Kate Solomon

Before you buy a house, you will hear old wives’ tales and made up statistics about how it’s the most stressful thing you can do in life.

Pah, you may say. I buy stuff all the time. Hell, I even bought a car/three-seat sofa/plasma TV/holiday and that cost multiple thousands of pounds. No way can buying a house be more stressful than that.

Soon you’ll realise that you were wrong.

First, the hunt. You find a house you like the look of online and visit it. It is either a poky little hovel that has been Photoshopped into looking like a halfway acceptable home, or it’s the most perfect thing you ever saw in your life and you’ll feel that without owning this house you will be unable to enjoy even a millisecond of the remaining years of your life.

Meanwhile, the credit check. The days of nail biting anxiety as you await the mortgage agreement in principle, wondering if the bank is judging you unable to afford a mortgage because you put a £3 cinnamon and raisin bagel on your credit card on Tuesday and haven’t paid it off yet.

Then, the offer. You look at the asking price, realise you’ve been completely over-optimistic in your budget and should never truly have viewed the house at all. You take a punt and put in an offer of exactly half. You’ll justify this to yourself in a number of ways – none are valid. The offer is rejected. You offer a bit more; there’s a bit more rejection. You offer again but the vendor has accepted another offer.

Heartbreak. You mourn. You go through the seven stages of grief, spending more than is socially acceptable on ‘anger’. You say ‘que sera sera’ a lot.

You return to Rightmove. You find a house you like the look of. You go through it all again two or three more times, with two or three further floorplans made to scale in Illustrator, with scale models of your furniture variously arranged throughout your hypothetical home. You come up with decorating schemes. You ponder which walls you could knock through. You consider loft conversions, installing a food disposal unit, opening up the chimney for an open fire.

Finally, just when you feel there isn’t a single house on the market that suits you, you come across a wildcard. Panic sets in. If you don’t get this house, you’ll never get any house. If you don’t make an offer now, someone else will get this one. If you don’t get the chance to two rooms into one in the next six months, you’ll explode.

You make an offer.

You wait.

You dial the estate agent’s number for an update and hang up before they answer. Treat ‘em mean, keep ‘em keen.

At last, success! Your offer is accepted. There’s champagne and interior design magazines. You are overflowing with good will.

You feel like you’ve won the war, but it’s only half time in the first battle. Next comes the actual mortgage application. The repeated requests for the estate agent to take the house off the market. The constant fear of gazumping. The shock of how much solicitors charge. The suspense of the survey. The inability of anyone to give you a straight answer.

That’s where we are. There has to be a better way.

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When e-readers first became a thing, they were pretty easy to write off as a needless technological gimmick that people would grow to regret buying, like 3D TVs. But, in the manner of a particularly robust terrier, they’ve refused to relinquish their grip on the old sock that is popular culture.

2010 was (arguably) the year that the e-reader finally took off and now Amazon is forever bleating that it’s sold a zillion e-books and Mr Unknown Author has made his first million by self-publishing one. Although history has proved time and time again that vast groups of people can be wrong about stuff (Nazi-ism? Titanic deserving 11 Oscars? The whole world-being-flat thing?), when it gets to the point when some other would-be novelist is making millions instead of me, it’s time to check it out.

And so, having been a staunch and fairly vocal resister of the electronic reading revolution for several years, I went to Amazon cap in hand and asked to borrow a Kindle. It very kindly agreed, and so “my” Kindle has accompanied me everywhere for the last few weeks.

My previous position was this: e-readers are technology for the sake of it. There can be no better reading experience than of print on paper. Not even if you paid a seventy-three-year-old cave-dwelling monk to engrave the entire text of the Harry Potter books onto slabs of gold which come complete with cup holder, masseuse and three-storey town house in Manhattan could you have a better time reading it than if you just picked up the paper and ink books.

“But hey!” cried the technology gods. “You can’t plug a book in and charge it up every night! We can’t sell you a book that you’ll need to replace with the same book in a year’s time! You can’t carry eight hundred books at once! You can’t not read a book in direct sunlight! You don’t need a warranty or extra personal contents insurance for a book! Unless it’s super old and rare, that is! How can you people live like this?”

