Granddaughter Lizzie (second from right in the sidebar Grandchildren picture) is among the many tens of thousands expecting A Level results today – a place at Birmingham University is at stake, in her case. She is Rachel and Ed’s youngest child.

And I have reached round 101 in the Mourning Shawl border. This is really rather exciting. So I should finish the border patterning today, and start on the transitional rounds, and, ideally, give some thought to the centre: (a) calculating with some care the relationship between the number of centre rows to be knitted and the number of border stitches, right and left, to be incorporated; and (b) at the very least, charting the first set of initials – MCRM – and thinking ahead to where the numerals for the year will go. In the middle, for them, but I still need to see exactly how deep they are and therefore exactly how far before the actual middle I need to start them.

Looking for something else yesterday I found the chart for the insertion I did in the Princess shawl when I signed and dated it. That gives me a “2”; “0” is just the letter “o” from the Rorem alphabet. All I need to think about is “1”.

We’d better have a picture soon.

And the only other thing to talk about is the iPad, which is pretty boring for non-iPad-owners.

iPad section

I cannot tell you how grateful I am for all of yesterday’s comments, to which I will often return. I didn’t do much myself yesterday. I felt sort of mentally tired from the previous day’s excitement. I went on reading Ruth Rendell – it’s getting better – and straightened out the Piecework subscription.

I think it’s the ideal magazine, for me, for digital subscription. There’s not all that much knitting in it; I would really begrudge it space amongst the magazine piles in the bedroom. But there’s much of interest, and I will continue dipping in to it at least until the next issue drops down from heaven.

Two matters in which you can continue to help me:

This morning I (think I) bought Julian Barnes’ new novel (cheaper than Rendell – but, of course, shorter). Where is it? When I tap the Kindle icon, I am taken back to the page I was most recently reading in Rendell. How can I see what other titles are available?

Ted: you said yesterday, "I offloaded photos from the digital camera to the iPad”. How did you do that, when the iPad seems to have no ports? But maybe I see – there is one cord, with iPad at one end and USB at the other which could be attached to a camera?

James says in an email this morning, interestingly,“you can't do much to tweak machines to do exactly what you want as opposed to what Apple thinks you want.”

Non iPad, non-knit

Lizzie just rang up. She got in.