World Affairs

The leader in yesterday’s Telegraph (the “Waffy”, here) led off with the remark: “There is an unsettling air of unreality about this stage of the banking crisis, not unlike the Phoney War in 1939-40. Something extremely unpleasant is about to hit us, but we don’t quite know what.”

That sent me back to Evelyn Waugh’s “Put Out More Flags”, the book of the Phoney War. I envy those who haven’t read it yet, but the rest of us can at least read it again.

What is going to happen to Iceland? You can’t very well close down a whole country, can you? It has been a delight, in all this gloom, to learn that the chain of cheap food shops in Britain called “Iceland” is in fact owned by Iceland.

Tonight’s debate will be uncommonly interesting. They say McCain is particularly good at Town Hall style debating. They say Obama is much better on economics, but since nobody seems to know how we got here (Clinton’s housing policies? deregulation? greed? China?) or what to do next, that may not help him much. I hope there will be somebody in charge who will try to make them answer the questions.

Knitting is a great comfort at times like these (and at most others).

I finished off the 7th pattern repeat of the Princess centre, and am by now well-embarked on the 8th. The stitches on the needle are even, left and right. I attempted a rough count of the ones remaining to be picked up – they’re hard to count, but my general impression is that the numbers are pretty evenly matched.

I applied Cynthia’s formula and found that I have knit 27.3% of the centre so far. Will four more balls of yarn be enough? I’ll try again on that one at the end of each repeat. Each repeat will contribute a larger percentage than the one before it.