Well, that's Thanksgiving done.

I ran into two instances yesterday of unstinting praise for the NHS. Mrs Hussain in the corner shop told me about the treatment her elderly mother is getting for diabetes and numerous other complicated age-related infirmities – an old Pakistani woman with imperfect English. Then, later, I ran into an old friend on Broughton Street, a man of my children's generation, whose sister had just died of cancer in a Glasgow hospital. He spoke with great feeling of the care they had received, the dying woman and her daughters and himself.

Newspapers are full of stories about the overburdened NHS. Our own experience – and that of my brother-in-law, when he had a stroke in Yorkshire last month – corresponds much more closely with yesterday's conversations.

Knitting

After a nice run on the edging of the Unst Bridal Shawl, my foot slipped yesterday, metaphorically speaking, and there's an unwanted hole at the point where the edging connects to the shawl. I can't think how this is possible without a dropped stitch which is going to unzip, but everything seems secure. I can correct it with a needle at the blocking stage – or would it be better to do it now?

I wound the next skein for Archie's sweater. It seemed a bit different from the three I've used so far (a danger, with madelinetosh) so I am alternating rounds of it with the last few yards of the old skein. And I could wind another one and go on alternating if that seems a good idea.

Non-knit

Thank you for your long, thoughtful comment on Wednesday, Melfina, about different sorts of intelligence and the possible male-female imbalance at the extreme end of geekiness. (And then there's Bill Gates, who seems to have it all, including even common sense. I suspect he had good parents.)

A few decades ago, an explanation often offered for the difference was that boys were tougher and pushier than girls and were thus able to monopolise the classroom computers. Now that every child has its own computer from infancy, that one won't wash any more.

I think I got the weekend meals lined up well enough yesterday to allow an early start tomorrow on my walk with our niece. It will be very welcome. The darkness is oppressive, and I'm always afraid at this point in the year that Someone Up There will forget to throw the switch and it'll just go on getting darker. Added to which, the two saddest anniversaries (of death) in our family calendar, occur within a week of each other just about now.

And then there's Christmas and the Income Tax to look forward to. And today I must renew our resident's parking permit, a job I keep postponing because it means looking up the engine capacity of our car and I have again forgotten how to do that.

Maybe I'd better order that shawl.