The Rime of the Ancient Wotsit

Twas a grumpy pensioner
And he had a go at me
Twas MY wool quoth he.

I spotted a carrier bag full of cream yarn in a charity shop. I had a bit of a grope and decided that it felt yummy so asked the price. Fifty pence, the nice lady said, and I probably broke Mach 10 getting my purse out of my bag.

There was this elderly bloke lounging in a armchair just across the room.

"I know a story about that wool," he said.

Well, my mother brought me up to be polite to elderly strangers (especially when they have walking sticks!), so I smiled in a friendly fashion and indicated that I would interested in hearing his story. Stupid, stupid plan.

"I bought that wool. A woman was going to knit socks for me to go with my kilt, but she died." At this point I felt impaled by his glare. "It was VERY EXPENSIVE WOOL."

I mumbled something about how it certainly seemed like very lovely wool and tried to make my escape before I offered to knit the kilt socks.

When I examined the yarn at home, I decided that it had been in that bag for some time. There's at least 400g of it, in a nearly 400g size ball and several grapefruit size balls that have been wound off, plus a mismatched pair of knitting needles. There was a bit of knitting, about 1cm of rib, that had escaped from the needle and it had been on that needle so long that the stitches had been stained by the metallic coating. Any guesses on long that would take?