I couldn’t make a potato work (in the light fitting). I was grateful for the suggestion, and I tried hard. Maybe it works with a screw-in bulb but not with a bayonet? But our nice electrician came in the afternoon and got the offending piece out without difficulty, and also changed a bulb in my husband’s study which hadn’t been replaced due to nothing more serious than laziness, and declined to take payment for what he regarded as trivial services.

So today I go get Archie. If the vibes are right, I’ll take an “after” picture in front of the house where he has been living this week.

Archie is tall, Beverley. He’s 14. His height is part of the problem, in a sense.

Helen and David had a small legacy a year ago, and decided to send all three of their boys back to Britain to boarding school for the sixth form (the last two years of school), to teach them how to be British before they move on to university and Real Life. But Archie has been getting seriously nowhere in his Athenian school, and they realized when they started to think about it that the sixth form might be too late for him.

So the idea is for him to drop back a year and board now, to give him a two-year run at GCSE’s, the pre-sixth-form exams. Dropping back is not at all uncommon – the education industry calls it “consolidation”. But Archie will be twice the size of his classmates, which might be awkward. He has been diagnosed with mild Asperger’s. I don’t like labels, putting people in boxes, but I suppose it provides a convenient starting-point for conversations with headmasters.

At least they won’t laugh at him on the rugby field until he actually starts playing.

My family history includes two disastrous episodes of sending teen-aged boys off to boarding school, and no successes. But I am only one of four sources of Archie’s DNA. It would be nice for me if things have gone well this week – I’d like to have him here in Edinburgh. The alternative is a school down souff somewhere, which has also accepted him.

Lester, those double-yoked  eggs must have been fun. Someone in England had a box of six of them a couple of years ago, and the newspapers were all of a flutter for a day or two, trying to calculate the odds. Odds don’t come into it, in either instance. The eggs were candled, and the box of oddities then – by mistake? – got into the system.

Knitting

Yesterday was one of those unusual days when things went better than expected. I’ve finished the back of the v-neck vest; distributed the stitches on three pieces of waste yarn, shoulder-back neck-shoulder; wound the last (dark) skein so as to be able to knit the fronts simultaneously; recovered the stitches for the front from their waste yarn; and calculated the necessary rate of decrease.

There’s every reason to hope I can finish both this and a pair of socks by Easter. Easter (as we all know) is the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox – and the preceding moon won't be full for some days yet.