Unravelling
This week has been pffffffff….
A lot.
Such a lot. There’s been climate grief and panic writ LARGE1. There’s been family stuff kicking off all over the place. There’s been the doing of work and the planning of future work. There’s been trying to finish a zine and explaining to various operators of industrial photocopiers why I need copies of my zine artwork to be made without borders ( I failed utterly in this task) because minizines sans frontières simply don’t fold properly. There have been epic quantities of rose petals to be plucked and dried and bagged in advance of our eldest daughter’s wedding.
There’s been a Scottish Green Party post-election meeting that felt as if it lasted at least three aeons and there’s been a house full of family to feed on an infinitesimally small income and…
I’m overwhelmed by the scale of the task at hand. The task? How to spin all the plates and bat all the curved balls and, and, and, and all the while retaining some measure of myself in the onrushing tide.
I’d love to say that I meditate every morning and by so doing, achieve some kind of inner quietude, but alas…
Currently, my primitive brain is jumping around like a deranged primate, gibbering to itself, clawing at its armpits and occasionally emitting a high-pitched shriek. Meditation? Are you EEEEEEEeeeeeeEEEEE kidding? In this economy?
I feel like creating a new tarot card: The Scattered Human. There’s too much coming at me to process, and before you prescribe the offline solution, trust me, I’d hurl my little Black Rectangle of Doomtm down the cludgie2 were it not for the fact I need it for so many facets of Life Inc. that I’m seriously considering having it stapled permanently to the palm of my hand.
But that would make it impossible to knit things, and currently, knitting things is my last bastion of sanity in a rapidly unravelling ( see what I did th- oh, never mind) world. But even there, even in the woolly goodness of the endless knitting project list, even there I come up against some form of decision fatigue. In knitting, as in so many things, I’m cautious. I swatch till I’m sure the designer and I are on exactly the same page, stitchwise. I am continually aghast at the number of fellow knitters who bypass this step entirely, sallying forth into uncharted territory with an airy ‘it’ll be fine’ as they trust that their hold and grip and twist of each stitch will exactly duplicate those of the original designer.
What? Like what are they smoking? One’s gauge ( ie how tightly or loosely we knit) is a. highly personal and b. influenced by one’s mental state at any given moment. The fabric I create after two glasses of wine is nothing like the same as the one I squeak my way through after a difficult day wrangling online with the demons of buffering, screen freezes and the rainbow spinny ball of doom.
So this week, my sole knitting output was swatch after swatch as I swore and fumbled my way through four cable-knit samples in search of alignment with the original design. Four. Dear gawd, I don’t get out much, do I?
None of them worked.
The whole thing made me want to have a fit of the stampies and shriekies, but I bottled that up ( so good for me, all that suppressed knitrage) and went off to look at other projects3.
So much for knitting as a form of relaxation. There has also been recourse to chocolate and alcohol, both applied orally, but to be brutally honest, they’re band-aids, not cures for what ails me. Which is… well, there’s the thing. What exactly does ail me?
Paging Dr Purr. Come in, Dr Purr.
Oh NO. Dr Purr’s got it too. Whatever ‘it’ is. The main symptom being that even the combined caffeinated outputs of three French presses, one Bialetti, one Aeropress and a Melitta dripper wouldn’t shift the dial by as much as one Z on the Get-up-and-Go-o-Meter. Yes, that.
In the absence of my favourite feline physician, I’m going to self-diagnose. I think I’m coming down with a galloping case of 2026-itis. I’ve tried yoga, more sleep, daily constitutionals among trees and leafy things, an obnoxiously healthy diet and the company of good friends but in the face of the endless Godawful which so many of our fellow beings are undergoing, my efforts to find purpose and joy in the everyday feel…well…futile and self-serving.
But…I had a start the week catch-up with Agent P from Holroyde Cartey in which, amongst many good related-to-work things, she said, and I quote: ‘We are doing important work here,’
She’s absolutely right. What could be more important in the face of the ongoing Godawful than making comforting books for small people to share at bedtime? To invent a place called Hushnow where all beings live together in a chaotic but kindly neighbourliness? If you build it, it WILL come. Not hopium but hopeful comfort for small people who haven’t yet been ground down to nubbins by Life Inc.
And hopefully never will be.
So if you’ll excuse me - I have Very Important Work To Do.
I went to a screening of the National Emergency Briefing at our local library. It wasn’t fiction. It’s a collection of climate scientists presenting evidence of the Awful State of Things and attempting “to build an irresistible call for the (UK) Government to stage a televised emergency briefing, the essential first step towards the WW2-scale response now required.”
It was so urgent and frightening that I found myself holding my breath for large sections of the science. It was clear, it was compelling and it is an emergency. Chris Packham was a perfect choice as presenter - a bit like getting the very bad scan result from your favourite uncle. The film managed to balance existential terror with a clear call to action. It’s not too late to act but we need to get cracking asap.
We ( that’s all of us) need to arrange more screenings for the public until enough momentum is created by concerned citizens demanding that their MPs take action towards screening the whole film across all broadcast TV networks. The website explains how to do this.
One of the takeaway quotes ran something like ‘ You are currently experiencing the best/most stable weather/climate of your lifetime.’
Tell that to the farmers. Tell it to the flood-displaced citizens of low-lying land masses. Tell it to the Los Angelenos whose houses burned to the ground. This is the most stable climate we’ll ever know.
Watch the film. Take action. And please, hurry UP, we no longer have the luxury of time.
Toilet in demotic Scots. AKA, the Big China Telephone.
The next day, in full sunlight ( yes - amazing, Scotland can perform this meteorological miracle) I recounted the stitches across all four swatches. Ah. Turns out, swatch two down was pretty near as dammit bang on. HUZZAH! Let us now proceed to yarn purchasing…
I'm an "it'll be fine" no-swatcher... but I have done a LOT of unravelling in my time. Maybe one day I'll do the sensible thing!
What a lot going on! I know the overwhelm feeling too, and I thought the second swatch on your lovely photo was the one that worked best for stitch definition so felt smug when I read later on that it was the one closest to the pattern. I always knit swatches for anything with proportions that matter so I'm with you there. And yes, making picture books is very important work! The rose petals look glorious.