It’s hot, all right. If Edinburgh is like this, London must be blistering – true American heat.

 

I didn’t walk. Just as I was finishing my exercises – first thing after breakfast – I was struck with a sudden diarrhoea. No trouble since, but I took the rest of the morning quietly.

 

And resumed knitting the legwarmers. They aren’t quite as bad as I remembered – perhaps because the yoke of the Lilias Day was also a bit disappointing as far as the experience of colour knitting was concerned. Three rounds a day, and the patterned part will be done in a fortnight. And the rounds are small – that’s the whole trouble. Four or five a day should be perfectly feasible.

 

Crochet66 (comment Friday): that is a rather good idea, knitting the Calcutta Cup into the sock pattern in the new Shetland Wool Adventure magazine. My tentative thought is to knit something for Helen’s youngest son Fergus, who sat next to the captain of Scottish rugby on a flight south from Edinburgh not long before the match. I might ask him what he thinks of socks. I don’t have anything else particularly in mind.

 

Wordle: four today, for me. That’s a bit better. But I’ll never be as good as the others until I stop using two starter words. Between them they yielded one brown vowel today. Even so, I couldn’t think of a qualifying word and had to put a Jean-word which re-used one of my eliminated letters. As often, it was very useful: two greens and a new brown, enough to point me to the right answer. Ketki and Alexander did it in three, Mark needed four.

 

C. is now safely back in Edinburgh, but staying away because one of the wedding guests has Covid (and wasn’t entirely straight about it, during the stage when everybody was hugging). She will keep on testing daily. Meanwhile she has sent me first pictures of the kittens. I am impressed at how energetic they are, trying to walk without a single useful leg. They were born in the box Manaba and Hamish had prepared for the lying-in: surely a first in the history of cat-keeping.