I am grateful for all your sympathy – especially for yours, Judith, which came so quickly after I had posted last night about my disaster with the Sous Sous.

The danger of its becoming a UFO is high. My current plan is to address the steps I mentioned last night, one at a time. Today I unpicked the grafting that held the ends of the neck edging together. Tomorrow I will unpick the edging itself from the back neck. Then one shoulder seam. Then the other.

And I will certainly go see what people are saying on Ravelry, as you advise. I don’t use that resource nearly enough, nor do I contribute to it as I ought.

I have a dreadful confession: after that talk the other day, mostly my own, about what-are-we-going-to-do-while-Kate-Davies-closes-the-shop-down-for-a-wee-while, I went and ordered the kit for Miss Rachel’s Yoke and Gauntlets. It reminds me of a VK pattern I knit for our Rachel long ago, when she was a young teen-ager. It was the pattern in the doing of which I suddenly discovered that I could do Fair Isle – drop-and-throw, as ever, with my right hand; continental picking with the left. I can’t do continental with my left hand by itself, only in conjunction with a different colour in the right hand.

That’s fine, as far as it goes, but I have far too many projects in the yarn cupboard already. Perhaps giving away all that stash was a mistake. Perhaps it kept me grounded.

Maybe I could restrain myself more effectivly if I wrote down a list of the projects I have acquired – remembering that my sister is soon to arrive with the discontinued madtosh DK for my husband’s (much-needed) long-sleeved v-neck sweater. And I must certainly resolve not to order yarn in the evening when such judgment as I retain is distorted by exhaustion.

As for actual knitting, I went on with the Neap Tide shawl. If my vague calculations are roughly right, it will be about the size the designer intended, and will use the same weight of wool. But it will involve vastly more knitting. In the straight centre section upon which I am now engaged, the designer (our own Mary Lou) asks for six pattern repeats. I will have knit 16. On many more stitches.

Literary criticism

Perdita often sits on the kitchen windowsill, looking at birds and making little chattering sounds while thrashing her tail. We think often of Gray’s wonderful poem, “her conscious tail her joy declared”. My husband and I saw the very vase in an exhibition in London not all that long ago.

But today I decided, and will continue to believe, that it wasn’t as bad as all that. Selima was a perfectly healthy cat. She climbed out of the vase, wet, furious and embarrassed as cats are when they have made fools of themselves. Gray made a better poem by providing a different ending.