I can Crochet!!!

I can knit, but I have never been able to crochet, so I have had a few lessons from my friend at work and surprise surprise, I can now crochet. I am amazed!! In fact I can crochet while watching telly, I am so pleased that at my late age I have cracked the technique and have joined the crochet club!

So what to do with it?? This square is now twice as big and I have had to go and buy more wool. It grows really fast. I am excited!!!

Today it has been awful, pouring with rain, blowing a gale and generally horrible. It was so dark at 2.30pm that all the street lights came on. That's what I hate about the winter.

The one thing I like about winter is that we get to watch I'm a Celebrity get me out of here!! Its a brilliant show, you get to watch semi famous people fall out with each other, eat awful food and generally live a very uncomfortable life while starving hungry, whats not to like???

As part of my attempt to get a little fitter I have bought myself a bike,I have been looking for a while, I wanted a Dutch style bike or a town bike (both similar and look a bit like bikes that Miss Marple might ride) So having looked for a while I finally found one on Gum tree  not too far away (Hitchin) and for a bargain £20!! Its a lovely metallic purple with white walled tyre, its ancient but its just what I had been looking for. We picked it up on Monday afternoon and I wanted to get it home and give it a go. In my head I was still 15 and able to ride around with no problems  in fact Madeline and I used to ride all over the place when we were living in Bedmond, what I had failed to take into consideration was that when I was 15 it was 37 long years ago and although my brain remembered cycling as an easy activity in real life it wasn't so straight forward. So we blew up the tyres and I was keen to try it out. I got me leg over (oo err missus) and got my feet on the pedals, it was then I realised that the saddle was too high and it was a bit of a reach to actually sit down. Well as I was on I decided to keep pedaling and headed off down the footpath in our little close.  I was quite pleased with myself, navigated around a tree and headed back to where Tom was locking up the car. I braked gently and stopped on the grass in front of the house. At this point I thought that the old adage about never forgetting about how to ride a bike was true. Very quickly I realised that I needed to get off of the bike, so I tried to get off the saddle (which was just about impossible) I was wearing a skirt which got stuck on the saddle, so I ended up hopping around on my left leg trying to hold the bike and free my skirt, when it quickly became clear that the only place I was going to end up was on the ground, so I fell on my backside in the mud!!! You know how it is when you take a tumble, I checked to make sure I wasn't injured, and then started to get up at precisely the same time as a group of laughing teenagers came around the corner, the look on their faces was a picture, strange middle aged woman 'crawling' on the wet grass/mud looking at a bike!!! They just ran away leaving Tom to try and assist me off of the ground!!

It hasn't put me off although my hip is even more dodgy this week, I will give it another go with a lower saddle and better weather, once I have mastered it, I am planning a trip out with my friend Jane who assures me she knows the way to a pub, which is a great incentive to become a cyclist again!!!!

Roll on summer time!!!