I got to the chemist, and sure enough! a service is available to obtain and sort one's pills and dole them out in day-by-day capsules. Even deliver them, weekly. One's GP has to put one on the Silly Old Fools track – fair enough, since the process must be fairly labour-intensive. I don't think we'll have any difficulty about that. Tomorrow is my husband's 89^th birthday.

Can one trust them to get it all right, after all these years of anxiously supervising everything oneself? Try it and you may, I say, as someone once famously remarked.

Knitlass, don't worry about our “getting out”. (In fact, the weather improved markedly yesterday, after a poor start.) We are great believers in the merits of it. We try to go out together for a half-hour walk before lunch (which consumes any disposable time I might have had in the morning). There are obvious benefits for my husband's blood sugars, and he thinks it's good for what's left of his muscle tone. It's a bit scary. Getting up and down to/from a curbstone is a perilous occupation for him these days.

This morning I must get up to the top of the hill to buy the birthday present. I know what I want, and where it's to be had, and could perfectly well have bought it last week when I was up there pursuing prescriptions. And get back in time to get lunch ready and then go for the walk – you get the idea.

Mary Lou took this picture after our happy lunch last week. She called it “relaxed”, because of the sweater I'm wearing, but I think you can discern in my face a certain anxiety about getting back down the hill to Drummond Place and resuming the responsibilities adumbrated above. That's the electric blue jacket I bought for my trip to Shetland last year.

While on the subject of old age and infirmity, the news from CT is much-as-before. My sister is not entirely happy with the speech therapy Roger is getting (after his small stroke in Yorkshire, while they were here for the wedding). They have paid the deposit to get on the waiting list for the retirement community in DC they had already sussed out (refundable if they don't go, applicable to the capital payment if they do). I am very glad the NHS performed well, the day/night of the crisis. My sister can be a severe critic, and she seemed satisfied. We have always found them brilliant in crises.

Knitting

Thank you for the advice about the length of tip I need for my forthcoming set of small-gauge Hiya Hiya bamboo circulars. Nothing was done about that yesterday, but 5” it will be. Nothing is worse – well, in fact, a lot is – than clutching a too-short tip.

Actual domestic knitting went well yesterday. I think the system I have adopted may carry me through. Two scallops of the edging of the Unst Bridal Shawl are enough to maintain forward progress, if steadily pursued. And that's about as much as I can do before late-evening-tiredness and the dangers involved in repeating an easy pattern, make it hazardous to go on. And at that point, the round-and-roundness of Archie's sweater – I know; I should have stopped; he needs to try it on – are the perfect retreat.

Madeline Tosh makes everybody's knitting look like gold. The fabric is marvellous.

The other knitting-related thing I did yesterday was to spend a little more time (before the walk supervened) in sorting out my knitting books with the thought of relegating some of them to the cellar (perfectly warm and dry) and thus creating more shelf-space and reducing the piles on the floor.

It's grand to spend time with the books. And it's not as if I were going to consign the B-list to a bonfire. But the process was still about as difficult as culling kittens. Single-designer books are going downstairs – “The Best of Annabel Fox” – except for Kaffe and Kate Davies and Starmore (although I've never knit anything of hers) and EZ and Meg who are in a category of their own. That still leaves a lot of difficult decisions.