Everybody has gone away. I’ve had a wonderful time. I’ve met all sorts of great-granddaughters, and they’re all delightful. And they have met their third cousins, Hamish (above) and Quinn. It’s not often you meet a third cousin.

 

And we remembered to unpin the Shetland hap this morning and send it off to London. Joe’s wife Becca is going to have a scheduled Caesarean, any minute now, because she had a terrible time with her first labour which ended with an emergency one. So Rachel knows the Probable Date of Birth, but she wasn’t telling us.

 

And the Malabrigo sock yarn called Primavera has arrived, and I’ve embarked on the next shawl. It’s wonderful yarn, with many colours splendidly blended in, BUT the overall effect is a darkish brown, not vernal at all. There’s nothing to be done about it – the yarn was too expensive for even me to neglect. I’ve started. The pattern asks for largish needles; the ball band specifies something much smaller. I’ve started off with the needle I’ve just been using for the Shetland hap, which is halfway in between,  and am more than satisfied with the fabric I’m getting. Size doesn’t matter unless it turns out handkerchief-small or curtain-large, and it won’t.

 

Helen and David and I are going to a garden centre tomorrow to buy plants for the doorstep. This morning they got me out, and pushed me around the garden in my wheelchair – I am that much diminished. Spring has made all sorts of advances since I was last there. We harvested some wild garlic. And, goodness! isn’t April wonderful!

 

Anonymous: “frot” is written like that to save me the tedium of typing “fraught”, as I’m sure you guessed. I shudder to think what Google thinks it means.

 

Wordle: what I wanted to tell you – and I have remembered – is that when you have a U in a suitable place, or floating loose, it’s always worth trying a Q with it. I think it was Theo who failed on the day we had QUALM recently. He had the green U in the second position, but never tried Q. Alexander wasn’t entirely satisfied with that word, on the grounds that one never has a single QUALM.

 

Today we were mostly threes and fours. I was one of the threes. Alexander and Ketki were the fours. Mark blew us all out of the water with his two.