...and Back Again

safe and sound and exhausted.

Knitting

I didn't finish the travel sock, but I got a fair amount done, round the heel and onto the home stretch. I love Lang Jawoll, and no longer so sadly lament the demise, or absorbtion into something else, of Socka Colors.

We saw a lot of art in London (hance the exhaustion) but only one item of knitterly interest, which I will report on soon. I can't scan the image from the exhibition catalogue, out of respect for its binding, but I should be able to photograph it and at least give you a rough idea.

Other

We saw lots of family, of whom the most engaging was Thomas-the-Younger. He is now five months old, and has a broad smile which implies that YOU are the person he has been waiting to see. He will go far in life if he can hang on to that. My sister was there, and said she missed the Blog, although she understood the reason (=that I was in London, as she was). She is probably the most faithful of my ten or a dozen readers. It was odd to hear her say it, like meeting oneself on the stairs.

Comments

Ann asks why I can't reply. When a comment is made via the Blogger system, it is relayed to me as an email (I have to check the Blog myself for the Halogen ones). I think maybe Blogger has changed things recently, so that replying is sometimes possible. Certainly yours came, Ann, in a format I could reply to, and the other comment on my last post was deliberately anonymous, an option Blogger wisely provides. When I first started this caper all the emails arrived anonymously. I happily replied to each one before I noticed that my answers were going into the Blogger Anonymous Basket.

Camilla: the other comment asks, why not Camilla for Queen? and I couldn't agree more. I think she is an admirable woman, who will make the Prince of Wales a good wife and the nation a good Queen Consort. I also think (paradoxically) that the marriage cost her more than it did him, altholugh it elevated her at a leap from commoner to senior royal. She already had the love of her prince, and I am sure all the diamonds and horses a woman could require. She had to give up privacy and expose her fragile (I think) nerves to constant public scrutiny and also will have to spend a lot of time doing boring things and smiling through it. The Prince, on the other hand, has lost nothing and gained much. Whereas I am sure Diana never cared for Prince Charles himself, or was ever very interested in him. She was dead keen from the beginning on the idea of being Diana, Princess of Wales, however.

(I didn't buy or read those Andrew Norton books, but I looked at one in a railway station once and found that she complained that Prince Charles took a BOOK along on their honeymoon on the royal yacht. The complaint, of course, was made years after the event. It was a slight she had suffered and remembered. Crikey.)

But we have had centuries of blameless Queens and Queens Consort recently, and I was taken aback, no more, last Sunday when I heard the joke which I repeated in my last Blog, at the idea of having a Queen -- a Queen -- of whom such a thing could be said. I recalled it over supper one evening in London last week -- Alexander and Ketki had heard it too, and agreed that it was funny -- and said that the Queen would probably be willing to part wioth a good few Canaletto's not to have a daughter-in-law people could make such jokes about. "Or a son", Alexander said. Rightly.