Life presses, this morning. I must be brief.

The new ceiling is up. Decorators will come today. But is it dry? There are serious splashes of plaster on the walls – we had hoped the old wallpaper could be saved. So that is this morning’s first question. The woman on the telephone thought the decorators could wash it off. I am suddenly, enormously, depressed again by the whole thing.

Thank goodness for knitting.

You are right, of course, Knitlass, Kate deserves acknowledgement and payment for those sweaters at Debenham’s. I was glad to see in her blog post that she has “taken advice”. I trust that whatever else her lawyer does or doesn’t do, he has written a scary letter to the shop.

I am trying to compose in my head an email to them. I don’t want to imply that I have seen the wretched sweaters myself. Debenham's email address is in Kate’s blog. The more of us who write, the better.

As for the socks, they progress. The Sweet Tomato consists of three wedges stacked on top of each other. I’m working on the third. Yet another drawback of toe-up construction, when one is trying out heels, is that one doesn’t know where to start because one doesn’t know quite how much the heel will add to foot length. Top-down, easy. Knit the leg, knit any heel you like, measure the foot and keep going until it’s long enough.

Despite all this, there’s something I like about toe-up.

Non-knit

Mary Lou, thanks for the reminder. I am sort of between books at the moment, and I need one, and that’s the answer: go back to Ann Cleve and Shetland. I’ll do it today.

And now I must get on with Wednesday the 11^th. The weather forecast this morning said that the current misery would go on for the rest of the month. I had continued until that moment to nourish the hope that things would improve next week, when James will be here and St Swithin will have had his chance to intervene.