A new approach -- I'm writing an email to myself on my iPad, to be edited and uploaded, perhaps, later.

Well, what? We've had a good weekend in many respects -- the birthday party was fine:

It got harder when everyone (except, thank God, Helen) went away yesterday. Aspects of the last two days have been very hard indeed. I think my current resolution is to stick it out until Xmas and then decide among various unappetizing options.

Knitting -- various

The poor socks have been totally abandoned, but the first sleeve of the half-brioche progresses nicely -- I'm knitting the shoulder strap, and will soon have finished. The Whiskey Barrel DK has held out -- I won't need to order more or cannibalize the Sous Sous. I might need to knit the neck placket and collar in Roast Hatch Chillis but there's no great harm in that. I like how it's looking.

Norah Gaughan's "Knitted Cable Soucebook" turned up this morning.  It’s definitely a keeper, in the sense of being one of the books to take along to one's final lodging. It rekindles the excitement I felt in the -- surely it must have been the Sixties -- when Aran was suddenly everywhere. Now I want to knit a big crunchy Sweater.

There has been an answer from Susan Crawford about the Vintage Shetland project -- the new date is "sometime in the new year" which certainly sounds more realistic. I could wish that she had managed to broadcast a couple of sentences with this information before rather than after the deadline she had herself set, of November 14 for dispatching the files to the printer. It shouldn't have required any more effort than her endless tweets. 

(A well-known British journalist, Susan's sort of age -- one of those people you read every week and feel you almost know – told us last weekend that he has cancer: "...the full English. There is barely a morsel of offal that is not included." It's a hell of a thing.)

The BBC is showing a programme next week -- or perhaps even the start of a series -- about Fair Isle, "Britain's most remote inhabited island". That surprises me a bit -- remote from what? It's not all that far from Lerwick, in the direction of Orkney rather than further out to sea, although the crossing (by water or air) is often impossible. Certainly that will be one to watch.

Is it of interest that the two knitting traditions for which Shetland is most famous, derive from two such remote outposts, Fair Isle and Unst? No one on Unst could suggest to us, when we asked, why it had become so well-known for lace. Presumably the answer is a genius knitter who took things to new heights and whose name has been forgotten -- although that itself is odd in a place with so retentive a memory.

Non-knit

No one in my family has much time for Andy Murray, so I feel I must say here how pleased I am that he beat Djokovic last weekend in London and is therefore established as the World Number One at least through the new year. And we are agog -- at least, I am -- to see what the Queen will do for him in the New Year's Honours. 

I trust everybody knows that Andy Murray was a little boy in the Dunblane Primary School the day in March, 1996, when Thomas Hamilton came in and perpetrated the Dunblane Massacre. It is a bizarre coincidence, given how relatively rare such atrocities are in GB and how totally remarkable it is for a British man to be the World Number One in tennis. I can't think of any conclusion to be drawn. You win some, you lose some.