Not so good a day, in one sense. Brilliant in another.

I got home from the hospital rather late in the afternoon, ate mussels – which may not have been wise – and felt pretty feeble for the rest of the day. But I got my five rows of Uncia done. It was a very good idea, to set that low hurdle and keep myself jumping over it every day. I’ve done row 300.

The brilliant bit was earlier, when I met Maureen from Fargo at Kathy’s Knits and went on around the corner with her for coffee. Goodness, how wonderful it is to see and talk to a knitter. Much as I treasure my daily companionship with all of you, flesh-and-blood takes some beating.

Maureen is an utterly wonderful Fair Isle knitter, and was fresh from Shetland Wool Week. (She hasn’t been to Unst, however, and therefore hasn’t seen Muckle Flugga. I told her not to miss that experience, next time.)

High points: she had the Shetland Wool Week annual, and while I was browsing it, she pulled out a sock. It was one of those Opal self-striping numbers, and it had me completely fooled. Maureen said that it is all right to go on buying sock wool even if you already have more than could be knit in a lifetime. I'll remember that.

AND when I finished browsing the annual, and she put the socks away, they went into a Knitzi. Wow! I want one of those. I wish I had some knitters on my Christmas list. I’ve done some googling – it looks as if I’ll have to order mine from source, in the USofA. That’s all right. I'll do it.

We talked about the design problem I mentioned yesterday, and Maureen went straight for the solution which several of you suggested yesterday – namely, a big v-neck. My problem had been trying to place the beginning of the steek on the right hip, where the cross-over must end and be in some way fastened. But, no! Cast on three body-widths of stitches. Put the steek in the middle. Decrease on both sides of the steek. Get down to two body-widths of stitches at the point where you want the two fronts to cross, but keep on decreasing towards the shoulders, to make a genuine deep v-neck.

We’ve got something here. It demands a pretty close knowledge of one's gauge.

Non-knit

Thank you for your thoughts about bats, and how some people, especially young ones, can hear them. I remembered a sentence from Brideshead, in the scene where Charles first meets Julia: “As I took the cigarette from my lips and put it in hers [she was driving] I caught a thin bat’s squeak of sexuality, inaudible to any but me.”

Mary Lou: your comment made me think how “Victoria” must have, faintly, far behind, the sort of appeal Greek tragedy would have had for its original audiences. You know what’s going to happen. But exactly how is the author going to get there?