The outlandish success of the iPod didn’t help – if Apple can do it for music, someone really ought to do it for books, right?

Well, they may – may – be on to something. I’ll admit that I haven’t hated using the Kindle.

The print is not too offensive to the eye, rendered as it is in e-ink rather than on a brash LED-lit screen that you might use on an iPad. And yes, using an e-reader on a packed tube carriage is far more convenient than wielding The Pale King at my fellow commuters, trying out a million innovative and completely unsuccessful ways of turning a page without moving either of my arms.

The easy reading experience meant I raced through a good few books; Capote’s In Cold Blood which was, obviously, excellent, Freedom by Jonathan Franzen which reminded me, inexplicably, of Zadie Smith’s On Beauty and Tina Fey’s not-as-good-as-I’d-hoped Bossy Pants before I stalled on War and Peace – well, I thought I ought to read something massive to make the most of it. At the time of writing, I’m 6% of the way through. It’s only ok so far.

Having been prepared to loathe and resent the e-reader, I was surprised at just how much I didn’t hate it. In fact, I genuinely liked using the Kindle.

But I’ll tell you what; after the novelty of having a new toy wore off, I really missed books. If you’re anything like me, you get a bit excited about turning the page of a book, physically preparing the action when you’re still paragraphs away from go time. When all you have to do is press a button to turn the page, it can result in quite a few premature page-turning scenarios, which then leads to quite a few lost places and frustrated guesses at how many pages 42% of the way through the book equates to so you can use the Go To function.

There’s a reason why books have survived hundreds of years of industrial and technological progress; it’s because they’re brilliant. There’s nothing quite like a book – the comfortable familiarity of an old worn-out favourite and the sheer potential and new-book smell of a just-purchased one. Not to mention the beautiful cover art and painstakingly perfect typesetting that some books come with.

Each e-book I tried came with the same drab fonts and a tiny black-and-white thumbnail of the cover art offering no visual excitement whatsoever. Real books can be big, little, square, rectangular, pristine, misshapen, tea-stained, annotated, dog-eared and always truly yours. Any e-book could pretty much belong to anybody.

Last year a few of my late gran’s books passed into my ownership, with her handwriting, her notes and the knowledge that these well-thumbed pages had been made so by my much-loved grandmother’s thumbs. I’m sure my great-grandchildren (optimistic) will be thrilled to have my Amazon account passed down to them in my will, complete with the one passage I highlighted.

E-books are too expensive as well* – partly because we’re charged VAT on e-books in the UK but not on real ones. There’s no way this will change, unless it’s a change that sees VAT applied to physical tomes as well and that’s not really what I had in mind. But it’s also psychological; I’ve paid £100 for this gadget, but every time I actually want to use it, I’m shelling out another eight quid for something that I can’t even touch and hold and put on my shelf to look cool and allow others to admire my impeccable literary taste (ignore that copy of Twilight, I’m just looking after it for a friend).

Granted, I didn’t use the Kindle for very many weeks, but I never once found myself glad to have eight books with me instead of the regular old one; and I’m more than happy to lug several books away with me on holiday, just as I’m ok with shoving fourteen pairs of shoes into my suitcase rather than settling for just flip flops.

The other issues came down to availability; the first book I’d wanted (The True Deceiver by Tove Jansson) wasn’t available. You can go on about how many hundreds of thousands of books you can get on Kindle or any other brand of e-reader ‘til the cows come home, but it’ll never equal the number you can get in actual book form. Then I mentioned to a friend that I was reading Bossy Pants and she asked to borrow it – while you can lend Kindle books to friends in the US, it’s not allowed in the UK yet. So it was either say no or lend her the whole Kindle. So I said no (sorry Kat).

It’s kind of depressing for the people-watcher getting the tube these days. Instead of being able to judge people by the paper they read, you’re simply faced with a sea of rustling freesheets, and instead of being able to judge people by the book they’re reading, you can only judge them for the kind of e-reader they have – and on the District Line’s Edgware Road branch, they all have Kindles and iPads. Very dull.

I can’t speak for the rest of the country, or indeed the Underground, but on the District Line we’re turning into indistinguishable people-shaped blobs hiding behind our anonymous grey plastic slabs and that’s just no fun. Even if we are all secretly reading Mills and Boons on them.

