Somewhat more knitting, today. I have finished both short-row shoulders on the front of the Polliwog. That brings me to a sewn bind-off which I can’t, for the moment, do without peering at the page for each of the four steps. I’ve been through the sequence twice, with success, but will have to start early tomorrow to finish it, or at least get the hang of it, before the day closes in.

Andrew and Andrea have a sequence called “Knitters of the World” – as it might be, you or me. In one episode they had an Australian man, a fairly recent convert to knitting, who said something like “The Book of Knitting has no last page”.

I thought that was rather good. The German short-row technique that Mary Lou uses here is new to me, as is this sewn bind-off. There is always something new to learn.

I am very grateful for all your replies about yarn bowls. I am, again, strongly tempted. When I was in Athens with our niece two years ago – just before my husband’s fall that precipitated us into our present state of decline – I bought an olive-wood bowl, about 6” across.

I asked myself in the shop, as my husband would have done had he been there, what am I going to do with it? The answer was, keep it in front of me on the coffee table to hold stitch markers and safety pins and my little scissors and point protectors (but Perdita makes off with those, having gone through the contents of the bowl with gentle paw).

There are also a few sea-smoothed fragments of (possibly ancient) pottery which we picked up that week in the harbour at Corinth, where St Paul landed before preaching to the Corinthians. That bowl is a constant pleasure.

But that doesn’t mean that I couldn’t have a yarn bowl as well.

New topic: I got a postcard today from Lisa, from Ravenna: an astonishing and delightful surprise. I look forward to showing it to Helen -- Ravenna is Mecca for mosaicists. St Apollanaris' sheep look wonderfully like the yoke of a Kate Davies sweater.