My husband was less well yesterday. He had apparently fainted, or nearly fainted, when being helped back to bed after his shower on Saturday (they didn't tell us) and again yesterday. He has been checked over from head to toe. He told me and Helen himself that he had had another chest xray on Saturday, and we were puzzled. Yesterday he was being given oxygen again, and an intravenous antibiotic. There is some infection, lung and urinary, and some fever, the excellent nurse explained. Oxygen saturation is OK.

I think “incarceration” is the word, Shandy. He certainly regards his time in hospital as imprisonment. And “rehab” will do fine as the word for the next stage. There has been some talk of moving him to a ward dedicated to that purpose, or even to a different establishment. I was told to bring in clothes for him today so that he can demonstrate to the Occupational Therapist his ability to put (at least some of) them on. I am afraid he will regard that undertaking as “social work” and be extremely bad tempered.

I am sure the NHS is as eager to get rid of him as he is of it.

Alas, that epistle about the Medes and the Elamites was badly read in Leith yesterday, as it often is, even in the cathedral we used to attend. Maybe I'll have better luck next year.

Knitting

I got on well with Fantoosh yesterday. The garter tab worked fine with an ordinary, un-crocheted cast-on. I have nearly finished the set-up chart which establishes the first two tesserae. That's not the right word: the first two lozenges or tiles. Kate Davies says that the pattern is easily memorised. At first I thought she had overestimated me, but I am beginning to think she might be right. I'm afraid I'm going to have to go on to the next, four-lozenge rank.

But then I must stop and finish at least one of the other things.

I plucked Nancy Bush's “Knitted Lace of Estonia” from the shelf – it was actually in the right place. And found everything to be as she said in the Craftsy lessons. Modern Estonian knitters now sometimes knit the edging on (since the invention of circular needles) but the traditional way is to sew it on – in two long pieces for the big square or rectangular shawls. And to use a single length of yarn to do it.

The pattern of three-for-one and two-for-one as you sew applies mostly at the corners. I hadn't grasped that on Craftsy, where one progresses fairly rapidly from one corner to the next on the small sample shawl. And Bush admits that a bit of fudging may be necessary to ensure that a scallop is properly centred at each corner.

And meanwhile I'm getting on fine with Eunny Jang and lace. We started out with basic left-leaning and right-leaning meshs and have now progressed into slightly more advanced lace patterns, where the YO's are separate from the decreases. But we are still keeping the building blocks in sight. This is relevant both to the Tokyo shawl and to Fantoosh, and really rather interesting.