Yesterday's excitement was lunch with one of you in a sushi restaurant on Broughton Street – we had a grand time, and scarcely talked about knitting at all. We'll get around to that next time, which may not be for awhile, alas, as she lives several thousand miles away from Broughton Street. She brought me three skeins of Jared's Shelter yarn in a wonderful dark red. I follow his designs with attention, and have bought and knit one of them (for Thomas the Elder, this month's bridegroom, and then there was enough yarn left over to allow me to scale the pattern down and knit it again for Thomas the Younger, this month's birthday boy). But I've never had the yarn in my hands before. There's enough for a serious scarf.

She also gave me “Coats and Caps for Children”, a hand-out included with the Centenary Stitches exhibition in Lincoln. I'd like to see that one. The patterns have been taken from an old Paton's publication and updated by Judith Brodnicki.

The exhibition is connected with the opening of a film called “Tell Them Of Us”, about the Great War losses of a particular Lincolnshire family. Many knitters worked to construct authentic period sweaters and shawls for the film, including my lunch companion of yesterday, and a book called “Centenary Stitches” with 70 of the patterns they used, updated, is about to be released upon the world. I've just pre-ordered mine.

“Tell Them of Us”, the title of the film, derives from a famous WWI epitaph written by John Maxwell Edmonds deriving, of course, from the even more famous epitaph to the dead of Thermopylae by Simonides. It's one of the few things I can still quote in the original Greek – I'd write it out for you if I were more adroit with this computer. The point of the battle was to hold the Persians back for a bit while the main Greek forces got ready to beat them at Marathon, further south.

Tell the Lacedaemonians, passer-by,

That we lie here, doing what they told us to do.

The site of the battle must be somewhere proximate to the road from Thessaloniki to Pelion which we drove along one happy day with Greek Helen and her family. There is only one way south to Athens – that was the point of the battle.

And while we're on this elegaic WWI theme, appropriate to 11/11, there was an interesting article in the FT last weekend about the death of Lord Kitchener. (Nothing was said about knitting.) I knew he had died on a voyage to Russia, and had always assumed that death struck somewhere off the coasts of northern Europe, as it did for so many British merchant seamen taking supplies to Russia in WWII. And not being terribly hospitably received when they got there (if they did)– Churchill is interesting on this subject in his account of WWII.

But,no, in Kitchener's case. His ship had just left Scapa Flow and was still within sight of the west coast of Orkney. It doesn't make much difference. Everybody is just as dead. But it's interesting to know.

As for actual knitting, it progressed well yesterday. Archie's sweater is difficult to photograph because it begins abruptly, and therefore curls – an edging will be added later. The rows are very long and slow now – and I am a clumsy knitter. But yesterday I counted the fronts and the back – and they came out right! The fronts are exactly half the back, as they should be, allowing for the fact that one of the packets will be suppressed when everything is joined into a tube.