This morning, nada. And a wander around The Usual Places (Twist Collective, Knitty, Schoolhouse Press) fails to inspire. So, bits and pieces.

As more or less expected, the mitred jacket still has a couple of rows to go, on the back, before I graft those 84 stitches to the top border. Today should see it done.

Thanks for comments, as always. Jeanfromcornwall, yours of yesterday has helped me visualise what must be going on with the top-down sleeve, soon to come. The decreases after the sleeve cap will be to taper the sleeve. I don’t think my knitting library includes any pre-war Woolcrafts – it is interesting to learn that they included top-down sleeves.

Linda (comment Saturday), I don’t knit fast at all – it’s just that I keep doing it. There’s an hour or so at the end of the day when my husband takes his second insulin injection, and then must wait half an hour, for reasons neither of us entirely understands, before having something to eat. So we watch the news and other trivial television, and then I make his tea, and then we watch some more trivial television while he eats. And I knit.

At bedtime I read to him for 20 minutes or so. (If he reads to me, I fall asleep at once, so we always do it this way.) In 55 years of marriage, we have got through an awful lot, acres of Dickens and Trollope and Scott and Thackeray, Edith Wharton and Evelyn Waugh, War and Peace and even Ulysses – that one is brilliant, read aloud. Currently we are on the last few pages of Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s “Scots Quair” – the first volume of the trilogy is easily the best, but we have persevered to the end. Next will be Ford Madox Ford’s “The Good Soldier”. Both of us have read it privately, but never aloud, and it deserves repetition anyway. I was thinking of attempting “Parade’s End” but I’ve had a look, and I think it is too complicated and allusive for tired minds.

Some authors we have failed with: “Brighton Rock”, too grim. Anything by Wodehouse, too funny. You can’t go to sleep laughing.

Knitting, over those 55 years, has been much the same, although the quality has been on a considerably lower level. It's wonderful what we can do, if we be ever doing. Somebody said that, once. And I’ve said this before: my connection to the internet, in the 90’s, was the big breakthrough for me, being in touch with other knitters everywhere. Thinking of my own experience increases my respect for EZ into something like awe. She had to figure it out for herself, and hoe her own furrow.

Non-knit

I sent an account of last week’s scam (see recent posts) to Money Box Live, following on from your comment, Hat. I have more confidence that someone at the BBC will actually read it, than I do for the same narrative sent to the Bank of Scotland security address.