We had a grand Easter, and everyone is now safely returned to their various bases. Rachel and Ed had to do the long drive down the face of England yesterday, but they reached home in the early evening and should be fit for work today. All three of us, here in Drummond Place, spent the afternoon drowsing in our chairs. Today I will restock the larder and then life can begin anew.

Southern Gal, thanks for putting me right about the date of Passover this year After reading your message, I did a bit of Googling and then gave up in despair. I know that Easter is the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox. I had always assumed that the Orthodox rule is the same except that they use the Julian calendar instead of the Gregorian one for determining the date of the equinox. It turns out to be a bit more complicated than that.

And the Jewish calendar is far more complicated than either of the above. Passover is always on the same date, I think, but the calendar itself isn’t attached to the Gregorian one, why should it be? It’s much older, and it floats about a bit, so that Jews ask each other, When is Passover this year? just like Christians enquiring about Easter.

I have a dear Jewish friend, an Oberlin friend, a retired academic, who writes a private daily blog, mostly intended for her family, but she generously includes friends. I enjoy it enormously. She had been asking lately, Who’s coming for Passover? and I had leapt to the conclusion that the date was the same as that of Easter. No – she was thinking well ahead.

It would be an interesting question to pursue, if I had the mental energy. Where did Christians get that Paschal moon? How does it relate to the Jewish calendar? It must be in there somewhere.

Knitting

I hope everybody has by now heard Felicity Ford singing her Buachaille Song. It’s beyond wonderful, and has inspired me to begin to try to learn how to spell the name of Kate Davies’ new yarn. Listening to Felicity sing, I deduce that the pronunciation is more or less Booke-ul.

Ironically, one of the things I wanted to do at the EYF market, and didn’t achieve, was to spend some time fondling Buachaille. I’ve seen it. Kathy at Kathy’s Knits around the corner was a member of the Seven Skeins Club – they got to see it first. She showed me some, and it’s good all right, but I would have liked to wallow in it a bit more and think about projects.

As for actual knitting, since I saw you last, I have finished the bit of the Sous Sous front where I had to do six repeats of a six-row sequence involving two decrease rows, and have now embarked on eight repeats of a four-row sequence involving one decrease row. And when that is done, the front will be damn’ near finished.