You probably won't remember, but round about the end of March, I started knitting a sock using a pattern from a library book. 

I've made a couple of pairs of socks before, with a straightforward beginner pattern, but this was a little more complex, with wavy edges, and a little lacy pattern, which I never quite got to grips with. 

In early June, I finished the first sock (hooray!) and cast on the second, which I then ignored for a considerable number of weeks. Fortunately, when I picked it up again, I still hadn't quite got the lacy bit of the pattern right, and so the second sock turned out just as puckery and wavy as the first one. 

Finally, this week, I finished the pair (you can see I'm not one for matching the stripes on each sock). 

Look how cheerful they are, in all their stripey, unintentionally-knobbly cosiness! They're more hanging around in socks than socks to wear to work with your shoes, but it's always exciting to wear something you've made yourself. 

Sadly, I can't remember which book the pattern was from, which isn't that sad really as I'm not sure I'd recommend it. I mean, these were quite fun to knit, and relatively straightforward if you've knit socks before, but there were several points where the pattern was quite unclear and I had to make an educated guess (and not always the right one). 

Still, a cheerful new pair of cosy socks just in time for the weather to turn. Hooray! And if you're related to me, I'm sorry but given that it's taken me on average 3 months a sock, you probably won't be getting a pair of these for Christmas... 

I do love knitting socks though, and I think I've found my next pattern. Prompted by the sock-related enthusiasm of Lucy at Attic24, I found my way to this sockalong tutorial, which has such clear instructions and pictures even I can't possibly go wrong. This time I'm actually going to measure my feet and see if I can make a pair I can wear in normal boots, rather than yet another snuggling on the sofa pair, cosy as they are. Just need to decide on a colour... 

Since I last shared what I'd been reading, I've been on a bit of a mission. I've made a new rule that there is to be No DIY On Weeknights After Work, and therefore I've found myself with hours each night stretching ahead of me. 

(Yes, there are good arguments for filling those hours back up with DIY. Or housework. Or cooking fancy meals. And occasionally I do those things. But, temporarily at least, sanity dictated a break). 

Anyway, back to reading. I've been eating my tea, sometimes doing the washing up (and sometimes leaving it to the morning, when I curse myself for not doing it the night before), and then curling up on the sofa with a book. Autumn evenings do that to me sometimes - I think I'm trying to avoid thinking too hard about the nights drawing in, and outdoor adventures after tea being a thing of the past for the next few months. 

So, this month, I've been reading... 

Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America (Barbara Ehrenreich) 
This book was published in 2002 so is getting on a bit now, and I picked it up second hand (I'm not even sure why I'm telling you that - it's very rare for me to buy a book new). The author is a journalist, and this is her account of trying to find out how people actually manage to survive in low paid jobs in America. The answer, unsurprisingly, is that they barely do - people often need two jobs and even then end up in all kinds of inadequate living situations with nothing left over for the smallest emergency. Depressing. 

Hard Work: Life in Low Pay Britain (Polly Toynbee)
I picked this book up at the same time as the last one, and it's equally depressing. Published a year later, in 2003, it's another journalist's account of living on one of the worst council estates in Britain, and taking whatever minimum wage job she could get. It doesn't contain anything surprising if you've ever done a minimum wage job yourself, but I think what distressed me the most was the sheer disregard for people's time. The author regularly turned up for interviews for jobs that didn't exist, or had meetings cancelled right at the last minute, forms needed to be taking by hand, during the day, right across town, for jobs which then turned out to be 'speculative'. The most basic equipment (like latex gloves in a care home) was often missing, making a difficult job even harder, often for the sake of someone higher up being miserly over a small amount of money. You can read the first chapter here. 

If This Is A Man, and The Truce (Primo Levi)
Continuing this month's non-deliberate gloomy theme, I made a start on this account of the author's year in the Auschwitz concentration camp, and his months-long journey home after it was liberated in 1945. Primo Levi is one of those writers I'd heard of, but never read anything by, although I always had a niggling sense that I should have done. A few weeks ago I caught a few episodes of The Periodic Table (another one of his books) when it was serialised on Radio 4, and I was intrigued by mentions of his experiences, so when I spotted this in a charity shop, I picked it up. It's compelling, all the more so for the lack of too much emotion. It's just an account of the day to day life inside a concentration camp, with details that had never even occured to me - how he learned where to stand in the queue so as not to get the watery soup from the top of the pan, but not be so far back that it ran out before he reached the front. How a complex system of bartering sprung up between the prisoners (and occasional civilian outsiders). What it feels like to be slowly starved, and how to retain a sense of who you are, almost impossible in such a place. The vexation of having to do hours of hard labour in mismatched shoes. It's well written and both easy and very difficult to read, and I'd highly recommend it. 

Wanderlust: A History of Walking (Rebecca Solnit)
Slightly more cheerful this time - this is a book I started way back in August and have yet to finish. In some ways it's an fairly interesting account of different forms of walking (pilgrimage, trekking across the wilderness, wandering through the city) - a topic which I'm predisposed to be interested in - but I confess it's just not capturing my imagination, and the only time I'm still reading it is when I've left my other book downstairs and it's the only thing left by the bed. 

Vinland (George Mackay Brown)
I love George Mackay Brown. I was first introduced to him by my auntie (introducer of many good books), who bought me a copy of his autobiography one year. That book was the reason I first went to Orkney, and his other books contributed to me falling head over heels for the place and going back year after year after year. This book isn't my favourite (although now I say that, I don't know what is), but I came across three of his books in a charity shop this week and acquired a couple of them for my auntie (she already had the other one). I already have a copy, but it's packed away in a box in the cellar, and not been read for a good long time, so it was a pleasure to lose myself in this one for a while. I don't know what it is about these books, I'm really not that interested in Vikings and sea voyages on the whole, but there's just something about the writing that gets me every time. I'll have to sneakily read the second book before I pass it on. 

