I am enormously encouraged by your Sous Sous experience, Pascoag Girl (comment yesterday). We’ll both get there in the end, I am sure. And, for the moment, I feel I have your permission to knit on, on the half-brioche sweater. I am within about four rows of finishing the tedious initial ribbing on the front.

I am also enormously encouraged by having been able to write the preceding paragraph. I was sitting here just now, blamelessly arranging my thoughts, when the computer went ding, ding, ding and thereafter everything I typed was in the Greek alphabet. Even when I closed Word and went back to my emails, everything I said was in Greek. If I had tried to do it, it would have taken me at least an agonized half-hour. I solved the problem (thank goodness) by restarting the computer. I want to try to find out what combination of keys I must have hit to produce so remarkable an effect, but meanwhile I am profoundly grateful to be back with Times Roman.

I think I felt a bit as King Midas must have, when everything he touched turned to gold. It’s no use invoking Help and typing in “alphabet” if you type in “alphabet” in Greek and Help says it doesn’t know what you mean.

My husband has a genius for creating unexpected computer problems by just looking at the screen, but even he has never achieved that one.

Genetics: Rachel says that Thomas and Lizzie, the eldest and youngest of her four children, have her brown eyes -- Thomas, of course, being the father of the wonderful Juliet. My own eyes are a sort of washed-out blue, and my husband has always claimed that his are hazel. He was an orphan when I met him. We have a drawing of his father which makes it pretty clear that his eyes were light in colour, but I don’t know about his mother. And you may well be right, Knitlass, that Juliet’s eyes are kitten-blue at the moment, rather than brown.