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*Well, that’s a fallacy actually, because if you think about the blood, sweat, tears, time and talent that go into penning a novel, I think you’ll find you’re getting a bargain.

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Knitting is brilliant, and – as I discovered – there’s no better teacher than the internet. If you don’t already know how, you should let the worldly wise web teach you. Here’s how I did it:

Like a lot of people, I first learned to knit at my mother’s knee. I was probably about seven the first time I tried. After a painful half hour I sort of got the hang of it, knitted about three rows, got bored, gave up and went outside to make potions or climb something or generally play at getting muddy and making a lot of noise.

Over the years, I think I asked my mum to teach me again several times, sessions that always ended with me in a huff because I wasn’t getting it and mum yanking the yarn from me in exasperation and doing it herself (NB: I may well have invented this memory, my mum is usually a very good teacher).

Honestly, I don’t know why I kept coming back to it. Somewhere in my soul there was a bullish element of Well, if old people can do it then I must be able to do it which is ridiculous, of course, but then brains can think the stupidest things from time to time.

Video tutor

After a good decade and a half of trying it, hating it, trying it again and hating it some more, I finally got the hang of it. To this day, I couldn’t tell you how or why but something just clicked into place and eureka! I could knit.  And I have YouTube and a pair of bamboo needles to thank for it.

These are my two top tips for anyone learning to knit: use online video tutorials and get yourself a pair of bamboo needles. Videos are so much easier to follow than a book and you can shout at them in frustration as much as you like and they’ll never get upset; unlike, say, mothers.

Meanwhile, bamboo needles grip the wool much better than metal or plastic sticks, meaning you’re less likely to let all your precious stitches slip off when you’re not paying full attention. Trust me, I am the world’s greatest stitch-dropper.

At last I had mastered the basic knit stitch and, to celebrate, I very slowly but surely knitted myself a lovely mustard coloured scarf. I love this scarf very much and wear it all the time.

Having conquered the knit stitch, I stopped. Stopped knitting, stopped learning, stopped lusting over particularly delicious shades of wool. And that was that for almost a year.

Purl, purl, then purl again

For some reason, I was scared to learn how to purl.

You must never be scared to learn to purl! Once you can knit and purl, the world is your cuddly knitted oyster.

Eventually, I manned up and tried it (thanks again, YouTube) and it wasn’t too bad. I’m just about as comfortable purling now as I am knitting, and that’s after a year or so of practice. The only hard bit for me now is starting a purling row and even that’s not hard, just different.

Once you can purl you can do proper knitting. Stocking stitch (knit one row, purl the next, repeat) is wonderful – it’s so flat and uniform and neat and lovely – and being able to do ribbing (alternating knit and purl stitches) means you can make hats and legwarmers and things. Honestly, you’re not properly knitting until you can knit and purl.

Then you can go on to the really exciting things, like knitting the same stitch twice to increase the length of a row, or SSK which is my own personal favourite (you slip two stitches on to the other needle, then knit and whip the slipped stitches back over). Once again, video tutorials are you friends; always look for a video for something you don’t understand.

Ravishing Ravelry

Here’s where I suggest you join Ravelry. It’s an amazing network of knitters and crocheters (you don’t have to talk to them if you don’t want to), and plays host to reams and reams of amazing patterns created by users.

A lot of them are easy to follow and free to download and then you can make all kinds of brilliant things. Ok, so yes, there are a lot of scarves and hats on there but some more exciting garments are featured in the easy sections too.

Making exciting stuff is the best way to learn the more complicated-sounding techniques; sometimes it’s worth practicing with some spare yarn first but often you can just dive right on in. One of the best things about knitting is that if you go wrong, you just unpick it and try again. No probs.

Quick wins

When you’re starting out, knitting can be a bit of a slog. It requires a lot of counting (not my forte) and a bit (read: a lot) of patience, especially if you’re working on something big. Trust me, I know what I’m talking about here – at the moment, I’m knitting a cushion cover and it’s taking for-bleedin’-ever.

To avoid losing your knitting mojo, break the project up with a couple of small, quick wins. Like this tiny mouse I made when I couldn’t take any more cushion cover knitting. He took me just a couple of hours to make and now I have a little friend to keep me company in my knitting den. Please note: I am not insane.

