Again, I have little to report. I have finished the basic knitting of the Stronachlachar. I have slid the stitches hither and yon, threaded others onto waste yarn, and embarked on a three-needle bind-off – a favourite of mine. I have even dared to disobey KD: I am binding off with the right-sides facing.

Our club pattern this week is the lovely Milarrochy stripes again, this time in a cropped pullover with what I think are called dolman sleeves – that heavy triangle under the armpits which I know doesn’t suit me.

Reading

Dawn, thank you for the interesting links on lie-lay. Here’s an embarrassing anecdote for you, fully 70 years old:

My sophomore, or was it junior? English teacher at Asbury Park High School wasn’t very bright. She told us, one day, that familiar American misleading rule, that “lie” was for animate objects and “lay” for inanimate. I put up my hand – I told you this was embarrassing – and asked whether that meant that it would be correct to say that the baby was lying on the bed and the book was laying on the bed beside it.

She looked a bit uneasy, but agreed that that was right. I subsided. She was equally misguided on “blank verse” and “free verse”, and on that one, I faced her down, at some other point during the year. (Blank verse is unrhymed iambic pentameter, I told her. I must have been insufferable.)

As for Fanny Price: I think we have to assume that there were “good genes” in the Price family, Shandy.  Fanny, William, Susan. And Fanny, plucked from her unsatisfactory family, was subsequently shaped and instructed by Edmund.

Anonymous: by “trash” I just mean easily-forgettable thrillers.