Abominations Unto Nuggan

So, yes, I am in fact writing these out of order, but writing the last one made me think about this album and as it was also gig related I thought it was a natural companion piece to follow up with. So this album choice was a result of two different gigs. As noted previously I went to see the Scottish Ensemble and Anna Meredith doing their collaborative album Anno at the Barbican at the end of September, and then at the end of October I went to see the Scottish Ensemble here in the Inverness again. To my intense amusement, working with Anna Meredith again had clearly reminded the ensemble how much they enjoy playing her work, because the whole second half of the Inverness gig was pieces by Anna Meredith re-arranged for string ensemble. Mostly from her first electronic album Varmints - the lead violin noted with clear irony before they played Nautilus that that piece had been intended as a clear break from her previous orchestral work - and having experienced it as something akin to a transcendental experience - I virtually floated home afterwards - obviously I had to go and actually listen to the album in question.

I didn’t initially love this album, despite it being much more what I was expecting from Anna Meredith - before I encountered Anno I knew her mostly from her film scoring work - but as I’ve continued to listen to it across the last month, I’ve come to the conclusion that I like it more the further away from the gig I get. For example, I can now listen to Blackfriars and feel it’s glorious rhythms combine happily with my memories of my recent holiday in London, of standing outside Blackfriars station at rush hour, hearing bells and clocks striking all over the place, feeling the ebb and flow of traffic around me and the rumble of the tube below - I have a whole bunch of field recordings I made in and around that tube station - and think, yes, that part of London does indeed feel like that. I also feel like I’ve been able to fall in love with Nautilus and Scrimshaw all over again in their own right, without constantly comparing them negatively with their reimagined versions. (Honestly I want to hear Nautilus re-arranged for brass a la that Hannah Peel album I wrote about earlier this year.) I do think I need to go see Anna Meredith live in her own right next time she’s touring, because I think her work really lends itself to live performance, to variations on a theme and interacting with visuals and graphics, a proper multimedia experience. However, now that I’ve got enough distance from the gig, I can happily also enjoy it, lying on the sofa with low winter light and just the fairy lights on, through big headphones and let it transport me to other places.

I held off on making this post until today, as it’s my last day of annual leave, so the last day of my dedicated writing time. Writing has been going well, I’ve now written as many words as I had by the end of the year last year so I’m officially caught up. As I started November 6000 words ahead of where I was last year, I’m hoping to maintain that, ideally I’d like to be able to say I wrote 10,000 more words this year than last but we’ll call that a stretch goal! (The return of my fic writing ability/motivation means that I’m hopeful that I’ll be able to spend December writing a bunch of treats and pinch hits, thereby getting a decent word count for the final month.) An interesting thing about this year’s writing is that it hasn’t consumed everything else. For a start, I’ve finished the non-fiction book I was reading this month, and I’ve started another.

My other personal target for this month was that I wanted to finish the little crochet crab that I’m making. It’s the first proper amigurumi that I’ve tackled so getting it successfully finished will tick a bunch of boxes. It goes in fits and starts because I keep having to take it to my knitting group to get help. (Being a very beginner crocheter and working between UK and US instructions can be complicated - I was taught by someone who uses US terms, one of the ladies at knitting uses UK terms and the other is Dutch!) So I have finished the body and a leg, and I’ve made half a claw but now I’m stuck until I can get to knitting and have someone show me what’s meant by ‘turn’ in this context. I have, however, found a good video for doing magic circle so hopefully by the time I finish the legs - there’s eight - I’ll have that down pat. I’m travelling for work this week, so I’m hoping to get the rest of the legs and both eyes done while I’m away. That way I can ask about both the claw and the eyestalks while I’m there and get both sorted out. It’s fun looking at the progress that I’ve made on it, I’m quite pleased with the stitch texture I’m getting now, and I’m pleased to have mastered decreasing but already I can see where I’ve improved and got better. Like, I’m having moments of realising ‘oh that’s why keeping the stitch count right was so hard’ and ‘oh that was silly, of course I should do it this way instead’. (I did, as predicted end up breaking the flismy little plastic hook that came with the kit - my tension is tight! - but actually now that I’ve dug out a metal hook of the correct size I feel that I’m getting on better, I don’t know if it’s just that I was worrying about snapping the old one, or if it’s actually easier with a hook of a different material.) I’ve been zooming through my podcast backlog while I’ve been working on the crab, which has also been quite satisfying.

At the start of last week I kind of felt that I wasn’t making much progress on many things I wanted to have done this week, but looking back on it, I think I’ve done everything I needed to do. There's definitely more things I wanted/intended to do but the time critical stuff - things that needed ordered and bought by deadline, stuff that was expiring both food and digital stuff have been dealt with - has been done, I've added a bunch of lights to places in the unending fight against the lack of light. I got some more cute decorative lights, fairy lights and a snow globe style one. Also while i was tidying out other things, I found some stick on press lights that my dad gave me ages ago and had no idea what I'd do with them, and it dawn on me they'd be ideal for the meter cupboard so now the cupboard with the fuse box and the electric meter and the cupboard where the gas meter lives have little press lights so I don't have to juggle my phone's flashlight when I'm trying to send my meter readings.

I didn’t get my curtains dry cleaned in the end because when I took them in to the dry cleaners, they were like ‘oh no’ because they’re both thermal lined and from Dunelm and apparently they’ve had a run of those where there’s something wrong with the thermal lining, so they stick together in the machine and the lining shreds when you try to separate them again. (Sometimes they’re fine, but they’re not often that they’ve got a special report and letter they give people to get their money back/replacement curtains from Dunelm.) The dry cleaning lady recommended - as mine were dusty rather than actually grubby, I vacuumed them when I took them down - hanging the outside on a nice dry breezy day and giving them a febreeze! I even got my good sewing shears sharpened - now if I could just find my chalk I could get to work on shortening those curtains. Though I do now have...concerns about ironing the new seams...