Come live with me and be my Lendrum

...and we will all the pleasures prove. It's here! It got here on Wednesday, 11/04/07, so it shares my father's birthday. I am totally in love with it, which is just as well - buying the most expensive item of your life, then waiting four months for it to arrive, is nervewracking. I'd never even seen a spinning wheel 'in the flesh' before. Would it cooperate with my cackhanded efforts? Would it turn into a three-foot wooden reproach, lurking in the living room, festooned with woolly tangles and mocking my recklessness in the pursuit of craft? Nah.

It's amazing. It's so much fun the rest of my life is threatening to disappear into a whirling vortex of wheel. Every stage of the process is so pretty. The things that happen to colours when you spin them with other colours are beautiful and always surprising. The camera has of course run out of batteries, so the parade of ever-less-lumpen skeins will have to wait. The wheel makes roving disappear really fast when you're used to a spindle. I'll have to get dying again.

Fungus the Bogeyman

Filth, filth, filth. Fungus the Bogeyman may have left too deep an impression on my infant mind. We are trying to get up the momentum to move house, which means digging ourselves out of our filthy flat and rendering it fit for inspection by landlords and their minions. We are a pair of mucky pups, and much of the mess is due to our minimal cleaning regime, but the level of stomach-churning squalor around us is also due to the sponge-like quality of this building, which is why we are leaving. There are some things that just should not be inside. Such as these: