Rachel and her family, ever prone to sudden, decisive action, drove to Glasgow from south London yesterday, to spend the weekend with Alexander and Ketki. They will all watch the Rugby World Cup final together, and I’m glad I won’t be there. But we will go over this morning to join them for lunch at the New Loon Fung restaurant on Sauchiehall Street. The website is largely in Chinese, which promises well. They are said to be tolerant of small boys.

We’ll go by train this time. Less sock-knitting opportunity, alas. And not free.

Digital television

I re-tuned our new set, and reception of BBC1 and BBC2 remained lousy or non-existent. So I wrote to the Toshiba helpdesk, and got a prompt reply in the form of a couple of questions. Zen-fashion, they solved the problem.

Was I watching in digital or analogue mode? Until yesterday, I didn’t know there was such a thing as digital television. I thought it was in the future, and I knew that our new set promised to be ready for it. But no, it’s here among us. I figured out how to switch to analogue – it’s not the best manual in the world, but it’s not the worst, either. The set then tuned itself all over again, and all is well with BBC reception. So full marks to Toshiba.

Somewhere down the line we’ll need a new aerial, I’m sure.

And I figured out how to make the screen square for old movies, a point that had been worrying my husband a lot.

So we’re very happy, and I feel I’ve Learned Something.

My swift

I got it in an antique shop. It’s a form of shopping which my husband is fond of, and I abhor. But there it was. I didn’t even buy it. We went home, and I thought about it overnight, and rang up the next day. I have seen two or three similar ones in antique-eria's since, but they’re not common. Is there some website where one could register a request, like asking Abebooks to look for a book?

The side bars have holes in them, and you can easily move the dowels on which the cages turn up and down to accommodate skeins of different sizes. There is a nice little cup on top, for resting the half-wound ball of wool in when you want to go off and do something else.

I was in my Knitlist phase when I got it, and wrote about it. I think someone said that it was called a “squirrel-cage” swift. I think she or someone else remembered old-fashioned wool shops with a similar arrangement, only larger, somehow attached to the wall, for winding customers’ skeins.

Other

I finished my LibraryThing catalogue – about 250 books, when the ones on dyeing and mosaics and needlework alphabets and Amish quilts are subtracted. No time for Ravelry this morning, though; we must rev up for Glasgow.