The neighbours two doors down are having a very noisy party in their garden. It has been going on for some hours now. My only emotion is delight that I don’t have to attend – there is something, after all, to be said for old age. Gone, that feeling that everyone else somewhere else is having a better time than oneself. I’m glad, though, that Perdita’s and my bedroom is at the other end of our house.

Isabella, thank you very much indeed for your kitten-advice. That had been more or less my plan [comment yesterday], but I had been worried about the night. Perdita and I have slept together almost every night since she came here. It would be nice to hope that all three of us might pile into bed together soon, but I can’t take it for granted. I’ll have to shut Hermione in the kitchen (where it’s warm) at first, and put out a second litter tray for Perdita in case she is caught short in the night as I often am.

Yesterday I wound Carol Sunday’s beautiful yarn and cast on the Soutache. I have never actually done brioche stitch before. It’s not entirely easy. Marchant says in her book “Knitting Brioche” that the fisherman’s-rib system, k1, k1b, ad infinitum, produces the same fabric. She says that she finds brioche knitting faster and more even. Not me.

But can you do two colours with fisherman’s rib? Not to mention all those interesting cables and swirls? It might be worth attempting a swatch.

In any case, the Soutache is moving forward. It begins with 5” of plain-vanilla two-colour brioche, before the swirling starts. That’s where I still am. There are mistakes – and correcting a mistake in brioche knitting is next thing to impossible. In the night, I asked myself, what would Andrea do? and got up this morning resolved to frog and start again.

But looking at it in the cold light of day, I decided that I could live with the mistakes, and forged ahead.

Brioche stitch, as I am sure you know, is a succession of k1s or p1s with, in between, a slipped stitch crossed with a yarn over. On the next pass, the slipped stitch and yo are knit, or purled, together as one. That’s easy.

I think the essence of my difficulty is that the motion of the working yarn, as you establish the cross over the slipped stitch, is different, depending on whether the following stitch is to be knit or purled. We all know this in real life, but someone or other in brioche stitch it’s harder to keep straight.

I can only forge ahead and hope it will be second nature by the time I have done 5 inches.