Bandwagon

Even more knitting spilling over into mainstream culture this week. On Friday morning, the illustrious Today Programme on Radio 4 deigned to notice that it is becoming quite popular again "recently". They aren't half slow! Interviewees were knitwear designer Lise-Lotte Lystrup and the guy whose company runs the Knitting & Stitching Shows (including Ally Pally, which isn't far off). There's an article about it here, and the interview itself can be played about halfway down the page.

However, whilst I was pleased to hear my dear hobby on that bastion of radio programming as I was ironing my office clothes, and in fact was very late to work because of it, I did get annoyed enough with Evan Davies to start shouting at the radio. No, this is not because of the credit crunch, not everything is, even though as ex-economics correspondent you probably think it should be. I'm afraid, Evan, that this resurgence does slightly predate the recent market troubles. And as you hopefully now know, it's not exactly money-saving.

Annoyance on Friday turned to horror on Saturday as I saw this travesty of a shop window in Covent Garden:

That's Diesel, who have clearly employed a marketing department who have heard one phrase only about knitting, and don't feel the need to look it up to see how it's spelled. Actually, I've just Google searched "knit and pearl" and there are 2.36m hits, which is worrying, compared to less than 1m for "knit and purl".  Or am I the one who's getting it wrong, along with all of Ravelry and the blogosphere?

Anyway, they've even got their own branded wool for the window. I'd be impressed, if I hadn't been so irritated in the first place.

Not that my tolerance was up to much yesterday, seeing as we'd been to Shunt the night before and I was suffering badly with the after-effects of too much cheap red wine, only mitigated by enough paracetamol to run the risk of even more liver damage.

Bad Lucy. Shunt was as amusing as ever. What did we have there this week?

An enchanted forest at the entrance:

Followed by an astonishingly photo-real and erotic series of portraits of a woman undressing herself, through her hoop skirts and corset (in fact called "The Fear of Falling" by Sophie Lewis and Emma Critchley):

Crazy Japanese kids Yes-Yes-5638 programming noise-art, and no PCs allowed evidently:

The KissBox - put your blindfolded heads in here...

...and start snogging for the whole bar to watch on live feed:

(And no, I didn't, though we did have some amusing discussions on how popular and ergonomically feasible BlowJobBox and DVDABox would be.)

Pinball Geoff was back:

Including table football in the dark:

Water pistol-wielding ninjas policing hygiene in the loo - they even gave me a mint imperial:

I may have been drunk whilst trying to take this self-portrait:

Best of all, awesome Mongolians! Playing fantastic music!

They are called Hanggai and are over here for the Thames Festival this weekend (to which I utterly failed to go, even to Johnny Woo's cabaret). They were utterly rocking and the crowd loved them. I mean, seriously, holy crap they were good. If only we could book them for the wedding...

Look at his shoes!  And go listen to their stuff on Myspace!

And finally, a complete WTF moment walking around Soho:

The website is even more baffling.

Oh, and we're not dead yet! Hooray for CERN!