A chilly, grey day. Helen says it’s cold in Greece. We’ve got Fergus’ recent birthday to date our memories by. I was there in Thessaloniki when he was born, and the weather was lovely. The frogs were all singing the Croaking Chorus from the “Frogs” of Aristophanes. And now Fergus is 21, and I am lame. Helen says there is wild asparagus in the supermarket. That’s something.

 

I got my assigned portion of edging-knitting done, and hope to knock off another scallop this evening. I often say that, and almost always fail.

 

I’ve had two scam phone calls today. I think they were scams – but such things (they are frequent) leave me anxious and unsettled.

 

Wordle: I thought it was a stinker today. My line three was perfectly plausible, but wrong. Then I couldn’t think of anything for a long time – breakfast over, newspapers read. Finally I hit upon a Jean-word which might be useful – and was. Three greens and a brown. All I had to do was find one more letter and slot it and the brown into their places. Even that wasn’t easy, but eventually I succeeded and thus scored five  Thomas and Ketki and Roger joined me with that score. (That proves it: it wasn’t easy.)  Mark and Daughter-Rachel and Theo had four. Alexander beat us all with a three.

 

Yesterday’s word was HURRY. All I wanted to say about it – not very interesting – is that it figured in an intelligence test I took long, long ago. We were set COME TO LONDON in a letter-substitution code, and asked to write HURRY in the same code. One soon discovers that none of the letters in COME TO LONDON reappear in HURRY, and soon after that one notices that each letter is replaced by the one after it in the alphabet: DPNF UP MPOEPO (that’s not guaranteed, but you get the idea). Then you have to use the same system to encode HURRY.