A summer’s day again. You Americans would, I suspect, welcome our occasional cooling breeze, but I feel flattened. C. and I got around the garden this morning, however – that’s something.

 

Little else to report. Helen’s clients came from Oxford and took away her latest mosaic. She says – I was having my nap during all this – that they were pleased. She is anxious: will it fit? I am sure it will, if they have given her the right dimensions.  Helen is meticulous. They had just been to the Scottish Gallery and bought a large Blackadder. So now they’ve got a Blackadder and a Helen Miles.

 

No knitting, and I still haven’t put wee Hamish’s Calcutta Cup vest on waste yarn. My plan for tomorrow morning – since I won’t have to walk, because of going to C.’s lunch party – is to have a delicious bath (I’m filthy) after the Andrew Marr show, and then steam myself dry. I ought to be able to get the vest onto waste yarn during that period. I did the same for Alexander’s what-year-was-it? vest and took it along when I went to see him. Or when we did – depends on the year. And it proved to be grotesquely too large (so much for swatching) and I started again from scratch and wound up with what is probably my best-fitting garment ever. See above.

 

I had a good Italian lesson this morning. Canto 31 of the Inferno has a passage about the Towel of Babel, which got us talking about the  the origin of language. Which is a matter that has long interested me. I’m not altogether sure that modern thought has progressed all that far since the Old Testament writers, and Dante. My tutor recommended Noam Chomsky.