A  fairly productive day. Archie comes around a couple of times a week, as you may have gathered, to help me with heavy things, and with the sorting of the endless piles of paper – he’s good at that – and doorstep gardening and going for walks. His presence often provokes me into doing paper-work-y things which I have been postponing. It was too cold for comfortable gardening today but we got a lot of other things done.

Including finding (amongst my emails) and printing my ferry reservations from Aberdeen to Lerwick and back, for the Wool Adventure on Shetland, now about a month away.

There’s some homework for the Adventure. It will take a while to knit a very simple edging for the hap we are going to learn about. In the class, the rest of it will be knit inwards, Amedro-fashion. I had better do that as soon as the baby sweater is finished (which won’t be long now), rather than leaving it to do on the ferry in my usual fashion.

After we finished our morning’s work, Archie’s brother Mungo came around and cooked lunch. Then they both cleaned up the kitchen. Mungo is going back to Oxford tomorrow. He’s the one who’s studying Arabic.

I’ve now got it in writing that the Perth County Council has removed the 100% surcharge on the property tax for our house in Strathardle. And today Archie and I applied for a 25% reduction of my Edinburgh property tax – I’m due that because I live here alone. I only recently found out about that one.

Courgettes

Kate, I meant to answer your comment yesterday. I do have a spiralizer, and love making courgette-spaghetti. When Greek Helen and I were putting the kitchen back together after last year's upheaval, she said as she put it in a drawer, There's one thing you'll never use. But she was wrong. Mindful Chef is very health-conscious, and often has me spiralizing things, especially courgettes