So -- tomorrow we'll know about Brexit. Knitlass, I am a hollow reed, changing my mind every half hour. Archie's vote will have been cast your way, but I think I might be a bit happier tomorrow morning if it has gone the other way. It will also be interesting to see how Mr Trump fares here -- he's coming to open his improvements at Turnberry Golf Course, one of the great ones. ("Here" = Scotland, not Drummond Place.)

I wrote last night, meaning to polish and post this morning, as I often do. But this morning got away from me, as it often does, and already last night’s paragraphs begin to sound stale. Amended, they follow.

My husband is perhaps a bit stronger. At least, he has been walking a few steps with the zimmer frame, which he hasn’t done for a while. He still seems sleepy and dim. A dr will call on Tuesday, when the course of fairly fierce antibiotics prescribed for him last Sunday is finished.

An old friend came to call yesterday afternoon; my husband was glad to see him and brightened considerably. The friend was, we all thought, a confirmed bachelor until, in his early forties, he met his match: a woman of the same age, as stubborn as himself, or so he tells it. A Dutch woman, not greatly enamoured of Scotland. They didn’t marry, but had fifteen happy years and were planning old age together in Belgium, as a compromise: until she died, earlier this year, of a rare form of lung cancer. She was a life-long non-smoker, robustly healthy. Jimmy is devastated. The house in Amsterdam has been sold. He has come back here and doesn’t know what to do with the rest of his life. But he feels he will have to give a good account of it, when he and Lieke next meet.

Knitting

I have reached round 33, of 50, on the borders of the Hansel hap. The rounds are getting longer all right. I bought two balls of each of the four contrast colours, guided by the yardages given on the pattern. I have now finished with Contrast Four, and have plenty of yarn left from its first ball. No great harm done – I will put it away with the colours I bought that happy day in Jamieson & Smith, and wait for Scotland to win the Calcutta Cup so that I can knit Alexander his Fair Isle vest.

Contrast Three, on the other hand, may or may not require a few yards from the second ball. I’ll know soon. Contrasts One and Two certainly will. It’s all rather exciting.

I have become a patron of Knitty – I can’t now remember exactly how it was done. I hope I have given them access to my credit card and don’t have to take any further action myself this week. My reward has been, recently, to hear their report on TNNA  (gradient yarns are in) and now to have an advance look at the new issue. It’s nice.

The thing about Knitty, though, is not so much advance looks as the fact that, there it is, and one goes back, in my case, nowadays, more often than I go back to real magazine, often late in the evening.  In the old days I used to read VK in the bath until I knew each issue by heart, but times have changed.

I feel I’ve knit from Knitty as much (or more) as from any other publication: Kate Gilbert’s Clapotis Shawl, that one everyone was doing a few years ago, with long ladders made by dropping stitches; the Dunfallandy blankie; the Cameo flower shawl – I can’t really count that yet, but at least I printed it out and bought the yarn for it at EYF.

And I feel pretty sure that there’s at least one other Knitty FO out there somewhere.