Sticks and Twine at the Black Lion

 Sticks and Twine is a new knitting (or crocheting or whatever other handicrafts people are doing) group that meets in the Black Lion about once a month.

It was on Tuesday this month, from 6pm to 8pm, so I went along straight from work.  We were sitting round a table in the Lion's Den, the room across the corridor from the main bar, and it was very pleasant indeed.  As we were in one of the oldest buildings in Hay, there was quite a bit of discussion about old superstitions to protect buildings, like burying a witch bottle under the hearth so a witch couldn't fly down the chimney.

And, of course, the Black Lion has ghosts.

Originally, the present pub and the house next door and the bookbinder's  workshop beyond that were all part of the same complex of buildings.  The present owners of the Black Lion bought the house after many years of it standing vacant, and renovated it.  Before they did this, though, they had some ghost hunters in who spoke to the French ghost in the cellar.  I'm not sure how a French ghost ended up in the Black Lion cellar, but he seems to be a fixture - and he talked about going to the "other cellar" after they talked to him.  (Again, I'm not sure how they were talking to him - but something was mentioned about an app they had on their phone!  You can get apps for anything these days!)  As far as the owners of the Black Lion were concerned, there wasn't another cellar, so they thought the ghost hunters might be making things up.  Then they bought the house next door - and it has a cellar, which would originally have connected to the Black Lion.

We weren't just telling ghost stories, though -  apparently there's a new TV series about knitting, along the same lines as the Sewing Bee, but the people who'd seen it weren't terribly impressed.  They did a piece about Fair Isle knitting, and got a long and detailed letter from a lady in Shetland, which one of the ladies in the group quoted, telling them all the things that they had got wrong, or had failed to mention, despite the researchers going to the Shetland Museum and finding out all about it.  So I don't think this programme is going to be the success among knitters that the Sewing Bee was among the sewing community.

They weren't sure if there was going to be a December meeting - the feeling was that it might be too close to Christmas - but I'll keep my eyes open for information, because I really enjoyed the evening.