I’ve been knitting squares. It started as a learning exercise more than anything else, just getting used to the rhythm of it, the feel of the needles, the small discipline of finishing something properly. At first it was uneven, a bit tentative. Then, somewhere along the way, it settled into something fairly neat and even... I’ve mostly been working with what I have: creams, a few greens, the occasional pink. I do have a rather severe purple, but I’ve decided against it. It feels too declarative. I’m more interested in something like damson which is quieter, and with a bit more depth. I don’t have the right one yet, but that seems part of the process as well: waiting until something actually fits, rather than filling the space for the sake of it. It made me think, in a very loose way, about local making, how people have always produced things where they are, often without much fuss or announcement. There was a local maker, Mary Walker, whose work still gets mentioned. I don’t kno...
The Green Knowe books have such a distinctive atmosphere. The old house sits at the centre of everything, and time there never feels fixed. Instead of dramatic time travel, the past seems to slip quietly into the present. In The Children of Green Knowe , when Tolly stays with his grandmother, he encounters the children who lived there centuries earlier; Toby, Alexander and Linnet: as if the house itself allows different periods to overlap. In The River at Green Knowe , Tolly experiences the house in the Middle Ages in the same gentle way. There’s no explanation or mechanism; the house simply seems to hold those earlier lives within it. That sense of time folding softly back on itself gives the stories their quiet enchantment. Inspired by Hemingford Grey Manor where the author lived, the house feels ancient, calm and full of memory; a place where the garden, river and rooms all carry traces of the past. It’s the kind of atmosphere that stays with readers for decad...