Cliff walking

This weekend was a bank holiday weekend, which means, for those of you not familiar with the term, that Monday is a public holiday, a long weekend. On Saturday I drove down to the Kentish coast to visit my father, who left the big smoke a couple of years ago for the wide open spaces and fresh sea air.

Cliff-walking

We had such a fun day. We started with a pot of tea at the National Trust centre on the white cliffs, where I whipped out a sock (appropriately enough, a new pair I'm making for mon père) and knitted quite happily watching the ferries come and go. Then we walked along the cliffs; the sea was quite grey, but as you can see from the photos, everywhere else was beautifully green, and there were pretty wild flowers growing in the chalk, something you definitely don’t see in the city.

Overlooking the docks

We drove westwards along the coast, stopping to eat fish and chips on the beach and feel the calming influence of the sea. Then, in the evening, I accompanied my father to his bowls club for their annual prize-giving ceremony followed by a dinner and dance. I am extraordinarily proud of him, not only for receiving a medal in something he has only picked up in the past year or so, but for assimilating into and making new friends in the local community.

During the day I had felt quite sleepy, but we had put it down to the sea air. However, in the evening, I started to have brief giddy moments, and when I drove back to London later, I got lost coming off the motorway, a trip I have made countless times, but my normally reliable sense of direction failed me completely, and I took several wrong turnings and for a while drove further away from London, before I finally got back on track. Turns out I wasn’t feeling too well, and I spent the rest of the weekend in bed. On Tuesday, I called in to say I would work from home that day, but as it turned out, I slept until mid-afternoon! Anyway, all this rambling is to explain why, despite a luxurious four-day weekend, I have no knitting to show you, because a) my camera batteries are dead and b) it's remarkable how sleeping for three days and nights can ruin your productivity.

For the record, I have picked up all 768 stitches of PotW and completed the eyelet rounds, in so doing, increasing the stitch count. This does not appear to accord with Eunny’s instructions, but I have read and re-read them till my head hurts and I still don't see how you can NOT increase the number, so I shall forge ahead and start the border. Hmm, I see much fudging ahead. [This dreadful picture was taken with my phone, and the colour is way, way off the deep ruby red in real life.]

Finally, when I opened the door this evening for some pizza delivery [!], I found a package from Amazon containing the iPod I'd ordered on Friday. It was a wonderful, marvellous surprise, and I'm very excited and now looking forward to going back to work tomorrow to start downloading (since it will take forever and a day on my home dial-up).

Actually, I'm writing as though it's Tuesday night, it is in fact Wednesday morning, and I need to be up in three or four hours, so I'll sign off for now, and hopefully return soon with some actual knitting content!