I saw a heron just now, standing on the wall between two of our neighbours’ gardens. Not entirely uncommon, even in Edinburgh, but I’ve never seen one in Drummond Place before. It stood there quite a long time, long enough for me to discover that the camera needed new batteries, before elongating itself and taking off calmly on a flight path over the Milligans’.

Google was helpful with symbolic meanings. Everything good, is the answer  -- strength, wisdom, purity, long life. Making it a good morning to announce that I am to be a great aunt: Jenni and Theo are expecting a child in October.

(I pinched that picture from Theo's Facebook wall. I don't know where they got that baby.)

I’ve known about this for a few days, but the news embargo was only lifted this morning. In fact, it is for their baby that I plan to knit the Tulip Cardigan. (Modern pregnancy being what it is, I should be told which side to put the buttons on pretty soon.) I now feel rather mean about the subterfuge, and may have to do something for Iona G. upstairs as well.

I heard from Coldwater this morning, too, to say that the kit is on its way.

The bad news is that Mr ChemDry came back yesterday, spent a desultory half-hour picking at the ceiling paper in the dining room, and announced that we need a new ceiling. Even before we get to the stage where everything in the house is covered with plaster, we have to move all the furniture out of the dining room. It’s a big room. There are some big things in there (and lots of smaller things). There is not a great deal of space to spare elsewhere in the house.

I could wish myself back in that care home, with nothing to worry about except the date of the next Occupational Therapy session.

So we will go to Strathardle today to get away from it all. Back at the weekend. The weather forecast is fairly horrendous, but I will take along a few potatoes to plant in case there is a window of opportunity. They have been quietly chitting in the dining room all this time.

As for actual knitting, the snood progresses nicely. Yarn B has nearly finished its first appearance – the next stripe after the current one is three strands of C. That’s far enough along for me to feel happy about yarn quantities, always an anxiety, including enough for those extra inches I mentioned yesterday.

And I finished my first Gibson Roberts heel. It’s not very good. I hope I’ll do better on the other one. It’s not a heel I’ll ever use again, because of those double decreases. They are awkward and difficult; there’s always the danger of losing a stitch – and, indeed, of breaking a needle. I’ve done a better job, as it happens, with the p3togtbl’s than with the k3togs on the other side.

(When I have to do a double decrease in lace, as often, I almost always centre it: insert the right-hand needle in the first two stitches as if to knit them together, slip them both at once like that, knit the next stitch, pass the two slipped stitches over, both together still. Since the needle entered the middle stitch of the decrease first, that’s the one that winds up on top, on Margaret Stove’s Principle, enunciated here often before. But in the case of the heel, the centre stitch is a slip stitch already, and I don’t know whether I’d be allowed that approach.)