So, Kirkmichael tomorrow. I am suffering a bit from departure-anxiety, although not nearly as badly as for the cruise. And I’ll have my cats with me. I am a bit of a dead weight these days: it is noble of Helen to take me on. I should be back here on Monday.

 

I’ve done that heel flap, turned the heel, and picked up the gusset stitches. I remember when I first turned a heel – I’ve probably told you this. We were driving from New Jersey to Dallas to spend Christmas with my grandparents, probably in ’47 or ’48 when I would have been 14 or 15.  I was knitting a pair of Christmas-present socks for my father. I had got the impression from various bits of girls’ reading that heels were tricky. I did what the pattern said to do, and it wasn’t difficult at all. 

I spent some time fairly recently – I think it is chronicled in this blog somewhere – trying out different systems, but have come happily back to the one I regard as basic. The only modification over the years has been to pick up a couple of extra stitches, including one in the ladders between the gussets and the top of the sock, to get rid of that maddening little hole. I’m pretty good at that, by now.

 

Archie came this morning, but we didn’t get all the way around the garden. Only 1252 steps today. He will come with Helen tomorrow to get the cats into their travelling cages. We’ll have to do it ourselves, coming home.

 

Someone on the cruise was reading “Wilding” – it’s all the rage, these days. It’s pleasant to dream about what we might do, if we ever got our fields back into our own hands. But it’s clearly difficult. Our paddock has been untouched for quite a while now – it used to be grazed. All that has happened is nettles, where the driveway was made through it, and raspberries. We are much plagued with deer.