I’m sure I’ve told you before that Rachel was born early in the day, 60 years ago, and I was taken down to a ward, and someone came around selling newspapers, and I bought the Express. I still have it. The horoscope for my new daughter started off: “Not a day you will remember…”

Fully worthy of the Delphic Oracle.

And rather odd, given that 1 in 365 of the Express’ thousands of readers would have been celebrating a birthday that day.

On the whole, today has been more minus than plus, here. The mother of my beloved cleaning woman died suddenly and unexpectedly, in Rumania. Daniella is going home tomorrow and doesn’t know when she’ll be back. I depend on her for almost everything. Can I get to the Hebrides without her?

The parking permit wasn’t in today’s post. If it doesn’t turn up on Monday, I’ll try to phone them.

Knitting has advanced slightly. I’ve reached the central three rows of the current Fair Isle band – the division for the armholes will take place on the second or third of them. Tomorrow, or perhaps even this evening.

One of the reasons I have been advancing so slowly is that I have been watching something called Staircase on Netflix. I thought until today that it was an utterly brilliant mock documentary, about a murder trial. The credits at the end give Jean-Xavier Lestrade as “writer and director” which seemed to indicate that it was fiction. But today I google’d – and it’s not. It gives one furiously to think about Pilate’s question: What is truth?

Perdita is fine.