Day Three, already, of This Week. I am gibbering with terror, but I think everything is fairly well in hand. I’ll feel better once my husband is safely on that train tomorrow. Rachel is going to meet him at Kings Cross.

I have scarcely touched knitting needles lately.

We had a grand weekend in Strathardle with the Greeks. All too brief. Sunday lunch was a particular triumph:

A large organic chicken, and I got it right. Not roasted to desiccation, nor did it, with everyone sitting expectantly around the table, ooze pink juices as the carver made the first two or three incisions. With it we ate absolute gallons of mange-tout peas ( but I don’t feel on top of the question of how best to cook them) and afterwards, the 2009 Summer Pudding.

I had netted the red current bush before the previous departure, and we got the whole crop, nearly three pounds, more than enough for a big pudding. Just as well, the netting, because the birds in the interval had stripped the white currents. I thought they’d leave those alone.

The rest of the garden looks reasonably well, although the potatoes don’t seem quite as perky as they ought to be at this stage. Needless to say, there’s no trace of salsola soda. That’s not strictly true: there is one tiny plant which I think must be it. My only remaining ambition for ’09 is for it to get big enough to allow me a taste.

I did a bit better than expected yesterday at the Business of Life. Amongst other things, I made an appointment to have my hair done next Tuesday. Charles himself will do it, as the girl who usually attends to me will be on holiday – she’s going with her boyfriend to a darts tournament in Blackpool, which sounds fun.

Today has dawned wet and disagreeable. St Swithin’s day has recently been and gone and seems to have got it essentially right. Certainly right-er than the people who were so confidently predicting a sizzling summer for us.

How will I manage in CT if it’s chilly? I haven't planned for that.

Knitting

I made a great discovery yesterday – I had been confusing “1” and “l” in my reading of Duchrow’s chart. It’s easily done, especially as the charts are reproduced photographically from the old leaflets. “l” means “1 Masche links stricken”, i.e., purl (I think). “1” means “1 mal unschlagen”, i.e., yo.

The jabot is full of double yo’s, with a clearly readable sign. I had assumed that all the yo’s in the piece were the same, and blithely interpreted all the “1’s” as “purl” without looking closely. This mistake is probably enough to explain all the missing stitches I have been complaining about.

I’m not going to unpick, and this may well reduce my current effort to the status of a trial sally. I’ll finish (I’m nearly done) and block it, leaving the stitches live for possible future edging.

My husband awoke to what I was doing yesterday, and thought the cashsilk too soft and droopy for wear with a dress kilt. He may be right. I have some DMC cotton somewhere (are those the right letters?) prescribed by Sharon Miller for the Princess. I think that’s what she knitted the prototype in. I bought one ball to try, but was easily diverted to her Gossamer Merino which had just then become available. I could try the cotton for jabot-knitting.

But first I must get to Kinloch Anderson and have a look. And feel.

Comments

Thanks for the help on acid-free tissue paper. How could I have forgotten Google, even for a moment? I’ll order some soon, probably from Amazon, and the postage ought not to be too bad.

Stash haus, no, I don’t need to have the blocked Princess out of the way before my husband gets home. I do need an uninterrupted stretch of time for the doing of it. No meals, no computer crises, no call for afternoon exercise. Annie M. wrote movingly the other day (July 8) about the pleasure of being alone in one’s house. It is a rare one, for me.

Dawn, thank you for the tip about how to deal with American websites that expect you to live in some state. I look forward to trying it out.

Good progress yesterday – but today is the Last One before It All Starts (= the Greeks arrive tomorrow), and that doesn’t allow time to do a third of what needs doing.

Yesterday’s great achievement was to equip my husband with a source of money while I’m away. London is an expensive city, and of course I will provide him with a wad of readies before I leave. But what if he runs out?

In normal life, he never uses an ATM. Lest that make him sound more imbecilic than is the case, I should add that he regularly and successfully uses a chip-and-pin credit card. I vaguely thot that when the bank issued his bank card, two or three years ago now, we changed the number so that it was the same as the credit card number.

But I wasn't sure, maybe that was just a good intention, and we didn’t want to try a machine which might laugh at us and swallow the card. So we went up to the Royal Bank in the big, beautifully overblown former town house they inhabit in St Andrew Square, and tried it in one of those little machines on the counter, with an employee watching. It worked.

But I think I’ll tell Rachel the number, just for insurance.

The other step forward – but this has to count as failure, on my part – was to book Amtrak from Old Saybrook to Newark Airport on Monday the 27th, to take me and Lizzie home. I got that all done, but at the end Amtrak wanted to know the billing address to which my credit card statements are sent. Fair enough. And I was allowed to choose “United Kingdom” from a drop-down list of countries. Good!

