No progress on the big question of getting my husband home. The hospital says that re-starting a care package is usually a lot quicker than starting one from scratch. That is at least encouraging.

I made a good start on the leg of the second Arne & Carlos sock. Maybe for Helen’s husband David? She thinks he wouldn’t mind the bright colours despite working in a bank.

And I knit peacefully on, on the Tokyo shawl. Even if I don’t have it to wrap around myself against the February chill, I do have its warm and comforting presence on my lap. Like a knitted cat.

I’ve cut out Lucy Kellaway’s FT page about Shetland, of course. Oddly, it seems to have disappeared from Flipboard where I first read it. To her credit, she tried to get to Fair Isle but was prevented by the weather.

The bit that irritated me comes right at the end, where she is writing about Jamieson & Smith. “…at the back the fleeces were sorted by the same man who has been doing it for 40 years. On the shelves were the same colours I used to knit with, the only difference being that back then they were skeins, now they are disappointingly ordinary-looking balls.”

The man who was sorting the fleeces was (surely) Oliver Henry, a director of the firm. I think she might have mentioned his name.

And the colours are not all the same as they were. J&S, in conjunction with the Shetland Museum, have fairly recently put out a line of “Shetland Heritage” yarn, imitating as closely as possible the bright colours of the Fair Isle pieces in the Museum’s collection. The ballbands are signed with a facsimile of Oliver Henry’s signature. There is also an equivalent fine lace yarn, imitating handspun, wonderful stuff and far superior, in my estimation, to the fragile, single-ply cobweb yarn which used to be the only option for those wedding-ring shawls.