Sorry!

Again yesterday morning, my modem quietly dropped the line with the result that five or six deathless paragraphs proved to be nothing of the sort. I'm composing this in an off-line program called BlogJet, which gives me, I think, a spar to hang on to. I didn't try to reconstruct the morning's work right away, being too cross.

I began, I remember, by saying that sometimes when I log on to Queer Joe and discover that he hasn't written anything, I feel a sort of sense of relief. I haven't missed anything, and I don't need to read on. So maybe it's just as well that I've missed a couple of days here.

I finished Mungo's sweater in the dying hours of the old year. I'm now resuming the erstwhile Fair Isle jacket, formerly Starmore's "Stillwater" pattern, now ripped back to the ribbing and re-commenced in a traditional, symmetrical pattern. It's going better than Stillwater did. It remains to be seen how the colours are working.

Mary Hughes-Thompson's Koigu site is http://foxyknits.com, apparently without the "www" bit. My dark Koigu is speeding eastwards already, she says.

I have discovered www.honeylanefarms.com at the same time (must have been Saturday, in both cases) as receiving a request for a knitted present to mark a graduation in the summer. Honey Lane Farms does hand-dyed alpaca of great beauty and considerable expense, but a scarf won't take much.

Tsumani

James writes from Beijing that their Christmas holiday in Thailand last year (meaning, '03) was on the other side of the country. They seriously considered Phuket for this year but decided to face up to the horrors of a traditional Christmas instead. Beijing even provived the snow.

Our daughter Rachel lost two friends in the disaster, one of them of long standing, a visit-each-other's-houses-godparent-to-each-other's-children sort of friend. what the ancient Romans called hospes. He worked for CARE USA in Thailand. Rachel was worried when we were in London last week, in the sort of apotropaic way one worries about one's friends when they are anywhere near anything bad. But when emails, uncharactertisically, went unanswered, she went to the CARE website and found his obituary. Robin Needham. The rest of the family are safe, and have been evacuated.