I’ve had a peaceful day with Wimbledon. Today was almost all women, and the ones I cared about were already gone. It was still not without interest. My prediction for the ultimate winner is Ashleigh Barty. Everybody else has an unpronounceable Eastern European name, and the commentators kept calling her Ashbarty as if she had one too. We had the great Navratolova commentating: she’s good at that, too.

 

Otherwise, little to report. I ribbed valiantly on, with that blasted sock, but am at the point, familiar to us all, that no matter how much I do, the knitting doesn’t progress. Sock-ribbing isn’t really suitable for tennis-watching. I need to look at my hands.

 

I was glad to hear that Kukla, Fran and Ollie are not entirely forgotten, although at the moment I can’t find your comments. Kukla and Ollie were hand puppets – Ollie was a dragon. Fran was Fran. And, as I remember it, for half an hour a day, in the late afternoon, they stood there and talked to each other. My sister and I were devoted to them. One day my sister wrote a letter to them, asking what colour Ollie’s hair was? This was in the post-war days when colour television was but a gleam on the horizon.

 

As was video recording. And one day our mother had a friend for tea, or something, and we had to sit there in polite and agonised silence. watching the clock move through Kukla, Fran and Ollie’s half hour.  And we found out afterwards that my sister’s letter had been read out – on national television, the coaxial cable having only recently been connected. I think they sent her an autograffed photograff, but that hardly compensated for the moment we had missed.