Another good day – six rows of Uncia. I should pass row 300 today – that will leave only 100 to go. But it doesn’t mean that I’m 75% of the way home, because we started with five stitches and the first 150 rows were easy-peasy, compared with what followed.

I should reach the heel flap of the first Mosaic sock today.

And there are only three more edging points to be done on the Hansel Hap. When my husband finally gets his Package of Care, there should still be a couple of days while everything else is put in place – visits from the District Nurse to inject insulin, delivery of weekly pills from the chemist – during which I hope I could hastily finish it off and block it.

Victoria and Albert are married – I am sorry to have left you in suspense on that one.

I’ve been thinking, without much result, about how to knit a wrap-around sweater in the round. (Janine Bajus, “The Joy of Color”, p 96 ff) You cast on three times the body width (plus ease or whatever). With a steek. After the ribbing, you start decreasing on the left-hand edge of the steek – the far edge, as you knit around.

Ah, but wait a moment! What’s happening meanwhile to the part which will be underneath when eventually the sweater is wrapped around? Can one steek accommodate two diagonal lines which cross each other?  And if not, then what? Writing this down helps the thinking process --  cast on with two steeks?  But surely there will be only one cut? I'll go on thinking.

The knitter – not Janine, but one of her students, Karen Hust – says that she took it step by step, and kept notes of what she did “in case I wanted to recreate this shape”. Otherwise, no hints.

First draw a schematic, perhaps.

Reading

I’m nearly finished with Tana French’s “In the Woods”, very much enjoyed. But I think I’ve caught her out in a mistake – always enormously gratifying to the pedant.

On page 381 (it’s a big book) of the Kindle edition, the hero is spending a night in the woods, for insufficient reasons, and, among other things, “bats shrilled across the dig”.

We have bats in Strathardle, more than ever this year. In the gloaming, that late, long failing of the light on a Scottish summer evening, they fly and swoop. We stand on the back doorstep and watch them. They are utterly, uncannily silent. Maybe Irish bats are different, but I doubt it.

Once my sister-in-law, who was a bit given to contrariety, suggested that we had only one bat which paused behind the garage for a bit and then came swooping back. This year there were so many that even she could not have doubted.