Oh, France! I have nothing to say, but silence mustn't be interpreted as indifference.

It’s raining tonight, real, serious rain. All my doorstep pots appreciate that far more than all the heavy watering cans I can carry out to them.

Here is a picture of the nasturtium pot. I think you can see how the flowers to the right, the first to open, are proper nasturtium flowers, and the ones to the left – and even more, the buds being held aloft from the leaves – are different, with the stems attached to the base of the flower. I no longer have the seed packet, alas. There was nothing at all in the earlier progress of the seedlings, or in the foliage, to make me suspect that they weren’t all common or garden nasturtiums.

One of the things I didn’t know about until I was thoroughly grown up was the way plants can be picked up and moved from one species to another – or even switched between genera? – as botanists currently think fit.  I think I thought it had all been fixed forever by Linnaeus. Not that I suspect anything of the sort is happening here. It’s just that I have been trying again, and failing again, to identify the cactuses in my little collection and you have never seen such a family of plants for reclassification. The experience leaves me edgy and suspicious.

As for knitting, again, there is little to report. I have reached the penultimate repeat of the edging on the third side (the penultimate side, indeed) of the Hansel shawl. I’m getting there. And I welcome your question, KayT, about what comes next.

The main idea is to return to the half-brioche sweater I am knitting for myself. But starting something new would be very pleasant, and could be invigorating. I am in need of invigoration. But what? My husband’s sweater, with the beautiful madtosh Tannehill? Or one of the alarmingly long list of other projects for which I have yarn and pattern carefully stashed together? Or – caution thrown to the winds – Lucy Hague’s “Uncia” pattern from the Haps book? It’s fun to think about such things.

The whole world must know by now about the sheriff in Dundee who, confronted by a road rage case in which the offender claimed to have been on her way to an LYS, told her to knit some things to be donated to a charity shop and bring them back to court in December. Otherwise, prison.

There is a good deal we are not being told here. Even an LYS doesn’t justify road rage. Maybe the sheriff didn’t entirely like the victim’s story? It would be nice if the Dundee Courier, which first broke the story, would assign a reporter to keep in touch with the accused and let us know how her knitting is getting on. I think I’d go for hats, in that situation.

I think (from Flipboard) that this item first ran in the Courier, and then got taken up in America, and has now been noticed by the serious London press here.