All is more or less well here, although I fear I’m falling apart. My husband is progressing well, but still very tottery on his pins. Lizzie and her friend have gone, before I got the socks finished off. I thought they were going to take the overnight bus on Sunday – that’s how they got here. But they travelled down by day, wisely. Both had to be at their desks on Monday morning.

Archie is here, but he’s leaving today for Athens. His family are in the very throes of leaving Athens – Helen emailed yesterday that her house was full of men in tight t-shirts with wires in their ears. They – the family, not the men – will go to Mount Pelion and on to Thessaloniki, thence across Europe by car to Edinburgh.

Archie will be away from here, and with them, when he gets his A-Level results. I’m glad not to be in charge that day, although I have every expectation that it will be a happy one.

Comments

Janet, I think you’d enjoy “The Double Helix”. It’s not popular science, in the ordinary sense. He doesn’t try to explain what they did. The science is there, but not much of it, and it is (to me) incomprehensible. You just slide past it. The fun is in the pursuit. The BBC gave us a splendid television transcription of it, years ago, with Jeff Goldblum (of all people) as Watson. I’d love to see that again.

Maria, yes, we had a very happy year in Northampton, 1960-61. We were there to see Kennedy elected. And despite the presence at my ankles of Rachel and Alexander, and the weight, for half of the year, of the unborn James, it was a time of ease and comfort, compared to life in Glasgow. 

My husband was filling in for a friend on sabbatical. While we were there, the directorship of the Smith Art Gallery became unexpectedly vacant and he filled in (having museum experience) for our last couple of months there, and enjoyed himself, and was invited to stay.

It was tempting.

When I went to Camp Stitches on Lake George in 2000, I wanted to go on afterwards to see my sister in Old Saybrook, at the mouth of the CT river. Investigations from here revealed that it was easy enough to move up and down the Hudson, or the CT, but not easy – by public transport, anyway – to cut across. I didn’t want to go back to NYC and out again. So I advertised on the Knitlist and got a lift from a woman who remains a friend, who lived in Lyme, practically on my sister’s doorstep.

We came through Northampton. We went to Webs, of course, which hadn’t been there in my day. And saw the house where we spent that year. I have the very fondest memories of Northampton.