Still no Parking Permit. Helen has taken the car away to a place where you don’t have to pay to park. A housing estate somewhere. Will it survive? 

Your advice is excellent, Chloe: but there is no paperwork. If they sent me a reminder, I never saw it. I renewed (and paid) on-line on the 17^th. I cannot find a telephone number on the website. I sent an email expressing agitation and distress yesterday, and another today. I won’t tell them I’m going away.

Today I had an Italian lesson, and a hair cut. The new hairdresser is about ½ mile away (my former one has retired) and I walked both ways. It nearly did for me. I think I am weaker than I was in January in Palermo.

Tomorrow I must resume list-making – starting with paying the three parking tickets I have accumulated.

The skirt arrived from Toast, but not the yarn from Jamieson & Smith. Lerwick is a long way away, even from Edinburgh. So this evening I resumed knitting Archie’s socks – not a bad idea, anyway, to get a renewed grip on what will be my cruise knitting. (With a 60^th birthday pair for Rachel to follow, if I finish Archie’s.)

The Green Bean Relish is quiet. I am far enough along in fermentation not to worry about that, although I am looking forward to making another fermented gardiniera. That one is a fairly lively ferment, but involves a lot of preliminary chopping.

The Majestic Line (who operate the cruise) rang up this afternoon to see how I was getting on. That was thoughtful of them. There was an article about them in the Sunday Times day before yesterday – not as good as the article in the Financial Times which started me off on this two or three years ago, but very laudatory.

The journalist said that her fellow-passengers ranged in age from 30 to 70, and went for two-hour walks in the rain. That would make me 15 years older than the oldest, and quite unable to keep up. I am hoping for gentler walks for old ladies – if only from the pier to the internet café. The FT article mentioned a retired High Court judge in her nineties.