this weekend past i took the tentative steps towards a full-blown knitting kit at fabrications at broadway market.

so now i have a great big ball of 100% acrylic yarn sitting on my desk. it’s only saving grace is that it was so cheap (£1.50) for so much (500g), and so it shall be used for all my test stitches and my beginner learning lessons like how to increase/decrease, how to make a buttonhole, how to create weird patterns etc.

knitting’s been pretty easy so far. the hardest part was casting on and getting my needles and fingers in the right position. once i realised that it was merely a really complicated system of looping and knotting, everything became so much clearer and the mystique of the knit dissipated. but it really is quite fun, and watching a lousy piece of string become an actual piece of fabric, woah that’s crazy dude.

i’ve already made a mobile phone cover/sock whilst learning to perfect a garter (knit) stitch, and last night i made a finger-glove/finger-puppet whilst learning to purl and then making a stockinette stitch. so now that i have learnt to both knit and purl, i can go out and buy nice woollen yarn in beautiful colours and start creating a scarf. yay!

and i have to say, learning kniting from a book is dead easy. but maybe it’s the book that i use that makes it so simple. if you ever want to learn to knit, i highly recommend Stitch ‘n Bitch. it’s amazing what a bit of common sense and a lot of sass can do.

i’ve decided to teach myself to knit, with 2 books and a craft kit.

and once i’ve done that, i might move on to crochet. because i absolutely love crocheted flower brooches and accessories, but am too skint to fork out the £5 or more they go for.

or maybe i’ll just scrap the knitting and jump straight into crocheting.

hmm.

well, it’s been a strange week. very surreal, and mostly passed in a fog

but then again, stranger and/or worse things have happened to Man.

i’ve begun taking my own lunch to school, which is a slightly alien concept because even in primary school i never brought a lunch box - my school’s canteen had an amazing array of food that catered to every taste at relatively cheap prices. but planning my lunch has become an obsession, and the various tupperware shapes and sizes have taken on new significance.

i’ve also had friends around for dinner this weekend past, and that was very nice. we all sat around and ate south african lychees, cheese on baguettes and young leaf salad, with bloody mary’s for kicks. it was a living-room picnic. we were meant to go watch Perfume at the cinema, but after the 2nd bloody mary we decided against moving from our places on the sofa.

the wild rocket seeds have been sown. hopefully i can start picking at them in a few weeks and add them to my lunchbox repertoire.

i’ve been ignoring my balcony for a while.

initially, it was because the summer drought had started to abate, and so i didn’t have to spend half to three-quarters of an hour watering the plants. then it was because as autumn began, the only things i could pick were the cherry tomatoes that kept on giving all the way up to october. and then the rains came and i didn’t want to do anything in the cold and wet.

but today, bright and sunny morning that it was, i got out there for the first time in months and immediately remembered how much i like gardening and pottering about.

i got down to some serious tidying-up, cutting away the skeletons of the verbena and the mint, clearing away the remains of the borage and tomato plants, as well as the husks of the sweet peas, spaghetti squash and marigolds. i pruned the mini-rose topiary, the sage, the gardenia and begonias, and cut away the dead and dying leaves of the stock and the salad box.

i also hunted down as many slugs as i could, depositing them in a plastic bottle and leaving it out by the bins with the rest of my garden waste. slug eggs (at least i think they’re slug eggs) look like frog spawn, and are alarmingly identical-looking to sago - which of course means that i will never be able to enjoy honey-dew sago again.

while i’d fretted about the parsley dying in the summer, i found out today that the seeds it cast off prior to its death had germinated in and amongst its neighbouring pots, and the plants are now about 2-inches tall. so i gathered the stray plants from their various landing places and re-potted them together, crossed my fingers and hoped for the best. the anemones that i’d been dismissive of in the summer are thriving. this is, i think, in part due to them thinking it’s spring rather than the supposed dead of winter (hello, global warming!), and also because they’re lack of performance earlier this year has given the bulbs/corms tremendous stores of energy to throw out frond after frond of beautiful foliage and the occasional stunning flower.

