All well, but I’m feeling very feeble – and there are still three more rows to go before Clue One of the MKAL is finished. Alan Bennett is good, and fairly conducive to knitting, but awfully gloomy. There will be two more this evening. There’s no sign yet of my favourite – it was Patricia Routledge, the first time round, who was dying of cancer (like, gloomy). She knew, the doctors knew, her workmates knew, but nobody ever said it out loud. Bennett is awfully good at that sort of thing, language that conveys more than its explicit meaning.

(I was surprised to find the word “cancer” in “Dr. Thorne”. Lady Arabella – was that her name? – was suspected of it. Nothing came of it. Perhaps Trollope was preparing a plot-line for himself and then abandoned it.)

I investigated pi today, but it’s too much for me. You’re right, of course, Tamar, the Egyptians were on to it. Also the Chinese. Archimedes did rather well at working out a value, considering that he had no decimal point or zero to work with. An irrational number like that must have been very frustrating to the orderly Greeks, after – was it after? – the elegance of the Square on the Hypotenuse.

Helen came this morning. We went to the chemist (=drug store) on Broughton Street where I got my next batch of blood-thinners. We saw Kathy, who had just opened the shop (http://www.kathysknits.co.uk/). I must go in and have a look the next time I’m there. Then we went to the corner shop where I bought an apple for what has turned out to be not a very successful beetroot soup.