My husband continued to seem better when Helen and I visited yesterday, although some diarrhoea continues and he is still in hospital clothes. There has been no report back from the lab. The first samples must have been sent off on Thursday — perhaps this means, at least, that they weren’t marked urgent.

Helen and her boys are going back to Strathardle today, after another early hospital visit. We have been joined by Mungo — I haven’t seen him yet; his plane landed after my early bedtime. He has been at a Joint Association of Classical Teachers summer school in ancient Greek. He says, according to Helen this morning, that it was the first time in his life that no one did a double-take when he told them his name.

Not much to report here. In fact, no knitting at all yesterday. I have a strange belief that it is wrong to knit before 5p.m. I think I need to overcome that, because after 5p.m. I am likely to be sagging. I feel well, these days, but weak — eager to sit down, if a chair is available; unwilling to attempt to walk very far. I think this is normal after/with a pulmonary embolism episode, and the list of possible side-effects of Warfarin is pretty well endless.

The fact that Serena Williams has been here and done this, is enormously cheering.

Anyway: I pursued Wooly Thoughts with great interest, first on Ravelry and then on their own website. It was only when I went to the list of their books that I remembered that I’ve got “Wooly Thoughts”. I haven’t seen it for a long time; it’s not where it ought to be, on the knitting shelves. But that cover is familiar, and I have some memory of the contents.

As for “Knitting Nature”, my feeling is that I have never owned it, but that someone loaned it to me once. I think I thought it was too difficult. I’ve ordered it, this morning.

The remark in Loop-d-Loop which launched me in pursuit of this chimaera is as follows: “[The spiral growth pattern] is based on Fibonacci's law, a numerical series in which each new number is the sum of the prior two. When expressed geometrically, ever-larger spirals spread outward from the centre…”

I observe that “Wooly Thoughts” doesn’t figure in my Library Thing catalogue. I catalogued everything faithfully once, although I haven’t been very good at keeping the list up lately. So it must have been missing for a long time.

Non-knit

I thought of sending Perdita to Strathardle for a few days with her aunt and cousins. I’m sure she’d love it. I feel more and more guilty about keeping her away from outdoors. But my husband thinks it would be confusing for her, and Helen’s youngest son Fergus said, rather sweetly I thought, that he didn’t think she was old enough to go to Kirkmichael “by herself”.