The knitting went better today, but I still haven’t recovered the pleasure and ease with which I used to knit Fair Isle. Here it is, slightly blurry:

 

I’d better measure tomorrow and make a tentative decision, at least, about when I want to start the armholes.

 

I still found it difficult today. I couldn’t let my thoughts wander at all – which is the whole point of knitting – or I’d find that I was confused about whether I was in the expanding or the contracting diamond. But I think it was getting slightly better in that respect before I stopped.

 

I wish I had mastered a better technique when I was young enough to do so. Somewhere Arne and Carlos have a video that shows clearly how they do it. I remember that it’s important to keep the left forefinger down low. (Mine isn’t) I’d like to find it and look again but don’t know how to start hunting. I just find myself in a wilderness of Christmas ornaments.

 

The salad machine continues well. Soon I’ll be able to start tasting. Everything salad-y I get from the supermarket this time of year must have been grown under cover and probably under eerie blue lights. I am fully persuaded that everything tastes better if grown in the open air under God’s own sunshine.

 

Shandy, no, I’ve been drinking my usual ration of cider since I got back from the hospital. The NHS and my sister disapprove, and I think my children mutter behind my back. The hospital sent me an Alcohol Counsellor who virtually said that if she was as well as I was at my age, she’d go on drinking too. She said there’s lots of Alcohol Counselling to do at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, and they had just taken on an extra member of staff. Drugs must complicate the issue nowadays. My difficulty is that I don’t think I can cut down – I’d have to cut it out altogether like your youthful mother, Shandy, or like my son James. He stopped drinking beer because he found that he always wanted one more than he was allowed. He’s taken in his belt a couple of notches and looks extremely well.

 

After my perfect January last year, I got most of the way through February on four-days-off, three-days-on but couldn’t keep it up. Or, at any rate, didn’t.