Another good day. It looked seriously nice out there, but I didn’t walk, perhaps somewhat flattened, still, by yesterday’s kimchi-making. I had my bath, and progressed with the legwarmer.

 

Wordle in four. My first starter word produced nothing – Alexander has comforted me in the past with the reflection that the elimination of five letters is not a negligible benefit. The second one gave me a green and a brown. That looked sort of unpromising, but reflection suggested that there weren’t many letters which could follow my green – it was in fourth place. I eventually thought of one, a real Jean-word which couldn’t have been right because it didn’t use my brown and contained an already-eliminated vowel. But, hey! it yielded four greens. It took me an embarrassing interval to grasp that all I had to do, now, was to slot my brown into the fifth place.

 

Goodness, this is fun. Shandy, I don’t think I want anything more taxing. Wordle as it stands is just right.

 

Sarah, that’s an interesting question about sock-knitting, and the answer is, essentially, that I can’t remember. In my sock-knitting heyday – all those trips to London to stay with Rachel and look at art – I think I knit the ribbing on four needles and then switched to five. Why? This time I tried to start the way I used to – casting on all the stitches onto one needle and then knitting them off, needle by needle, on the first real round.

 

That didn’t work because Paradox jumped onto my lap at a crucial point. The one mistake that can’t be rectified except by going back to the absolute beginning, is when even one stitch is dropped during that first round. Then I tried casting on on separate needles. That didn’t work either. Finally I cast on on a circular needle, and knit the stitches off from that. It worked, more or less, although there are some irregularities on the first and -- oddly -- the last needle.

 

There must be many gaps in my sock-knitting memory. I remember knitting a pair for my father when I was 12 or so. I had been brought up on books in which “turning a heel” was a feat of skill and ingenuity. I was astonished to discover that all you had to do was follow the instructions. I remember knitting a pair for my husband in the early days of 1957, when we were walking out together. It was an unbirthday present, and he was surprised and pleased. And after that I don’t remember another sock until we went to the USofA in 1995 for my mother’s 90^th birthday. I was a poor traveller in those days, but discovered that I was completely intrepid if I had socks to knit.