Sorry about yesterday. I was – and still am – pretty well incapacitated by an embarrassing and uncomfortable ailment. Not for me the lying pale on a couch and coughing like Mimi, as other bloggers seem to do.

I bought VKB #19 on eBay last night. Six to go, concentrated in date between Spring, ’35 and Spring ’41. I notice, indeed, that five of the missing six are even-numbered spring issues. Knitting must have been more fun in the fall, even 70 years ago – no surprise. Number 19 itself is fall, ’41 and ought to be interesting. I’ll tell you all about it when it gets here.

I paid more than anyone else, of the seven wartime VKB’s that were sold last night. I wasn’t quite brave enough with the timing of my last-minute bid, and the underbidder had time to push me up twice.

In intervals of discomfort I got a little knitting done yesterday. I went on with the cashmere gansey – most of Sunday had been spent counting stitches, increasing from the rib to the body count, and lining up two opposite purl ribs to be the basis of false seams. I had knit the basic k2, p2 ribbing on a number of stitches divisible by four but not by eight – and that meant, if one thinks about it, that I didn’t have two p2’s directly opposite each other and had to add stitches to one side and subtract from the other to line them up. The great thing would be to learn to think.

So after all that I thought I’d start the initials yesterday.

They’re tough. (a) I can’t really see what’s going on, although I’m half-way through and (b) Theo has, I suspect, a particularly difficult set of initials, TELeC, and I keep forgetting where I am. I think maybe I’ll try to finish them today, while I’ve got the bit between my teeth.

Comments

Many thanks for the new anti-Jerry-Lewis votes. But now you’ve got to contrive to watch “King of Comedy”, if you haven’t seen it yet. The New Yorker did a big piece on JL several years ago, and if I’m remembering it rightly, the writer was surprised that JL didn’t seem to have much regard for or interest in that movie. He plays himself, needless to say, under another name, and there’s a scene in his fictional house when one sees a photograph of the young JL, just to underline the point.

I’m in the fortunate position of having seen Jim Carrey only in The Truman Show, which is wonderful. I tried to persuade Rachel to go, but she hates him so much she couldn’t face it. He was the perfect choice.

And, Julie, I loved your story about laughing in the wrong places – I’m sure you’ve married the right man. My only comparable experience was when my husband and I first saw “Mash” in a cinema in Birmingham. I think some of the operating-theatre scenes are still trimmed a bitwhen it appears on television. My husband and I sat there howling with laughter (and he hates medical drama) – “That’s BLOOD!” I remember him saying, slapping his knee. While the rest of the cinema sat in horrified silence.

But that was meant to be funny.