the cyclamen i’d rescued from the garden when we moved out of elephant and castle is putting out cute fuschia flowers, and the jasmine has finally started to produce little flower buds that i hope will proceed to burst into white clouds of perfume. several of the seeds i’d planted really late in the season are still going strong, albeit rather slowly, but at least they’ll be well-established by the time the growing season begins in earnest and hopefully avoid being devoured by aphids and slugs. the daffodils are beginning to shove up from their hiding place in the planter box, and the hydrangea has started to produce leaf-buds after the rather severe pruning i gave it.

i also discovered that a potato i’d half-heartedly buried in some soil because it was no longer fit for eating. having sprouted leaves and whatnot, had actually gone and produced a bunch of tiny potatoes! while i knew the technicalities of how it reproduced, i’d never grown potatoes before, and to somehow manage to do it without even having to try very hard led first to astonishment, and then to a warm glow of awe at nature’s abilities to just get on with it.

by the end of it, my hands were scratched up and my nails were filthy, my thighs were burning from the squatting i’d been doing, and i’d broken a pair of scissors (must remember to buy secateurs). but i was feeling very relaxed and satisfied, and very at-one with the world - gardening is seriously therapeutic. now all i need is for the lavender to grow like crazy.

being gluten- and lactose-intolerant, eating and drinking and grocery shopping is complicated.

most people don’t understand what gluten is, and so i simplify matters by telling them that i can’t eat wheat or flour. then they sort of blink really slowly and ask me to repeat myself.

but it’s not just wheat. it’s oats and barley and rye and a great big number of other grains that are suspect. gluten is the protein in grains that make the dough springy and spongy, so highly tensile bread products like bagels are basically gluten factories. even when it’s not in bread or bread-products, gluten still gets into everything somehow or other. even corn flakes and soya sauce.

and even though being lactose-intolerant is a much easier concept for people to understand, apart from big coffee chains and/or more upmarket places that cater to a more upmarket crowd, non-dairy milk is hard to come by if i’m thinking of drinking some coffee. furthermore, i’m not too big a fan of soy milk anymore, which makes the hunt for a cup of coffee with rice milk not made by me and which i’d be willing to pay good money for even harder.

it also makes being invited to dinner parties a nightmare, because i have no idea what they’re going to make. pasta? pizza? cous cous? falafel? noodles? gravy? sauce? cake? biscuits? custard? cream? ice cream? and i don’t think it’s polite to refuse food that someone’s cooked for me. and it makes me feel like a twat calling someone up the day before and telling them that i’m gluten- and lactose-intolerant and expect a special meal for myself.

it’s hard enough at my dinner parties to make separate dishes for non-/meat-eating guests and it’s just one ingredient. can you imagine if someone was making pasta in a cream sauce, with a chocolate cake for dessert, for 7 other people and i was the only one who had to eat something else?

anyway, as hard as it is, i’m rather thankful that up till now i’m only still intolerant of gluten and lactose, and not allergic. i won’t die or break out in hives or have a severe physically manifested reaction if i do eat things that contain gluten or lactose. i indulge in ice-cream sometimes, and i eat sandwiches for lunch when there’s nothing else available, and i really love pasta. it also means that whilst i might not be doing the best thing to my body and my hosts toilets, i don’t absolutely have to eat a special meal by myself when i go to dinner parties.

and i’m really lucky to be chinese and have a natural tendency towards the eating of rice and non-creamy things. the things i can do with rice. i eat it steamed, cold, warm, in salads, with other dishes, baked, in soup, as porridge, etc. i can eat rice for all 3 meals in a day.

it’s also probably a good thing that supermarkets are realising the potential (financially) of gluten- and lactose-free foods, and so i can get things like rice spaghetti, rice milk and gluten-free breads and flour quite easily. the organic shop round the corner also has a wide range of things that are gluten-/lactose-free.

but probably the best thing that comes out of all this is the fact that with these special dietary requirements, almost all convenience foods are no longer attractive to me because whilst they may look real pretty on the box, the ingredients list just makes me go ‘eurgh’ at the wheat flour and ‘eurgh’ at the milk and then ‘eeeurgh’ at the nutritional information panel. as a result, out of necessity, i buy lots of fresh ingredients and cook most of my own meals and end up eating pretty healthily incidentally.