Yes, it is much to be hoped that death will find one at work. I think it was St Ignatius who was asked one day, as he was sweeping the floor, what he would do if he knew the world were going to end in half an hour, and he said, I would go on sweeping the floor. And gardeners look forward, especially in the spring. That’s what gardening is all about. But John Cushnie’s death was a reminder – and they abound – that man proposes, God disposes, and every statement about the future needs a silent God willing, insh’Allah, D.V.

In my case, it turned out all right – I finished that ball of wool, and joined in the next one. Not very much progress on the Grandson Sweater yesterday otherwise, however, maybe 5/8”. The day was devoted to my husband’s appointment at the Respiratory dep’t of the Royal Infirmary. Aiming at the appropriate bus, catching it, travelling on it, waiting to see a dr, travelling home again, consumed almost all available time and much mental energy. We felt it a worthwhile undertaking, although I still don’t understand why he is so breathless.

I took the KF sock along, and made progress. The Progress Bars have been altered.

(I have had a spate of spurious comments lately. The ones that worry me are the brief, harmless-looking ones containing no links and betraying themselves only by their irrelevance. I had one yesterday that I was willing to give the benefit of the doubt, until it replicated itself three or four times attached to various posts. Who does that, and why on earth?)

I looked out my print-out of the pattern for the ear-flap hat yesterday. Thirty years ago I took a manila folder and labelled it “Knitting Actually Done, 1979-”. In it I started putting patterns, notes, swatches, photographs, whatever, related to FO’s. At a stroke, this practice reduced to manageable proportions my tendency to surround myself with UFO’s.

Eventually the folder was bulging. Then I put its contents into a box file, and labelled it, and wrote a new start-date on the folder, and began again. I am constantly surprised at how often I open the folder to look for something, as I did yesterday, or even go back through the box files. In my KnitList days, I used to post an annual summary of knitting-done. I printed them out and put them in the appropriate places in the file. They are useful in speeding up the occasional search for projects-long-completed.


Yesterday I decided it was high time for a fourth box file, and another new start.

The intervals are not consistent – the first one was a whole decade, from 1979 through 1988. I was still working then, and had children at home at least for part of the time. The periods have been shorter, since. The most recent one, as can just be discerned from the photograph, was seven years long.