If I knew how to launch my computer into the Greek alphabet, I would report today’s events in the very words Pheidippides used when he had run back to Athens from the battlefield of Marathon and delivered the news before dropping dead: “Rejoice! We conquer!”

It was a nail-biter. Scotland was brilliant in the first half. Ireland came out like tigers in the second, and took the lead. But we won.

I think I have said before that Mr Laidlaw, sizing up a kick, looks remarkably like Perdita, calculating a leap to a high (forbidden) shelf: look up, look down, look up, look down again, and… And he got them all in, today. The Irishman, the Englishman and the Frenchman who had to do the same thing at other points in the day (and did rather well at it, on the whole), didn’t have quite that Perdita-gleam in their eyes.

Later on, England beat France, in another nail-biter.

I couldn’t interest my sister. She decided to have a nap. “You can tell me about it.”

Not much knitting, and some of that got confused. All is well, but the fourth repeat in the centre of Mrs Hunter’s shawl isn’t quite finished. Still no photograph.

Thank you very much for your help with my enquiry yesterday, about Brooklyn Tweed’s  “Nila” pattern. I suspect you’re right. The slightest-built of my loved ones is Hellie, soon to be the mother of 2017’s great-grandchild. When I first knit a Relax, it came out exactly the size I was carefully  calculating it to be, and it was entirely wrong for me – it needed much more positive ease. I gave it to Hellie, who I think wears it with pleasure. I knit it again for myself, on rather more generously-proportioned lines, and I, too, wear  it with pleasure.

I’ll see what she thinks about “Nila”.

Meanwhile, I have had at least one possibly-productive thought. Namely, that I can employ graduated-skein-packages, if purchased at the EYF, in any number of Baby Surprises for Hellie and Matt’s baby.