Health

Not a bad day. Maybe this assume-a-virtue-if-you-have-it-not approach is going to work. I'll try walking a bit farther than usual today. Thank you for your kind words. I had been feeling rather embarrassed, myself, all this fuss about what seems to be turning out to be nothing. There is much that still puzzles me.

A totally irrelevant note, tangentially related: when Helen's wonderful friend S. was driving us home from the appt with the Great Man on Wednesday, she took us through Holyrood Park in that wonderful moment of a Scottish equinoctial evening when the light is preternaturally vivid, picking out each dog-walker and jogger on Arthur's Seat and the Crags which were looming above us. As we passed the Palace of Holyrood, S. said, “A prince must be here”. It was flying a very serious-looking, royal-looking flag, with quarters.

I read the Court Circular with particular interest yesterday, and sure enough. Princess Anne, after a day spent attending boring-sounding meetings in Manchester and Newcastle on Wednesday, rounded it all off with a boring-sounding dinner in Edinburgh. The flag must have been flying for her. That's something else Scotland will lose if they vote Yes in this bloody referendum.

Knitting

Not an entirely good day, yesterday. The needles arrived from Heirloom Knitting – but, has something happened to Inox? They are called Prym and they are that familiar knitting-needle grey. I knit a whole round on one of them, and immediately knit everything back onto the unreliable needle because I couldn't see the stitches. The old needle is shiny, and I can see them fine. Nickle-plated, I gather is the term.

So I have ordered another two circulars, nickle-plated Knit Pro's from Meadow Yarn. The blurb mentions lace knitting in particular, a propos the sharpness of the needles and the smoothness of the join between cable and point. I've been having trouble with that, too. It will probably turn out, as so often, that I should have consulted you people first.

And as for the knitting itself, I'm not doing at all well with Fleegle and I don't know what's wrong, so I have decided to switch to wrap-and-turn. That is, to use one ball of yarn and to turn around after each circuit and knit the next one in the other direction. I've done that once before, and the only difficulty is that it leaves a strong, discernible line up one corner, clearly visible from horseback. It's not entirely easy to do, either, when there is a YO on either side of the wrapped stitch every other row. I'll get the hang of it, I suppose. A 10-minute Google session hasn't provided any helpful instructions.

My first thought had been to wrap all the corner stitches – if you can't disguise it, make a feature of it -- but that turns out to be so awkward a manoeuvre for the reason just given, that I have abandoned the idea.

Let's hope for better news tomorrow.