...and then two come along at once

I know, right? You wait a year for a folk festival, and... Last weekend, the Womad-esque Sunfest; this, the Home County Folk Festival, which is very like Sidmouth was before it got so pleased with itself. Needless to say, full beard code was strictly enforced. (the Folk–vs.–Womad beard ratio is about two to one, and Home County is right on schedule for fulfilling its quota).

I fear, without intervention, I could easily become a mandolin-whore. There was much top-class mandolin action. James and his buddy Darrin even very kindly answered a number of my spectacularly ill-explained questions and set me further on the road to getting to grips with the thing.

Mandolin haiku

O mandolin men
F5 or A5, you are
The hottest folkies.

(Incidentally, I got the best answer out of these guys on the F5-or-A5 question. The F5 mandolin is, apparently, “way cooler”).

In non-folk news, I have so utterly screwed up this:

that it will take me approximately the rest of my life to rectify it. This is not by any means my first screw-up on this one. I wonder, now, why I would bother to persevere and try to fix this. After all, there’s always a point of no return in something – knitting, transplant surgery, marriage – when a girl just has to recognise she’s no good at it, and move on. For example, if you’re twice-divorced, there’s got to be a moment sometime before you’re on one knee holding out a third diamond, when you think to yourself, wait a minute: I truly suck at this. Time I stopped and took up something else.

Well, I am more than twice-divorced from this project. I am bad at it, and I should really be dividing up the assets and thinking about casually seeing other knitting. And yet. I keep trying to fix it. There’s a point at which perseverance becomes stupidity, and I think I am there.