I'm grateful for all of your messages, and sorry to have left you in the lurch yesterday. The main difficulty was an Unexplained Connectivity Problem first thing in the morning.

Things are going quite well. I am finding it difficult to keep nimble and keep thinking, but otherwise the burdens are not unmanageable. I need to make more lists and to keep them by the calendar. My husband is pleased with his new cat:

The carers so far are young and pretty and kind and helpful. I had expected grumpy, middle-aged, underpaid.

Alexander and Ketki were here on Friday for the homecoming itself. James and Cathy came up from London for the weekend – Cathy is still here. Everything is being done to spare me effort.

Knitting:

Not much, but I have finished the crunch bit of the fourth Dunfallandy square. It went very smoothly, with the help of the designer's tutorial (link on the Dunfallandy blanket Ravelry page).  I should have looked at it sooner. 

I have been all right from the beginning with the first horizontal cables, when cables already established make a sharp turn and set off on the horizontal. But I was making a bit of a mess of the next ones, which run parallel a couple of rows later. They spring into existence out of nothing.

The difficulty turned out to stem from the instruction to knit 2 and then insert a crochet hook into “the first of the two sts just worked” and pull the working yarn through. Repeat with the second stitch (which will be the one most recently worked, at the tip of the right-hand needle). Put the two new stitches on a cable needle, rotate it, and knit them.

Not entirely easy. My basic mistake was to insert the crochet hook through the loops on the right hand needle. She doesn't mean that. She means “the sts just worked”, exactly as she says – the ones which have just become the-row-below. If you remember that, and keep the crochet hook and the cable needle in front of the work, and rotate it counter-clockwise when the moment comes, everything goes remarkably smoothly and the result looks good.

I'm not going to re-knit the first three squares, although the idea crosses my mind. The forthcoming triangles aren't affected – they're finished when you've done the first horizontal cable.

Rugby didn't go very well for the northern hemisphere yesterday. Scotland at least are still in with a chance. England are out of the World Cup.