A Busy Few Days

Sorry for the lack of posts for the last few days. It's been a bit hectic here.

Normal service will now be resumed, and I have good excuses!

Firstly we went to an auction on Saturday where we bought books (as usual) and also all sorts of woolly wonders.
This is just a small part of the haul, some of which is destined for sale on eBay and some of which is going in my stash.

Then on Sunday we had a day out on the Walsall Canal, courtesy of John (sadly blogless) who is slowly making his way towards Yorkshire on the canal network. We met up with him North of Birmingham and helped him through Walsall. Sadly, while many parts of the canal network are flanked with beautiful scenery or great canalside architecture, none of these places are in Walsall. The canal through Walsall seems to be flanked mostly by industrial estates or derelict factories or burnt out buildings. You could have furnished several houses with the things that we saw in the canal - sofas, fridges, all manner of stuff. Still the sun was shining (for at least part of the day) and it was still good to get out on the boat and see some bits of Walsall I'd never seen before. I did remember the camera, though I had the old camera which has a dodgy battery (as I am not beyond dropping things into water if it's at all possible) so there weren't many pictures taken before the battery drained itself - also there wasn't much you'd have wanted to see - unless you especially like the derelict and ramshackle. Anyway here is Pete at the tiller of the Gemma Joy at Birchills locks (where some helpful little toerags had drained all the water out of the locks). Behind him is Smith's Flour Mill, possibly the only interesting building we passed all day - now destined to be designer apartments.

I've been selected as a reader reviewer for the Simon Mayo Show on Radio Five this week. So, I've been reading Runt by Niall Griffiths. You can probably hear me on the radio on Thurday between 3pm and 4pm sometime (although last time I did anything like this something more newsworthy happened and shunted the book reviews back so I was on for about 5 seconds.) I'll post a review of the book on the blog after the show.

Anyway now that I've read that book, with the most pressing deadline, (I only got it on Saturday, thankfully it was quite short), I am back on the Robert Goddard which I will hopefully finish this week.

I've been failing miserably with Project Spectrum. I'm still knitting the same three dull things I was at the beginning of the month. So, in the interests of at least playing lipservice to more colour here are some BLUEberry Muffins (there were more but some got eaten)........