That was not too bad a day. I had my hair cut, early on, and will look tidy for the wedding. I did a supermarket sweep – a friend of a friend is going to look after my dear cats while I am away. He has a cat of his own, named Hamish. He is coming to lunch on Thursday, along with the connecting link, so to speak.

I’m going for Gennaro’s Chicken with Garlic and Rosemary and Chilli (and white wine), from the Jamie Oliver Youtube Channel. With a green salad from the doorstep.

Then I spent a happy afternoon watching Wimbledon. Federer lost his first set, which created a frisson of excitement. I gave up on Serena, who came next. She seemed to have everything under control. Unlike Federer (a fellow oldie), however, she looked as if she was carrying some extra weight and not moving with absolute fluency.

Last year I was on my Hebridean cruise during the first week of Wimbledon, and missed it all. One really needs it, like the first chapters of a novel.

The schoolgirl’s triumph over Venus yesterday was an excellent match. She looks as if she should be with us for a while, except that the promising young ones so often don't stay the course. Two such young men crashed out in the first round yesterday (Zverev and Tsitsipas, seeded 6 and 7, in the Greek God category, both). 

And I got quite a bit of knitting done while the tennis was burbling on. The secret is to stop knitting whenever there are 30 points against the server.

Cat sent me this interesting link to the Shetland Lace Project, for the sake of the red-and-white “burnous”, but there are other interesting articles there as well. I particularly enjoyed the one by Carol Christiansen called “What’s In a Name?”, about the difficulties of giving names to the lace pieces in the Shetland Museum Collection. She doesn’t want to assign names – she wants to discover what the original knitters would have called the patterns.

Mary Thomas says, in her famous “Knitting Book”, that there are only ten truly native Shetland lace patterns. I believed her for quite a while. I now know that lace knitters were/are fully as adventurous as Fair Isle ones at adapting and expanding the boundaries of the craft, and that "truly native" is a meaningless classification.

The new VK is here. Nothing really stirring, although there are some things I will go back to and consider again. I’m sorry to hear that Trisha Malcolm is demitting office. She has been an excellent editor. Does anyone know who is to succeed her? I don’t suppose the name will mean anything to me, anyway.