Progress with Gudrun’s hap: three landmarks in a day!

 

1)    I reached the half-way point on the central square (knit corner-to-corner) and started down the other side.

2)    I finished the first ball of yarn and attached the second.

3)    I finished page 2 of the pattern and embarked on page 3.

So I’m feeling pretty smug.

 

Otherwise there’s little or nothing to report. C. came and got me around the garden. (I’ve missed only one day recently.) She says her daughter Christina, Hamish’s mother, who broke her neck recently falling from a horse, is now out of her neck brace. It’s good to know that the NHS can still manage some non-Covid treatments. This new, more infectious variation threatens to overwhelm us.

 

Doubling back to Christmas Eve: I couldn’t keep my fingers off the radio, at 3 in the afternoon. They played a recently-recorded version of the carol service. This year’s Boy was very good. If I’ve got it right, the first verse of “Once in royal David’s city…” is a solo, then the choir comes in for the second verse, and then the organ and all the mummies and daddies, for the third and subsequent. But there were no mummies and daddies. I knew that, but hadn’t expected the effect it would have on me. I wept, and turned the radio off.

 

Later in the day, I heard another programme about the Boys, with a bit about their mothers of whom I have often thought. Presumably with the first syllable or two, she knows, that’s Nigel! (Or, of course, that’s not Nigel!) What I hadn’t thought is that, through all those first four lines (and like all the rest of us, only how much more intensely) she then must worry about whether he will be able to hit and hold the high note – MARy was that mother mild…

 

We can only hope it all comes back next year.

 

We’ve been having a storm, with a fair bit of snow down south. Edinburgh has got off lightly. Is this, as I think I predicted, the American East Coast snow storm, 10 days later?

I think I'm all set for sourdough-baking tomorrow. The starter is very vigorous, and I'll feed it again tonight. The secret is a bit of rye flour in its diet -- it's like putting it on steroids.

 

Reading

 

Where were we? I’ve finished another complete re-reading of Il Gattopardo (usually I just dip into favourite passages). That woman who talked about it at my sister’s club in DC recently left out very nearly half, by sticking to Visconti’s beautiful film. I don’t blame Visconti at all, but she was meant to be talking about the book. 

So anxious am I to avoid Unpleasantness that I am now reading Roy Strong’s diaries – soporific, but not entirely without interest – and have loaded my Kindle with another Barbara Pym.