A new month in a new year! a new follower! I'm very fond of February.

Back to knitting, today.

We had a good session at the Royal Infirmary breathlessness dept yesterday. I got Joe’s socks well started, despite finding halfway around the first round that I was knitting with the long tail. Happens to us all.

They can’t help my husband, we knew that. They can only tell him to keep active, we knew that. I can’t remember the name for his condition, but I asked yesterday and learned that it’s not a punishment for having smoked long ago, it’s idiopathic – meaning, one of those things that just happens. Isn't that a good word? There is even a related condition, fascinating information, from which smoking seems to protect you – “we don’t advertise that”.

So that’s an argument, if one were needed, for struggling on with Strathardle as long as possible. There, he is active automatically. There’s nothing else to do. Here, we have to think of reasons to totter out in the afternoon, and don't always rise to the challenge.

I am round the bottom corner of Round-the-Bend, and knitting upwards on the first half-back. I think I’m getting the hang of mitred corners. I have nearly finished the first huge greenery-yallery skein, and have three more.

That sleeve won’t do. It was all very well when I thought that the whole was going to be a clamjamfry of miscellaneous stripes, like the ASJ. I think I have decided to go for the nuclear option – snip it off, pick up the stitches, graft to a green sleeve which I have yet to knit. I’ll go ahead and finish this half of the jacket, and think again – but I’m pretty sure that’s the answer. But are three more skeins quite enough for sleeves?

In K*rkmichael I looked again at the dusty pink Araucania for which I have yet to find an entirely satisfactory solution. I do love it. I brought a skein home to contemplate and perhaps even swatch.

What I am actually knitting with it is a rugby shirt on roughly the same pattern as Rachel’s striped Koigu one

and Ketki’s one celebrating Scotland’s victory in the Calcutta Cup of ’08:

And there’s nothing wrong with that. Why not press on?

I keep being drawn to the Anhinga, but it’s a big gamble, even if I knit it for one of Rachel’s small-boned and slender daughters.