All well, although panic increases. Even list-making doesn’t help, because by now the lists look long (although each separate item is in fact simple). I haven’t yet seen the girl next door, whom I don’t really know – I need to introduce her to the cats and give her a key. I think I’ll feel better when that conversation has been done. I allowed myself not to walk again today, which was probably a mistake. 738 steps. Oh dear oh dear. Archie is coming tomorrow – there will be no escape. And I did fill out and return a form to the Majestic line attesting that C. and I are in robust health. That’s one thing to cross off the list.

 

The charger problem is more mysterious than that, Tamar. (comment, yesterday) The telephone was happy to charge on the bedroom charger; the iPad charged fine on the kitchen one. Which charger to take along?

 

Mary Lou, (another comment yesterday) – you would benefit mankind if you demonstrated how to get stitches from one needle onto four. I didn’t do much knitting today, just sat there stewing in my panic, but I did advance the ribbing somewhat, on the second Pairfect sock.

 

And finished the first Cazalet book and started the second – WWII has been declared. The author is good on how huge events like that intertwine with daily life. The nearest comparison for me, I think, would be the week of the Cuban Missile Crisis, two months before Helen was born. We had nowhere to run to – Kirkmichael came later. My mother (I may well have said this before) was in Dallas that week, and hardly noticed, indeed confused it later on with the Bay of Pigs. Her own mother was near death at the time; that may have been why. Or Texas may have been so big and so far away that the danger didn’t seem as terrible and immediate there as it did to the rest of us.

It was November, of course; not a cheerful month at the best of times. I remember waking up and hearing the milkman's dear horse in the street and knowing that the world hadn't, at least, hurled itself into catastrophe for one more night.