A new follower! You are very welcome!

Again, there is little to report. I'm halfway through the second repeat (of 19) on the centre of the Unst Bridal Shawl. Soon there will be enough to spread out for a picture. It's looking good.

The dr was running very late yesterday – I am well along with the toe-shaping of that eternal Pakokku sock, as a consequence.

Something useful from Zite: this website has a run-down of all there is to know about knitted buttonholes, a subject I have never mastered. Makes a change from endless articles about a Chinese woman who knit a coat with her own hair.

Calcutta Cup

That's tomorrow. Alexander says the weather forecast is dire – does that offer Scotland a glimmer of hope? I doubt it. I think our case is even more dire. What I must do today is learn the words to “Flower of Scotland”. It will be printed in the programme, but it would be too embarrassing for words to have to read it.   I plan to sing both anthems, like Princess Anne.

Anyway, I haven't time for another knitting project. It would be just as well if Scotland lost.

Literature

Normally, we read the New Yorker when we are in Strathardle, free from the distractions of television and newspapers. And, under those circumstances, discover many an interesting article on topics one might have skipped past in the more pressured atmosphere of Edinburgh.

But we haven't been there for a long time, for fear of snow and our own frailty, so I've been catching up lately on a winter's-worth of New Yorkers. America seems stranger and stranger.

I don't always read the short story; in fact, more often than not, I don't. I give a story about a paragraph and a half to take me by the throat. The ones I do read are sometimes remarkably good, and I found one such yesterday in the January 20 issue: “A Mistake” by Akhil Sharma. The first two sentences are: “As far back as I can remember, my parents have bothered each other. [new paragraph] In India, we lived in two concrete rooms on the roof of a house.”

When I finished it, I rushed to amazon.co.uk. His novel “Family Life” is soon to be published. The New Yorker story would appear to be an excerpt from it. They often do that – Ian McEwan is a particular favourite of the New Yorker's, and I first met Vikram Seth's “A Suitable Boy” in the form of a long excerpt there. The days of their publishing entire books (Silent Spring, Hiroshima, Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, In Cold Blood) seem to be over.

Anyway, recommended.

More non-knit, indeed completely irrelevant

A few months ago, we had some serious trouble with television reception. The choice was to send someone up to the roof of the tenement far above us, to fiddle with or replace the aerial, or to go for cable. We chose the latter, Virgin, and it has worked well on the whole.

It is our wont to spend the hour from six to seven watching the news, me knitting, my husband injecting insulin and then waiting half-an-hour for his tea. First the BBC News at Six, then Reporting Scotland.

Last Friday, we found ourselves transported to |Northern Ireland when we expected Reporting Scotland, and the situation has persisted. It must be Richard Branson's fault. Northern Ireland is a strange and interesting place, with a good deal more low-level argie bargie going on than you might suspect from the newspapers. But we miss Reporting Scotland.