Kerry, how very kind of you (comment under the shrug, yesterday). I’ve got VKB 32 – it's Spring, 1948, I think. You say it mentions coupons -- I don’t know how long clothes rationing went on. Food rationing – meat -- finally ended in 1954. By then it was effectively rationed by price, anyway. I want to find out more about clothes coupons: it shouldn’t be difficult.

Princess Elizabeth and Philip Mountbatten were married in November, 1947. Lots of old ladies sent the Princess their clothes coupons for her trousseau, so rationing obviously still prevailed then.

Have a great time in the US, Kerry. I’ve lost your email address, what with getting a nice new computer and getting broadband to run on it. I’m jean at milesandmiles dot demon dot co dot uk these days.

More eBay

The bidding ends this morning on VKB 23, from 1943.

By then the Battle of Britain had been won, and the Battle of El Alamein – the one Churchill famously called, “the end of the beginning”. The Americans were in the war. Invasion was no longer feared with every full moon. Everybody must have known, if they’d ever doubted it, that all would be well in the end. Even Herr Schikelgruber must have known that (in reverse), at least during his three-a.m. moments. He wasn’t stupid, whatever his other faults.

But that didn’t mean that one’s own husband, or son, or brother, or house was going to make it through. One was still cold, and hungry, and ill-clothed, and, if of a nervous disposition, scared of the bangs. What did VK have to say to knitters in 1943? I think I know, but I’ll be very interested to see it in print. If I win the bidding.

I gave the matter some thought during Mass yesterday. (I have recommended religious observance before, for the opportunity it affords for reflection.) I want to enter a bid with significant digits.

I decided to go for the score by which Scotland defeated England and won the Calcutta Cup in 2000. The score by itself might suffice – with a decimal point in the obvious place, I hasten to add. But it wouldn't be a nuclear bid, not even a killer one for such a plum. So I will reverse the digits.

More on the subject tomorrow.

Meanwhile, I knit on, on the shrug border. Wrapping the purl stitches the “wrong” way is making a neat job of it, just as G-R promises, even though the yarn continues to twist. Jean-in-Cornwall, I’m doing exactly as you suggest: putting a rubber band around the ball every so often, and holding it up so that it can twirl wildly around for a while.

We are going to Glasgow today to have lunch with Ketki’s parents, who are in GB on a visit from NY. Ketki will be talking to the Glasgow branch of her bank the while. Indian languages have words to express the relationship of the parents of people who are married to each other. It’s very clumsy, in English.

Fortunately we don't have to leave until after the bidding finishes for VKB No. 23.