I’m in trouble with the knitting. No picture today. Details soon, but I’ll start with today’s good news.

 

Not the loss of the Prime Minister. They come and they go. But:

 

1)    Mrs Sacoolas has pleaded guilty in a British court – by video link, of course – to causing death by careless driving. The sentence will be trivial. “Dangerous” driving would have been far worse. The judge has required that she be in court in person to hear the sentence, at the end of November. That's something. It won’t give them Harry back, obviously, but it’s a result, and a credit to the family’s persistence.

2)    Archie and I – mostly Archie – applied for a Blue Badge this morning, for disabled parking. The website had warned that it could take up to ten weeks. I heard by lunchtime that Edinburgh has awarded me one, and that it will be here in ten days. It doesn’t belong to a particular car – it can be displayed on any dashboard. My husband had one, after several rejected applications. Alexander, who registered the death, had to hand it over. Some good thinking there, on somebody’s part.

 

Kniting: I’ve finished the horrible purling. I’ve come unstuck – I would almost say, as expected – with picking up stitches for the cable sections which follow. I think the only thing to do is to frog and to face the problem again in the morning. I’m at my best then, which is not to say it’s very good. At the moment, in the dark, tired, I don’t think the pictures in the pattern match the instructions. More on this tomorrow, I hope.

 

The new instalment looks perfectly doable within four or five days, or fewer. There is an optional bit (very attractive, I admit) which I’ll be happy to skip.

 

Wordle: Four today for me, but I feel I cheated. My first attempt at line four was rejected: not a word. I went out into the real world and typed it in. I can’t, alas, remember the details. It was a word somewhere, and somebody (Wikipedia?) said something involving the correct word, which I recognised as such after my hours of fruitless struggle. I went back and typed it in. Ketki, Thomas, and Daughter-Rachel were also four. Theo was a brilliant two. Granddaughter-Rachel, Mark, and (most surprisingly) Alexander haven’t reported yet.

 

I leave you feeling gloomy and novembrine. It must be the knitting.