A peaceful day. I watched Federer win in straight sets, and got a good deal of knitting done. I’ve finished the penultimate row of lace diamonds.

I had a good Italian lesson this morning, trying to tell my tutor about Coco Gauff’s match yesterday. I’m not strong on Italian tennis vocabulary (or on which past tense to use) – and my tutor isn’t particularly interested. She is too young even to remember Adriano Panatta. But the cicadas were making a terrific noise in the pine trees outside and she broke off to ask if I could hear them.

Shandy, thank you for the tip. I rushed off to Amazon and bought the Kindle edition of “The Great Hunger” (fortunately, very cheap). It turned out to be all poetic, if not actually all a poem, and I struggled for a couple of hours with the problem of how to tell you politely that that wasn’t what I wanted at all. Then I went back to your comment and read it again and went back to Amazon and found that the real “The Great Hunger” which you were referring to isn’t available in Kindle. I’ve ordered the paperback, which is also pretty cheap.

Meanwhile I’ve also bought the Kindle version of “The Great Irish Potato Famine” by James Donnelly which, so far, seems balanced. Some books (even in their Amazon summaries) accuse the government in London of genocide, and the word “holocaust” appears. I’m sure London made dreadful mistakes in the face of an utterly unprecedented situation, but I am also sure that it is wrong to use words which implicitly compare them to Hitler and his Final Solution.

We are all zero-ing in on this wedding. My sister and her husband are flying to London tomorrow (staying with James and Cathy in Sydenham). Their son Theo and his family are already there, in an Airb&b somewhere. I just have to pull myself together a bit before flying down on Thursday. Helen was last heard of on Mt. Pelion but will presumably touch down in Edinburgh soon.