A fresher day today, and the sun shone. But now we are back to apocalyptic rain and thunder and lightning. The iPad won’t connect to the internet. I think I’m all right here, with the laptop. We’ll soon see. How bereft I feel without the internet, alone in the universe!

One more row of Spring Shawl today – better than nothing.

Thank you for your kind remarks about Joe and Becca’s wedding. That was a good day.

Here is a pointless anecdote which serves, at least, to illustrate a point I often make, that there are few things better than creating a problem for yourself and then solving it.

Yesterday afternoon, I couldn’t find my keys. Normally, when that is the case, I have but to assure myself that since I am in the house, so must they be. Not so, yesterday. My nice man came about lunchtime (after my soaking in Drummond Place Gardens) and brought me a new battery for the car. When he had installed it, he came to the door and gave me the invoice and I paid him with my debit card and all four of our hands were occupied with this activity.

So when the keys weren’t with the invoice or the card, nor anywhere else plausible, I wondered if he still had them. I was anxious through the night. I rang him up this morning; he was sure he had given them to me. And as I talked to him, I solved the problem: I had put the keys aside, there by the door. Not a normal key-place, but there they were.

I told you it was pointless, but still, a great relief. I went off to the supermarket and the car went vroom, vroom.

Reading: “The Last September” is good, and I’m sure I will persevere, but it is also depressing. It’s a family-in-country-house story, a genre I adore (Mansfield Park! Il Gattopardo! Brideshead!) but this time with the grim sense of the Irish Troubles just beyond the gates, and the knowledge that the Irish will win and the house is doomed. So today I succumbed to a thriller – a medical thriller, at that: “Control” by Hugh Montgomery. It’s certainly thrilling.