Gobble gobble munch munch

Well, after reading quite a lot of Jon Ronson, I delved back into fiction with one from the Shelf of Unread Things - One Moment, One Morning by Sarah Rayner. People thrown together by a random event makes for a readable concept, but this one suffered slightly (for me at least) from the fact that the thrown-together people were all women with a variety of relationship issues. I don't think I'm spoiling it for you by saying that said relationship issues were all solved, or in that optimistic "healing" phase, by the end of the novel. And if I'm honest, at least one of them could have been solved a whole lot sooner than that, prompting me to get slightly irritated with one of the characters until she grew up and realised what everyone else had known all along. Still, it was readable and mildly interesting, so I'm not going to complain.

It did get me thinking about trash fiction, though, and things you can digest in very little time at all. As a teenager I used to read a lot of American series crime fiction, which often serves that purpose. One of my favourites was the Peter Decker series by Faye Kellerman, because the detective, as a result of events in the first novel, becomes and marries an Orthodox Jew, and the books are full of well-researched details about the religious life and how he makes it work with his job, which makes the novels interesting as well as being extremely readable cop stories. I looked them up, just out of interest. I thought it might be nice to read one for old times sake. Unfortunately for my bank account, here's where a Kindle and wifi access get dangerous - I've read 3 in 4 days and have just downloaded the fourth. It was a lot cheaper when I used to get them out of the library. Though in my defence, it was a lot harder to read them in order.

Metaphor

After a bit of a hiatus in favour of a sofa throw for the boyfriend's new house, I've picked up the little tiny fox feet again. (Not that the sofa throw is in any way finished, you understand, but it's big wool on big needles with a pretty but fairly mindless pattern, and I missed the intricacies of the fox feet.) Picking it up again after several weeks away, I've been reminded of the experience of knitting the very first repeat of the pattern, when I had no idea what I was doing and how it was going to work. Because this pattern gets ugly. If you click on the link and look at the photo, you can see how it knots itself up into lumps. At this stage in the repeat, there's none of the 'give' that you normally get in knitting. It's tight and lumpy and makes your hands ache after half a row. And when I first saw it looking like that, it was a real leap of faith to keep going. I thought maybe, best case scenario, it would eventually be fine after some serious blocking. Worst case scenario? Maybe I was using the wrong size needles. Maybe my tension was completely off. Maybe I was just going to end up with a colourful disaster of knotted string. But for some reason (sheer stubbornness?) keep going I did, and... well, you've seen how it turned out. Today it struck me as a good metaphor for life. Sometimes it gets ugly. Sometimes you just have to keep knitting.