I’ve been feeling a bit flat today. Missing the structure of Lent, perhaps. The weather has been good, but not great. Apple blossom in Drummond Place, as promised, but you may have to peer a bit:

I’ve started knitting a swatch for Thomas’ Calcutta Cup scarf, and it’s a good thing I did. All is not straightforward.

The pattern starts off, as many a cable before it, with a few rows of k2, p2. There’s a slightly unexpected p1 at the beginning and end of the row, but hey! ho! that’s what designers throw in.

Then one gets to the first cable row – and it begins by slipping four stitches onto a cable needle. That means, obviously, that the k2, p2 ribs are broken. OK, I can handle that. If one follows the row carefully across, it comes out right.

The following row, however, says to knit the knits and purl the purls. One has heard that before. The yarn is a dark blue, for Scotland. It’s not entirely easy for aged eyes to see what’s what, especially where the stitches are tortured into cables. But I can assure you that simply knitting that next row the way it was knitted before, won’t work. I’ll return to the problem tomorrow, with fresher eyes, and glad (for once) that this is only a swatch.

Isn’t knitting fun!!

Reading

I finished “Cousin Henry”. It resembles “Lady Anna” in that there is a central and not uninteresting problem, un-alleviated by distractions. And the characters involved in the problem, are not all that nice. Whereas in HKHWR, the central problem is equally burdensome and the characters involved in it, equally unappetising – but the whole is lifted by a lot of subsidiary characters with lots of interesting problems and amours.

I, too, have started “No Name” (Wilkie Collins), which starts brilliantly. Mary Lou, I was one degree stingier than you were, and got it for free as a Penguin Classic. So far, so good – no coal miners wandering about with candies in their hats, as in “Daniel Deronda”. And, quite apart from the transcription, the book begins splendidly: lively characters, well delineated.

I’m awfully glad to hear about your asparagus. I have now made hollandaise sauce three times to pour over English asparagus from the supermarket, so far without disaster. It’s no wonder I haven’t lost any weight to speak of, in Lent.