Here is a picture of my friend India Flint and me at the Gallery of New South Wales indulging in a little light refreshment. She was in Sydney just before Christmas and came to stay with me. She is now off on her wanderings in the Very Northern Hemisphere, off on an expodition to the North Pole as Winnie-ther-Pooh would say.

I am lucky enough to be in Sydney while the Sydney Festival is on. Each year that I am in Australia I always seem to miss out but this time I am trying to get to see as much as possible. Tonight I went to the see one of the most amazing visual and musical events I have ever seen. It was the Manganiyar Seduction and it was truly wonderful. The Manganiyars are a caste of musicians from the Thar Desert of Rajasthan. They all have the surname of Khan and they sing songs of love and ballads about Kings and songs marking special occasions such as births and marriages and other delightful things. The set was like a jewelled box for treasures with many compartments. Each compartment held a musician or singer and lit up when its inhabitant was performing. A true spectacle.

Three months is a long time to be without something for my fingers to do. I knew I would feel like this, twitchy, without something woolly between the fingers, so I bought out with me some crochet hooks and a small assortment of interesting yarns that I had secreted away in my yarn store for such a time as this. I found myself constructing strange tube like protuberances and realised that hands were beginning to form themselves off the crochet hook. This is not a new departure as I had hatched an 8 foot high edifice some way back in the '70's when I was sick of making matinee jackets. This lady was loved a lot by my then small children. She ended her days in various positions dressed in 1930 hats and a cigarette holder stuck in her mouth (?) in the front window of my dear departed neighbour Marsha Gardiner. She was a wonderful woman and a dear friend who took a fancy to my creation. She startled many a passer-by.

These newly constructed hands have taken on a life of their own and who knows where they will take me. I think at the moment they remind me of the Grinch Who Stole Christmas. Watch this space