Greig Laidlaw won't be coming back to the Six Nations tournament, due to an injury to a ligament. I know that is not the sort of news you come here for. The one or two people actually interested, already know. But there is a certain knitting relevance. After our glorious victory over Ireland in the first match of the tournament, it was possible to toy with the dream of winning the Calcutta Cup.

[To do that, you have to (a) be Scotland and (b) beat England.]

I have commemorated every Scotland victory since 2000 in knitting. This year it was going to be a sleeveless Fair Isle vest for Alexander with my rendition of the Cup, and the year, just above the ribbing. But I don't think there's any chance at all without Mr Laidlaw so we don't need to worry about that.

I'm on to the ninth repeat of the centre pattern of Mrs Hunter's shawl -- of fourteen. 

No luck with Gaughan, either. I'm sure you're right, Mary Lou, that the fault isn't Perdita's.

Records show that I bought it late in November. That makes it a strong candidate for having been swept into a totally miscellaneous pile of books and papers to make space to celebrate Christmas. Once I had that thought, I believed I had cracked it, but no such luck. 

Your idea is a good one, Tamar, and one I still cling to -- the books I did find were here in the dining room, where I sit over my computer. The book must have been in here when I was writing enthusiastically to you about it. We ate Christmas dinner here, and later I needed most of the table for the Income Tax. But apart from the knitting books I found yesterday, everything seems to be art. I’m sure you’re right, Chloe, that it’s under something.

I feel confident that I wouldn't have mis-shelved it, but otherwise am completely baffled.

We have had two epic book-searches in recent years. One was for an old edition of Ripley's Believe it or Not. Alexander and James, in youth, annotated the illustrations, often very wittily. I looked for that high and low, both in Kirkmichael where the annotations had been done, and here. I eventually found it in a perfectly appropriate place, in a pile of books under the Glass-Fronted Bookcase. The G-FB is devoted to books by family members or to works of great significance, but has run out of space. I've given Ripley to Alexander.

The other was a book my husband had convinced himself that my sister had taken away to the USofA and never returned to him. He was fairly unpleasant about it. That one had been mis-shelved. I found it, purely by chance, not long ago, when I was looking for something to take him to read in hospital. It must have been there ever since we moved here from Birmingham in (I think) 1994.  I rang my sister up at once. The book is called "Ordeal by Hunger" and well worth a read. Copies are available, but my husband wanted his copy, which had belonged to his father. It's now in the G-FB. He never apologised. He was never very good at that, and he's far too old to learn how now.

Those two books were literally irreplaceable. I can always buy another Gaughan.