Another good day, spent edging forwards. Three stitches remain to be decreased on each side of the Sous Sous neck – 12 rows. A good deal of knitting time yesterday was devoted to winding a skein. That always feels like progress.

It looks as if I have far more Roast Hatch Chillies than I do Whiskey Barrel, but I am not going to revise my original plan of having the latter be the dominant colour in my half-brioche sweater. If I have to order a third lot of it, at least I’ll do so when things are in a state when the amount-needed can be estimated fairly accurately.

Knitlass, I’m sure you’re right, about the pronunciation of the “ch” in Buachaille. (And, hey! I think I’ve spelled it right even before looking it up!) I went back to the recording of the native speaker whose version KD provided early on – on her lips, it sounds like three syllables. So “Booke-ul” won’t really do. And we don’t really need to say it out loud anyway, since it seems to be sold only from KD’s website and at markets.

On the other hand, “Booke-ul” gives us a mental handle for thinking about it!

Easter

Sorry – the subject has wedged itself obsessively in my mind, just for the moment. In the very early church, the date of Easter was determined by the simple and effective means of asking your Jewish neighbour when Passover was this year. The Council of Nicaea in the fourth century put paid to that, and launched us on the path towards the present confusion.

Wikipedia has a useful chart showing the dates of the Spring Full Moon, the Astronomical Easter, the Gregorian Easter, the Julian Easter, and Passover, for every year from 2001 to 2021. Of those 21 years, 2016 is the only one with a big difference between the Gregorian Easter (that’s what we just had) and Passover. I don’t know why, probably because I wasn’t paying attention. Wikipedia explains what the “astronomical Easter” is; I’ve forgotten already.

There are serious moves afoot to fix Easter on the second Sunday of April. If they ever do that, it will simply create another column in the Wikipedia chart – we’ll have the Old Easter and the Official Easter. It is the spring holiday in England, nothing to do with religion at all, bunny rabbits and chocolate and bank holidays. I can see why they would like to pin it down a bit.

That is an interesting observation, Mary Lou, that Ramadan is linked to the moon as well. I’m pretty sure that it’s a complete lunar month, from the dark of one moon, all through the phases of the next one, ending with the first sighting of the first sliver of the one after that.

It moves gradually backward through the (Gregorian) calendar year and has recently been particularly difficult for Scottish Muslims, occurring at the summer solstice when there isn’t much darkness at all.