Further progress with the first sleeve of Miss Rachel’s Yoke. There are now enough stitches that the circumference takes noticeably longer to get around, but even so, the end of the increases is in sight – and after that I can consider whether I want to knit the sleeves perhaps slightly shorter than the pattern would bid me do.

Tomorrow I am to have my first Italian lesson. Great excitement. I have bought myself a brand new notebook – taccuino? Or quaderno? Federica will have to tell me. I’ll tell you all about it tomorrow, I hope.

And the day’s other event was the arrival of Clara Parkes’ “A Stash of One’s Own”, an actual, physical book, not Kindle. It is the sort of thing I resolve not to buy. I succumbed in this case – it’s not another memory lapse – because it contains an essay by Franklin. It’s a rather sad one, about the death of his mother.

I’ve only read two or three of the essays, so far, but what a revealing subject it is! One cannot write about one’s stash without exposing one’s whole self.

The Good Intentions Club turned up in my in-box this morning, and I like the idea:but I don’t think it would help much here. I’m getting slower and slower. I now try, if I buy yarn at all, to buy it with a specific project in mind and put it away in a project bag with the pattern. It just means I've got a lot of project bags.

Perdita

When I go away for the Christening -- three nights at most -- I think I will ask a friend to come in and feed Perdita. That solution would be possible for January/Palermo, too. She will be sad and anxious in either case. It is hard to judge which would be worse – an empty house, or a cattery. In the latter case she would have more company, including perhaps other cats. But she would be in a cage, and she might not like the other cats. Here, she would be lonelier but free-er. I wish we could talk to each other.

Meg contributes the opening essay to the Parkes book. She says that the Zimmermanns have a whole “cat language” for talking to cats with.