Sunday, December 15, 2019


Thank you for all your help with the Spring Shawl. Ginelou wrote to me yesterday (an email, rather than a comment) suggesting that I might have put it with the rest of the yarn. A very interesting suggestion – but I didn’t. The yarn is in plain sight. As is the pattern.

However, I got to thinking about Ginelou’s idea. I had noticed this, during the search:



This is an untidy house. I gave it little thought, at first. But what else could it be but the cone around which lace yarn is wound? The third ball was nearly finished when I laid the shawl aside. The structure on the right of the picture is the chest of drawers that I thought the shawl was on top of.

So maybe it is the cats’ fault, after all, and the thing to do is to look very thoroughly under all the things they could have left it under. I’ll pursue this line of enquiry.

Otherwise, there is little to report. Andrew Marr, this morning, got me through a couple more rows of the Dathan hap – I think I have 523 stitches, which will become 527 when I have toiled through the next right-side row. Progress. But it would be nice if the yarn for the South African hap would turn up tomorrow – someone will be here all day, which is not true of Tuesday.

James is coming up from London this week, and will be here on Thursday. Everybody wants to come and see him. Helen will bring a frittata. Archie is coming tomorrow to help – there’s lots to do – and has invited his cousin Alistair (James’ son) to lunch. So tomorrow will be a busy day. As will Thursday.

Mary Lou, for any other election I wouldn’t have thought of asking my children how they were going to vote, or had voted. But this one was so odd and inconvenient that it seemed not unreasonable. My parents were FDR Democrats, too. I had a school friend whose mother was a southern Democrat (back in the days of the Solid South – over here, the Labour party used to have that sort of reliable block in the west of Scotland, Glasgow and environs). My friend’s father was a Republican and they used to congratulate themselves on cancelling out each other’s vote, like your parents, Jane. Eventually, however, northern life turned the Southern Democrat into a Republican.

5 comments:

  1. interestingly the south has become all republican. my parents registered republican in the 60s because there were so many democrats (at least that is what they told me.. i disagreed) and then when watergate happened I was vindicated. anyway the entire South is now strongly Republican UNTIL this last midterms - and now we Dems are making inroads. and also the many rulings in the last years (since Bush) overturning the gerrymandering that created pockets of RED in these states.

    its a neverending battle against corruption in this country

    i weep for the UK and pray for Scotland and Ireland - these next months and the aftermath of Brexit could be the undoing of the UK.

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  2. If, as Tamar says, you showed the shawl to Maureen in late September or early October, perhaps it did not go back on the chest . . . thinking through that visit with Maureen, where did you sit? Would the shawl have gone somewhere near there? Or, could it have been put away in the "proper" place for an unfinished project? What else did you show her? Did it get tucked away with those other projects? I hope you find it soon -- I have two or three books that are currently hiding from me, and they gnaw away in the back of my mind.

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  3. I'm glad I didn't have to decide how to vote in the UK. Perhaps I'd have gone for the Greens too.

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  4. I bet that shawl is behind the chest on the floor....

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