She piddles, she fins

Or something like that. She does both in between bouts of full-on dragoning, but she also wakes up in the wee small hours with a feeling that she ought to get up and Get On With It. Like why am I lying around in bed, pray? Don't I realise that there's stuff needing made?

Had a brief foray into The World of Seasonal Commerce last week. Tooled round various children's toyshops, growing more bleak and unseasonal as the minutes rolled past. All around lay pink plastic, batteries, fake pets rolling over and playing dead, more batteries, muzak, cheesey songs with tone-deaf celebs exhorting us to feel guilty for our affluence, long queues managed by idiots who plainly enjoy the power of going as s..l..o..w..l..y.. as they can get away with before a sudden stampede of enraged shoppers club them to death with the latest Harpy Otter Deathmask with Light-up Gonads ( takes 37 AA batteries, not included) and people looking utterly miserable... 

Coming back home with a few bags of toys I barely had time to do a quick Witch Baby cover rough and then rush back out again to go to the Society of Authors' Winter Party. Jeez.  Being self-employed and in straightened circumstances means that days which pass without earning diddly-squat are days on the debit side of the Great Ledger Book. If these kind of days aren't spent doing something worthwhile like spending time with one's children, walking on a beach or climbing a hill, then they are wasted days. Wasted. Spending a day shopping is not good for my soul.

And the food at the Winter Party was the wrong side of atrocious. Next year I should offer to do the catering - I'd probably make more in one evening than I do in a whole year of selling books. Plus I had a robust discussion with a right-wing fund manager who spent most of the coffee and mints course proving what a fine fellow he was, and how he knew better than the IPCC about the likely outcome of runaway climate change. My pet subject, hijacked by a fuckwit? Oh, joy.

Let's draw a veil over that, shall we?

The knitted dolly in cotton glace for my youngest daughter is progressing nicely. Two legs, two arms, a pair of pants and half a torso are done and dusted. Must go do some more. The youngest daughter is the same child for whom I knitted the jumper at the top of this post. Amazingly, she still loves it. Amazingly, it's still in one piece.