.

Home

Last Friday - December 11 - marked 25 years since we moved into our apartment.



It's a long time to have lived in one place. I think I have an image of myself as someone who's not particularly attached to a place, so I'm surprised to realise I've lived here so long. So much has happened in that time. We came here as a family - parents and two children. But the children have grown up and moved away and the marriage unravelled. When we came here I was part of the 'middle generation' - my parents and parents-in-law were all still alive and we seemed to be in the centre of all the comings and goings of family relationships. I'm now part of the oldest generation and inevitably the centre of relationships is shifting.

Lots of birthdays and Christmases, and some births, deaths, marriages and separations.

We will sell the apartment next year. For me, this won't be a huge change as I'm going to move to a smaller apartment in the same building. I'll have the same neighbourhood and will keep all the things I like about the suburb in which I live.

But, inevitably, it will feel like the end of an era for our family. In fact, it will be the end of an era. I'm pleased that my daughter, son-in-law and grand-daughter will share this last Christmas in the apartment with me. It's impossible to dwell only on the past and not look to the future when you have small children around.

Patterns

I'm sure there must be many psychological theories that try to explain the mental pattern-making we all engage in to make sense of our world. At one extreme, I guess this pattern-making results in elaborate conspiracy theories and hypotheses about the power of aliens in our world. My own mental pattern-making is at the mild end of the spectrum, and mostly exhibits itself in pleasurably observing the way apparently unrelated incidents come together to make patterns.

I've had a bit of a Scandinavian pattern happening lately. (Immediately I wrote this sentence I felt rather self-conscious. Do people from the various countries that make up the entity I think of as 'Scandinavia' resent being lumped together under this label? I'm sufficiently aware of some of the cultural, historical and language differences between Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Iceland to feel some discomfort with this over-arching category. I'd be interested in any comments).

When I participated in the backtack 4 swap last year I had a Danish partner, Anne. I enjoyed her Ravelry site and her blog and found her knitting delightful - frequently using Danish patterns with a style that is quite distinctive. From my interest in Anne's work I started reading (or rather, sometimes just looking at the pictures) on other Danish and Finnish blogs. Some of the Danish knitters were knitting enviable designs by Helga Isager from Amimono,



so I've purchased some of these patterns and am working up courage and energy to knit in the rather fine yarns they require.

In the meantime I've been knitting from time to time on Baktus, a most pleasurable garter-stitch project that's a free, simple pattern from Strikkelise, a Norwegian knitter.



I've blogged about my captivation by Swedish crime fiction, and , more recently, my pleasure in reading Icelandic author Ardaldur Idridason, so I'm often imaginatively engaged with Scandinavian landscapes.

But I think the Scandinavian pattern really began about six months ago when I bought a small cabinet for my living room.



It's a very simple cabinet by Danish designer Hans Wegner made in the 1960s for the Ry Mobler workshop in Denmark. It's made of oak and the interior is finished in beech. If one can fall in love with an object, I've fallen in love with my Danish cabinet.