Alexander got the tickets!

When he got to the head of the on-line queue yesterday morning, he found that tickets were available in all parts of the stadium. So he started with the best – no, nothing. (Presumably they had only singletons, and he was asking for two.) Then the next best. Same thing, Then the next – and then he began to panic for fear that the parsimonious fans would be starting at the other end of the scale (no ticket to the Calcutta Cup is anything like what a reasonable human being would call cheap) and by the time he got there, those tickets would be gone too.

I don't know how he resolved this dilemma, but he says that Mark and I are in a corner of the ground-level tier. That sounds fine – not exactly the 50-yard line, but not the Black Hole of Calcutta either. (hey! A joke!) I've been to Murrayfield three times, I think (win, win, lose). The third time, we were sitting upstairs and I didn't care for it at all. That was the year I won tickets to the Calcutta Cup in a newspaper competition. We found ourselves in a disconsolate group of newspaper-ticket-winners, some from places in England so far-flung that they had to leave before the end to catch the last train home.

Kick-off is at 5 p.m. I profoundly disapprove of the way sport after sport has become a thing of the night. Perhaps the first and worst was my once-beloved baseball. I am trying to become a cricket fan – a proper, five-day Test Match is still played in daylight. Everything stops for lunch and tea. But it's an uphill struggle on my part.

The match is on March 8. And this time I will stay until I see Princess Anne (she'll be there) hand the Cup to the winning captain. Maybe I'll be the only person in that whole huge stadium who has ever knitted it.

Knitting

Here's the Silly Christmas Project at last, in James's hands. The pattern is in the book “Knit Your Own Britain”. It's not very good (my rendition isn't, I mean) but at least you can see what was intended.

I've now done 23 2/3rds scallops on the edging for the third side of the Unst Bridal Shawl – another percentage point, and today I should pass halfway.

I've been thinking about the borders – it's obvious I'll have to swatch. There are lots of diamond motifs which may flip over without difficulty – the problem is that I am knitting the shawl edging-inwards whereas it was written centre-out. But there are also trees, and they've got to be right.

There's a Tree of Life Border, edging-inwards, on p.163 of Heirloom Knitting which may solve a number of problems.

It's funny how much I resent the idea of taking some time off to swatch. Real knitters like Franklin and Kate Davies swatch all the time. I remember when I was knitting a Christening shawl for James' and Cathy's youngest, in 2000, and wanted to incorporate the Calcutta Cup which Scotland had gloriously and unexpectedly won that year – couldn't I just chart it and start knitting? It was an Amedro pattern knit from the edging all the way in to the middle. I was nearly finished when Kirsty was born, and wanted to put the her initials, mine, her birthday, and the year in the four quarters of the shawl – with the cup under the “2000”.

And of course I couldn't just bash on. I had to swatch to see if it worked. My lace Calcutta Cup is pretty basic, but it involves curved handles, based on something in Susanna Lewis' splendid “Knitting Lace”. My first attempt did indeed have to be tweaked. If I were using Old Slowcoach, my desktop computer, I'd show you a picture of the result.

If I'm so happy to be devoting 2014 to the Unst Bridal Shawl, why should I begrudge a week of swatching?