Trip to Town

I have had such a busy time of late... Yule tide approaching and because so many members of our clan are abroad I have to plan ahead and get parcels posted in plenty of time... aged parent in and out of hospital and then nursing home - that's a month worth of blogs in itself... but probably not the most interesting... soap and toiletry students coming to the house - must tidy up, it looks like Armageddon in here at the moment... a costly visit to the dentist with a prescription for anti-biotics and a further appointment that is likely to cost me another arm and a leg (fast running out of limbs here!)........ and a couple of treats this month that I just have to tell you about........

The first one is this place We went to London yesterday for a concert - more about that later - and I wanted to take the opportunity to visit this wool shop. Unfortunately our visit was not on one of the days that they stay open late... I would have loved that... and we arrived not long before they closed and I forgot to get my camera out, so here's one from their archives and the 'knit in public day' earlier this year (I missed that one entirely!!).



If you think you have a good wool shop near you then lets compare... IKnit London have a really nice choice of yarns, loads of knitting books to buy, files full of knitting patterns and knitting magazines to browse through and a large comfy sofa to sit on while you do the browsing, they have loads of accessories and equipment and tools and gadgets and lots of finished projects to check out along with very helpful staff... pretty much standard for a good wool shop eh? Does your wool shop have a licensed bar? Yep, you read that right. They have a licensed bar and serve wine with the wool on Tuesdays and Wednesdays between 6pm and 9pm when their free to join knitting club meets. I wish it was in Oxford! London is within easy reach of us here but takes time to get there so we tend to make it special trips only.... which brings me to the real purpose of our visit this time.

We went to see Rodrigo y Gabriella - guitar players extra-ordinaire!! Never heard of them? Well it doesn't suprise me, they don't seem to have the acclaim I think they deserve in this country, all the same, they packed out the Hammersmith Apollo for their one night only appearance in London.



Their speciality is doing classical guitar covers of heavy metal anthems... there are a few vids on utube of them, especially this one with them playing Metallica's Orion. But none of the online videos can convey the energy of their performance and the incredible musician-ship... it was F*****G AWESOME!!!!!!!!!!! yeah I know the picture is out of focus...



....We had a really good night (understatement)... crawled into bed at about 1:30 this morning and even though we hadn't had a single alcoholic drink all night - feel really hung over this morning. Mmmm perhaps we are feeling our age - No Never!!