I’m glad you’re listening, Lorna (comment yesterday). I’m now knitting row 9 of the Nudibranch, the third of four plain rows after the Big Increase, and things are marginally easier. The contrast yarn appears on row 10. It must have been most gratifying for you, when the prototype was recognised as a sea slug. And Kate, thank you both for “twirly-swirly-hurly across the room” and for news of the Curly Whirlies blogspot, which I hadn’t known about. There’s some good stuff there.

I looked back to the Koigu pattern I used for a couple of Christmas presents. It’s less swirly. The Nudibranch goes, roughly, from 140 stitches to 210, to 420, to 840, to 1680. I’ve got 840 at the moment (but I’m not going to count them).

Maybe I’m going to have to round this off by getting the XRX scarf book to see what Rick Mondragon’s take on the thing is. That’s where my quest started, with a photograph advertising the book.

I’ve heard from HipKnits, and it’s true that they’ve got Malibrigio yarns. She’s planning to launch them next month. She offers to let me have some now, but I think I’ll wait, and meanwhile try to figure out how much I need. I know I knit a ribwarmer with four skeins of Debbie Bliss “Maya”, which seems to have disappeared, at least from John Lewis, and which I now learn was a real Uruguyan homespun, like Manos and Malibrigio. No wonder it was so nice.

But the ball-band I have retained doesn’t say what the yardage was, so that’s not much help. And this time I want to add sleeves. Perhaps someone on KnitTalk might have an idea. I’m enjoying them.

Here’s a picture of my new Guernsey yarn. I can hardly wait to get started. I wrote to them yesterday about the missing pattern, but the message bounced. And this morning the webpage is down.











Rugby

The priest at Kirsty’s Christening seemed to regard the Calcutta Cup as a perfectly natural symbol for the shawl of a child with Scottish connections born in 2000. “Maybe this will be our year to beat them,” he said. By “our” he meant “Ireland’s”, of course, and by “them” he meant “England”, even more of course. And Ireland did beat them, that year.

The England rugby team is very fierce and nearly always beats everybody and we all hate them.

More non-knit

The High Court decided yesterday that some fat-cat bankers must be extradited to the US on charges related to the collapse of Enron. There is, apparently, a new extradition law in Britain which means that the US does not even have to present a case for extradition, just to announce to the court that there is one.

I heard one of the bankers on the radio yesterday. This will mean, he said, two years in a Texas jail before trial. His legal expenses are likely to run into millions. So if he’s an innocent man and is therefore acquitted, he will have served a jail term and been bankrupted. It does seem harsh. Since the crime, if there was one, was committed in England against an English bank (NatWest), he doesn’t quite see why he can’t be tried here.

But the point of the new extradition law, apparently, is “terrorists”. If you’re a brown man who lives down a back street, the US can have you any time it wants. And then what?