All well. No knitting, again, but I feel fine – or, as fine as I get these days. There would be time for some this evening, but again, it’s Friday: Italian looms.

I have provided myself with L’escargot Bleu food again, this time without card-trouble. The entrees all sounded a bit heavy and meaty, so I stuck to starters, as I sometimes do when lunching there. A fish soup; a terrine; cold asparagus; a dauph. That should see me through the weekend.

And I am trying to drum up trade for another cookery session with the Duchess of Palma, this time involving my own participation. That involves struggling with a website called mi.o (modernialian.org) which is not always cooperative (or comprehensible).

Helen came around and marched me around the gardens. Goodness, what a change three days makes, this time of year! The grass is now covered with tiny daisies. And there were various groups disporting themselves, taking advantage of the new permission for two households to meet out of doors at a safe distance.

Reading

(Since I can’t report on knitting) I am reading Elizabeth Strout’s “The Burgess Boys”. I love Olive Kitteridge, very dearly, but am enjoying this one somewhat less. The odd thing is that I feel sure the beginning is familiar: No spoiler here, as it’s all in the first pages. Three small children in a parked car. Their father leaves them, briefly. One of them pulls the hand brake off. The car rolls forward and kills the father.

If I had the Kindle book – I read all my novels on Kindle, these days – Amazon would have told me so. And the rest of the book feels totally unfamiliar (and a bit padded-out). A New Yorker story that later turned out to be a whole novel? That happens.