Today I began with a quiet quarter-hour with Franklin. We went on to mattress stitch, in the lesson about sewing on lace edgings. This time I had trouble because he kept stopping – that’s something about something called “streaming”, I think.

Except at the end of the section, when I wanted him to stop and he was determined to talk on about herringbone stitch. I silenced him at last. We’ll come to that only after I have practised mattress stitch.

I wound the first skein for Relax2 yesterday, and ordered some KnitPro needles, and worried on about size and gauge (it's different every time I measure it) and how many stitches to cast on. And I mustn’t forget that I want to wear this thing over a polo shirt, to provide a collar. Back to Epaminondas mode.

The Pakokku sock progresses. I should get pretty near the second heel today. It’s striping tamely. And my agent is this very day, I believe, going to Maryland S&W to look for more Pakokku on my behalf.

One of you sent me this wonderful link: Franklin, again.

Judith, I was deeply grateful for the link you sent yesterday to the article about Art Needlework Industries in Oxford, and Heinz Edward Kiewe. One of the things I did right in life was to write to him, when the shop closed. I got in reply one of his famous letters in green ink – it must be somewhere here in the archives.

There was a summer once when I collected bits of heather and things in Strathardle, and then went into that shop and tipped them all out onto the counter, and said, I want a sweater like that. The girl went away and after a while came back with the right Shetland yarn and I knitted it for my husband, an all-over Fair Isle pattern. It made him look like a pheasant. Eventually he outgrew it, and the moths got it – the remnants must be somewhere here in the archives.

Cardinal O’Brien

He turned up unexpectedly this week, moving the last of his things out of Archbishop’s House here in Edinburgh and – rather more controversially – into a church house in Dunbar to which he had long planned to retire. The parishioners of Our Lady of the Waves in Dunbar recently organised a statement, signed by over 90% of those attending Sunday Mass, saying “We the undersigned wish to express our support and affection for Cardinal Keith O’Brien. We look forward to welcoming him into our community when he retires to Dunbar.”

I suspect these developments mean that the new Pope has decided that there is no need for further public humiliation. O’Brien is still a cardinal, so it is a matter for the two of them. The bishops of Scotland are said to be cross at his reappearnce, and the stout Glasgow archbishop who is now in charge of Edinburgh is said to have shot off a letter to the Papal Nuncio.

If he is really to be allowed to retire to Dunbar, and even to help out in the parish, I am very happy to hear it. My husband thinks he should have stayed away (like Marshall Ney). Maybe he had nowhere else to live. I don’t suppose he is a rich man.

But nothing that I have said above should be construed as approval of his taste in sweaters.