Long time no blog.

Here, let me make it up to you with this tiny bouquet of daphne.



I don't actually have anything of note to tell you, except for the goings on in my family.

These of late have featured:

a strings concert (Son #1 played violin beautifully in a string quartet);

a guitar concert (Son #1 played two [solo] pieces beautifully); and

two nights' worth of Twelfth Night pulled off by a bunch of exuberant and occasionally wildly talented fourteen year olds. Son #2, in a spectacular piece of typecasting (he is our token extrovert, inexplicably trapped in a family of introverts) played Sir Toby Belch, complete with a very impressive set of bushy muttonchops. His sword fight with Sebastian went on a trifle longer than expected due to the failure of Olivia to hear her cue, and the spectacle of two boys swinging swords at each other while simultaneously looking intently and meaningfully over their shoulders into the wings at the recalcitrant Olivia, was a sight to behold.

Son #3 hasn't done much I can tell you about except read voraciously, although hey what's new. Seriously, all our boys have gone through phases where you can barely prise a book out of their hands, but this child is unstoppable. He reads for hours and hours on end every single day. Currently he's re-reading the Harry Potter books for about the fourth time - he started last weekend and is on the fifth book already (which he picked up yesterday and is already halfway through, and you know how big the fifth book is). Edited to amend - I originally wrote Son #1 but it's the 11 year old who is the voracious reader at the moment.

What else? Oh yes, for those of you not of our shores, Australia had an election a week ago and we still have no idea, six days later, who will be running our country for the next three years. When it became clear a hung parliament was the outcome everyone was shocked and traumatised (and people such as myself were gobsmacked that Mr Rabbit actually got any votes because OMG how could anyone actually vote for someone who's blatantly sexist and racist not to mention a rabid twit ...) ... I wrote a huge ranty post about this a couple of days ago and deleted it, and do you know what? I'm feeling a whole lot calmer and more detached about things now; I am watching the two major parties' wooing of the independents with much amusement. It is passing extraordinary as the Tailor of Gloucester might say.

As for me, I'm kind of in limbo at the moment. I have spat the dummy with just about everything I'm knitting and haven't touched my needles in ages. I need to remedy this as Fathers Day approaches frighteningly fast, as do the arrival dates of several new babies over the next few months.

Bookwise, I have just read The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell and by golly you should too. Immediately. I haven't yet found a good replacement book so what with the lack of knitting and lack of reading and exhorbitant amounts of time watching my children on stage every evening and going to work and going to uni and driving children to soccer matches and parties and attempting to keep food in the house and a sore throat at bay, I've been busy but not actually achieving anything apart from half an hour's worth of weeding in the weak winter sunshine last Sunday.

And there endeth the blogpost.