Milano is finished, knitting-wise. It will need at least one more session for dealing with ends and then I may or may not decide to block it. The picking up of stitches for the neck wasn't very tidy, and the fact that different colours were involved made small flaws more conspicuous: the neck scoop cuts down through several stripes, so whatever colour I chose for the band was going to have to pick up a lot of stitches from other colours.

I added an extra three rounds to the neck band itself, in the hope that the st st curl would conceal the pick-up line, and rather to my surprise, I think this has worked.

You'll have to wait a week or so for a pic, for reasons you will eventually understand.

Beans

I have just ordered Elliot's Bean Book – I bought the 1980 edition from Abebooks because several of the reviews on Amazon said it was better than the modern update. I use Abebooks a lot. I order things on-line a lot. When I got to the last click, security code from credit card already entered, I noticed that I was about to buy a book in Spanish (not about beans, as far as I could grasp) costing more than £23,000.

I removed it from my shopping basket and went ahead with the Elliot order, but it was an unnerving experience, and must have something to do with this plague of pop-ups which often means, as I said recently, that I click on one thing and get something else entirely. There's a job for Archie when he's here next weekend. I had better make a list for him.

And my sister says she has ordered the Rancho Gordo book for me from American Amazon – I should have an Abnormal ECG more often. Then Amazon offered her the Kindle edition for a small additional sum and she took it, since the pages of her own copy are stuck together with tamale sauce. Amazon.co.uk hasn't got on to that wheeze yet. It's a good one.

Yesterday I cleaned out the top cupboard shelf where previous essays into healthy and cheap eating were stored – beans of various sorts (more than I expected) for the most part BBE Nov 2011. I threw them all away – they would have served well enough if we were under siege, but I now know that the fresher dried beans are, the better, so I'll start from scratch.

And I discovered that Jamie Oliver has a rather good pulse chapter in his first book, The Naked Chef.

But despite all that, I went to bed forgetting to put any beans on to soak. So, not today.

Miscellaneous

Alexander and his family are coming over for the rugby, ever hopeful. They'll drop in here around lunchtime if they can get past Rest and Be Thankful. It's been in trouble again.

I am strongly tempted to follow my own lead, and regard the Sundays in Lent as extra-curricular. I've never done that before, but I've never had an Abnormal ECG on Ash Wednesday before, either. One of the two or three things I can remember from a lifetime of sermon-listening is the suggestion that the cheerful acceptance of the penances life imposes on one can be more meritorious than laboriously carrying out the ones one has thought up for oneself. (I got home from church that day and found that the Aga had gone out, which sort of underlined the message.)

So, perhaps a bottle of Weston's Vintage with lunch tomorrow.