The Income Tax is ready to file, as soon as I’ve had my porridge. Liz Lovick has done hers, and bought a lovely wheel with her lovely rebate. We got a big rebate last year, but then they lowered our code so I am not expecting good news this morning.

The sweater progresses. The slowness of the decreases means that there is no feeling of acceleration such as one has with a raglan yoke. But the size looks plausible.

That’s about all I have had to say about knitting for some time past, I feel. But today there are titbits of knitting news.

We’re about to have an Edinburgh Yarn Festival day, March 16.

These ponies were in the Scotsman yesterday, amongst the snow pictures although there doesn’t appear to be any more snow on Shetland then there is in Drummond Place. (I think that's water in the background.) We’ve seen pictures before now of lambs wearing Fair Isle sweaters, looking as if the children’s cast-offs might have been pressed into service. But the most barrel-chested farmer wouldn’t have anything in his drawer to fit a pony – and these sweaters not only look fresh and new, but also appear to have colour-coordinated to the ponies themselves.

I keep getting emails from Evernote. James is keen on it. This morning on Zite there is a blog entry by a woman who uses it to organise her knitting. Would it have any advantages over Ravelry? Wouldn’t it just consume a lot of fiddle-time that could be better spent knitting?

Zite also has a tantalizing article about Franklin’s Knitted Tesselations class at Vogue Knitting Live. Alas, without photographs or any text by Franklin himself, making it impossible to visualise what is going on. Still, it sounds exciting. Perhaps we will hear more.

Rip Van Winkle in Central Edinburgh

I had a mixed morning yesterday. After polishing off my business with Santander, I went shopping at John Lewis.

I needed a blanket – Old Faithful had started shedding in its old age. Blankets are out. Duvets are everywhere. (We sleep with both, in weather like this.) At last I found a small rack with a poor selection, and bought one of them.

We need a bedside rug. Various searches had come up with nothing. We thought of getting a length of patterned stair carpet – that red Turkey pattern, if that’s the word, which used to cover every stair in Britain. Lewis’s could surely cut a length off and bind the ends for us. There are no stair carpets of any sort at Lewis’s any more. You have to cut a length of broadloom up the middle if you want something for your stairs these days.

(There must be some somewhere. We’ll go on looking.)

I had an idea. There I was at the top of Broughton Street, near Ladbrokes. Rachel says she doesn’t like Andy Murray. I would place a bet on him to win the Australian Open and send her the slip (which she can easily cash in London, if it proves to be worth anything).

So, after discussing the odds with the helpful girl behind the counter, I said I wanted to bet five pounds and added, “…and I’ll pay the tax.”

“We don’t pay tax any more,” she said. (Elderly British gamblers will know what I mean.)