Miscellany

It is a leaden morning, in more senses than one. It’s raining. We needed rain.

I harvested sorrel from the doorstep yesterday and made soup. Delicious, if I do say so. Alexander refuses to grow sorrel because his garden is overrun with the closely-related weed of the same name. “It would be like planting Japanese knotweed,” he says.

But if we abstained from planting anything that was related to a weed, we wouldn’t have much to eat. Delicious soup can be made from the leaves of the weed sorrel, but they are much smaller and would take a lot of picking. The plan is to augment my sorrel-patch in Strathardle with the plants from the pot on the doorstep, come September. 

An honour has been conferred on grandson Thomas-the-Elder (middle of the back row, above), all the more wonderful for being totally Gilbertian:

"Blue bags are those with which barristers provide themselves when first called, and it is a breach of etiquette to let this bag be visible in court. The only brief-bag allowed to be placed on the desks is the red bag, which by English legal etiquette is given by a leading counsel to a junior who has been useful to him in some important case."

"As well as wigs and gowns, Ede & Ravenscroft also produces a traditional accessory: colour-coded bags for holding a barrister's wig and gown which, etiquette dictates, may only be ordered by those of a certain status within the legal system. The rarest is a green bag, which is only for judges, followed by the red bag, which is for junior barristers, but should only be ordered by a QC. The QC may present the bag, embroidered with the junior's initials, at the end of a case, with a piece of parchment on which the QC can write a special message."

Thomas has been given a red bag. His message was “Virtue is the reward for services to Queen and country” which sounds a bit meaningless.

A quiet day at Wimbledon yesterday. Djokovic looks unbeatable.

Today will largely be spent getting ready for prize-day-at-school tomorrow, costume chosen and inspected for moth-holes, meals planned and shopped-for. I am becoming increasingly leaden-footed.

On the other hand, I keep turning up on Zite these days. The knitting content of individual blog-entries seems irrelevant, and readership numbers seem unaffected.

Knitting

Franklin liked my early reference to gauge.

I finished the straight underarm-to-shoulder part of the back of Relax2, and now have but to shape the shoulders and neck.

I also cast on a Mind the Gap sock, but twisted the stiches or something – there was a hole in the top edge, so I frogged and we’ll start again. I think I’ll look out a London tube map – after Northern-Line-black I’m not sure I can identify any of the colours for certain.