Here we are briefly back in Edinburgh between one busy week and the next.

The weather has been abominable – rain every day. Individual days of this sort are common enough, but I can’t remember so consistent a run of them in August. Friday the 8th was a nice day – I didn’t feel up to getting the lawnmower out, but Helen took her sons for a deer walk, up Glen Derby half way to Pitlochry. They saw dozens, including an antlered stag. Just waiting up there until the Games are over, when they’ll come down and eat my vegetables.

We dined splendidly off them -- the vegetables, not the deer, alas -- and with variety. We’re up to date with courgette-eating, and indeed production is slow: lots of flowers, but most of them male. Is this a response to the lowering, sunless weather? Can a plant change its mind that fast? Such courgettes as there are at the moment are being grown on for their role in the Collection of Four Vegetables which I hope to enter in the Games.

There’s nothing like a freshly-dug potato.

Knitting

I didn’t do much, but the Araucania sweater was a great comfort when I did pick it up. It’s looking large, and at one point I tried it on, popping a third of the stitches off the circular needle as I did so. It’s fine. I’m large, too.

Here, I press on with the Liesl, although I don’t know for how much longer. I’ve come to the difficult bit of which other knitters have spoken, when I’ve got to decide whether it’s long enough to reach the armpits. (It’s top-down.) Since it will eventually be fairly severely blocked, to bring up the lace effect – it’s essentially feather-and-fan – the problem is compounded.

I can’t actually start designing the swallowtail coat of a beautiful blue for a teddy bear until I’ve wound the yarn and swatched it. So I think I’d better press on with that. I bought the teddy bear yesterday. That’s a start.

While I was there in John Lewis, I looked at the autumn Rowan magazine, but left it behind. I might have bought it at half the price. I’ve got the new IK. Not too bad. What about the Estes vest in Rowan’s new Colorscape?

I felt of the last issue – can’t remember whether I said it here or just thought it to myself – that Eunny’s editorial eye preferred designs that would look well on Eunny Jang. This issue looks as if others complained to her of the same thing, and she is trying, against the grain, to suit the Fuller Figure.

The Curmudgeon says the new VK is good, and links to this brilliant site where Vogue has had the bright idea of showing some of the designs in motion.

Family News

Grandson Joe – Rachel’s younger son – got the A Levels he needed for university. He’s going to Nottingham to read politics. I know everybody gets good grades these days, but on the day, “everybody” can’t be guaranteed to include one’s dear grandson. He got three A’s.