We're going on our postponed walk today, our niece and I (and we've got good weather for it). So I'll be brief here -- often the preface to an unusually long post -- as I must leave my husband breakfast and lunch and generally tidy up. I've chosen an absurdly easy walk, to be on the safe side – the circuit of Linlithgow Loch with changing views of the ruins of the Palace where Mary QofS was born. We can do something more strenuous in September if this is a success.

Knitting went well yesterday, on the new system. I did three rounds of Rams&Yowes, all the more eagerly for knowing I would then allow myself to stop, and then managed another bump or so of the shawl edging. Thank you for your kind words about it. They are undeserved – there really are too many mistakes. Wait 'till you see the Queen Ring, or the wedding pictures in November with the Princess in action.

I have thought – am thinking – about all you have said, on the subject of casting off (or not) before picking up stitches for the edging. I suspect Kate Davies knows her craft rather well, and must, therefore, have a reason for that cast-off. At the moment, all I want for this project is to FINISH it and have it be reasonably acceptable-looking. I will continue to ponder.

And while on the subject of knitting, and before I forget, I tremendously like Woolly Wormhead's “Asymloche” hat. And the yarn employed, from Juno Fibre Arts, sounds interesting, too. Bluefaced Leicester – are those the sheep with dreadlocks? Christmas is coming, my friends.

Thank you for the remarks about Jane Gardam. Stashdragon, I will certainly search out that ghost story. And finish the Filth series. And then Bilgewater. I'm set for a while.

Catdownunder, I liked your story about meeting JG – and I like your blog entry, link just provided, about global warming and the environment, Have you read Germaine Greer's recent book about trying to restore her own tiny fragment of Australia to its primitive state?

Gardam says in the introduction to the edition of Old Filth which I am reading, that she met Stevie Smith at a party and was asked who she was.

“A Wmbledon housewife,” I said, “who writes novels.”

“But,” said Stevie Smith, “Who are you really?”

That's rather good. 

My husband's father, then employed by a publisher, worked with Stevie Smith on the editing of Novel on Yellow Paper. Somewhere we have his copy, with a grateful inscription from her. He would be 120 now, if he had been spared, but in fact died young of a brain tumour not long before the war. Gardam's anecdote seems to syncopate the 20^th century in a marvellous way.

But it works. Gardam is very old now, and the anecdote is not recent. Stevie Smith was very old then.