Here we are, chaps! We got here! 2010! Let’s hope it’s a good one, all round.

I was very grateful for all the holiday wishes appended to my last post, and heartily wish them all back to you.

We have been ill – par for the Christmas course. “Gastric flu”, if that amateur diagnosis is still acceptable. My husband is still rather droopy, but improving. His illness started sooner, and was less violent. I had eight hours of vomiting on the afternoon and evening of the 31st, just after the Beijing Mileses left, very sudden of onset and departure, and remain slightly weak, but fully functioning.

We had a good time, though.

Here are Ketki and her sons in the kitchen, probably on Christmas Eve:



This is the climactic moment of Christmas Day, when the cook pours flaming brandy over the pudding:


Alistair Miles of Beijing got an Absolutely Wonderful Laptop from his parents:

And here are the knitting pictures. Ketki in her old pink gansey, just before Christmas dinner:

The group picture of my Christmas knitting, on the shores of Loch Fyne just before the party broke up on the 27th. From left to right, Thomas-the-Elder is his Lynn Barr scarf, his mother Rachel in the ASJ, his sister Lizzie in the ear-flap hat, his Aunt Cathy in the Sock Yarn Slouch Hat, his cousin Kirsty in the watch cap of round-the-world Chinese cashmere, and finally his Uncle James, in his watch cap.

Here’s an extra, taken a few minutes later in front of the inn at Cairndow. James has taken his cap off. I like the slouch hat a lot, and may return to the pattern. I knit and dispatched two chemo caps over the hols, one of them of KF sock yarn (maybe not soft enough, as I explained in the covering letter, but washable). That leaves me with a ball-and-a-bit of that wonderful yarn which could find itself metamorphosed into another slouch.

Much else to say, including primarily the planning and early decisions for the Grandson sweater. But I think I’ll keep it for later.