The temperatures have started to drop this week and I’ve been wearing a hat and gloves on my early morning dog walks. For me this is most likely to be a wool or insulated beanie hat if it’s dry and a baseball cap if it’s raining. I wear the baseball cap because it means I can turn my head with my hood up and the peak of the cap pushes the hood around so that I can see and don’t have to pull the hood to one side. Great for crossing roads and general visibility. My gloves are a bit of a mixture, I had some of those posh ones that meant I could still use my phone with them on but I can’t find those since we moved so I’m using whatever comes to hand.
I’m reminded of my childhood too and my Great Auntie Matt. She was a knitter and for Christmas each year she would knit me a combination of hat, gloves and a scarf from the leftover wool she had from whatever projects she’d been working on that year. This meant that I could end up with a kaleidoscope set of protection against the cold. The gloves might be one colour or they might be any mixture up to having all the fingers and thumbs different colours, stripes were not uncommon.
These gifts were a bonus for me as they often came at the point where the set from the previous year were wearing out or had been misplaced. I used to do a paper-round, so whatever the colour the gloves started out as they would always end up blackened by newsprint.
I can picture my Auntie Matt in her little bungalow knitting away. She used to stay up late watching her black and white television, she particularly enjoyed the snooker (despite the obvious impediment) but would rebuff any attempts to encourage her to buy a colour set. She lived there with a succession of particularly evil cats and I can remember one Christmas Day morning we spent several hours at Accident and Emergency because one of those cats had scratched her so badly that we couldn’t stop the wound bleeding.
35 years on and I miss those soft squashy Christmas parcels that kept me warm around to the next Christmas and she was knitting right up until the end.
Thanks for reading.