Still no Knitting

I've done some -- Mungo's sweater is all in one piece, yoke depth calculated, short rows added to raise the back and lower the front -- but a lovely message from Ann yesterday tempts me to leave knitting aside for another day. I am also attempting to write an entry around a picture. In the early days, I sometimes succeeded with that, and sometimes didn't.

Ann's message was about the line in which I said yesterday that I preferred to be my children's mother than anybody else's.

I'll expand on that obliquely today by saying that my son James, in his last year at Oxford, lived on the same stair as Hugh Grant and once, according to James' version of events, loaned him a frying pan.

James and his wife had a year in Ann Arbor some time ago, when they were still childless. James had a journalism fellowship. In his career at the BBC he had met the Pope and the Dalai Lama and some other folk, but all anybody in Michigan was interested in hearing about was Hugh Grant.

Hugh Grant is a millionaire and his waxwork effigy is in Madame Tussaud's. James, on the other hand, has a beautiful and highly talented wife and three wonderful children. And he has never, that I know of, been arrested for unsuitable behavior, although it has to be admitted that he stunned the University of Michigan by appearing at the farewell party that year

Not Hugh Grant


wearing a skirt.

That is his daughter Kirsty on the left, and his nephew the innimitable Fergus Drake, on the right.