Sorry about that. I had a breakfast date with an old friend yesterday. I thought there might be time to put in a brief appearance here, but there wasn't. Tomorrow I hope to go for a walk with our niece, the first in a while (it's all go around here) – again, I hope to be here but may not make it.

The old friend is a man I met on Broughton Street one day, perhaps 15 years ago, when I had nearly finished climbing to the fishmonger's. He stopped me and said, Don't we know each other? I peered. He wasn't Alexander. He wasn't James. He wasn't drunk. I was about to suggest that perhaps, although unacquainted, we were each the sort of person that the other knew, when he offered his name, and I recognised him.

For several years, while we lived in Birmingham, I taught New Testament Greek once a week to the Jesuit novitiate. (St Peter will let me straight in when he hears that, especially now that the Pope is a Jesuit.) Chris had been one of them, one of my favourites, indeed. He took vows and became a Jesuit, although never a priest, but by the time we met on Broughton Street he had left the order.

And we've seen each other from time to time, ever since. Yesterday he told me that he has become an enthusiastic Facebook-er. I'm there, but only nominally, but when I got back here, I sent him a friend-request. It turns out that he has no fewer than six Friends who share a Friend with me – talk about degrees of separation!

Knitting

All went fairly well, yesterday. One bump is smaller than the othets -- I think I must have gone straight from Row 4 to Row 9, in a 12-row repeat. It was very obviously a mistake that it would be wiser not to try to repair. Mary Lou, I take some comfort from your thought that the knitters of Unst and Fair Isle and wherever were really no better than we are, considered in the moiety.

[I don't think that word is rightly used, but now that it has popped into my head, I'm going to leave it there.]

But I have often reflected that if you devoted your life to one sort of knitting, you'd get to be pretty good at it. A Fair Isle knitter would know her gauge to the millimetre and could concentrate on fit, for instance. Whereas we flit from Shetland lace to Bavarian Travelling Stitch to Norwegian lusekofte and never get to be very good at anything. Speaking for myself.

Anyway, here are the promised pictures of local gardens, taken on Tuesday without the slightest deviation from my usual route from home to newsagent.

And here is one my downstairs neighbour sent the other day, clearly not taken this year because the tripod isn't there. Their cat often sits on our doorstep because it is sunnier than his own, or so he maintains. I'm sure I didn't know it was being taken.