All well. No news from social services yesterday, about the package of care which will bring my husband home. Today I will tell him about my hopes of going to London. And today I must get started on shoe-polishing and clothes-selecting. I don’t move from base very often these days, and as a consequence I get tremendously agitated about the slightest change.

The credit card seems to work! I wanted to start with something worthy, and have ordered Fuschia Dunlop’s “Land of Fish and Rice”. I doubt if I will cook anything from it – she’s more on Alexander’s level – but it will be a serious and worthy addition to my shelves. And Amazon seems to have accepted the payment.

So I went into PayPal and put the new number there, and ordered a Knitzi. And Knitzi has acknowledged the order!

And here’s the Hansel Hap:

I’m terribly pleased with it. The next time we get a baby, surely this is what to do again?

Perdita sat under the dining room table and watched while I placed the first half dozen pins or so, and then she pounced. She loves those brightly-headed pins, pulls them out and scampers about the room. I am of course terrified that she will swallow one and die in agony. The scene didn’t end well.

I think it needs another day on the floor before it gets packaged up. Tomorrow is fraught – hair to be done, appt with social worker about carer-support. I’m sorry to have to wait until Monday – it’ll be Tuesday, in fact. But I think that’s what will happen. Oh! for the days when we had a post office around the corner.

Other knitting went well yesterday. Six more rows of Uncia. One-over-one crosses: you’re right, Shandy, no prob. Knit the second stitch on the left-hand needle, then the first one, then slip both off. The only slight difficulty is when the first stitch on the left-hand needle has to cross to the left, so that one is forced to begin by knitting the second stitch tbl. I decided that that didn’t matter.

So (relatively) close to the end. I’m sure it’s important not to let the Uncia sag.

It feels like a long time since we’ve had a serious FO around here. In the Queen-Victoria stage of the evening, I re-addressed myself to the half-brioche sweater and got back in the saddle as far as the four-row stitch pattern is concerned. Now I must think again seriously about the schematic. I would also like to start the plain-vanilla v-necked long-sleeved sweater for my husband, for which my sister brought me the (discontinued) madtosh yarn on her last visit. Details are buried somewhere within the blog.

The Queen is pregnant, frightened of pain and of death. The death in childbirth of someone called Princess Charlotte apparently smoothed her path to the throne. And as for pain: I think neighbour Simpson made the Queen an early beneficiary of pain-relief in labour – for the birth of one of her many children, later on. On the other hand, my daughter Rachel eschewed all pain relief in labour, four times. It can be done – and must so very often have happened.

My husband and I are reading Mrs Trollope’s “The Vicar of Wrexhill”. (It was our bedtime reading, earlier, and I have resumed reading it to him in the hospital.) I hope it is a text in feminist literature courses, in that case for the control husbands automatically had over wives’ money. What with safe childbirth, and control of one’s cash, things have improved a good deal in not-all-that-many years. Bugger the glass ceiling.