I shall talk wildly, to try to keep our minds off tomorrow.

Have I been the victim of a previously-unknown Literary Hacker? Mary Lou, I don’t think I’ve ever read Naomi Mitchison. I’ll be interested to hear how you get on. My only literary references yesterday, surely, were to Rudyard Kipling and R.C. Sherriff. If you have me mixed up with someone else, I’d be glad to know who it is so that I can read her too.

At first I thought Herb Caen was an equally puzzling reference – I’ve never even heard of him – but then I grasped that you were commenting on a comment, Maureen, in which he was indeed mentioned.

And, Loretta, Pat Paulsen – another I don’t think I had heard of. At least you didn’t suggest that I had mentioned him.

Now: the new VK is here, bigger and better, but can they keep it up? Lots of good reading. None of the knitting quite grabs me, except for the “Knit Kit on a String” on page 10. Loop has got it. And my Christmas spreadsheet reveals that neither of James’ and Cathy’s daughters have had a knitted hat for a good many years. I do love stripes.

Shandy, your blocked Uncia is simply beautiful, a lesson in doing-things-properly. I’ve unpinned mine, but haven’t got anywhere beyond that. For me, it doesn’t matter what it looks like draped about my person, since it’s destined for elsewhere.

Shandy, again, you’re quite right that the Carol Feller Craftsy class called Celtic Cables isn’t exactly that – it’s much more about carefully-measuring-for, swatching, planning, knitting a cabled sweater. In the episode I watched last night, she had cast on all the stitches for the cardigan (fronts and back) and knit the ribbing and then went along the long row inserting stitch markers for the pattern repeats before even attempting to knit. Not at all a bad idea.

But for actual Celtic Cables, you want Melissa Leapman’s class on “Infinite Cables”. Trust me – I’m a Craftsy junkie.

I’ve been thinking, restlessly, and without much success, about c=2 pi r. I have never cared for EZ’s paragraph in the Almanac: “Have you begun to see the well-known geometric theory behind what you have been doing? If you are a man, you will have spotted it right away. If you are a woman (sorry, lib) you probably expunged such theories from your memory the minute you finished high school…”

The point is that the circumference of a circle will double whenever the radius does. Much the same is true of a square, but squares don’t involve the mysterious entity “pi” which is the answer you get whenever you divide the circumference of any circle by the length of its radius. It was pretty clever of the ancient Greeks to work that out all those years before calculators were invented. “Pi” is an irrational number which can never be completely expressed.

Anyway, I much prefer the Harlot’s treatment of the subject in “Knitting Rules!”