I had another nasty comment yesterday – nasty in the sense that it offered a link to what threatened to be a most unpleasant website. Kathy spotted it first. I’ve had several of these lately – ostensibly from different sources – and if it goes on, I will have to switch to verification like grown-up bloggers.

I finished the first Fog sock, as hoped.

Stash Haus, you’re right that most plain vanilla sock patterns have ribbing all the way down to the heel. I can’t remember quite how my Standard Sock evolved. I took up sock knitting again 12 years ago – I can be precise because it was travel knitting for a trip to the US to celebrate my mother’s 90th birthday. I had recently discovered the Internet and Patternworks and Socka Colors. Those first socks were a colour I think is called teal and they’re still in my husband’s sock drawer although darned, and getting thin.

I used a pattern Patternworks sold. I carried it for a long time and all the writing got rubbed off. Now I know it by heart. But it was I, not Patternworks, who put in that longish plain section between ribbing and heel.

Why? I think that’s the way people like them, but maybe I am inflicting my own preferences on my audience. Ribbing all the way would be tedious to knit, but neater. I will raise the subject when next I have a group of them together.

Which might be soon…

My husband had hoped for an London-art-viewing session this month. With his recent round of mouth-centred ill health, he hasn’t felt up to it. But the last few days, he has started feeling, after all, that maybe he could manage it. He has got to have two of his few remaining teeth pulled this afternoon, where the abscess was. If he is comfortable tomorrow, we’ll go to Strathardle. I’m way behind with my vegetables…

And perhaps after that, London, in the week beginning April 20. My sister and her husband will be there. It would be jolly to see them. They will have to sleep under the billiard table if we’re in the spare room.

So we shall see.

Meanwhile, I reflected last night that sock-knitting incorporates two or perhaps even three knitting techniques which I remember learning from a human being. Almost everything I know comes from books.

I have no memory of learning to knit in the first place: presumably my father’s mother taught me. I think it was a friend at Hampton Elementary School in Detroit who taught me the long-tailed cast-on, and the idea – which I still use, with socks – of casting on over two needles held together, to ensure that the cast-on edge will be elastic.

Much more recently, a grown-up friend taught me to avoid that hole in the corner of the gusset by taking up two or even three of the horizontal threads that lie between the last gusset stitch and the first instep one and making a stitch of them. Same on the other side. Then decrease those extra stitches away in the first decrease round. I’m getting pretty good at that one.