Again, very little to report.

I had left the loose underarm stitches of Miss Rachel's Yoke in poor condition for picking up, so that took quite a while, before I could embark on the pleasure of actually Kitchener’ing. Then there were more loose ends to do – I had temporarily forgotten the coloured ribbons on the sleeves just above the wrist-ribbing.

One is done, one remains to do. Again, I can only hold out hope of tomorrow.

I had a very jolly day, though. I went shopping with our niece C. It has been a long time since I had the pleasure of wandering through shops in a purposeless fashion with another woman. We bought virtually nothing. It was I who broke our duck (is that the phrase?) by spending not-very-much in T.K. Maxx.

Then we went to lunch at Dishoom in St Andrews Square. Very highly recommended for food and service and ambience. C. had been before, I never had. Both Greek Helen and C’s daughter, another C., turned up to sit with us for a while as we were finishing.

Non-knit

I allowed myself the pleasure of looking again at “Mansfield Park” to see if I could find a couple of sentences of justification for assigning the role of Mrs Grant to Theresa May. But Mrs Grant is introduced in very few words. She was the next mistress of the parsonage, after Mr Norris died. Mrs Norris profoundly disapproved of the amount of butter and eggs that were regularly consumed in Mrs Grant’s kitchen. She is described as a “warm-hearted, unreserved woman” a few pages later. Mary and Henry Crawford were her half-sister and -brother.

Cats

Thank you for your advice. I’ll leave Paradox at liberty tonight. But it was nice having Perdita back with me last night, just the two of us.