As I thought – that sleeve, on one circular, fairly hums along. It won’t be long now…and then I must start some serious thinking about necklines.

What is it about spring? The knitting magazines are all utterly blah, or approaching that state, and here we are wanting to buy all the yarn there is, and knit everything we can imagine. Franklin even wants to learn to crochet granny squares. (It’s a stunning scarf, Franklin, and granny squares are easy and fun. Crede expertae.) It’s something about reading blogs and seeing what everyone is doing and wanting to do it all oneself. It's something about spring.

Comments

If the worst comes to the worst and I have to knit a toy as my Games entry this year, I’ll look first for a pattern for a mermaid which I knit for granddaughter Hellie a good many years ago. She loved it, and eventually it sort of wore out; I’m sure she’d like another one. Hellie always seems to be the one who winds up with my Games entry.

And, Kate, that’s a good idea, about trying to get onto the Home Industries Tent committee myself. I doubt if it would work, because our visits are so irregular. And it would also mean, of course, that I would have to think of things for the knitting section. There is always a choice of two things: one daft, like a lavatory roll cover, and one fairly sensible, if we’re lucky. Thinking of things is harder than complaining about what the committee comes up with: but hey! we haven’t been asked for a scarf in any recent year that I can remember. There’s an idea, for free.

I hope your pregnancy goes forward without further incident, after that grim beginning. And no, shamefully, I’ve never seen the Falkirk Wheel. It does indeed look fascinating. If it’s any comfort, we have some prospect of taking the boat out to the ruins of Inchcolm Abbey, on an island in the Firth of Forth. Every year since we moved to Edinburgh, we say, we really must… and every year we don’t get around to it. But next month some old friends from Boston are coming to see us, and this could be the moment.

One year at the Festival they did Macbeth there, starting with the witches moving among the passengers on the boat. Boy am I sorry I missed that.

Deb, I learned “insh’Allah” from my daughter, too. She and her family – this is Helen we're talking about, in Thessaloniki – went back to Cairo for Christmas. She and her husband met and married there, and hadn’t been back for 10 years or more, and found it sadly changed, rich and poor segregated from each other, everybody hostile.