Stormy, this morning. I watched some entertaining rugby yesterday, but got some knitting done, too. I should finish the ninth repeat on the centre of the Unst Bridal Shawl today.

Thank you very much, Catmum, for that Wikipedia link to Andre Raffalovich. I was so sure he was an architect that I hadn't read beyond the words “French poet”. So much for my scholarship. I thought, specifically, that he had designed St Peter's RC church in Morningside. It turns out to be by Lorimer. It's very nice. Raffalovich' contribution was money. My sister-in-law, his goddaughter, felt hard done by that she wasn't mentioned in his will.

The picture we failed to buy in NY a couple of weeks ago belonged to a similar-sounding family – wealthy Jews, in that case of Alexandria, one of whom became a Catholic convert and moved in arty-literary British society. Much younger than Raffalovich, but they might still have known each other.

While on the subject of Barbara Vine's “the child's child” – for it was she who started the Raffalovich hare – my reading of it has now advanced to the early years of WW2. In the part about the Battle of Britain  – I can't find the passage this morning – she mentions Churchill's famous line, that never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few. She says that a fighter pilot, on hearing that, remarked, He must be referring to the mess bills.

That's so good that I shall believe it henceforth. For several years in adolescence I thot that the word “apocryphal” meant something that ought to be true, whether it actually was or not. I still feel that the language needs such a word.

But we're supposed to be here to talk about knitting. Zite directed me this morning to the Amirisu on-line magazine. That's the designer the Relax came from, which is in fact the pattern I am knitting Milano to. I'll try to re-clarify that next week when I resume it. Meanwhile the magazine looks very promising, and I hope to report further tomorrow.