But I wasn’t allowed to proceed without choosing an American state or Canadian province from another drop-down list. “Other” or “none” were not options. Stalemate.

So my sister has made the booking and I’ll pay her back when I get there. I had a feeling, not a new one, of being trapped by American we’re-the-centre-of-the-universe-ness. That’s silly – I use the card regularly to order books and knitting materials from the US. It’s Amtrak’s fault, not the nation’s.

Anyway, knitting

I’ve come to another row in the jabot pattern where there aren’t enough stitches. This time I’m ready.

Fiberqat and Stash haus, sorry to disappoint, but no, under no circumstances will I unpick that graft and try to re-do the finishing of the Princess. I am looking forward to the blocking, which is firmly scheduled for the afternoon of the day I get back from CT. Sleep can wait.

My husband won’t get back from London until the end of Wednesday afternoon. I wonder if I could fit in a jabot-viewing expedition to Kinloch Anderson on Wednesday morning? I really can’t progress until I’ve seen one. I dropped into a junky tourist kilt shop in central Edinburgh the other day, since I happened to be passing the door. The man had never heard of a jabot.

Plans shifted from hour to hour yesterday, spreading gloom and confusion in my heart. Unnecessarily. The most immediate problem is that my husband must have the remains of a broken tooth extracted on Friday afternoon which means among other things that we can’t join the Greeks in K*rkmichael until the next day. They’re landing in Edinburgh, so we should at least see them to say hello.

And they can get started picking red currants before we get there.

It sounds as if Greek Helen and I will have a car for 48 hours in CT. That’s thoroughly good news. We won’t have to hang around waiting for our lift while merriment goes on elsewhere, and we can leave and go home when jet lag requires. My brother-in-law is hiring a bunch of cars for wedding guests from a firm called Rent a Wreck. I’m not quite sure whether that is Roger being funny, or someone with a really good business idea.

I think the time has come to start a List. It should calm me down.

Let’s think about knitting – another calming influence.

I made some advances, yesterday.

I finished off the Princess, very clumsily. Unpicking waste yarn has never been among my talents, and that one was a nightmare, spiced with the constant anxiety that I would snip the working yarn in my irritation and haste. That didn’t happen, but the pick-up of the original first row was clumsy and in the end, lace-grafting be damned, I garter-stitch grafted the two ends together and there’s a visible line.

The moth repairs – there were two holes, in close conjunction – was even clumsier. The Princess can consider herself lucky I didn’t just darn her.

But it’s done, and I don’t think these clumsiness’s matter much in that sea of stitchery. I have put her away in a drawer for the moment, hoping to wash and block the day I get back from CT. Where do I go for acid-free tissue paper?

I’ve done a few more rows of the jabot, and concluded that it was Duchrow’s fault, not mine, that I kept finding myself a stitch short the day before. I think the admirable Judy Gibson warns of the danger of mistakes in the patterns, although I can’t find the passage. It happened during a section in which the jabot was increasing in size – we started with 11 stitches, and are adding more by fits and starts. For a while each row had balanced increases and decreases, but the designer then proceeded in the next row as if she had added a stitch in each repeat.

Once I grasped this – if, indeed, I did grasp it; the mistake may still be mine – I could put the missing stitch in where it belonged, instead of discovering its lack a few stitches later on and working an awkward kludge on the assumption that it was All My Fault.

The problem only lasted for a few rows. We’re now back on track.

On top of all this, I got some cardigan sleeve done, too. I’ve finished the second-sleeve increases.

le Quatorze Juillet

Thank you, everybody, for all the help and support on the subject of my Travel Nerves.

I like Bonnie’s idea of hiring a car – specifically, hiring one for Greek Helen to drive us around in on Friday and Saturday next week. I will want to be where the action is during the earlier hours of those days, and will want to be able to get back from time to time to the inconveniently-located hotel where she and I are bunking, to rest and change into another dazzling costume.

We’ll explore that idea. She and her family will be here on Friday – yikes! We’ll spend the weekend together in K*rkmichael, picking red currants – I’ve netted the bush to keep the pigeons off – and then picking them again off the little stems and making summer pudding and, finally, eating it. On Monday my husband and I will come back here to regroup and, in my case, get my hair done. On Wednesday he goes to London, and granddaughter Lizzie comes here. They ought to be able to wave to each other when the trains pass.

On Thursday Helen’s husband David will drive their sons to Wales to see his mother, dropping Helen off at Edinburgh airport on the way.

Where she will be joined by me and Lizzie. Fortunately David is a man after my own heart, a worrier and a getter-to-places-earlier-than-strictly-necessary (unlike the man I married) – so I know Helen will be there in good time. (That's not David in the picture, though.)

And off we’ll go.

