Greek Helen and her son Mungo and I went to the hospital together yesterday, and had a good visit. I’ll go alone today, and tomorrow not at all, as I am going to North Berwick with a friend. I’ve been past it often, and once went there to buy petrol on a journey south. But I’ve never been to North Berwick, per se. It’s a long way north of Berwick.

I think my four children and my sister feel that care of my husband at home is going to be more than I can cope with, even given maximum care. Helen and I are going on Monday to see the care home which a friend and I sussed out over a year ago – the one with the cat on the staff, although he no longer seems to be there. He was old. And on Tuesday we’re going to talk to the consultant in charge of the ward where my husband is.

I am much torn. He would be devastated. What about the marriage vows?

Knitting

A bit more ribbing-of-the-second-sock while we were at the hospital, and a successful day with the Uncia. I have done row 214 of Chart C, out of 228. I got rid of the six stitches I had mistakenly added, and I think you’d have to stop the bloody horse and get off before you could spot the place. There are people on Ravelry who seem to be able to sit all afternoon knitting Uncia while the Olympics roar in the background. Not me.

I think the travelling stitches and cables of Chart C are more or less discernible at the top of that image.

It occurred to me as I was toiling on yesterday, what an expenditure of time this must have involved for Lucy Hague. Not just designing it, and knitting the prototype, although that is no small thing, but devising the charts – there are 34 different symbols on page 86, where I am at the moment. I couldn’t say, and won’t attempt to, whether there are more and others, on other pages. But I can say that the charts are brilliantly done, and reliable.

She lives somewhere around here, and often helps out in Kathy’s Knits where I was yesterday buying a cable needle to help with all this.

Non-knit

Perdita doesn’t seem to be eating. But we all know that a cat rivals an IRA terrorist when it comes to starving oneself to death to make a point. Does anyone remember an otherwise utterly unremarkable movie with Donald Sutherland or Elliot Gould, which has a wonderful 90-minute sequence in which the hero finds himself out of cat food, and goes to the all night grocery but they don’t have the right brand, so he goes home, and pushes the cat out of the kitchen, and decants the wrong cat food into an empty tin of the right brand and then invites the cat back in for feeding?

I don’t remember that we are shown the cat’s disdainful response.