A bit warmer today. It was a better day in general. I was feeling sorry for myself because no comments had shown up, as they usually do, in the Social section of my emails. But I went and looked at the blog itself just now, and there they are. I am very grateful. They mean a lot to me.

 

The knitting is fine, I think. I put in two successive plain-vanilla knit rows, to balance the two successive pattern rows mistakenly knit yesterday. Never mind the galloping horse: I don’t think I could find them myself, on foot. There is something to be said for garter stitch. I’ve now finished 11 of the 14 pattern repeats for the centre of this shawl. And I am now pretty sure that this first ball of yarn will be enough to finish the centre. I’ll then switch to one of the slightly brighter skeins for the borders.

 

Grandson Joe sent me this picture of his mother Rachel with his son my great-grandson Freddie, in his shawl.

 

Comments yesterday: Southern Gal, it might just be possible to make a new driveway across a field of sheep which has the merit of being a field we own. I’ll see what Helen thinks of the idea. It’s all the fault of the lawyer who acted for us when we bought Burnside in 1963, the year Helen was born. He should have made sure we had iron-clad access.

 

Chloe, I think the NHS is in a bad way – it’s not just me and my hip. I also think that the private surgeon I consulted so expensively recently, may have moved me up the waiting list by several months, by attaching my name to his. (He also works for the NHS.) And I further think that falling and breaking a hip and having emergency surgery (like Dame Edna) is probably more dangerous than a scheduled operation. The private surgeon warned us that when that happens, it’s more often than not the good hip that gets broken.

 

Wordle: Mary Lou (comment Monday): you mentioned getting four with a word you didn’t think was a real word. Was that DITTO? If so, Archie was here that day and he looked it up on his telephone and it goes back to Venice in whatever century it was (sixteenth?) when they were launching the idea of  printing. That doesn’t make it an English word, of course.

 

I was today’s dunce, with five. Mark was the star, with two. Threes and fours elsewhere. I had four browns from my two starter words, and moved too fast on the vital line three. I typed in what I soon saw was a Jean-word: one of the browns hadn’t changed position, and so the word couldn’t be right. I might have scored four had I been more cautious.