Tomorrow is the big day – EYF classes go on sale at 4. I will have drooped by that time of day, and live in dread of having forgotten. It’s complicated this year – there are five days of classes and only three days of market and there are lots of rules to govern the relationship between class ticket and general admittance. It doesn’t affect me – I will only want to go to the market on a day when I have a class. I hope everyone else will be so bogged down with calculation that I’ll be able to nip in and book what I want. I’ll start with Marchant on advanced brioche. You have to do them one at a time. You can’t pile them up in your cart.

Cooking with the Duchess: all well on that front. I have heard from PayPal that my refund has been received. I have heard from the Duchess that she has every hope of being able to recruit four more cookery students from among the people booked to stay in the self-catering flats carved out of the Palazzo. Most of the Trip Adviser reports on the cookery lessons are from people who were also staying at the palazzo.

Mary Lou, Italian lessons are going fine. At least, I am enjoying them. I don’t know if I’m improving. Federica is coming at 9 tomorrow morning, as every week, and I haven’t done my homework yet. I’ll have to take it to bed with me. (I’ve been keeping up with Italian, Duolingo every day; reading one of Montalbano’s adventures – just slide over the bits in dialect, is my advice; trying to watch Italian television news – I can sometimes get the general idea, but they talk too fast. But that doesn’t add up to doing my homework.)

If Federica had been a disaster, the trip to Palermo would have been a tactful point to leave off the lessons. But she’s wonderful, and I will continue, in the hopes of being granted the strength to go back to Italy again soon.

But the lesson, which lasts an hour and a half, leaves me tired and, this evening, that fact increases my fear of forgetting to be poised with finger on the button at 4 p.m. tomorrow.

I am knitting colours into Miss Rachel’s Yoke. The colour pattern is very simple, and I think I mentioned that I found it difficult when I was knitting it into the sleeves just above the wrist ribbing. I thought it might go better when it was laid out on a larger canvas, and it does. It remains a bit too easy for comfort, however.

Be careful what you wish for: I have often taken Perdita to task for not being the sort of cat who sits on laps and purrs. Now I’ve got one, and she renders knitting almost impossible.