Wonderful, grannypurple and Donice, to find the same family relationship to the New Yorker as our own. I struggled mightily with the subscriptions yesterday and in the end, I think, succeeded. The website seemed to offer subscriptions including Gift and International, but no renewals. I tracked it down to Conde Nast in the end.

Last year I didn’t get the annual letter inviting me to renew my gift subscriptions – I think it got swallowed up in some semi-post-office-strike. So I did it on-line, as again yesterday. Apart from not wanting to waste any issues, renewal is essential for James and Alexander who have addresses which are too long for the New Yorker computer. They have to be adroitly shoehorned in. I tried at one point yesterday to enter a new subscription for James, using exactly the wording of his current address label. The computer wouldn’t accept it.

James wants to read the New Yorker on his iPad and is cross (along with a lot of other people) that you have to pay twice, to do that.

We pass our copies on to our admirable neighbours downstairs. Pete is an advocate. He told me recently that the library of the Faculty of Advocates now subscribes to the New Yorker, on his suggestion. I glow with pride. I have made my little mark on Edinburgh life.

Today’s event is a visit to my husband’s sister in the Western Infirmary. She has been suffering from nausea for a couple of months now – we haven’t actually seen her since the Games -- and drs have been slow to do anything about it. She had an out-patient appt three weeks ago at which she was told, in so many words, that she didn’t have cancer, and was then just sent home to get on with the symptoms with a vague promise of further investigations some weeks hence.

By last week she had become so weak and uncomfortable that further delay was impossible.

She and my husband have always been highly important to each other. There are no other sib. Their father died young, their mother in middle age. There are no first cousins. C. is younger than my husband (although not quite as young as I am).

And as for knitting, I have finished the penultimate row of the Amedro shawl. Thank you for your help with lighting, which I shall save, and your admirable suggestion, Anonymous, of “combined” knitting to distinguish knit stitches from purl in a situation like this. I think I’ve got it right – and of course, if I can’t tell, no one else is likely to be able to. I’ve put in several stitch markers as a form of life-line. We’re all right up to here, if the section ends k1.

I don’t see why these final 10 rows couldn’t have been done in garter stitch. Would it have pulled in?