A good day, yesterday.

I got my husband to the National Gallery, and later fetched him away from it. I got some things done in his absence that had been bugging me. And later,  knitting leapt forward.

In the end, I phoned the Gallery. To their credit, the telephone was answered directly by an intelligent human being. No need to choose-from-the-following-options. And she told me that it was all right to drive down the Mound from above, despite being neither a bus or a taxi, if all I wanted was access to the National Gallery. But don’t take my word for it. The centre of Edinburgh is a mess, and the rules can change from one day to the next.

My husband had a nice time, but came home tired. The committee won’t pronounce on our picture until June. In the evening we watched "Coogan's Bluff". It hasn't aged at all well (=isn't terribly good). But it was interesting to look back on a world where goodies and baddies alike smoked, and where there was only one black man in the whole of Manhattan. 

While I was alone, I tidied a little table which was piled high with the clutter of months. That felt good. And sent in my seed and potato order. It has been hard to find the usual enthusiasm for that job, so miserable was last year’s garden. But it’s done at last. I have ordered a few plug plants, as Rachel’s husband Ed does. Will they fare any better?

And, knitting

In the evening, I finished the body of the v-neck vest (to my surprise), did a three-needle bind off on the shoulders, picked up stitches around the neck and knit a couple of rounds of ribbing. For the pick-up, I did a careful one-two-three skip down one side and up the other, as advised, without counting higher than four. To my astonishment I wound up with exactly the same number of stitches on each side. My memory is that when I am aiming at a specific total, it is much easier to achieve it on one side than on the other.

Vicki Square’s kimono book turned up yesterday – the first one. It’s good. She starts with the history of the kimono, and its basic construction, and then provides a dozen or more variations on the theme. Even flipping through the pages, one is inspired to seize the elements and reconstruct them to one’s heart’s desire. Might this be the stage for my ever-receding Koigu masterpiece?

We had no mail delivered last Friday. Any other day of the week, one might shrug (suspiciously) and say, well, maybe no one wrote to us. But the Economist always comes on Friday. It didn’t, and hasn’t turned up subsequently. I think last week’s New Yorker is missing as well. I was worried about “The Knitter’s Book of Socks” which I will need for the Great Sock Session to come, but Amazon says that’s due today.

Yesterday I was successful in collaring our excellent postwoman. Friday was her day off, she said – no surprise there. She’s now on the case.