Another nothing-much of a day. I am not engaging with this scarf as I should, and yet there’s not much more to do and I must finish it.

I am having a good time with the Shetland Wool Week book Maureen brought me. Apart from anything else, there are some excellent pictures of sheep, capturing that look of theirs in which there is something of idiocy and something of the sinister. You will forgive me for being hard on sheep if you have ever had them in your vegetable garden.

And speaking of sheep, as we were driving to Kirkmichael last Sunday I saw some, for the first time in quite a while, and I found myself feeling quite hungry. (I hadn’t had much breakfast, and that’s always unwise.) I have ordered some on-line mutton which should be delivered tomorrow. I’ll get the slow cooker out and make Gennaro Contaldo’s (YouTube) lamb stew.

Non-knit

Before I go off to a determined evening of scarf-knitting…

I am having a tough time with A Spool of Blue Thread. There are an awful lot of characters, covering three – indeed, four – generations. It is hard to keep them straight in one’s head, especially as some of them are dogs. With human-type names, not Fido or Spot or Rover. And none of them, to my taste, are very interesting.

Whereas the alternative is Barchester Towers which is blissful. And choc-a-bloc with interesting characters.

The Prime Minister has spoken to Trump about Mrs Sakoolas. Trump has expressed Deepest Sympathy, and promised to send someone to talk to her. Clearly, nothing can be done, now that she is back in the US, unless she should decide to return voluntarily. The Sakoolas’s were at an RAF base which is in fact a US Air Force base. The accident happened just outside. She – or they? – flew back from the base itself – I had been imagining Heathrow.

I feel almost a novelist’s interest in the question of how the rest of her life will pan out, after having killed someone and skipped town. I am inclined to believe that the mills of the gods grind slowly, but they grind exceeding small. (I just looked that up on Wikipedia, and am delighted to learn that it goes back to the ancient Greek.)