One of those mornings when facility deserts me. Knitting? Never heard of it.

I’m early in row 104 of the Princess border, and must begin the day’s work by tinking 20 stitches – a silly miscounting.

Try as I will, I can’t stop thinking about the centre. The whole gigantic thing is a triangle, not a square. When the border is finished -- !-- you reduce 865 stitches to 647 by means of a “laurel leaf pattern” which I don’t understand. Then you start in the middle on 5 stitches – that leaves 642 – and knit back and forth, taking in one stitch with each row. So that means 642 rows and at the end, 647 stitches again.

Then the edging, along the edges of the border I’m knitting at the moment, and along those 647 stitches.

So, a long way to go. I’m having fun with my simple-minded Greek course, and am pleased to find how much simple-minded Greek has remained lodged somewhere in the synapses since I mugged it up with a BBC cassette course before I went out to be there when Fergus was born. I hope that means that that edging pattern is still in there somewhere, too.

Knitting magazine, the British one, turned up yesterday. How long am I going to stagger on with it? The patterns are not going to get good, and when did I last knit a pattern from any magazine, anyway? The ads are useful, but I’ve got Google. The articles are pretty banal. I could buy a couple of expensive Rowan books a year for what the subscription costs. I’d rather have the two Kaffe patterns in that £15 Rowan Scottish Islands book, than my whole pile of Knittings.