I seem to have managed to delete an almost-complete post. I will re-do it, but it will lack a certain spontaneity. I must get back to my laptop in the catalogue room.

     I didn’t get out today — another fine May day, with a burst of rain at the end. But if tomorrow isn’t much worse, I mean to attempt to go shopping on Broughton Street. I quite enjoy shopping. 

     Sleep was curtailed again last night. I spent most of today dozing while listening to Kenji (see yesterday). I’m glad I didn’t buy the book. A disproportional amount of it, it seems to me, is devoted to cooking beef. I don’t do that very often. He says, at the end of a chapter on roasts, that Americans don’t eat lamb very much (and actually import some of that little from Australia), why so? I loved lamb chops when I was growing up, and regarded them as a great treat.

   The promised essay from KD turned up this morning. How hard she has worked on this, quite apart from designing knitwear! This essay is about Tolleshunt d’Arcy, the village in Essex where Allingham lived. The house looks much more substantial than I expected. Allingham’s husband never provided much support. And there were also a number of hangers-on, and their horses. For some years there were also a handful of elderly relatives in a nursing home over the way. Margery Allingham and Albert Campion bore the whole burden, not without anxiety.

   My own knitting moved forward at its usual snail’s pace. I’ve finished the decreases on the first Spalding sleeve, and made a guess at how much more I’ll do before the cuff. Top-down, remember.

   Wordle: I got all five letters from my two starters this morning.  I could not think of ANY word that fit. I finally gave up and put in a Jean-word — two letters wrong. That yielded no greens, but at least for the three letters I had used rightly, I now knew one more position in which each of them couldn’t be. The succeeding struggle was fairly brief. Four for me.

   Three for Mark and Thomas. Four for Ketki and Rachel. Five for Alexander and Theo. Six for Roger.