A pretty good day. C. came, and we walked around the garden. She is proposing to take me and the cats back to Strathardle soon. Which would be wonderful. But I am a heavy weight these days.

 

I got two more long, long rows done on the Stillness Shawl. Another week will do it, if I can keep this up. And the fact that there are still ten more rows (or as near as dammit) means that the place where I corrected my initial mistake will have time to recover and to form a more or less convincing point at the end.

 

Tamar, I hope you saw Quinn’s reply to your post of August 3 about how to bend YouTube to one’s requirements.

 

I have embarked on another sourdough loaf – to be baked tomorrow morning. It’s perhaps getting slightly easier. The loaf still has to be shaped and left to chill overnight, but there’s plenty of time.

 

I also mean – this is more ambitious – to attempt kimchi again tomorrow (once the sourdough is out of the oven). The last attempt – using the wrong cabbage, as some may remember – was not a success, and leaving it to ferment for however many further weeks has been no help. It’s still too chewy, still wrong. So today I threw it courageously away and hope that tomorrow’s Tesco delivery will include the right cabbage, as promised.

 

Reading: Trollope’s “Belton Estate” didn’t exactly feel familiar, but produced various sensations of unease, and I discovered, to my embarrassment, that I read it as recently as last November. I’ve kept a diary of books-read since Jan,’19. So I switched, at least temporarily, to the latest Simon Serrailler – I think I’ve read them all. This one is called “The Benefit of Hindsight” and is rather good.

 

Life

 

Alexander and Ketki are again cut off from the outside world – there has been yet another landslide at the Rest and Be Thankful. In the last couple of years, the authorities have resurrected an Old Military Road in the valley below – not wholly satisfactory, as it is very narrow and traffic is thus required to flow first in one direction, then in the other. But that's better than the 70 mile diversion. This time, the landslide slid on down and blocked the OMR as well.

 

In the Good Old Days, we only had landslides in the winter, but the Rest was often closed in the summer by a motorcycle accident.

 

My husband and I had to do that diversion once – you get to Tarbet at the head of Loch Lomond and are then required to turn right into the back of beyond, instead of left over the Rest. Somebody has really got to do something about that road. Inverary is involved, not just Alexander and Ketki at Cairndow.