Have You Seen My Hat?

The good thing about the wintery temperatures all over Europe, and about all the snow and cold despite the calendar already writing April is that the late birthday present I have made for my dearest friend [e] might still get a little bit of wear before spring – hopefully soon! – will arrive: Pattern: Rikke Hat by Sarah

Exmoor by the book

So, we promised you’d see/read more from our trip to Exmoor National Park in September and, finally, here we go… In a way, our first stop on the way to Exmoor was at Daunt Books in Marylebone High Street, London, back in July, long before the actual trip. Daunt is notable for preserving its beautiful

What we did on our holidays (1495 edition)

I know we promised you mountains, but this will have to wait until [m] finds the time to put together a blog post. You see, where I come from the landscape looks like this… … so, frankly, I don’t feel competent to write about mountains. [m], on the other hand, is a regular Heidi –

Lit Knit 5: “Poets and their Companions” by Joseph von Eichendorff

Believe it or not, I finally wrote a post in our Lit Knit series which is NOT about Terry Pratchett! So, here goes… The author: Joseph von Eichendorff (1788-1857) was one of the most important writers of German Romanticism. Having been born only 1788, however, meant that he wrote his earliest works at a time

My ancestors’ books, pt. 3: Kisses

If you looked closely at the images in yesterday’s post, you will have realised that the book with the clover isn’t a prayer book but a dictionary. More precisely, it’s this… … pocket-size German-Czech dictionary, published in 1923. Even though this was five years after the end of the Habsburg Empire, Austria still had close

Lit Knit 4: Knitting with Terry. Again

At the risk of becoming repetitive, here’s another one of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels, Night Watch (first published 2002), in our Lit Knit series… Like Jingo, it features Commander Sam Vimes of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch as the main protagonist. This time, however, Ankh-Morpork isn’t at war with a foreign superpower but, so to speak, with

Lit Knit 3: Jingo by Terry Pratchett

So, another post in our Lit Knit series and guess what, it’s Terry Pratchett again! Hm, I’m beginning to think we ought to rename the series Knitting with Terry or something like that ;-) Anyway, this time the book in question is Jingo, the 21st Discworld novel first published in 1997. In Jingo, the mighty

Blast you, Thomas Mann!

So I just read Thomas Mann’s classic Der Tod in Venedig [Death in Venice] and guess what? Now I have an incredible urge to go to Venice. Actually, we’re sort of planning a short trip to Venice to see the Biennale, anyway, but unfortunately our plans are for sometime in autumn. Blast! [Throws himself on floor

A Hobbit’s Riding Hall?

A few weeks ago, in a far-off corner of the world, director Peter Jackson started shooting his movie adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. To commemorate this, Jackson has posted a short behind-the-scenes-video on his Facebook page. Of course, the clip also offers a glimpse of the film set, and when I watched it a

May I introduce you to: Der Strickaere

It appears that I almost missed my knitterversary. Ok, not almost, I actually did miss it: It is now one year and a little more than a week since [m] first initiated my into the arcane art of knitting. This, of course, would call for a post about knitting, but alas, I don’t have anything