On we go. I need to talk to someone at the hospital about all sorts of things. Wednesday is the projected day for my husband’s release. How are we to manage the lavatory?

The socks are progressing rather slowly, especially given that they have but two more days. I read to my husband, now,  during my visits, which precludes knitting. We’ve finished “The Vicar of Wrexhill” and are currently engaged on “Greengates” by RC Sherriff – not as good as the “Fortnight in September”, but holding up pretty well. We started “The Hopkins Manuscript”, also Sherriff, which is about the moon crashing into the earth, but decided it wasn’t for us. We read enough to make me distinctly nervous about what the moon is doing at the moment, although I haven’t seen it myself.

The first sleeve of the half-brioche is coming along nicely, although I made a stupid mistake last night – not through watching TV or a movie on my iPad, but from setting the text at Large Print and reading a thriller in the Kindle app. When you pick up the work and find a ball of yarn hanging on to each end, the thing to do is to look at the stitches and see which ball was used for the last row, and choose the other one.

That’s what I failed to do. The result is not nearly as bad as you might think, and frogging brioche is not to be undertaken lightly.

My sister phoned last night. She will pass on your observations about that hat (comments yesterday) to her friend the knitter of it.

The book called “An Island Rooing” by Joan Grigsby has turned up – that’s the one which is said to have brought Anthony Bryer’s parents together. It’s about Shetland, and most engaging. The author isn’t particularly interested in knitting, which makes her observations all the more interesting. Women wear haps, and knit constantly.

And here’s one that really pleased me. Some background –

A few years ago, I knit a gansey for Ketki (Alexander’s wife). “Mrs Laidlaw’s Pattern” from Gladys Thompson’s book; Brown-Reinsel “Knitting Ganseys” for shape; yarn from Frangipani. The result is pretty successful – I think I remember a substantial swatch. It’s as firm as a carapace, but she often wears it to Murrayfield and for climbing munro’s.

It’s in “herring girl pink”. While I was working on it, my sister-in-law stayed with us in Strathardle and expressed some doubt about whether the herring girls – they who followed the fleet from port to port, and gutted the fish; it must have been grim – about whether their sweaters were really coloured. I tried to answer; I can’t remember what evidence I was able to muster. Maybe only what it says on the Frangipani site.

Well, Grigsby: “The herring had come to Lerwick bringing with it the fleets of some three or four nations, and with the fishermen came the fish salesmen, and finally the fishergirls from all over Scotland. The streets that were usually half deserted were now filled with fishermen in brown jersies and huge white thigh boots, while the girls in black oilskin aprons and brightly-coloured jersies to match the handkerchiefs on their heads, arm in arm marched down Commercial Street…”

Interesting, that "brown". Not blue, then?