You're absolutely right, Mary Lou and Kristie both – a mistake of one's own making, easily if tediously remedied, is a good deal easier to bear than the discovery, late in the game, that the gauge is seriously out. I have not yet knit up all the ravelled yarn – I haven't even re-joined-in the recently-wound skein. But the shoulder decreases are making themselves felt, and I'm speeding forward. I hope to finish the back today.

The other thing that happened on Sunday (after I had ravelled and picked up all those stitches and knit back across seating everybody properly and unsplitting where necessary) is that I discovered that a whole wing, 64 stitches, had been done wrongly on the wrong side, producing single moss stitch instead of the required double.

It does matter, and it's the sort of mistake that becomes more glaring when you finish and regard the whole. It might have been quicker to frog a row and a half, but I was tired of frogging, so I worked across those 64 stitches reversing each one as I came to it and worrying, towards the end, about whether I had misunderstood the situation and was creating the very problem I was trying to avoid.

But no – all is well.

/

Wedding

The medical staff isn't the issue – it's the City of Edinburgh. The hospital has recommended a certain level of home care for my husband, the city has agreed and put it out to tender. Nobody is tendering. Everybody seems to agree that going straight for private care at home won't work – we need the city and the NHS pulling together. We'll probably need extra private care on top of the city package when it comes, but that's a separate problem.

I asked once whether things would move faster if we settled for less care, and the hospital thought not.

So it's possible that the City could ring up, any moment now, and announce that they're ready to roll. Still, one day has passed this week without that happening. Four to go. And meanwhile, of course, my husband is excellently accommodated, in his own ground-floor room with a garden view and en suite facilities and with cheerful and highly competent 24-hour care. It would cost a bomb, in the private sector.

I need new shoes, for comfort as much as appearance. My toes are coming through. And I must have my hair done. It's to be an informal, come-as-you-please wedding so there's nothing else to worry about. Except whether I'll get there.