Still very little knitting. Is this a symptom of a deeper malaise? James’ wife Cathy asked me early last week for the Latin for “Help! I’m dissolving!” (Something to do with something she’s writing.) I offered “Subvenite! Liquor!” and have wondered since if I should adopt it as my own motto. I discovered in the course of looking things up that Ovid says somewhere of somebody that she “…liquitur in lacrimas” (= ”…dissolves into tears”). It’s always slightly disconcerting to find a modern phrase in the Bible or Shakespeare or, in this case, Ovid.

I’m sorry for my absence. My husband has another chest infection. Perhaps more accurately, his chronic condition has flared up again. Our GP suspected trouble when he was here on Wednesday, and prescribed a course of antibiotics now half-finished. But my husband continued to weaken and this morning his diabetic nurse told me to phone the emergency NHS weekend number.

A nice doctor came fairly promptly and wanted to send my husband off to hospital yet again. We demurred, and he acquiesced, too polite to ask why we had called him out if we weren’t going to take his advice. My husband has been in bed all day, too weak to totter about, disagreeable but clear-headed. I don’t think he lost ground during the day. Tomorrow we’ll call our own doctor.

Knitting

I have got as far as to hold the shoulders of the Sous Sous up against each other, and I even tried slipping a needle through some of the bound-off stitches on the back shoulder, to see if I could by that means, graft them to the live stitches of the front. It soon became obvious that the answer was, no. And just at the right moment, I read your heartening comment, Mary Lou, to the effect that a grafted shoulder might not be strong enough anyway to hold up this fairly hefty item.

So the next thing is to do the binding-off and start seaming. But all that has actually happened is a few more rows of half-brioche.