My main content for today is quite brief, so I’m going to start by going off on a tangent, then slowly make my way back. So, here’s a thought. Though I know that music is very important and I like a nice tune, for me it has always the been lyrics which have drawn me in, which probably ties in with my enjoyment of poetry. When I was young I used to love capturing the lyrics of songs. I could spend happy hours playing tiny sections of a cassette then rewinding and replaying to get the words written down, and any cassette or record which included the lyrics within in its cover spread would be close to my heart. Is it any wonder, then, that I have gravitated towards a career where a reasonable amount of my time is spent transcribing the words that others speak? From learning shorthand, through taking telephone messages, minuting meetings, to the current world of recorded microsoft teams meetings, there has been some element of transcription in many of my jobs. I hadn’t made the connection back to my youthful lyric-hunting days until recently, but how gratifying to realise that all that effort in my youth was actually an apprenticeship and not a complete waste of time as it might have appeared to the casual observer.

I had a good weekend planned. I was going to knit. I was going to go grocery shopping and buy Easter treats. I was going to make a trifle. Then I woke up on Saturday morning with a painful wrist and so the weekend has gone by, filled with winces and creative ways of washing up with only one hand. It is beginning to ease now, with more movement, so a restful weekend has been beneficial. In the past I have been known to say I could lose the use of my left hand and not notice it because I am so strongly right-handed. Well, I know better now! My left hand clearly does a lot more work than I give it credit for.

Now, on to the main content – I finished the Nusfjord socks mid-week, long before the wrist pain set in. I did a little research into the name of the yarn which is from the Arne and Carlos “Lofoten” collection for the German yarn brand Regia. Lofoten is a region at the north-west of Norway and Nusfjord is a fishing village in the region. I got distracted by the information that a German board game designer named a fishing game after the village and it sounds rather fun. Anyone up for a quick round of ‘match your socks to your board game’? I’ve already found a shade called ‘Carcassone’ from Yellow Van Yarns.

I’m happy with the fit, feel and look of these socks, and the colours are very much in my comfort zone with the blues and pinks. They are nice and bright and totally in tune with the current weather here in eastern England – lovely sunshine tempting you to think you’re going to be a bit too warm in your winter clothes, then turning out to be incredibly chilly when you’re stuck half an hour waiting for the bus. It’s a while yet before we’ll be abandoning our wool socks in this neck of the woods.

I’m expecting these socks to be on the better-wearing end of the spectrum as commercial 75% wool/25% manmade sock yarns tend to be. It’s pretty hard not to turn out a serviceable pair of everyday socks using these yarns and the most basic of sock patterns, although I have managed to fail on odd occasions. Now, though, these can go off to sit in my sock drawer and, once my wrist has repaired itself, I can press on with my sleeveless cardigan. Even though my heart is still in sock mode and nudging me to cast on that Rico sock yarn I bought a couple of weeks ago. We don’t listen to our hearts, do we? We are made of sterner stuff. Just lucky those aliens abducted me in the pre-dawn hours and messed with my wrist, that’s all I can say, because otherwise I’d have another pair of socks on the needles right now.