The Coofle yarns came today: so now there is nothing to stand between me and panic, to which I am beginning to succumb. I’ll leave here on Saturday morning about 10:30, returning the following Friday. Everything is moving forward pretty well, in fact, except that I am sinking into Hogarthian squalor without my Romanians. Clothes for the cruise are clean and ironed and kept separate – that’s something.

 

I’ll see a doctor, tomorrow, to discuss my “bloods”. I don’t expect any news, but I’ll let you know.

 

Helen came and we got perhaps 2/3rds of the way around the garden. 1930 steps.

 

And I finished turning my heel, and picked up the gusset stitches, and have embarked on their decreasing.

 

Have you seen Brooklyn Tweed’s new “Tones” yarn? Very nice indeed. I can’t think of how to use it, but I’m sure Jared will come up with something interesting soon.

 

I wish that interesting Irish podcast which I mentioned yesterday, hadn’t turned my thoughts to Robert Black. He is a most unpleasant thought. One of his victims was the daughter of the Scotsman’s agriculture editor Fordyce Maxwell whom I used to read devotedly and regarded almost as an acquaintance. The day after the Dunblane massacre he wrote about his daughter’s murder.

 

Black wasn’t arrested until 13 years after Mary Boyle’s disappearance, although police suspected that a serial killer was at work and there had been a major manhunt. But that was in another country (the UK). Difficult, perhaps, for everybody to shift mental gears after so long. Even so. He was in the vicinity when Mary vanished, and there was a witness who thought she heard bumping noises such as a trussed and gagged child might make, from the back of his parked van.