Well, the good news is that I have an appt with cardiology. The bad news is, that it's not until the end of April. But – good news, again – at least it's not in Easter week; we won't have to leap up from the roast lamb on Loch Fyne and hurry back to Edinburgh.

Three more rows will finish off the patterned part of the centre of the Unst Bridal Shawl. I made the mistake last night of trying to knit while we watched W1A which we had recorded earlier in the week. It may not be quite as good as Twenty Twelve, but it's good, and that's not a knitting mistake I will make again. I did fine, for a while, but then... And the resultant tinking included several k3tog's. Yet another skill I have never mastered.

It looks more or less all right. No stitches have escaped. But there are too many minor flaws (and one major one) in this thing. On Unst, they used to knit through the winter with no light, and you can see the results in museums.

Reading

Helen introduced me to Goodreads (an app) while she was here. I have loaded it and will try to keep up. She says it's useful for gleaning reading ideas from one's “friends”. 

I have recommended to her the BBC radio programme “A Good Read”. It's like a mini book club – the presenter and her two gjuests-of-the-week each propose a book. All three read all three books, and discuss on air., including "I thought it was rubbish" and "I couldn't get through it".  I always enjoy the programme when it comes my way. On Friday, waiting for my husband to come to bed, I heard one, and yesterday morning I started off by ordering “Alys, Always” [never heard of it] and “Get Shorty” [I remember the movie fondly, and I approve of Elmore Leonard] for my Kindle, and emailed Archie to ask whether he had read “Catcher in the Rye”.

He hadn't, so Amazon is sending it to him. Three out of three. Archie is a voracious reader, largely of horror and the occult. It was he who introduced me to H.P. Lovecraft. I keep trying to steer him back towards the real world. My last attempt was Nigel Molesworth.

I'm well into “Alys, Always” and enjoying it enormously. It's its author's debut, two years ago. I must have missed the reviews. She's got another coming out this summer. I'll watch out closely for that one.

And speaking of the Kindle, and turning to you guys as ever for technical support: when Archie was here a month or so ago, he updated the operating system on my iPad and everything has changed. But I didn't discover until yesterday, when I tried to get rid of “Perfect” by Rachel Joyce (not really recommended – I got it because the New Yorker liked it), that swiping a finger across a book's entry in the library list in my Kindle app no longer consigns that title to the cloud. Nor does any other action I have been able to devise. Suggestions gratefully received. I can still access the titles in the cloud, and download them to the iPad. But I can't figure out how to get anything up there.

Sunday presses.