Yesterday must have been a slow news day, or perhaps the editors at CBC News just felt that we needed something uplifting. Whatever, one of the main news features throughout the day was about Anthony Gormley's art project to put a different Brit atop the 4th "plinth" (who knew what a plinth was before yesterday? I didn't) in Trafalgar Square for an hour of pure, wonderful exhibitionism. The idea was to make art more about the present than the past. Here's a link to the Daily Mail's great article.http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1197704/Now-theres-poo-Trafalgar-Squares-fourth-plinth.html
Okay, so aside from sharing my discovery of the meaning of "plinth", why am I writing about this in my blog, you might ask. Good question.
The other thing that CBC mentioned in each of these news features was that participants could do anything (legal) for their hour on display, including knitting!
I thought: how wonderful to have the world recognize how the profile of knitters and knitting has changed in the past few years and how wonderfully expressive it can be. I was anxious to get on-line and see pictures of the new face of knitting in Britian atop one of its most memorable sites. As you will see if you click on the Daily Mail article, there are lots of photos of individuals doing intersting things, but I couldn't find the knitter!
Then I found her in this picture. That's right, bless her heart, the lady in black, second from the right.
Okay, so where is Debbie Bliss, Jean Moss, Kaffe Fassett??? The kid down the street who has learned to make knitted hackey sacks? The young mom knitting a beanie in eco cotton for her newborn? The grandmother making rainbow coloured socks for the whole family? Where is anyone who is not dressed from head to toe in black, knitting with white acrylic???
I guess I can console myself with the fact that CBC thought that it was noteworthy enough to mention that there was a knitter among the participants. Perhaps they were just a bit too squeamish to mention the gentleman that the Daily Mail leads off with wearing his excrement costume.
Oh well, we sometimes think that knitting is the just the coolest thing on earth these days, then we do get put back in our place when we realize that 99% of the rest of the world (the non-knitting Muggles, to quote the Harlot) still don't get it. Alas.
