Today’s first job was to straighten out a muddle on my husband’s computer. I think I’ve done it successfully, but time is curtailed.

And tomorrow’s, to go to Strathardle. Helen and her boys should be with us on Tuesday and after that I will adopt the life of a lotus-eater for nearly three weeks. It won’t be like that really, of course; husband to feed and worry about and pacify – but essentially, she’ll be in charge. Responsibility will be shared. Bliss.

Perhaps I’ll try to phone her today, to see how the trans-European journey is progressing. Mobile telephony has it uses.

Knitting

Moving nicely on down the foot of the 1^st Pakokku.

Donna (comment yesterday), it’s exciting to “meet” one of Herzog’s beta testers. This is a very interesting venture.

I had to go up to Boots for medicaments yet again yesterday, and treated myself to the new Rowan magazine while I was up there. I have grasped at last – this will be useful if I can hold on to it – that the even numbers are the preferred autumn issues. That is the opposite to the old – and equally undated – Vogue Knitting Books. They started off with No 1 in the autumn of 1932, and continued with odd numbers for autumn.

For knit-ability, I think I’d put Kate Davies’ “Nepal Wrap” tops: a triangular shawl with interesting stripes. And I agree with Kate herself, in a recent blog entry, in admiring Marie Wallin’s “Anatolia”, a wonderfully colourful “Fair Isle” – in the broadest sense of the term. It deviates occasionally from the Golden Rule: Only Two Colours at a Time. But the deviations are few enough, and far enough apart, and sufficiently worth having, that I think they would be bearable. One to think about.

There’s also an article about Kate, and some interesting material by her about steeking – both historical material, and instructional. The Kate Davies issue.

There’s a lot of Kidsilk Haze against which I have taken a life-time vow. But if that’s what you like, there it is.

Reading

I’ve finished Allingham’s non-fiction about village life during the war. There are some awfully good bits, most especially the account of a day trip to London made during the height of the blitz. The day began with an unusual daylight raid, so her conference with her publisher was conducted in the air-raid shelter under the building. The rest of the day was a disconcerting mixture of the absolutely familiar and the utterly destroyed. “There were few untidinesses, little of the jagged look I had imagined. Rather, complete smooth annihilation.”

At the end of the day she bought a newspaper from an old woman who had presumably been on her corner all day: “Cheer up. It’ll take ‘em a ‘ell of a time to knock it all down, dear.”

The train home ran on time, and likewise the connecting bus to her village.

Now I’ve reverted to reading Cathy’s new one, “Kate Sampson”’s “Carnaby”. It’s good. Where I am at the moment, the heroine has just arrived in Edinburgh, at a fictional address located, to judge from the post code, not far from the author’s parents-in-law’s real one. “It must be summer in Edinburgh too but it’s really cold.”