Kristen, I wish you were here so that we could talk about “Let the Right One In” a quattr’occhi, as I think the Italians say. I envy you having seen it in the cinema. Our television screen isn’t very large, although modern and digital and all that.

I thought the upshot of the film was love – is that just an old woman’s reaction? When the girl first appeared, she told Oskar, “I can’t be your friend”. And he needed a friend badly, not having any and being bullied at school. At the end, they were friends, despite everything. Love had got past horror, on both sides.

I hope I haven’t spoiled it for anyone else by saying too much.

It was awfully good on snow, almost as good as “Fargo”. And on colour, the lack of. And the camera so often moved back and distanced us and itself from the climax of horrific scenes, esp. at the end, in a way that made it seem less terrifying than the events might have been otherwise. But maybe in the cinema they were horrific anyway.

Anyway, that doesn’t get us very far with knitting.

I’m now nearly finished with the fifth stripe of the chevron scarf, and should at least cast that one off today. The total object looks awfully wide and short – I must hope that severe blocking will correct that to some extent.

I got an email from somewhere yesterday saying that a between-season, “early fall” VK is about to appear. It looked promising, and I think in general that VK is where the design is, at the moment. I hope they intend to send it to subscribers. I hope they intend to send it to subscribers in GB, where the magazine is now called “Designer Knitting”. K1 Yarns will have it, if all else fails.

I need to finish my scarf while the description of it in the sidebar is still accurate, with its reference to the “current VK”.

Gardening

The weather, after being uncharacteristically cold for months, has suddenly become uncharacteristically hot. My little plants will be wanting water, and I’m glad I shall be seeing them on Monday.

One of the treats of next weekend – when we are planning to go to Argyll to celebrate James-the-Younger’s birthday – will be observing Alexander’s vegetables, and even more, his newly-planted cider orchard. (No kidding – maybe his largely unused barn could be converted into a granny flat.) The trees arrived in January when Argyll was frozen solid. More than that, all of GB had been frozen solid for several weeks at that point, so they must have been out of the ground for a while. I don’t know anything about their progress since.

As for vegetables, Alexander has twelve professionally-constructed raised beds. He tends to look at my garden and say, “Anyone could grow vegetables in soil like that” (the area has probably been a kitchen garden, off and on, for more than a century); I tend to look at his and say, “Anyone could grow vegetables on the west coast” (where it’s distinctly warmer).