New follower, welcome! It's been a long wait for the 240th.

Here we are, after a fairly successful weekend, the very picture of old age:

Lunch yesterday with the woman from the Royal Collection was a great success. Today's excitement is a hospital appt for physiotherapy for my husband's rheumatic right hand, so I must be brief.

We had something of an adventure on Sunday, when the plan was that my husband and Archie and I would leave first, and Helen would stay behind to close the house and then take Mungo back to school.

All was going well, everything in the car, I pacing about clutching my comforting keys and trying to chivvy my husband out of the bathroom and onto the road. Just as he finally emerged, I noticed that the keys were no longer in my left hand, nor in the pocket of the Dear Old Brown Jacket. Helen, Archie, Mungo and I sought them for half-an-hour, while my husband pottered about. It's a small house, and I hadn't been upstairs.

Finally, Helen said we would have to switch to Plan B. My husband no longer carries a car key, alas, but he did, thank God, have house keys. Helen drove us to Edinburgh in her hire car. Archie shot off to school, and we left my husband with a sandwich. Helen and I then drove back to Kirkmichael with the spare car key, and I drove home. A day before, I wouldn't have thought I was strong enough for all that. Helen blitzed the house and took Mungo back to school as planned.

Helen is a demon blitzer. I think we can assume my keys aren't in the kitchen and probably not in the dining room. I fear we will never find them – or rather, that they'll turn up decades hence and someone will say, “Look! Mummy's keys! Do you remember that day? She must have...”

The loss is mainly a stag's horn fob – is that the word? – Rachel gave me when she was a child. It is – or was -- my daily comfort blanket. I had rather hoped to be buried clutching it.

Virtually no knitting was done there – a stitch or two on the Carol Sunday scarf. Back here, I haven't yet addressed myself to applied i-cord. The Pakokku socks have advanced a bit – the second one is nearing the heel-turning, and may reach it during today's hospital session. There is much that needs to be said about Archie's sweater and that tosh yarn, in response to your kind offers to help me get some. I'll leave all that until tomorrow and face up to Tuesday first.