Elizabeth, thank you for that most cheering comment yesterday: if you’ve only just received your summer Knitter’s, mine is probably still to come, and that means that only one issue is missing (namely spring), mislaid by me or of course by the postal services of one nation or the other. That’s a much more manageable thought. I can always get it from Back Issues.

But I think that henceforth I’ll make a note of the date when a knitting magazine arrives. Quarterly is too long an interval to get the mind around.

Thanks to everybody, too, for continued political comments. Theo, I look forward to continuing this conversation in Strathardle soon. Kate, I’ve never heard of anyone making a compendium of political platforms such as you describe. It sounds useful indeed.

Now, knitting.

Look at that:

I always cut out pictures of interesting kilt hose and put them in the back of my copy of Lady Gainford’s book, but this one from yesterday’s Scotsman really takes the cake.

It’s worth peering at, and I'm afraid it's less clear in the scan than in the newspaper. The two colours in the turnovers are continued all the way down the leg, panels of what may be knit-one-maroon, knit-one-aqua, offset by one stitch in the next round, punctuated with one- or perhaps two-stitch maroon ribs. The yarn must be finer than yarn usually used for hose, to accommodate two colours and leave room to get the royal foot into the royal shoe. He didn’t get those at Marks and Spencer’s.

I went to the Prince of Wales website in an idle moment yesterday, but although it’s set up to receive emails, it warns that you won’t get an answer. I toyed with the idea of writing an actual letter on actual paper to Clarence House, as the website suggests, asking who knits for H.R.H. – but that’s a lot of trouble and seemed rather silly.

However, this morning in the early moments of consciousness when I have always found that the synapses fire rather well, it occurred to me to set Knitting magazine on the job. It would make a good and unusual feature article, and there aren’t all that many of those around. I’d attempt it myself if I weren’t so old and so involved in cooking lunch.

Once when I was very young I saw a young man buying a lace jabot at a haberdashery counter in Copeland’s in Glasgow, and I reflected that there is no nation in Europe where a gent can do himself up so well as in Scotland, without joining the army.

As for my own knitting, I got around that third corner of the melon scarf. At the beginning of the whole job I was in such a hurry to get going that I took the Coward’s Way and knit a few rows in a waste yarn rather than attempting a more refined temporary cast-on. The predictable down-side, last night, was a laborious half-hour unpicking waste yarn and retrieving stitches.