All well here, I guess. I could wish that the BBC news told me more about New York than it does, but that seems an unreasonable cavil. How steadying and reassuring are those calm voices, no matter how dreadful the news. So it must have been during the war.

My mother taught me the word "an-genga", "lone-goer", an epithet -- perhaps the epithet -- of Beowulf. I have no syllable of Anglo-Saxon. She applied it to herself, and offered it to me. And I have been glad to embrace it, especially, perhaps, now. I like being alone.

I have reached row 29 of the Cameron Shawl borders (counting down to zero from 110). This is the row in which the final filler patterns begin, as the Trees of Life slim down into nothing. AND I am within a few feet of the end of the second ball of yarn. That’s real progress, in lace knitting.

The new VK turned up yesterday – well timed, in this vale of tears. Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita,  as we say in Italian. There’s nothing that grabs me, alas. Had I but world enough and time, No. 7, The Grandfather or No. 9, The Gradient. But I’m short of both.

I still haven’t pushed the button for Foldlines, but I probably will.

We’ve had our first perhaps-casuality. Helen and David’s youngest son Fergus was stricken with vomiting and a fever last night. Vomiting, of course, is not a COVID syndrome, but fever is. To what extent do the rest of the household need to isolate themselves from the world even more severely than they are already doing?

My niece C. (with whom I went to Kirkmichael last week) is contemplating joining forces with her daughter, another C., different name. The younger C., of course, is the one who is expecting a baby soon, and would be glad of her mother’s company while her husband is at work. The husband, also of course, is the point of danger, potentially bringing the virus home to wife and mother-in-law.