The Wild Winds Blow

This was supposed to be posted March 12. Oops.

I received an early birthday present yesterday. From me.

I had been on the lookout for a replacement for the much-loved fisherman's knit cardigan I bought in Scotland five years ago. I wear it constantly in winter. It's starting to unravel now. I'm hoping it's repairable, but wanted to know if it was possible to replace it with something similar if not identical when the time came.

I tried the retailer first, the Inverary Woollen Mill in Inverary, a tourist town north of Bute where Caitlin and Bob used to live. It doesn't have a website of its own but it's an affiliate of a fairly large chain in Scotland, the Edinburgh Woollen Mill. They appeared not to have anything even similar.

Next I tried the manufacturer. They still exist and still make jumpers and cardigans, but nothing remotely like mine. Bummer.

So I widened the search, and eventually thought to try Amazon. There, I found a sweater that looked very similar: same colour, same kind of knitting design, with a slightly different neck, buttons instead of a zipper and in Merino wool which would be softer and lighter than the heavy rough wool of my sweater.

What caught my eye was the price: $84 CDN, free delivery, shipped from Ireland. I had paid about $140 for the Scottish one I have. 

It was offered by a retailer headquartered in Dublin called Carrolls Irish Gifts and manufactured by Aran Crafts in Kildare, which claims to have been in business since 1856. There were a few troubling entries in the user reviews section, some suggesting the item had shipped from China rather than Ireland and was not real wool. I emailed Carrolls asking about this. They responded, reassuring me on all counts.

So what the hell, I thought, and ordered it. It came yesterday, and it's great, pretty much exactly as expected: not an exact replacement for my Scottish sweater, but a real bargain. I'm guessing a Canadian retailer would price it at $150 or more.

So there you go - that's how exciting my life is: I can spend seven paragraphs writing about a sweater I bought! Next, I'll be posting pictures of the dinners I eat.

*

It was a wild day. The wind was blustering from first thing in the morning - bringing warm air apparently: it reached 19C. It was heavy going with the wind on my morning walk, and Harris Park turned out to be partly flooded. The river was rampaging.

In the afternoon, I was determined to get my change of scenery. I drove to Adelaide and Windermere and walked back in along a paved river path. The river there was even wilder than it had been downtown in the morning. Logs, branches and other woody detritus swept along in the current. The sun shone out around dark clouds.

I had forgotten how wild it was down there. It's a place I used to have adventures occasionally as a pre-teen. Parents then didn't worry too much about where their kids went during the day. Heaven help any kid who fell into the river on a day like this. They'd be swept away in seconds.

The path soon veered away from the river so I turned back and drove home. I wanted to get some shots of the flooding downtown. Much more of Harris Park was underwater now. Lots of people, mostly student-aged kids out and about, many in a giddy mood, it seemed. Don't they exams to be studying for?