C. seemed very much worse last night – feverish, dopey and unresponsive, heart racing. We weren’t there. The final phone call from an anxious daughter said that she had been moved to a side room, was “sleeping peacefully” and would be closely monitored through the night. Our niece asked the nurses if the side room accommodation meant that they expected C. to die during the night, and was told, no. But they would say that, wouldn’t they?

I haven’t heard anything yet this morning. That means she must still be breathing. I feel this would be a little bit easier to bear in May than in November, but maybe not.

We have all been assuming that she would gradually get better from the surgery, and come home, and then we could face the future, taking it a day at a time. Although we have also been feeling increasingly frustrated at not being able to talk to a doctor. How successful was the operation? What’s the prognosis? I had wondered if this information was being held back from me and my husband but that is not so. Nobody knows.

VKB

You needn’t have worried, Janet, although I am touched that you did. Of course I got my VKB – No. 7, Autumn 1935. Nobody outbids Tayside00. With a minute to go, the bidding still stood – seemed to stand – at £23. I intervened when 49 seconds remained, which is pretty intrepid for me. My bid immediately revealed that the ostensible bidder of £23 had in fact bid a great deal more, but not as great a deal as I bid. Users of eBay will understand. There was no more bidding in the last few seconds, so my cowardice in not holding out a few seconds longer was unpunished.

eBay now indicates bidder’s identities with coy codes. The underbidder, for instance, was h***d. Helen C.K.S. assumed that my code would be T***0 for Tayside00, but she says it was 0***y so she missed the fun. On my screen I get to see my own name, Tayside00, so I didn't even know that much.

I don’t seem to be able to enlarge the image this morning – we’ll have a better look when it turns up in the mail.

Knitting

Sundays are never very productive, and the anxious time spent on the telephone yesterday evening reduced yesterday’s output even further. I’m ready to do the next twist on the scarf. I’ve reached the heel flap of Matt’s second sock. I’ve thought about the Wurm.

VKB

Thank you for all the good wishes. I mean to bid high enough that failure is very unlikely. I know now that I can trust eBay not to take the whole amount unless there is a determined underbidder pushing it up. The secret, of course, is to put in one’s massive bid in the last few seconds, so that rivals don’t have time to push you up. It takes very steady nerves. That’s where Helen C.K.S. excels.

Another pre-war issue (from a different seller) is coming up tomorrow. It will be interesting to see what it fetches.

Back in Ought Six, eBay used to tell you bidders’ code names, at least while the auction was going on. I made myself a spreadsheet showing the bidding histories of VKB’s I was interested in, my few failures as well as many successes. Littlepinksparrow was my most frequent underbidder. Leesonia43 was another formidable opponent. Rosemaryknit kept trying small bids – I hope she got some in the end. How they all must have trembled when Tayside00 entered the lists!

However, eBay decided in its wisdom that revealing even that much was undesirable in some way. One still knows, of course, that rival bids have been placed, but not who placed them. Much less fun.

Amedro shawl

I made a dreadful mistake last night. It will be interesting, today, to see if it can be fudged.

The roundels are finished, and I have proceeded to moss stitch. The first thing to do was to pick up 18 stitches from the cast-on edge of the first scallop in the edging, then turn around and knit back along them and moss stitch across 431 stitches, then pick up another 18 from the cast-off edge of the final scallop.

It was while I was performing that last operation, congratulating myself that the moss stitch seemed to have come out all right – beginning and ending with a k1 – that I began to feel uneasy. I looked back, and sure enough – in picking up the initial 18, I had gone past the cast-on stitches and on up the side of the scallop.

Tinking 431 stitches is unthinkable. Untinkable. Ripping out is a possibility – there is a row of plain knitting after the roundels, where I might be able to recover the stitches without loss. For the moment, I am moss-stitching back, wondering if there is something I can do when I get back to that edge.

I think I said earlier on that I could hardly tell which side of the shawl is which, although it is knit in st st. The problem becomes acute with moss stitch. I really can’t see what I’m doing, whether the stitch I am about to knit was k’d or p’d in the previous row, and whether or not, therefore, I have regressed to k1 p1 rib.

Maybe I really do need an Ott light.

Well.

Very, very faithful readers will remember much of what follows.

When I was young, I eagerly bought the Vogue Knitting Book twice a year. It died the death in the late ‘60’s. In later life, I started trying to find old copies to bulk out my collection – the library of the Knitting and Crochet Guild once sold off half a dozen very tatty examples, I remember.

In the summer of ’06 I connected with eBay, and got seriously to work.

It is fairly easy, if you keep an eye on things and have a bottomless pocket, to acquire the ones from the 50’s and 60’s. That is undoubtedly because people like me are currently of an age to be shuffled off to care homes or to their longer rest. Whereas the attics of knitters who bought the early copies, in the 30’s and 40’s, have already been cleared. But there is still a trickle.

Publication began in the autumn of 1932 with a joint British and American edition. Its cover is pictured in the anniversary issue of the current publication, a few years back, with “25 cents” clearly visible. But it must have bombed, because there were no further American ones until late in the war. Whereas the British edition appeared without interruption.

I paid a lot for my copy of No. 1. It came, not as usual from a dealer or an attic-clearing grandchild, but a charity, Feed the Children. I like to think that someone brought it in to a shop and a volunteer worker had the wit to see that it was worth offering on eBay.

It would be interesting to know the precise relationship between the British and American editions in the later years. There is a near-total overlap of patterns and illustrations, but the letterpress of my copies is entirely British. Designs have either been re-knit (on one side of the Atlantic or the other) in a yarn locally available, or else the editors have made the substitution in the text without actually venturing on the experiment. Horrors!

Designers weren’t named, although photographers were (and there are some famous names among them). I wonder, in the 50’s, in the days before the Schoolhouse when EZ was selling to magazines, did she ever appear in the VKB?

During the war, the issues were smaller and things were obviously tough. There are instructions for unravelling old garments and re-using the yarn. But Vogue was stoutly Vogue throughout; unpleasantness was kept at bay. (Although there is a delicious example, in those days when projects had but recently been recommended for golf or après tennis or a cruise, where a sweater is said to be just the thing for wearing in the air raid shelter.) If you actually wanted to knit for someone in the armed services – as I am sure almost all knitters were doing almost all the time – you had to get the separate “Vogue Service Woollies”.

I was buying VKB's hand-over-fist in ’06 and ’07. Things slowed down as I got near the end. There was only one acquisition in ’08. Two in ’09 -- my last purchase was almost exactly a year ago, made as many were with the help of Helen C.K.S.’ steady nerves and eBay expertise.

You’ll have guessed long since where this is tending: the last one I lack has been offered for sale. Bidding closes a week on Sunday. It looks like a splendid copy.