We're sliding toward the danger that the reforms simply create a permanent organization for the unemployed.

It's a very Social Democrat-oriented government, but that doesn't necessarily mean it can't get reforms done.

It won't lead to any dramatic change of course for Germany. But I still see a good potential for reform policies.

One party says cut one subsidy, the other part says cut the other one, ... Together, they have a chance to cut them both.

But unvented - ahh! One un-vents something; one unearths it; one digs it up, one runs it down in whatever recesses of the eternal consciousness it has gone to ground. I very much doubt if anything is really new when one works in the prehistoric medium of wool with needles. The products of science and technology may be new, and some of them are quite horrid, but knitting? In knitting there are ancient possibilities; the earth is enriched with the dust of the millions of knitters who have held wool and needles since the beginning of sheep. Seamless sweaters and one-row buttonholes; knitted hems and phoney seams - it is unthinkable that these have, in mankind's history, remained undiscovered and unknitted. One likes to believe that there is memory in the fingers; memory undeveloped, but still alive.

I know that spinning sets me in a trance; it soothes me and charges my batteries at the same time. When times are tough I sit down to spin during the news-broadcasts, with therapeutic results.