Another option is to make something in super chunky yarn that has lots of holes in, like a huge scarf or something. Chunky yarn works up much quicker than skinny and makes you feel like some kind of invincible knitting machine, if only temporarily.

Buying stuff

Obviously there are some essential pieces of apparatus you’ll need to get started: needles and yarn.

Don’t go to a proper knitting shop for your needles, you can easily nab some from a charity shop (you might need to ask), eBay (such bargains!) or Freecycle – I got a huge bag full of needles of all sizes by simply posting a wanted ad online.

Yarn is a bit trickier. In London, it’s outrageously expensive. In other places it’s just expensive. Charity shop yarn is hard to come by and tends to smell a bit like old ladies’ cupboards.

Ideally, I’d get a sheep and a spindle or whatever it is you need to spin your own wool, but I’m not sure my landlord would approve of my keeping livestock in the spare room and I clearly have no idea how to get the wool from sheeps-coat to, like, yknow, wool.

As far as I know, you’re pretty much stuck with yarn shops and online wool sellers. I’ve never really got a great yarn bargain yet, but I do live in hope.

That’s that

And thus, young padawan, I have taught you all that I know which the internet in turn taught me. Now go forth and knit stuff.

Once you get the hang of it, you’ll want to knit all day every day. Sometimes the urge to knit will hit me at the most inappropriate of times, like during important meetings or while dropping off to sleep. I’m not very good at the moment, but I’m getting better and faster all the time. You will too, I promise.

I’ll leave you with this essential piece of advice: If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s to never ever ever try to K6tog. Honestly. Even if the internet tells you to. You’ll thank me in the long run.

Images: Some photos in this post are taken from flickr. Please click the images to visit their sources.

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…to a blog post of a picture and nothing more. I am a walking contradiction.

Sure, it’s all basically advertising but my feet yearn for these cuddly knitted Nikes, they look so comfy.

This Is via Creative Review, Mocoloco

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If there’s one thing that really annoys me, it’s seeing “TLDNR” posted anywhere, ever*.

“TLDNR” is a sign of everything that’s wrong with the internet, in my opinion. It marries poor grammar with downright rudeness and implies that any piece of writing over a screen’s length is not worth the effort of reading. An acronym coined by the kind of moron that hangs about online with nary a good word to say about anyone, TLDNR stands for ‘too long did not read’.

First of all, congratu-frickin-lations for coming up with that, sounds as though you had a team of Oxford scholars working round the clock on it. Secondly, it’s not really a sentence, is it? Ok, so maybe it contains all the appropriate types of word required to make up a sentence, but it’s quite clearly caveman speak. Me tarzan you jane, too long did not read, me hungry want food. See what I mean?

I see where this has come from: simply using an acronym wasn’t quick enough for you, your time is so precious that you can’t even spare the three seconds it takes to form a proper sentence to abbreviate. A quick look on, er, Wiktionary reveals that, hey! There are variants! Some favour the punctuated acronym, whether it’s the insertion of a colon, semi-colon or, for no fathomable reason, a forward slash after ‘long’. Hell, you can even use TLDR (too long didn’t read) if you’re too busy to spare the millisecond it takes to type an N. Here’s an idea, save yourself even more time by just not commenting at all. What do I care if you didn’t read something? In fact, let’s formalise this: if you don’t comment on it, I’ll just assume you didn’t read it. Deal? There, saved you another eight precious seconds to spend trolling about elsewhere online.

The people who coined TLDNR are no doubt the same people who rfs2wst txtmsg spc on vwls so they don’t have to shell out the bank-breaking sum of 20 pence instead of 10. In the end, their messages make no sense and leave them sounding like an illiterate teenager. We should all agree to delete them unceremoniously and never give them another thought. (Sorry Mum.)

But why, general moronity aside, aren’t we allowed to be wordy on the internet? (I say ‘we’ as if I belong to that club of bloggers who actually have readers and not just words. I realise also that the eight people who do actually read this have probably given up by now. Understandable. What was I saying again? Oh yeah:) why does everything has to be so quick and short and sharp? It’s as though there’s an unwritten rule that decrees we shalt not make a point elegantly in ten words if we can do it clumsily in three.

