My achievement for this morning has been to get to grips with Feedly. I think if I had switched over in time, it would have imported all my Google Reader stuff automatically. But I didn’t. Or whatever. Anyway, I’ve got it going now, although I’m not yet comfortable in the saddle. Next is to remember how to make it my go-to page when I load Google Chrome.

I have reached the toe-shaping of the 2^nd Mind the Gap sock, as hoped, and should polish it off today. Then back to the Pakokku’s. I’m greatly looking forward to the Strong-Fleegle heel with YO’s – and therefore eyelets -- for the increases.

And that reminds me that I read somewhere very recently (but can’t give credit where it’s due, because I’ve forgotten the source) about a technique for the edges of a Stephen West-type shawl. The shawl is expanding furiously because of internal increases. The edge needs to be stretchy. Stephen warns in his Craftsy course about being very, very careful not to be too tight when changing colours for the stripes.

The technique was – is – to put in a YO on every row one or two stitches in from the edge, and to drop it on the following row. Sounds worth a try.

That’s about it for knitting this morning. I have a project mentally queued – HALFPINT isn’t quite the acronym wanted: I’ll make time for this one. I can’t tell you about it yet, except to say that I’m hovering around the Loopy Ewe website.

Reading

Allingham’s book about the war turned up yesterday. It’s interesting. She begins with the village itself, so like and so unlike the one I know in Perthshire. And then she spends quite a bit of time on the build-up to the war. I hadn’t realised that so much preparation was done in the year between Munich (“peace in our time”) and the actual outbreak of the war.

That’s as far as I’ve got – September, ’39. We still have the winter of the Phoney War to go, before bombs start falling.

It seems curiously dated – well, it would be. That’s the whole point. And – am I going too far here? – it is a hymn to an English myth, of a society where gentle and simple pull happily together, which was knocked into a cocked hat (as we say) by the General Election of 1945. That’s one of my memories of the war, the astonishing news that the British had voted Churchill out, even before the Japanese surrender. I would have been 11.