Sporting chance...

It's occasionally interesting, if sometimes a little scary, to wonder what our younger selves would make of our lives now. One thing I know my 17-year old self would have a hard time accepting is that my only published work is knitting patterns, because when I was 17, I was absolutely sure I was going to be a famous and published novelist, ideally in my 20s. This did not happen. I was forever writing books when I was at school, usually progressing no further than the first few chapters, because although I was generally very good at creating characters, situations, dialogue, etc, I used to find myself at a bit of a loss to come up with anything for all of these fascinating people to do.

I've found myself thinking a lot about one of these efforts recently, one of the few which reached the end, albeit I realised it was far too short to be considered a proper novel. I called it "Sport For All", after some sort of initiative that was going on at the time aimed, I assume, at getting feeble bookish types like me involved in sport. The plot was this. The time is around 1990. My hero was in his early 20s and working for a publishing company on the outskirts of a town in the Home Counties (a thinly-disguised Reading). He was at an educational publishers, where he'd taken a job, rather than go to university, in order to carry on with his real passion, keeping goal for the local non-league football club. He was also gay, not out to his parents, teammates or work colleagues, only his younger sister and a small group of friends. We first meet him during a football match, the early rounds of the FA Cup, which his team has done well to qualify for. He plays well that day, and his team are only just beaten by their (then) fourth-division opposition, from a town a few miles away. He is congratulated by their young star striker who scored the only goal.

In the meantime, his publishers are working on a new series of books about sport for schools and ask him to edit the football one, and to find a professional player who will feature in the book. He instantly thinks of the player from the fourth-division team, who is clearly destined for greatness and agrees to take part in the project. They meet and, in the course of putting the book together, realise they are attracted to each other and start a tentative relationship, very much away from their teammates and colleagues.

Just as things are going well and the book is nearly finished, a 'big club up north' buy the striker. My goalkeeping hero tells him their relationship has to end as it would scupper his chances of making it big if the truth about his sexuality comes out, and so they go their separate ways.

A few years later, the 'keeper is working as sports reporter for a gay magazine (basically Gay Times, which I think was just about it in 1990) and living in London, when he hears rumours from colleagues that a big star is about to be outed by the tabloids. It's his old lover from Reading, now a top player. He can only watch from a distance as the footballer's life falls apart.

After I wrote the first, short, draft, I realised it needed considerable beefing up if it was ever going to make it as a novel, so I began the process of re-writing. Hence the above précis is far more detailed at the start. What I remember is feeling something of a sense of urgency.  I felt sure that if I took 5 or 10 years to write the book, it would lose a lot of its significance, as gay footballers would by then be commonplace. (Then I went to university and discovered clubbing and cider, and I'm afraid that was that for the book).

If you had told my 17-year old self that, by the beginning of 2014, there would still not be a current professional league footballer in England who was out, I would have been astounded. Especially if you had added that by then it would be perfectly unremarkable for cabinet ministers, newsreaders and company CEOs to be honest about their sexuality.

(Whether I would have been more astounded by that than the fact that I have not yet won the Booker is a moot point).

Now you may be wondering what all of this has to do with the usual subject of this blog; viz. knitting. Sexuality and sport have been linked all over the news just lately, in some very good ways, with positive reactions (let's exclude the Twitter trolls) to those sports people who have spoken out, but also negatively, in the issues about Russian laws and attitudes that have been highlighted by the Winter Olympics. A group of knitting designers have got together to do their bit to try & make this a positive by donating some or all of their pattern sales to LGBT organisations around the world during the Winter Olympics and I'm very pleased to be with them. There's more details and a full list of all the patterns included in the project at BristolIvy's blog - please check it out, there's so many fab patterns there is bound to be something you want to knit!

As a lot of my patterns already include a charity donation I will be donating all profits from Talboys Wrap and Montserrat to the Albert Kennedy Trust, which supports LGBT young people in the UK. Because while we may be rightly concerned about attitudes in Russia, the fact that, were I so minded, I could still write some version of "Sport for All" in 2014, shows that things are still a long way from perfect here.

Ashes to sashes...

It has come up occasionally on this blog, but only occasionally, that one of my other loves, apart from yarn & knitting & making stuff, is cricket. I can often be found, in what passes for summer in London, sitting in the pavilion at Lord's clutching my sock knitting and a glass of wine. waiting to see what comment the Members will make today (my favourite was an elderly Scottish gentleman who hadn't seen anyone knitting in the round since his mum used to send him socks when he was in the Navy in the war).

I'm a Londoner now, and therefore a member at my local club, Middlesex (who play their county games mostly at Lord's), but Yorkshire by birth (as has definitely been mentioned on this blog before now!). This winter has not been a pleasant one for the England cricket fan, awaking every morning to hear what new depths the team had plumbed on the tour of Australia. (The good news is we have retained an Ashes - well done Charlotte Edwards and the England women's cricket team.) Last year, however, things were different, with England on largely winning form (albeit, and I don't just say this with hindsight, the signs of the imminent collapse were there). I went to both the New Zealand and Australia tests at Lord's & was otherwise glued to the Tests on TV. Now I adore my cricket, but even I will admit there are times when one's attention can drift, which is one of the factors that makes it the ideal sport for the knitter. During the New Zealand series, my attention drifted to the new pavilion at Yorkshire's splendid ground, Headingley.

And in particular its triangular roof. The colours happened to chime rather well with the designs I was doing for Artesano Yarns at the time in their British Blue Faced Blend yarn, and so my thoughts naturally turned to: could I knit the roof?

So, I took some techniques from Shetland shawl shaping and worked out a way to make interlocking, seamless, garter stitch triangles and neatened it off with a bright edging. Serendipitously, Knit Now have put together an issue full of fascinating geometric patterns & angular knitting (I especially love the Biennial Jumper but I am a sucker for a diagonal). And here it is, Headingley Scarf:

 



In lovely Artesano Blue Faced Blend.