So there we are. A motley, not-awfully-cheerful month of reading. I really must try for something more upbeat next month. It's funny, I've never really taken people's recommendations for books to read as I'm an odd mix between 'quite fussy/hard to please' and 'I'll read anything that's in front of me'. Mostly I read whatever takes my fancy in a charity shop or the library on any given day, which is why sometimes I have a bit of a theme for a while, and sometimes I dot about all over the place. 

It's been good to keep track over these last few weeks - wonder what I'll end up with next? 

September has turned out to be quite cheerful in my little garden. 

At the end of August I had a big tidy up, and bought a load of autumn bedding plants. This isn't something I'd usually do, but at that point we were still planning to put the house on the market in September (needless to say, that overambitious plan has been well and truly abandoned), and I wanted to get something finished. So I tidied everything up, put woodchip over all the bare soil, went to the tip several times, and planted up all my containers with cheerful flowers.  

I've been delighted with the results. It turns out the garden is now the most relaxing place at home, because nothing needs doing. I don't think I've ever had that experience with a garden before. I've had my breakfast out there most days in September, which has made me remember just how cheerful this little city garden is. 

The light is lovely out there in the mornings at this time of year. Families walk past on their way to school, not realising I'm sat there behind a fence, and I hear snippets of their conversations about the day ahead. There are a surprising number of birds, and the lavender is full of bees. 

At the weekends I've taken to eating my lunch out there too, and lingering for a while with a book. 

(Yes, I had pancakes for lunch, and yes, that is a potato growing in amongst the violas).

​The front part of the garden still looks a bit uninspiring, but at least it's now tidy, and the raspberries which overhang the pavement have been livening up my breakfast for the past few weeks. 

I can even walk from one end of the garden to the other without tripping over old plant pots, prunings, and piles of sticks. 

So I'm feeling quite affectionate towards this little garden right now. I don't know how long that'll last. Right now we're past the summer months where everything grows faster than I can cut it done, and I know that once we get to February it will be entirely full of sticks and I will be all despondent again. 

But who knows? Now I've realised the joy of having a nicely kept garden, I might well keep on top of it. The advantage of a small garden, of course, is that it doesn't take too much maintenance. I can see an afternoon of spring bulb planting in the near future, especially as we now won't be selling the house until well after Christmas (well after Christmas 2017 the rate we're going...). 

​I just hope the weather stays nice enough to have a few more weeks of garden breakfasts... 

This week I was introduced to a friend's new favourite cafe. It's in an area where there are a lot of cafes, but it's near a busy main road, and she loves this one in particular as it has an enclosed garden where her young daughter can rampage in safety. 

On this particular day, her daughter was elsewhere, and we were having a short break from work so we sat in the front yard. 

It's a cheerful little place, all mismatched chairs and bunting and old bicycles. There are plenty of seats, tea isn't too expensive, and they serve a good variety of cake. 

The problem is (if you can call it a problem), there are just too many cheery cafes to fit them all in. (I do realise this isn't a *real* problem*...). The one we currently head to most frequently is at the local city farm, a couple of miles away on the other side of town. 

The cafe itself isn't pretty, like some of the others, but the food is good and cheap, and it's run by a charity. They too have a decent variety of cake (although we usually go for brunch, so stick to egg butties and flapjack), and there is also, as you might imagine, a farm, as well as a little garden centre. 

I often ponder my love of cafes. I do know I'm privileged to be able to spend as much time and money in them as I do. Aside from people's houses, cafes are where I do most of my socialising - I'll sometimes meet a friend for lunch in the middle of the working day, and we often find ourselves in a cafe at the weekend somewhere or other. 

If I'm with Peter, we shy away from expensive places, heading for where a mug of tea costs less than £1.50. I rarely go in a chain cafe - there are just so many little independent ones to choose from round here. We support charity cafes, or tea stalls at little local events when we can. With friends, we meet where is convenient, but again, there are so many cafes that we often have a difficult choice to make. 

I don't think of cafes as a way to get food, although they do provide that function too. They're a place to sit, to watch other people, read a book, make plans, chat with a friend or two. Occasionally I find myself alone in a cafe, usually if I'm away from home for work, and there's something cheering about that too, sat in a corner with a book and a cup of tea, a little rest from walking around and a space to think for a while.  

Oddly enough, I don't think we're going to make it to a cafe this weekend. Today we've already had breakfast, so no need for brunch, and we have an afternoon of house-related activities planned. Tomorrow we're off to another city to visit family, and I imagine there won't be time for cafes. 

Never mind, there's always next weekend (and I might see if I can sneak in a weekday lunch too). In the meantime, we have 'cafe at home' - today with stewed apples grown by a friend and home made pancakes. Would've cost a fortune if we'd bought that in a cafe... 

The weeks are running away with me again. Last time I looked it was August, and now here we are, nearly half way through September, with the nights drawing in and a definite nip in the air. 

There's some decorating, as you'd imagine, but also a bit of travelling around, and some socialising. A family visit, with a trip to a local produce market. A night with some old school friends. Bicycling down the canal, and a musical escapade in a church in a nearby town. 

I even got out for a run, for the first time since my last race (which was such a long time ago I can't even remember what race that was. 

I ran up and down this hill several times, and right at the end, a rainbow appeared. 

Sometimes it's worth putting in a bit of extra effort.