Let’s start with knitting.

The Relax is far enough along that I can see another Sock Phase on the horizon, perhaps giving me a chance to recover some of the things I learned temporarily last year. I have heard from the Ravelry stash-seller who can let me have one of her Pakokku skeins – “Vampires of Venice” alas is gone. One of you wrote to me offering to send a skein she owns, just like that. I am deeply touched. And there’s your offer, Beverly, to look out for it at yarn festivals.

And, Holly, no, I didn’t know about the Planned Pooling website, and look forward to using it. I have added it to Evernote, after a bit of a struggle.

I admire your newly-installed public sculpture extravagantly. (I used to live in Salt Lake City, long enough ago that memories have faded. We went swimming in the GSL that Sunday in 1939 when the war started. My father told me, remember this day, and I have done so. I’m just coming up to it in Vol I of the Cazalets.)

Another evening or two will polish off the dolman increases of the Relax. I have resolved to leave half the stitches behind – for, from there, I’ll be knitting back and forth – on very thick yarn. I keep having trouble with left-behind stitches pulling so tight on their waste yarn that recovery becomes difficult.

Lent

We’re nearly half-way through. Day after tomorrow is the dividing line – and this coming Sunday is Laetare Sunday, when cider will be consumed. I’m not losing weight as fast as I did last year -- a bit of a disappointment. Four or five pounds, so far – not to be despised. I have one of those little cardboard collection boxes they hand out in the back of the church, and every morning I drop in three pound coins to represent (some of) the cider I didn’t drink the day before.

The box is getting nice and heavy and rattle-ly. At the end I will put all the pound coins back in the bank and send a donation to the Marie Curie hospice where my husband’s sister died two years ago. I read their bulletin board while we were there and learned that about half their funding comes from the NHS, per patient, and the rest from charitable donations. Their services are completely free at point-of-need, including home nursing.

It must be slightly different in the US, where those all-pervasive insurance companies are inevitably involved.

Religion

Cardinal O’Brien has left the country. A nice, hospitable Irish monastery is the temporary refuge I would choose for him if my opinion were asked. Will he ever be able to come back? It seems very hard to take Scotland away from the man, as well as all else.

I am sorry to have given the impression of being unsympathetic to his victims, if victims they were. We still don’t know, probably never will, whether we are talking about isolated incidents many years ago or a settled pattern of life, about drunken gropings or a habit of buggery. The mention of heavy drinking in this context distresses me as much as anything: crapulous priests are not uncommon.

We in the archdiocese of St Andrews and Edinburgh are suffering the additional indignity at the moment of being run from Glasgow.