We’re going back to Strathardle today. I should be back in position on Friday. I doubt whether I’ll try to plug everything back together and re-activate wi-fi while we’re there.

This Week’s Recommended Viewing…

On Wednesday evening, 9 pm on ITV, the daughter of old friends, Flora Spencer-Longhurst, is going to be in “Losing It” with Martin Clunes. I don’t know how prominent her role is. She is about 20 (the same age as granddaughter Hellie), slight and pretty, and is often hired to play younger roles because she can look 15 and spare the producers the trouble and expense of employing an actual minor.



Memory supplies a picture of her infant self wearing this sweater, but the archives produce only the sweater. It’s based on something in Pam Dawson’s “Knitting Fashion” of 1976. That was – is – a truly liberating and enabling book. I already had Mary Thomas, but she is daunting and the cartoons are an utter turn-off. Dawson was a real invitation to think, and design, for oneself. Worth watching the second-hand market for. It occasionally turns up.



While I was looking for that picture I found this one, of similar date. That’s Thomas-the-Only, as he then was, and his sister Hellie. It must have been taken at Burnside at Easter (judging from the daffodils) in 1987 (if I’m right that Hellie is going to be 20 in mid-November). Clearly, from the hats, I was having a lettering phase. Both children are wearing sweaters I knit, too. I don’t recognise Hellie’s. Thomas’s is a Vogue children’s pattern, I think.

And then on Thursday evening comes a thriller called “Low Winter Sun”, again 9pm and ITV I think. That’s the one that would have had a scene in which someone leaps out of a taxi and runs up the steps of our house, if we’d said yes.

Comments

Thank you for them all. I am now wholly determined to drop my subscription to “Knitting”. This is ridiculous. I couldn’t bear to part with Knitter’s or IK (I was in at the beginning, and I’ve got them all) or VK and don’t have the option, here, of inspecting them on the newsstand or at the library. But “Knitting” isn’t good enough, and it does turn up on some newsstands so I could look at it occasionally.

Ted, I’m glad you’re still here. I will certainly knit a trial piece of the Laurel Leaf pattern when I get there, as Sharon suggests. I will also try knitting it in my head before then, as you have done. That would be a comfort. Meanwhile I have reached row 106, and here is the promised update. That looks suspiciously like a dropped stitch – a too-big hole, in the feather to the left.