Something is wrong with my Internet Service Provider this morning, or else with BT broadband. Terrifying. I will have to print this out and throw it into the Firth of Forth in a bottle.

I’ve embarked on the 4th and final sleeve-dinosaur. I am glad I did it this way: the dinosaurs are getting better and smoother as I proceed. I wish I’d taken more trouble about buying yarn.

I have pretty well -- but not quite -- decided on “Tricorner” for the weekend scarf. Quite a few of the scarves in “Knitting New Scarves” are based on essentially the same technique, forming flanges and then dissolving them back into a tube. I did it, and enjoyed doing it, when I knit the Linked Ribs at the end of last year.

Non-knit

The internal monologue I mentioned the other day, has been concerned, this week, with the possibility of buying a field, the one containing the famous haugh. If I ever get on-line again, I’ll put in a link. (That’s a link to the April archives – if you want to pursue the matter, it’s April 17 and subsequent.)

Our little house and its fields once supported a numerous family. The fields go eastwards from the house towards the river Ardle: the Stubble Field, the Plantation (where my husband grows his trees), the Raspberries, the Island. These family names refer to characteristics long, long out of date. There’s no stubble now, no raspberries, and the Island is dry-land all the way. The haugh would be the next field, after the river, and buying it as a gift for our four children would be an anti-inheritance-tax move. I gather in the US you don’t go in for inheritance tax much, but it’s a big problem here for anyone who owns a house.

I have consulted our children who have reacted with indifference or bewilderment except for Helen in Thessaloniki, who wrote this:

"I think that the more (land) the merrier. The fact that the field in question is an extension (albeit separated by the Ardle) of our land, is a definate plus. We can build a foot bridge and create a Miles dynasty theme park complete with reinactions of the planting of the plantation and banks of fake snow with urchins dressed in tattered Fairisles traipsing back to a bowl of gruel in an Historically Preserved Burnside.
Land is the answer to everything. Greeks, all Greeks, have bits of land here and there all over the place and I think its a great thing to hand on to one's children/grandchildren especially if it adjoins the new Blairgowrie-Kirkmichael expressway."