Miscellaneous

FIVE courgettes came up in the pots on my front step yesterday! I put in eight seeds, in all. It's a chilly, grey Edinburgh morning today. They'll wish they'd stayed in bed.

Hellie says that Eeny Meeny will be 6^th, not 8^th, on that Sunday Times best-seller list this weekend. She also says that newspaper reviews can make a difference if you are – say – in the running for the Booker, but don't greatly affect “commercial books”.

Everybody must be potting on their chillis – B&Q had no flowerpots of the size I wanted, earthenware or plastic. I have been given some by a neighbour who came upon me searching for flowerpots in the boot of the car. Hers are plastic, somewhat chewed by her dogs. I hope to get the potting-on done today.

But today's real excitement will be getting my husband to the polling station to cast his vote for the European parliament. It's one of those unexciting elections with lists of candidates and votes distributed among them by a system too complicated for anyone to understand. Here in Scotland, it seems to be regarded as a dry run for the Referendum. If I had the franchise, I would be tempted to vote UKIP, just this once: a plague on all their houses.

“Pudding”: you're right, it means what Americans mean by “dessert” but it also means pudding, as in Yorkshire pudding and Guards pudding (there's a good one) and Christmas pudding. As for Summer Pudding, all the recipes I've ever seen say to make it with a mixture of red fruit – raspberries, strawberries, and red currents. My husband is emphatic that it must be made with red currents only so that's the way I do it.

Ebay hasn't emailed me with news of the hacker and instructions to change my password. I'll probably do it anyway but so far, at least, am not greatly agitated. As long as PayPal is secure. That's the scary one.

The Scotsman has been advertising a tour devoted to the gardens and wildflowers of Shetland. That would be fun. I read about an interesting garden, not long before we went, and took the clipping with me, but there was no time to be spared from kntting.

Knitting

I've reached round 103 – just – of the borders of the Unst Bridal Shawl and am beginning to establish the Tree of Life motifs. There's a slight oddity in the chart – some trees begin YO, k2tog and others k2tog, YO. I can't see any point in the distinction and think it may be a peculiarity – one couldn't even call it a mistake – in the charting.

Sure enough, there was trouble at one point (only) with the trellises in round 101. I didn't try to correct it. The stitch count was unaffected, and I figured that a temporarily errant trellis would be less conspicuous than the dropped stitch all too likely to emerge if I tried to unpick a k3tog.