My First Tension Square. Relatively loose (“for a beginner”), and quite controlled but hardly square. It’s difficult to knit, listen and chat. Regulars at the group say that they save work to bring in, stuff they don’t have to particularly focus on. The source of my tension, some might find it relaxing, but it is a complex series of knots nonetheless. Ten rows of ten stitches leaves me shellshocked in admiration for the person who took up two sticks and a length of string and created those first few stitches.
I thought this might be as far as I would get, but this week I have spent more time than usual in front of the computer working out how to Cast On. It was recommended that I use You Tube knitting videos as a guide. Hilarious. Lots of different ways of casting on, lots of different forms of presentation. Language and terminology I have never heard before.
Braided. Knit Half-Hitch. Standard. Tubular. Double Needle. Chain. Chain Crochet. Turkish. Circular. Magic. Knit-on. Twisted German. Wrap. Backward-Loop. Long Tail. Continental. Single. Double. Cable. Old Norwegian. Provisional. Invisible. Looped. Alternate cable.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=5T43J_cYlSU
www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAeSIlEQaZU&feature=related
According to Tigg who was told this by the travel writer Pete McCarthy (it must be true) the post box nearest to my flat is one of the oldest in the country. Next to what was once a rather eccentric greetings card shop it has now morphed into a pretty reasonable late night, fast food takeaway; with contrasting bins.
Looking around the city, talking about, drawing and measuring up post boxes I have come to realise that there are quite major differences to their designs. What I think of as A Pillar Box is the National Standard pillar box (1859) but there are many variations. It was Anthony Trollope, the novelist, a Post Office surveyor at the time who first introduced them, to the Channel Islands in 1853. These were red, but subsequent post boxes were painted dark green.
In an attempt to unify the design a factory in Birmingham was asked to be the manufacturer. Unfortunately the instructions they were given were wrongly measured, so the first four boxes were eight feet (2.4 metres) tall. It also had a vertical slot for the letters.
www.postalheritage.org.uk/history
Marital infidelities in French ‘end of the (last) century’ novels are maintained via Le Petit Blue, a pneumatic postal network that ran around central Paris from mid nineteenth century until the 1980’s. Though I’ve got the occasional glimpse of them in department stores and banks I had thought it was only a French thing but apparently the ‘Despatch’ system was developed for banking information in London, where there were on-street pneumatic post boxes and even pneumatic links into people’s homes. You placed your letter into a large lead capsule then they were then blown to the next station. There was even a human scale version tested between Holborn and Euston. In New York someone built a secret pneumatic mail system that went under Broadway. NASA’s Houston control center used them during the first moon landings. Prague still has a 55km network of piping in place but it is inoperative due to flood damage a couple of years ago.
www.dself.dsl.pipex.com/MUSEUM/COMMS/pneumess/pneu…
Quite a Sebaldian day. On a mission across town to see a friend, went into the grim building in which he works, up the lift, knocked on the door of his office. “Come in” only to be confronted by a room full of hand made shoes, some very elaborate. Baffling. A seriously pale woman emerged from behind some sheleves, asked me if I was OK, I explained that I was looking for Mick, had he left? She said that I had got the wrong floor, he was directly above. As I went back along the corridor, she called me back, “Are you Jonathan Swain, did you ever live at 55 Vere Rd?”, “No” “That’s odd, I lived there for about five years, we were getting mail delivered with your name all the time, no-one ever collected it. It’s probably still there.” she wrote the address down on the back of a card. Curiously when I mentioned this incident to Mick later, he looked at the photograph and said that he had actually met ‘Max’ Sebald whilst paddling in the sea at Clacton.
