Here We Go

I will see the eye doctor today, and hope to get a date, or possible date anyway, for the next cataract operation.

And Helen and her sons will arrive from Thessaloniki, late at night.

That's the striped Koigu above, of course, looking pretty good. It still needs the other band for the button placket, and the collar, and much finishing. Meanwhile I have finished the 35th repeat of the Princess shawl edging.

And left myself with no knitting to take along to the hospital today. The shawl edging is obviously out; the striped Koigu is at far too fiddly a stage; and I haven't cast on another pair of socks since I finished Thomas-the-Elder's pair. It'll have to be socks, somehow.

Non-Knit (and pretty non-interesting)

We are in the throes of switching banks. The ancient Bank of Scotland has been taken over by the Halifax Building Society and has developed so many evil practices as a result, that we decided to leave. It's very hard work but we had a good day yesterday -- succeeded in getting through to our new Royal Bank of Scotland accounts on line; activated our cards; actually bought something with an RBofS card; and handed in a leaflet asking them to go to the Bank of Scotland and find out about all our standing orders, and transfer them. That's sort of scary, as there is much scope for things to go wrong, and it involves all sorts of things like our annual payment to the Strathardle Highland Gathering, and the Direct Debit that pays for my subscription to Knitting Magazine. We shall see.

And I had a thot about current affairs. When we were being bombed by the IRA the government and the media and the police had to give some regard to the sensibilities of people like my husband and Bertie Ahern, and give some thought therefore to Irish grievances even while they blew up our pubs and our cabinet. But there is no such scruple now, and Brown Muslim People are all sort of lumped together. My grocer Mr Murtaza says that if the result of all this is that Muslims and other people become more separate, the bombers will have achieved what they wanted to achieve. The leader of the Liberal Democrat party gave a speech this week in which he rather sensibly suggested that the war in Iraq may have inflamed Muslim sensibilities. He has been roundly condemned for suggesting such a thing.