2009! We got here!

Time to get back in the saddle, I think. We had a great Christmas and a good New Year. I was touched by all of your good wishes, and reciprocate them heartily. It’s a thoroughly scary year we’re embarking on, but we’ve got President Obama to look forward to, like Hope at the bottom of Pandora’s box.

I don’t want to boast or anything, but I got a Christmas message on paper in the mail from Mel and David. It meant an awful lot to me. It was clever of them to find the address.

The Christmas holiday involved more knitterly news than you might expect. I took Ketki’s sweater along, rather than socks which are my usual travel knitting. I made enormous strides. I was only a couple of inches above the Calcutta Cup band when we set out. I’m awfully pleased with the way it’s looking, and I think Ketki liked it too.

I had twinges of thinking how much Princess I could have achieved, if I had taken that instead. But the Princess isn’t much use for sitting in the kitchen with, while everybody is talking and laughing.

The current socks are Araucania Multi’s for Alexander, and I may abandon them altogether (a) because I discovered, swatching for Ketki’s sweater, that the yarn will felt; and (b) because I was working on them during my most recent appointment at the eye pavilion. I had to stop when some trivial mistake occurred and I couldn’t see to correct it because of the eye drops. Then I went in and saw a dr and learned, for the first time, that the loss of sight in my left eye is permanent.

It wasn’t the socks’ fault, but it has left me feeling less than enthusiastic about them.

James drove us to Loch Fyne on the 23rd. I sat in the back seat and knitted. One drives past Murrayfield as one leaves Edinburgh for the west, and it was kind of exciting to have the sweater in my hands as we did so. That’s where the Calcutta Cup is won and (more often) lost, and that’s where – presumably – it actually is, at the moment. England will almost certainly get it back in the spring. If they fail to, I’ll knit it into the Princess when I sign and date her. That's very unlikely.

We had a big family lunch on the 27th – my husband’s sister and her daughters and some grandchildren converged from Glasgow and Edinburgh and we all went to Loch Fyne Oyster. Delicious, expensive. Our niece F. had knit a sweater for her sister C. as a Christmas present, and C. wore it that day. Noro sock yarn, – F. said, not nice to knit – perfectly plain st st, scoop neck. It looked wonderful, and fit to perfection, the sleeve-set-in seam sitting precisely on the shoulder, the stripes looking deliberate across body and sleeves. F. said she didn’t swatch, and didn’t make any attempt to match the colours when she attached a new ball. She told me the name of the designer – it’s in a book – but I didn’t recognise it, and don’t remember.