Monopoly!

Monopoly!

“That is what I have always understood to be the essence of anarchism: the conviction that the burden of proof has to be placed on authority, and that it should be dismantled if that burden cannot be met.”

― Noam Chomsky

It was a Sunday afternoon, Anna, one of the Middles, had spent the day at the Cousins. She came home ranting about some game they were playing where ‘you buy and sell property, there is a Banker, you charge rent…. it was amazing!’ The excitement was all too much, so much in fact, she forgot the rules. So, they were made up, along with the playing board, totems, money, chance cards etc. The dice were the only real part of the game, and in true Anna style, she was always Banker. We had been introduced to Monopoly.

Our Monopoly prototype was made out of a Weetabix box, the biscuits tossed to one side, as we couldn’t wait until they were finished. The board’s artwork was underdeveloped and the heavy creases running down the centre of the box/board often caused the dice to ricochet sending them to the other end of the room. The first game went on for over 3 weeks, until we finally decided we couldn’t take anymore. As we had no rules, we had no winners. By the end of the month, we had morphed into cut-throat swindlers, liars, thieves and power hungry property tycoons, with no morals and no money. The following Christmas, Mum and Dad, dreading what their children were growing into, gave Santa the nudge towards the board-game department and we got a shiny new Monopoly game, with rules.

The games began again but the rules were left in the box. We continued to conspire against each other, frequently stole from the bank and miscounted our moves to avoid paying rent.

 If only life could be a little bit more like this….

Life is like this….

Playing Monopoly, freefall style is how I approach lots of areas of my life. My cooking skills could be described as, changeable. My hormone induced, emotional eating and sleeping patterns are dependably undependable. Often, this is how I approach my knitting: buying up as much wool as I can afford (or not), I dive straight in, full of enthusiasm, attempting to tackle difficult patterns often with inconsolable consequences. Some knitting projects never get finished, like some games. Some should never have been finished. Here is one well on the way to being finished: my ‘smash, crack, snap, sabbatical throw’, concocted from a jumble of past knits unraveled, rewound and reworked, which took almost two years to nearly complete. Ta Dah!

Almost there...

I’m not promoting all out anarchy, but now and again, its okay to forgot the rules, if it feels right. If you do apply this ideology to your knitting, start by using cheaper yarns first. It can be far more fulfilling to achieve something you had no benchmarking for in the first place than trying to recreate a mock-up from an idealized image. Please share your mishaps, misadventures and final mistakes! Even the good ones!