The sun burnt away the haar fairly early on Tuesday. Yesterday was sun-all-day, and it looks as if today will be the same. Three days of summer, and one is prostrate.

Our 10-year-old car sailed through its MOT test yesterday. Our practice throughout life has been to buy a car new and run it into the ground. “The ground” has usually, if not always, been hit during the annual MOT test. As I remember New Jersey in my distant youth, all a car had to do was start, have lights that went on and off, and brakes that would stop it. The British MOT is more demanding, and my memory is that most if not all of our cars have perished not from mechanical faults but because the floor was rusted through. The motor industry seems to have solved that one. It’s a Skoda Fabia.

On one car we had a Ziebart life-time-guaranteed rust-proof treatment done when the car was new. Ziebart went bankrupt before the car expired from rust. What does one conclude?

I thought I had cracked the dining-room-ceiling problem on Monday and Tuesday. On the latter day, I spoke both to our broker and to the insurance company themselves, both prostrate with apologies for the delay. Since then, silence. There are two firms in the chain of command between the insurance company and the actual ceiling-knockers-down. Should I now phone one of them? Or what? I’m tired.

So the thing is to turn to knitting.

By the time I had frogged my first attempt at (what I shall now call) the Strong-Fleegle heel, and recovered the stitches, and unsplit and reseated them where necessary, I decided I might as well just go ahead and knit it again. The yarn and the needles for Alexander’s socks are now in the knitting bag. I can always cast on in the waiting room.

All went smoothly with the heel turn:

This is certainly one that will go into the repertoire. Probably the one I will use on the next socks I knit for my husband, who has been grumbling about too abrupt a right-turn for the heel. It is also very satisfactory, in the large and jumbled list I now have of sock-techniques-to-try, to reduce two to one. I am very inclined to believe (as we agreed recently must have been the case with IK’s and VK’s very similar sweaters with twisted fronts) …to believe that Strong and Fleegle came up with the idea independently of each other.

I think the two major remaining mountains-to-climb on that sock list, are Candace Strick’s revolutionary technique, and the Andersson heel. I’ve just re-read the latter, and I think it may be a modification of Strong-Fleegle, not very clearly expressed. Both Candace and Andersson are toe-up, oh dear, but maybe that’s just as well because I am eager to try Suzanne’s utterly easy-sounding cast-on (comment Friday, May 18), and eager to master Judy’s Magic cast-on.

Here’s a question for you: when you are turning a heel, how do you slip the first stitch on the right-side rows? On the purl rows, clearly, you slip purlwise with the yarn in front. If I were knitting a complete row, I would do the same on a knit row, and then pass the yarn between the needles. But is that right for a heel?