Hoxton Square

This past Sunday was a gorgeous day, and so I went to the square to sit and knit. I ran into some friends, which was really nice. I love that kind of fortuitous encounter. Admittedly, they live around the corner so it's not blind coincidence, but it was still nice. Well, until P got stung by a wasp on his tongue. He didn't make a fuss, though I kept trying to tell him that if he's not going to take advantage of this opportunity to make a fuss, when can he? "Tiff uppah lip," he tried to say, though of course, it was really just a swollen tongue.

It's the season when secret projects start to work their way into my consciousness. While I'm not knitting presents for everybody this year, as I did last year, I still want to get started on the few I'm doing. I'll finish the legwarmers I started for my yoga teacher last year - it's great to start on something that's already 50% done! And then a couple of other things. Rog's yearly birthday scarf, which he loses yearly, but then asks for again, so I can't really take the losing as a hint. Or not as a hint that he doesn't like them; more as a hint that I should somehow include velcro on it. And the rest of the projects? Really secret, so I won't discuss them here.

When we were sitting in the park, two of our local drunks were sitting on the bench behind us. When P went to get an antihistamine for his tongue, the drunks started talking to me. The young one (who has aged so much in the past year and a half) said, "excuse me! excuse me!" til I realised he was talking to me. "What are you knitting?" he asked. "A scarf," I said. "Oh," he said pausing. "Where did you learn?" As he's asking this, the other drunk, who is much older and much more f**ked up was saying things like, "hhmfffs jumpah fu mmeh?" "I'da smmmss scarf?" I told the young drunk, "my best friend." I told the old drunk, "no, I'm not knitting you anything." The young drunk said, "not so many people knit anymore, do they?" I told him there are lots of us. He said, "Oh. I remember spending lots of time with my nan while she was knitting." Then P came back, and the conversation stopped.

I feel bad for this young drunk. He obviously wants social interaction with other people besides the other drunks who are overwhelmingly male and probably twice his age. There's one woman that I've seen, but she's twice his age as well. They all seem to share this big brown dog, who always looks so resigned, with a "why me?" look on his face. The young drunk kept talking to other people in the square, trying to help a small child, for example, explaining something about trees and why you can't climb them. As you can imagine, a lot of people are pretty snobby to the drunks, though generally they keep to themselves, and their dog is gentle. I find the trustafarians desperately trying to be cool in their "I just pooed my pants" trousers (you know the ones I mean) to be the really offensive ones, leaving their rubbish all over the square. Or opening crap galleries on the square (that's you, Julian Schnabel's son with your crap taste in art). (Seriously, his last show included plastic turds left on a stack of catalogues - that's what he thinks of the people who come to see his shit.)(Sorry for the cursing.)

In other news, I was longing for corn tortillas once again, and just out of curiosity, I googled "corn tortillas," and it turns out that there's a Mexican grocery about a fifteen-minute walk from here. I came home with corn tortillas, mole, masa harina and ancho chiles, and we had a lovely Mexican / New Mexican fusion green chile stew with little corn flour dumplings.

And now we're off to see Gang of Four at the Macbeth!