IT’S all about the gigabyte and ram, says our boy. He might as well be speaking ancient Greek. He lost me at giga… I know little about what makes a laptop fast but I’ve a PhD in making it run slow.
Surfing down the internet highway, many’s a large wave has rolled me off my surfboard.
He says defrag and I whisper fragmentation and drift off into the sorrows of the soul, grief, loss, despair, The Lady of Shalott and La Belle Dame Sans Merci. He rolls his eyes and returns to the laptop issue in hand.
He gazes in despair at the 5,396 emails I still have to read and delete. I sigh at the little box that pops up warning me of intruders and technical threats that will disappear if I will just hand over a fistful of dollars.
This is a brave new world and we’re lucky to have a techy whizz kid in the house to navigate us through it. We’re lucky when we run shrieking that we’ve just clicked a link and willed our earthly goods to a Nigerian prince, that he can sort it out.
But, we long for simpler times. And in such times as we are having, my inner Holly Hobby and Raggedy Annie want out to play. Give me homespun, play me John Denver, wrap me up in Dolly Parton’s coat of many colours.
I blame Bernie Sanders’s mittens. They were so homely, so cosy, so utterly opposite to la Trump, that everyone wanted them.
Bernie stopped shy of having a string attached to the wrist of each one that runs up one arm across the back of his neck and down the other and operates to keep the mittens together like your mamma did so you didn’t lose one.
One look at the mittens and you could whiff the apple pie set out to cool on the kitchen window sill, picture the fresh red and white checked cloth on the table, hear the bluebirds tweet from the apple blossom tree.
It’s a hark back to simpler times, a patchwork planet where home-made was the norm.
Those mittens sparked a craze that has America in its grip. Personally, I wouldn’t thank you for them. Maybe it was having to learn that poem about the little kittens that lost their mittens and they began to cry.
But mittens are not my thing even if they are a la Mr Sanders. Never the less, it’s the urge to do something creative that has me in its grip… to plant, to bake, to embroider a tablecloth.
It has led to hours on Etsy deciding the relative merits of various embroidery patterns… to buy a hoop or not to buy a hoop?
I want a Regency feel to my drawing room… a tight bodice and a piano to tinkle on of an evening while the gentlemen sip a post-dinner brandy in the library.
We fought for so long to drop the shackles of Suzy Homemaker and now it has all boomeranged back on us.
In our house, knitting needles have always been for scratching the hard-to-reach places down your back or poking the hairy goo out of the bathroom drain.
Now I’m dreaming of old Simplicity patterns where models float about in swirly skirts, I’m begging recipes from my sister and I’m squeezing six whole lemons to make a real lemon meringue pie. Tis far from the days from the little capsule in the ready-to-go LMP box.
Conversations have turned to the best tins for baking your bread, to sourdough or not to sourdough and was there life on Earth before the Actifry.
My brain has gone mushy like in those toddler days when Tinky Winky felt like a big old purple friend.
Truly it is time to sit on the pin cushion, bin the mittens, get back to the real world.
But you need a dream and mine involves paint brushes and rollers and trying to keep a marriage together through the war of Farrow and Ball versus Dulux.
Winter is wicked. But look out of the window. The bulbs planted in the autumn are poking up shoots. The acer that had the dead look about it is starting to stir.
There is hope in all of this … the same hope that comes from that moment when you pop open the paint tin and stir the fresh paint with a stick.
Here’s to new beginnings. Wouldn’t that look well on a sampler. Somebody pass my embroidery hoop.