The real problem is that this stupid acronym assumes that long = boring. It is not so! There are plenty of brief, boring blog posts and news pieces online – hell, I’ve written a good few of them. The reverse is also true; but people’s attention spans are so distressingly short now, it’s as though we just can’t be bothered to concentrate on something for longer than three seconds. Why bother reading something properly when you can get the gist from the headline and a quick skim of the first paragraph? And why waste time actually reading something if you can leap straight into the comments and berate the author for putting time and effort into something that you couldn’t be bothered to read instead?

Me, I like a long read. I like the twisting winding tangent-y ramblings of the witty, the sharp, the passionate and the interesting – even if they consist of 16,000 brilliantly nonsensical words about a videogames show in which I have little-to-no interest.

Now, Twitter; that’s a different kettle of fish. I hate the verbose on Twitter. If you find yourself repeatedly taking three or four tweets to make your one point, you need to forget Twitter and get yourself a blog. The occasional two-tweet case is acceptable. I’ve even been known to do it myself, you know.

You know why there’s no acronym for ‘Wow, this was long but totally worth it as I enjoyed reading it a lot and it was generally really interesting, good job person who wrote it’? Because if you actually read something, you get to actually form your own opinion, which you can then actually legitimately post as a comment and I won’t loathe you forever even if it’s really mean.

Also it would be stupid: WTWLBTWIAIERIALAIWGRIGJPWWI would never catch on.

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Inevitably, some fucking comedian is going to post a TLDNR-or-variant comment now. Good imagination skills, internet. You know what else we could try? Selling pre-sliced bread and a box that sits in your living room and displays moving pictures.

*except, annoyingly, the t-shirt from BustedTees that the above image is taken from.

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It has come to my attention today that everyone hates Stephen Dorff.

What is up with that?

He has many fine films to his name, including Blade (actually, I didn’t like Blade all that much) and, er, that Britney Spears video (hey, it was emotional! She tried to kill herself in the bath! Guys!). Ok, actually he doesn’t have very many good films to his name – Entropy was a huge yawnfest and Cecil B. Demented was probably only good if you were a bit high when you watched it.

In fact, I don’t know where this good feeling towards Stephen Dorff springs from, maybe Just 17 is to blame. Whatever, I just know it exists. It’d be nice to know I’m not alone… Britney? Anyone? Hello? <cue tumbleweed>

Oh and here’s the trailer for Somewhere what sparked all this chatter. I think it looks quite good.

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Here’s what international silver-fox Keith Murray from We Are Scientists has to say about iPads and mobile phones and whatnot:

As a band we reject the iPad. We’ve picked them up at the Apple store and then immediately put them down again. It’s just an oversized iPhone that you can’t make phonecalls on. And phone-wise, we endorse the iPhone – it tramples the BlackBerry. We were living in London for about three and a half months at one stage and we were using BlackBerrys and were so miserable for the entire time. The quality of life decreased when I couldn’t use my iPhone. [Shortlist]

God, I love that guy (iPad-is-oversized-iPhone cliché aside).

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I inherited this copy of Romeo and Juliet from my gran who died earlier this year. On the first page she dated it January 1942, when she would have been 20 years old. And here I am, 68 years later, reading through it and feeling a connection with Gran through nothing more than paper, ink and someone else’s words.

Another point for the ‘against’ column in the great e-Reader debate.

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Something’s been troubling me. So, vampires are dead, yeah? Consequently, their hearts don’t beat? And if their hearts don’t beat then their blood doesn’t flow. So how can boy vampires, well, yknow, copulate?

It’s not that I think about vampires and their bedroom activities on a regular basis, it just occurred to me that, despite their reputation as the sluttiest of all the undead, they surely couldn’t physically do the deed.

Unless my rudimentary grasp of GCSE Biology is failing me and I’ve got completely the wrong end of the, er, stick.

*** PLEASE NOTE: I do not wish to sleep with a vampire. The risk of demon spawn is too high. ***

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At the risk of going all ‘I feel blue! Look at me! Look at me!’, this clip from Amelie adequately illustrates how I’ve been feeling lately. Wish it would stop.

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