Presumably Archie is in Rome. I’d have heard if he spent the night in London, or if his parents had called out Interpol. He seemed in good spirits.

The weather continues very remarkable indeed. Edinburgh is dry, bitter cold, icy wind, but things are far worse elsewhere.

Knitting

I finished the first sleeve of the Relax last night, and tried it on. It’s all right, in a sense, but would look better with more ease. My fault, not the designer’s. My current plan is to finish the second sleeve in the next four days, block it on Wednesday with ends still untidied and neck-edging still unknit, and take it along to Loch Fyne on Friday to try on Rachel’s daughter Lizzie, probably the smallest of the potential small adult recipients.

I bought a copy (not a subscription) of Knit Edge magazine yesterday, Some interesting stuff, but I doubt if I’ll go on to a subscription. There’s a gansey article with accompanying pattern knit in the same pink yarn from Frangipani I used for Ketki’s gansey, seen here recently. My sister-in-law, I remember, didn’t believe that the herring girls wore pastel-coloured ganseys. There was never any arguing with her: one presented one’s evidence, and she went silent. End of conversation.

Have I got Epstein’s “Knitting in Circles” (mentioned in Knit Edge)? No, according to LibraryThing, and I thought I was up to date there. Now that knitting books exceed shelf space – by quite a bit – and are piled on the floor, it’s not necessarily easy to find anything. That should be in the design section in the bedroom if I've got it, but…

I am feeling restless and unsatisfied. Anhinga? (Helen C.K.S. knit it a while ago, and it left her feeling restless and unsatisfied, and anyway I can’t figure out how to order the pamphlet, even from the Berocco website.)

Here’s the Pakokku. Wonderful, no?

Miscellaneous

I’m glad some of you read Alastair Robertson’s obituary of his mother which I linked to recently. He has mentioned fruites des routes en croute before, I think. I love the idea.

My husband’s word processing went very well yesterday. The only problem I remember was when both of  us had to figure out how to turn underlining on and off in OpenOffice. Very easy, in fact. I also discovered that the OpenOffice screen wasn’t quite maximized – those little strips of underlying windows at the edges may have been the cause of some earlier crises. I dealt with it.

Maureen, when I go to Settings > General on my iPad, I don’t find anything that says > Software Update. I’ve Google’d the question and found a series of instructions involving iTunes and my desktop computer. I have read that the process can take an hour and risks losing all one’s previously-installed apps. My Kindle library!

Archie is sure I have an iPad 2. He says he will be happy to come here one weekend early next term and do the updating.

I have taken to replying to comments sometimes – do the writers ever see the replies?