And yet another day when inspiration lacks.

But also another day with pink in the Sky Scarf stripe.

Here are the socks – photography has done better than expected at conveying the nature of the wonderful yarn (KF Random Stripes). In most circumstances, they don’t look as stripey as that. In real life they come across as a dark, solid colour with slight variation.

I should reach the second heel flap today. The “Georgia O’Keefe” yarn is on its way – I hope there will be time to get the next Random Striped socks started (“Moor”) before the package arrives, just to see how the brighter stripes work.

I was in John Lewis yesterday – not picking up a prescription, this time, but buying sheets in the sale – and looked at the sale yarn. I knew I could trust myself to resist. Quite a lot of Rowan’s KF Colorscape Chunky yarn in different colorways is available in big skeins marked down from about £12 to about £9. I wasn’t tempted, nor was anybody else, much – the sale was nearly over and there it all was. The price, and the thought of how quickly one of those big skeins could be knitted, made me feel I wasn’t quite as absurdly extravagant as I often seem to myself to be.

Non-knit misellaneous

I’m hard at work on our income tax, and hope to file it this weekend and so leave us free for a trip to Strathardle next week if the weather holds. At the moment, January is at its most ideal. I need to start working on the seed-and-potato order, and I need the actual garden to inspire me. Also, it’s time for some (Jerusalem) artichoke soup. And there might be some Brussels sprouts in my new vegetable cage – that would be exciting. And there’s compost and manure to spread which should have been done months ago.

Archie rang up from Athens last night in a state of some anxiety about SOPA – the Stop Online Piracy Act. I looked it up, briefly, and it sounds to me like a not unreasonable idea. A lot of intellectual property is being stolen out there. But will this be the end of the Internet As We Know It? Archie is not an online pirate that I know of, but he clearly reads websites which have got him worried.

Helen and Mungo went over to Glasgow last week to see the Loch Fyne Mileses. Here is a picture of James, Alexander, Thomas and Mungo standing in front of the tenement where Alexander and Helen were born. We were one up on the left. Our dining room bay window was therefore just above the window you see partially obscured by that tree. The window of the room in which the actual births took place was next to the left after that.