Little to report, and this is my sign-off for a while. The Mileses must be in a departure lounge at Beijing airport right this moment, if not actually airborne. If all goes according to plan, someone will be bedding down here by my computer tomorrow morning – and later, we’ll all go to Kirkmicha*l and I will start rescuing my poor vegetables from the all-enveloping weeds.

And casting-on the Japanese shirt!

Our niece came to lunch yesterday, looking younger and prettier than when we last saw her, freed from the stress of her mother’s dying. She is moving forward with the sad business of getting things valued for probate.

I didn’t get much knitting done, but the herringbone-ing of the first sleeve is finished, and the self-knitting sock has turned its heel.

Annie, thanks for the tip about Pavi Yarns and Cascade 220. I’ll bookmark.

Non-knit

There are two non-knit topics which have been forming themselves into possible blog-paragraphs in my head while I have been cooking and washing-up lately. One of them concerns the shouting of “Come on, Tim” at Andy Murray when he is playing tennis – which annoys him, understandably, and has an undercurrent of racism to it. Murray is undoubtedly the best British tennis player for a long, long time – better than Tim Henman, certainly – but if there’s one thing he’s rather emphatically not, it’s an Englishman.

These days he looks not entirely unlike Peter Capaldi in “In the Thick of It” – tall, Scottish and furious.

The other concerns Esther Rantzen, who had an article in the Telegraph recently about moving from a four-storey town house in London somewhere to a two-bedroom’d apartment, now that she is a widow and her children have flown the coop. The article was about how she misses her clutter.

But she didn’t even mention the aspect of house-clearing which would stop us in our tracks if we ever tried to downsize. Brown furniture can go to the sale room, stash to Alyth: but what about books?

Maybe Esther Rantzen has a Kindle.