Indian summer has given way to cold-and-nasty. Helen is staying here tonight, because she is going to a dinner party nearby. She has put a hot water bottle in my bed before leaving. Rachel and Ed are safely on the shores of Loch Fyne. The plan is for them to go on to Kirkmichael before returning to London. If the weather is like this everywhere, the temptation may be to cut out that part of the plan. Kirkmichael in this sort of weather is tough; I’m glad that old age exempts me from it.

 

It has been a relatively good day here. I knit a bit more of the Calcutta Cup vest. I’ll have to step up speed, but it’s gratifying to be doing it at all. I ate well.

 

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Retirement homes: Beverly, I visited my mother at Meadow Lakes several times, and enjoyed myself. A lot of Princeton faculty retired there, and the conversation was good. Shandy, I need to work out why retirement communities aren’t common all over GB. Money has a lot to do with it – normally (in the US, at least) one goes in with a substantial capital payment which uses up what one got selling one's house. The British resist that. It tends to happen anyway if you need care for any length of time.

 

I’m reading Penelope Lively’s Moon Tiger. I’ve read it once before, so it was there on my Kindle, therefore free. An article about Lively’s new collection of short stories in last Sunday’s Times mentioned it, and said, unless I misread, that in it the protagonist has an affair with her brother. I don’t remember that. So far, it’s vaguely familiar, and very good. It won the Booker, back in the days before diversity.