Another summer’s day, albeit grey. I have had a nice time watching Wimbledon. It looks to me as if there are far more people these days. The last time I was there was the famous year when Smith and Psmith fought the men’s semi-final to a fifth-set score something like 27-25. Since then, and because of that match, the tie-break has been introduced into fifth sets.  So I saw tennis history being made. Nadal was on next but it was late and I was exhausted.

  Helen came this morning. Fergus’ wound is oozing a bit. He is the one who had an emergency appendectomy in Thessaloniki last week. He is travelling home as planned, but Helen will meet him at the airport and take him straight to a&e. 

   No knitting, for shame.Kate Davies has released a new pattern in our club. The current book is Traitor’s Purse, one of my absolute faves. The new pattern is very nice, too, but I have too much to knit already.

  I have been thinking, I don’t know why, about Sunday lunch at my grandparents’ house in Dallas in the old days. I think it possible that everything on the table except salt and pepper were home-grown. My grandfather had a cow, and kept chickens, with an extensive vegetable garden. I remember the live-in servant who kept it all going killing chickens and also making ice-cream in the proper old-fashioned way where you put ice and salt in the ice-cream maker, and then the cream mixture, and turn it (by hand, of course) until it becomes ice cream.

   I don’t remember any of this tasting particularly nice. I’m sure it was cooked to death before it reached me.

   Wordle: I failed again. That’s three in a week. I wonder if it is time for me to retire from Wordle? Today’s failure was especially humiliating. Starters gave me two green vowels. An easy guess for line three contributed nothing but to eliminate three more letters. A Jean-word in line four eliminated another and gave me a brown consonant.

   And here’s where mental incompetence comes in.  My guesses for lines five and six omitted the brown consonant.

   Three for Mark (that keeps happening); four for Alexander, Thomas, Theo and Roger; five for Ketki and Rachel.

   It is interesting, in a melancholy way, how the news media have shut down entirely on the three big stories I am interested in: 1) Princess Anne, now out of hospital and presumably conscious. There were no photographs of her leaving hospital. 2) The Princess of Wales; and 3) President Biden. Maybe tomorrow.