Lots of achievement yesterday, leaving me feeling by six as if I’d been mowing the grass all day: more bank statements balanced, some ironing done, the scarf for Mrs Obama sent to Denver, Thomas-the-Elder’s socks to Streatham and a birthday present to Beijing.

I’m about half-way down the leg of Cathy’s second sock. I think I’ll go ahead and finish it, even if I haven’t quite achieved that state by midnight on the 31st. The toil up the hill to the post office yesterday afternoon left me near John Lewis’s – I went in and bought yarns that will-have-to-do for the dinosaur sweater, and to hell with it.

Gardening

Good King Henry: I tried it once before, Mary Lou. It’s one of the myriad off-beat vegetables which the books will tell you, “can be eaten like spinach”. See Angel’s interesting comment of yesterday. Well, I can tell you, Good King Henry doesn’t taste very good, eaten like spinach. It didn’t kill us, but it wasn’t very nice. So I pulled it all up. That must have been about ten years ago.

But I’ve decided that I wasn’t patient enough. I never got any flower shoots, and that’s what we’re really waiting for: “poor man’s asparagus”. I don’t know how I would set about “gently forcing” the shoots in the spring, as suggested in the link I’ve provided, but I’ll work on it.

Some unexpected knitting news

There was a story in yesterday’s Scotsman about a proposal to put some of those huge terrifying wind turbines on the Isle of Lewis, on a range of hills called the Old Woman of the Moors which form the view from the Callinish Stones, Scotland’s Stonehenge. It’s a dreadful idea.

But what has it to do with knitting? “Alice Starmore, a tour guide who has lived on Lewis all her life, said…” Clearly the Scotsman has never heard of her, but isn't that likely to be the famous bad-tempered knitting author and designer? Or someone else of the same name? More power to her, whichever.