I am very touched that anybody remembers my Great Victory with Sam the Ram. Anne (comment yesterday) has found the picture – just click on 2007 and there he is, at the end of the first post that comes up (=end of year). He is rather good, if I do say so.

What I, embarrassingly, don’t remember is which of you suggested knitting him. I was intending to reproduce a mermaid that I had knit for Rachel’s daughter Hellie. She loved it for years, but it eventually fell to pieces. I think, in ’07, I still had the original pattern. The category, remember, was “knitted toy”. But whoever-you-were was here in Edinburgh and we went on a modest yarn crawl and had coffee, over which she suggested Sam, saying, rightly, that he involved a certain amount of virtuoso knitting which might impress the judges. Maureen, could that have been you?

I’ll ask Alexander if Sam is available for a modern picture.

I felt more than ordinarily flattened after my Italian lesson this morning, which is my excuse for having done even less than usual for the rest of the day. And as for knitting, I succumbed. The Virus Scarf has a background colour called “Cast Iron”. I wound a skein of it – 150 grams; no joke; and cast on. It’s lovely stuff, and will be wonderfully cosy to wind around oneself if I ever finish. There are 524 rows, of which I’ve done 15. That might even last out the emergency. The yarn is called “fine highland wool” and comes from Peru. And there was not a single knot in those 150 grams.

Greek Helen, she with the abscessed tooth, is doing well, but anxious about how she will fare when the antibiotic is over. She has been warned about this tooth for years. It is fused to the bone in some way and will require surgery to remove – pliars won’t be sufficient. And these are no times to go through the door of a hospital if it can be avoided.

She has volunteered to be Helpful, on some register or other. That involved doing someone’s shopping the other day. She was horrified at the diet implied by the list. “Don’t you want any fruit or vegetables?” “Well, yes; you could put in a can of pineapple.”