Cheerily cherry

A few weeks ago Nadine and I were discussing the guilty pleasure of looking into people’s houses as you pass by them on the bus, glimpsing lives lived through brief moments at their windows, seconds spent on uninvited house tours.  The other thing I love about travelling by double-decker bus is the people watching it affords.  From the top deck you have a ring-side birds’-eye view of the people waiting at the stop, and I’ve often come home after a simple bus journey inspired by outfits I’ve seen or – even better – knitted items!

The other day I saw a really beautifully dressed girl at the bus stop.  She had her hair piled on top of her head and was wearing large black-framed Prism spectacles, a black pea-coat, skinny maroon jeans and black patent loafers.  (In case I read back over these posts in my dotage I’d better remind my future self that this is what the cool kids are wearing in London these days).  What really made her outfit, though, was her mustard-coloured scarf.  Wide and light, it looked hand-knit in a pattern of simple, graphic rows.  I peered closer.  It was … garter stitch.

So, this is what I’m knitting my sister for Christmas.  She asked for a very plain scarf, and chose this cherry-red wool when we went to Bath’s Christmas Market a few weeks ago, from Wool, a lovely welcoming yarn shop we happened across by stumbling down a cobbled lane.  The simplest possible knit, I am enjoying its repetitive, soothing mindlessness, but it does make me feel like a newbie, knitting row after row of plain garter in this primary colour – and strangely, somehow, incompetent.

I’d better go and make myself a complicated hat.

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