You will have heard by now about Cardinal O’Brien’s statement admitting “sexual misconduct”.

Professor Warren, in our Shakespeare class at Oberlin 60 years ago, defined the word “tragedy” down to the point where – in Shakespeare, anyway – only Antony & Cleopatra filled the bill. (I have forgotten why Othello, Lear, and Hamlet failed to qualify.) For full-scale tragedy, you need a protagonist of heroic stature, and you need “the retrospective awareness of irrecoverable loss”.

“Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight”: that sort of thing.

The Cardinal has given up hope even of serving as an assistant priest in Dunbar. His last public Mass was there, nine days ago, on Saturday February 23, the day before the storm broke.

Profesor Dawkins and large swathes of the world’s media will rejoice this morning. It’s just a guess, but I suspect the Cardinal has more sympathy in the parishes of St Andrews and Edinburgh – his episcopal see – than he might imagine.

Use every man after his desert, and who should 'scape whipping?

Knitting

I have embarked on the dolman increases of the Relax. The pattern distinguishes m1R and m1L. Meg says somewhere that she mirrors increases in this fashion and wonders whether it is not a perfectionist obsession too far? At any rate, the pattern doesn’t say how to do it. One is referred to a website.

It was late, I was tired, the computer was off (and it didn’t occur to me to find out whether the wi-fi signal reaches my knitting chair – I might have looked it up on my iPad). So I just increased. I’ll look it up today and do better this evening.

Zite pointed to a tantalizing reference this morning to a sock yarn called Into the Whirled Pakakku. (Scroll down past the baby pictures.) It pools deliciously on 64 stitches. I love pooling, as you know. I followed the link the blogger gives to the Loopy Ewe – but they don’t have any. The dyer’s shop on Ravelry has lots of unbearably beautiful yarns, but they’re almost all DK, and no Pakakku. She has a yarn club – that would be ridiculous. I haven’t time. And you don’t get Pakakku every month.

Anyway, the club is sold out too. I put my name on the waiting list. A very few Ravellers are willing to part with a skein or two. I wrote to one of them, hoping to buy her skeins of “Vampires of Venice” and “A Musing Anecdote”. Now I’ll have to haunt my Ravelry in-box.

Technology

We had another fairly good day yesterday. I learned that when Word screws up entirely – one’s text in a small window occupying ¼ of the screen while the rest is empty, for example; or no File in the upper left-hand corner, so no way to save one’s work – the secret can be to tap the upper right-hand corner of the screen. I can’t remember how I stumbled on that one.