Not a bad one. My beloved cleaner Daniela came and has as usual reduced all to order. Helen came, and we walked once around the gardens, not talking about trees. Helen and Daniela talk to each other in Greek, the first language of neither. (Daniela is Romanian.) They met in Athens, and Helen encouraged Daniela to come here. It depresses me a bit to hear them. I can’t imagine being able to speak Italian so fluently.

I had a bath and washed my hair this morning, as soon as Daniela arrived. That was nice.

I had cooked all of last week’s Mindful Chef packages already, so today for lunch I braised some sausages with potatoes and carrots and onions and moribund French beans from the vegetable drawer. Lovely to cook, delicious to eat. I think I will suspend Mindful Chef for a while. All that chopping. All that quinoa.

          Persicos odi, puer, apparatus.

          Bring us a chop and a couple of potatoes.

Knitting went well. I am adding gradient stripes to the EPS sweater – now well advanced with the second stripe. I’m slightly more anxious about the circumference, now that the ribbing is finished and stitches added to bring us fully up to “K”.  Perhaps I’ll involve the tape measure tomorrow and see what the current stitch gauge actually is.

Helen added a video this morning to this famous Instagram account, of my hands knitting. I am embarrassed to reveal to the world how clumsily I do it – drop and throw. I was somewhat encouraged the day I went to the launch of Kate Davies’ hap book,  just around the corner at Kathy’s Knits. And KD told me that she knits slowly too, and relies on a colleague to produce samples for photography.

OK, so that’s the weekend over. What I must do is get down to the Guelphs and the Ghibelines tomorrow and not leave them to Thursday evening.