The sunflower yellow S-bahn arced its way around an elevated sweep of railway, like a welcoming smile on platform 15 of the Berlin Hauptbanhof. There’s a disarming low-key-ness to arriving in a new country by train – no passports, luggage collection or international arrivals paraphernalia – just a platform change for the metro to finish the journey. It was 7am… Read more →
Waterloo station had never looked so woolly. It wasn’t a yarn bombing event, but ten minutes until the departure of the 10am train to Farnham, home of the Unravel Festival of Knitting. Right, left and centre on the grand station concourse, there were sweatered, beanied and shawl-wrapped knitters waiting for the platform announcement. I felt a pang of self consciousness… Read more →
With April Foolery nonsense safely behind us (and our dreams of a 4 storey wool shop on Oxford Street still floating around on a cloud for someone else to make real one day), I’m happy to say that this week’s newsletter is firmly anchored at feet-on-the-ground-street-level. There’s very little I regret about the change I made when I decided to… Read more →
It goes back to a Saturday evening in Barcelona about a year ago. We all sat around a table in a dimly-lit restaurant: an embroiderer, a piano restorer, a sweater designer, a creator of extraordinary knitted animals and a shopkeeper. Each of us had made a different journey to get there – mine came in the thinly veiled guise of… Read more →
I was on the 13.28 train to Norwich. The train was pulling away and I had to decide if it was going to be a reading or a knitting kind of journey. The novel’s main character had just begun to get under my skin so the book won. I removed the knitting pattern which was folded inside to keep it… Read more →
It was the Thursday before going away, and the Unfortunately.. Fortunately.. game started playing out in real life. Unfortunately the postman arrived early and Vi didn’t manage to get all the parcels into the sack. One was left over. Fortunately it was a Norfolk postcode Melton Constable address, which was exactly where we were headed the following Saturday. Unfortunately Google Maps didn’t recognise the address. Fortunately we found an… Read more →
