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So I gave myself a day off. Just a bit of Etsying in the morning (finishing off a cowl and some leg warmers and making up an order). Since then – ignoring the potential HOURS of work on the house – I have just been reading. All day. Curled up upstairs, with the occasional coffee raid.

I actually dipped into half a dozen books- more than in the photo, but those are the ones I settled on. I enjoy being a butterfly – I often have several different books on the go at once. There is always one in my bag – but that has to be a smallish paperback or it wouldn’t fit in the zip….Then there are quite a lot (!) around my bed. Heavier tomes stay in piles near the sofa…in fact it occurs to me that I don’t move my books that much, rather I seek them out by joining them wherever they happen to be!

Today I made a start on the two smaller books above but spent most time on the middle one, which I finished. A History of Ignorance (or, in fact, of ‘ignorances’). I had not realised how many historians were currently considering this topic, which turns out to be massive. Peter’s book above has such an impressive range of detailed examples – and elegantly written as always. A great read!

PS – he is giving a lecture on the same topic at the University (Sussex) tomorrow so I may learn even more!

Inside ‘the cathedral of the back streets’ that is. St Michael and All Angels, a well kept Grade 1 listed mid Victorian church in Brighton. Quite a contrast with yesterday’s offering – this building is rated as in the top 100 churches in England in Simon Jenkin’s ‘England’s Thousand Best Churches’. About 30 years after it was built an extension was added alongside – so it is sort of two churches in one, which does make an interesting interior.

But the best bit – not obvious from the exterior – has to be the Pre-Raphaelite stained glass, claimed to be the finest in Sussex. Work by William Morris, Burne-Jones, Ford Madox-Brown, Rossetti, and Philip Webb, amongst others.

I have been wandering around a few local churches again recently. So many of them tucked away in the back streets – often now disused or repurposed. You do get a sense of how central they were in the life of Victorian Brighton though.

Some are frankly depressing. This is St Andrews, in Waterloo street, once the parish church of Hove, serving the Brunswick Estate. I can just remember attending a service there.

You can’t even see inside it now – but the pungent smell of damp and decay reaches out to the street!

The photos at the top are a different story – more on those tomorrow.

To this:

Progress!

Back in position. It didn’t take long. I think I just wanted to see an Improvement – a concrete Result.

The rewards in teaching (still the best job in the world, by the way) can take a long time – about 5 to 7 years for academic achievement in secondary schools, though of course there are good moments along the way. But I think that is why I also feel the need to make stuff – the satisfaction of creating something tangible – from fleece to spun yarn to dye pots to hooks and needles to finished item in a couple of days.

Or even a super-shiny copper fish in a couple of hours!

The Christmas mugs. Lost. All 27 of them. In the house. It could only happen here.

But it does mean Christmas has arrived rather early, because I’m not letting them out of my sight again this year. We missed them.

My personal favourites are these:

Nothing to do with the designs – just that they are rather fine china, unlike most of the thick, clumping other ones.

I have a similar attitude to tea towels. Some of mine are quite embarrassingly coy (cute fluffy things) or tourist souvenir maps – but what they have in common is the fabric – 100% Irish linen every time. It’s getting much harder to find now – the mills closed in NI in the early 1990s. I have had a go at spinning linen – but I would need a lot more practice!