Some interesting rugby, this weekend. Scotland play Ireland in Dublin today. England play France in Paris tomorrow. Both are likely to be exciting matches. “Home advantage” is worth a 16th man on the field, in rugby (perhaps in all sports). Watch this space.

The Irish, incidentally, play rugby as one nation – there’s no separate team for the North.


The knitting knews is that I finished Rachel’s striped Koigu. I started it 13 months ago. Looking back through the archives, I discover that Nephew Theo’s striped Koigu only took 11 months, and he’s a good deal larger than Rachel. But he didn’t have a collar or a neck placket or buttons. That may be the difference. [Both were Strathardle projects.]

I’m really rather pleased with it. The collar is out of the VK book and is called a “shaped collar”. Every row is K1, P1 rib, as on the toddler version. But this time, every row begins, “Rib 3, M1”. I like the effect. I hope I’ll get my act together to the extent of writing up the pattern for my website sometime soon. I’ve kept careful notes.

Maybe next week when we’re in London, I can get a picture of Rachel wearing it.

I got it finished in time to pick up the Princess – and I finished row 62. That means, I have finished page 4 of the pattern. Really exciting. I will have to put it away somewhere firmly out of sight, when I start my sister’s shawl soon. It is absolutely irresistible, otherwise.

Miscellaneous Non-Knit

Franklin says that the new character in his Blog was inspired by my feelings about sheep. I feel extravagantly flattered. While you’re there, scroll down to the previous entry, his account of the ice-skating race between Gertrude Stein and Dorothy Parker. He has out-Franklin’d Franklin, and the standard was set pretty high to begin with.

I had a thorough panic last night when I sat down to my computer and found a box in the middle of the screen saying that Norton AntiVirus had encountered an “internal program error” and I had to un-install and reinstall it. What? Was this a “phishing” message from a sinister virus, like the ones you get purportedly from your bank inviting you to send your password and other details to a bad man? And anyway, how could I reinstall it without a disk? I bought it on-line. I have recently moved up to Norton AntiVirus 2006.

All went smoothly, and I’ll know what to do next time. I’ve done a live update and a full scan and everything seems fine. But it’s a sad world when the one unstable program on one’s computer is one’s virus protection.