Rugby

On Saturday, all was predictable. Wales thumped Italy and Ireland did the same to us. Yesterday, however, England were leading France by a satisfactory-seeming margin at half-time and France went on to win by one point. It was not, I think a very good match from a conoisseur's point of view, but it was so exciting it left me breathless. So now both England and Scotland have lost their opening two matches -- a gloriously preposterous state of affairs.

The Rest of Life

I've been using some of the time free'd up by the blessed absence of the Knitlist to go back to work on my website, sadly neglected in recent months. The address is in the sidebar, but don't look now. It's a mess. The youngest grandchild isn't even there yet.

Less than two inches to go, on the Fair Isle jacket, before it will be time to start the neck steek. Another picture promised then.

Marian Poller of Luvfairisle (http://www.marianknits.blogspot.com/) -- mentioned on Saturday but spelled wrong -- wrote to suggest a lacy scarf as a suitable project for the Chinese yarn mentioned and illustrated on Friday. A simple and elegant idea. There's a lot of the stuff. I could knit a scarf and go on to do a tee-shirt, if I wanted to. Jamieson & Smith in Lerwick used to sell, I hope they still do, a reprint of a 50's-looking booklet of Shetland scarf patterns, some of them very challenging indeed. I'm not a passionate lace-chart person, but when I did one from that booklet, I found I simply had to chart it, row-by-row as I went along. Otherwise there was only a long grey row of instructions which would have been impossible to knit without someone to sit there and read them aloud to me. The booklet is meticulously proof-read. Somehow one knows that, just looking at it.

Another good knitting blog, re-discovered as I was tidying my Internet Favourites yesterday, is Stephanie Pearl-McPhee's "The Yarn Harlot" -- http://www.yarnharlot.ca/blog/. The current post, about the death of the family goldfish, is most affecting.

The Comment situation doesn't seem to be entirely resolved yet. There are now two systems -- Blogger's own, in tiny print, comes first. It allows messages to be visible, for the first time, if you click on it, but they're still anonymous from my point of view, unless, I gather, you have a Blogger Blog of your own. Bouquets to Kathy for the first ever visible comment. Then comes the system I laboured to install last week, where it says "Comments" and "Trackback" (what does that mean?) in larger type. That one wasn't working yesterday, but now is. It's an independent system from Haloscan as used by grown-up Bloggers like Queer Joe. I think that's the one to go for. Maybe I can use my new-found daring to get rid of the Blogger one.

Today I'm going to defy fate and drive our car to the supermarket.