Should Auld Acquaintance be Forgot....

Well, the votes are in and most people preferred ‘a stash of knitters’, but there was some feeling out there for a ravel of knitters.

I was surprised that we all missed the obvious one – a yarn of knitters. This would work 2 ways (considering that most of us are, um, somewhat loquacious). We could also be a skein of knitters – so that would work, too.

Currently we have an old friend of mine staying for a few days. The Director and I have been friends since I was in Kindergarten and he was in grade 2. He is good looking, articulate, straight, witty, funny and a great cook. He is single.

His is also, I should point out, highly sought after, but rebuffs advances. He likes his urban life just the way it is. When he needs rural recreation he visits us and gardens. He weeds and prunes, mows and digs up thistles. The children adore his visits and he copes very well with small people following him around. We drink red wine and eat nice food. My husband gets on really well with him. In fact, on both occasions I was in hospital having children the Director came to stay and he and the Accountant went out for dinner and drank rather a lot of red.

This got me thinking about long relationships. Up until my 20s I complained that most of my relationships only lasted around 6 months (with a couple of exceptions which went on much too long!). Then I realised that I was too focussed on boy/girl love/romance relationships and that I wasn’t terribly good at those.

What I was good at was friendships. I put work into friendships. I had a number of friendships that had lasted decades. Many of my friends had been that way since I was 4, 5 or 6. They definitely outlasted romances. They also overcame living in different states and countries, they outlasted marriages (on their side, not mine). They outlasted fashion disasters, the sixties, seventies and eighties,nineties and noughties, careers and studies.

These friendships were both male and female. They were substantial and dynamic. A gap of a few years made very little difference to the quality of the relationship.

On one occasion, I hadn’t seen an old friend for more than 10 years. We slipped back into the friendship with no change in tempo – it was as if one of us had popped out for some milk.

These are not static friendships. They contain no competition (although there is occasionally friendly rivalry). They have no problem with different interests or priorities, even different politics. The wax and wane sometimes, but have remained the lodestone of my life. I value these friendships.

So while I am still pretty hopeless at romance, the Accountant and I started off as friends, then became best friends and then the romance followed. We are still best friends, but there’s always room for more friends, old and new.

So after all that, I am pretty good at relationships. They just weren’t the ones I was thinking of!

A Tinking of Knitters? A Purl of Knitters?

Just thought I’d get a head start on Shoesday! Found these in the local op-shop, never worn, $4! Red, Rosered, Red! That makes 4 pairs of red shoes in the last 2 months or so, a personal record! So why on earth am I wearing my aging green crocs today? I have no idea. Excuse me while I change!

The 7 things challenge reached a bit of a crescendo this weekend! I’ll put in my updates tomorrow – but a large chunk of the weekend was spent unwrapping stuff, looking at it and re-wrapping it and placing in boxes for the white elephant stall. I even managed to part with some books – more next weekend, I hope.

I have difficulty parting with books – even books I don’t like. The 2 exceptions to this were ‘Chung Quo’ which was so sexist and violent that I heaved it into a bin and the first Traci Harding book which I felt was lazy, poorly proofed and badly edited. That got heaved into a bin somewhere in Ireland (so disappointing when you hate your holiday reading). While backpacking through South East Asia in the 1980s I used to take James Clavell books – weighty, but a high swap value – and interesting to read. However, I met 2 favourite books in Singapore and refused to part with them – Mark Helprin’s ‘A Winter’s Tale’ and Raymond Feist’s ‘Magician’ – about 3 months before it reached Australia. I refused to part with them and carted them through Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia.

However, today’s post is not really about books. It’s really about collective nouns. I am a great collector of collective nouns – I love them. They’re a peculiarly English language thing, and a great drunken party game. You’ll remember some:
A gaggle of geese
A dabble of ducks
A murder of crows
A bumble of bears
An exaltation of larks
An unkindness of ravens
A shrewdness of apes
A sulk of foxes
A pride of lions, and so on.

The Princess's school diary has a whole page of these things – and I just love them. There are hundreds of these, and a favourite game after a few drinks is to invent new ones. (Yes, we are nerdy, Arabella, but someone has to be.)

Some of ours are
A corruption of politicians (sometimes changed to a headline of politicians)
An argument of lawyers
A plunger of plumbers
A shortness of jockeys
A rate of councillors
An investigation of police
A perseverance of farmers, and so on

Invent your own. A fun game for the whole family! Costs nothing!

So what are we? A tinking of knitters? A purl of knitters? Please not a frog of knitters? A whoredom of stashers? A spindle of dyers? A niddy noddy of spinners? A colour of dyers? What do you think?

Thinking of the lucky ducks that went for a road trip to Waratah fibres got me thinking about this. That and the fact that I still haven’t finished the mystery sock!