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Politics

When I first went to my present hairdresser, I asked him to aim for Hillary Clinton. But latterly, in the years between the Secretary of State-ship and the candidacy, I feel she rather lost interest in hair, and I have asked him to aim for Theresa May instead. And now look where we are!

I feared yesterday that the poor Queen might already have reached Balmoral  – she left Edinburgh on Saturday after some strenuous days of royal duties. I feared that before she had had had time to kick her shoes off, she had had to put them back on again and go haring back to London to receive Mr Cameron’s resignation and to ask Mrs May to form a government. I don’t think those are tasks which can be delegated.

But it turns out she went south from Edinburgh at the weekend anyway, to Sandringham, so she’s well placed for London.

Knitting

I’ve rounded the second corner, the half-way point, in attaching the edging to the Hansel hap. It turns out that the stitch count on the second side was right after all.

I think the trouble is that this edging is extremely boring, but not in the peaceful way that the rest of the shawl is boring, where one can just sit back and knit and read (or talk, or listen). The edging pattern is simple, but each of its 16 rows is different so one has to pay attention to where one is and what’s going on. I have never got going with audio books, and anyway when I am sitting with my husband, with or without the television on, an audio book wouldn’t really work.

I think I got on a bit more briskly today, for having grasped this. I’ve now done four and a half pattern repeats along the third side. There are 14 per side, and each takes – I am rather ashamed of myself for having timed one – about 15 minutes. The pattern is of the very simplest: a column of faggoting (I love faggoting, as you may remember) parallel to the straight edge of the shawl, and a zig-zag of YO eyelets at the outer extremity, as the knitting itself zigzags.

I looked up my Very First Hap, in Madeline Weston’s “Traditional Sweater Book”, and found that the edging was even simpler: the YO zig-zag is there, but no faggoting. How could I have endured it? I think that perhaps when I knit Gudrun’s pattern again, I might choose a slightly more complex “lace” (=edging pattern), just to keep myself awake. KD’s edging for the “Moder Dy” pattern in the Haps book would do very nicely indeed – and would fit just fine, since it’s also 16 rows long.

I have ordered some cheap point protectors for Perdita via Amazon. Will she like cheap ones? Will there be enough green ones in the package? She much prefers green. She has already gone through (=eaten, lost) the ones I bought from Kathy the other day, and has found and removed the ones I was trying to employ on the Hansel hap.

But now I learn that the cheap package is coming from Hong Kong and may not be here until early August. “Where do they find such slow airplanes?” as my late father once asked.