Knitting, mostly

I didn’t touch the Princess yesterday, and didn’t do much of the cardigan sleeve, either, being wholly obsessed with the Duchrow jabot. I don’t know whether this is a swatch or a trial run or an actual jabot. It’s certainly a lot of fun. (Jared says swatching is comparable to a first date – rather a good image, and one which should encourage all of us to do more of it.)


It’s pretty easy. The unfamiliar chart symbols are soon learned. The only difficulty at the start was my misunderstanding of a symbol which means, wrap the yarn around the needle twice. I thought that meant, create two new stitches, but it soon became clear that it doesn’t – it means, create one biggish hole. I’ve been having a bit of trouble in recent rows with a shortage of stitches but in general it’s going very smoothly.

I am terribly pleased with myself for making some use of this book. When I first saw the Duchrow set I thought, never. They are just here for the sake of bibliographical completeness. And here I am, knitting Duchrow!

Yesterday was largely spent (that’s my excuse) at the Royal Infirmary, accompanying my husband to a routine appt for his breathlessness. We saw an unfamiliar dr named MacDuff, which was wonderful enough in itself, who strikingly resembled next week’s bridegroom in both appearance and manner.

But today promises greater calm. No excuse for not grafting the Princess.

This is my 1,500th post.

It’s rubbish-collection day, and the gulls are making an almighty mess of Drummond Place. So far I have protected our own black plastic bag by rushing angrily out the door from time to time, but I can’t keep it up all morning.

Nor is it conducive to blogging.

So, guess what? I cast on a Christine Duchrow jabot in Cashsilk yesterday. Heavenly stuff, finer, I think, than the Princess’ Gossamer Merino, but so far I can handle it. I didn’t even try to rechart the pattern. It occurred to me that I am not attempting an historical reproduction, I am trying to knit a jabot for James. So it doesn’t matter if I misunderstand the chart here and there, as long as I proceed symmetrically and plausibly.

I used to have a reading knowledge of German – that helps somewhat. But it wasn’t Knitting German, it was Ancient Historical German, so it doesn’t help all that much.

Tamar, there are people who have knit the Princess twice. Like climbing all the munros in Scotland again, after you've climbed them once. But I don't think it's for me. The Unst Bridal Shawl and the Wedding Ring Shawl, as written, both require purl rows in the border -- not for me, either. If I knit one of them, I'd wrap a stitch and turn around at the starting point. I've done that once -- it leaves a line.

And the Queen Ring Shawl, as written, has lots of sewing at the end.

So I'll confine myself to the jabot for the moment, and think about that stole in Heirloom Knitting.

I didn’t get much further with the cardigan sleeve. And today is the day I mean to tackle lace-grafting and finish the Princess, if I can keep my eye on the ball.

Vegetables (reprise)

The Fishwife was right. The opium poppies have appeared among my vegetables. And MaryLou is right, too – it isn’t a bumper year for poppies. A few fell to the hoe last week, but I tried to preserve as many as possible.

Anxiety

I am almost paralysed by fear now that the CT adventure is so near. We drove back to Edinburgh last Saturday, as you know, and summer Saturdays are great days for weddings. It was easy to spot the Wedding Guests in pairs in the streets of Blairgowrie – the elegant, uncomfortable clothes; the slight air of anxiety – they clearly weren’t going shopping; and, a dead giveaway, him in a kilt.

After all these years of co-dependence, am I capable of acting independently? is part of my anxiety. The other part is, how are we all to move around Old Saybrook? From hotel to sister’s-house to Griswold Inn to wedding-venue to breakfast-picnic-on-the-beach? It’s not like K*rkmichael, where you can walk from anywhere to anywhere. There will be a lot of “us” with few if any cars – three of my four children, 9 of 12 grandchildren, 2 spouses, and I think one girlfriend and one boyfriend. And, no doubt, an awful lot of everybody else. I remember taxis as rare and unreliable, in that part of the world.

The thing to do on that one is to print out some Google maps and start calculating the distances which could be walked if need be. I’m good for five miles or so, as long as I don't actually have to walk to the wedding looking anxious in my new clothes.

Here we are home. Good week – although not much knitting, despite resolutions, and the garden is far too dry.

Funny, because Perthshire had newsworthy flash floods the day before we drove up. We passed sandbags in Milnathort (which had featured in the television news), and in Strathardle itself (a short strath, as straths go) there was a “Police Slow” sign followed by 100 yards of streaks of mud on the road. But we were, and are, bone dry, and the burn is very low. The weather kept promising rain during the week, and then wandering off and forgetting to do it. It was only on Friday that I really hunkered down and started carrying gallons of the stuff to my poor vegetables. It’s heavy.

Freed of grass-cutting (at an expense which continues to horrify my husband) I find plenty of strength for vegetable-growing, and again spent the time digging weeds out of long-neglected corners and edges and reveling in the tidiness of the result.

There is still much disappointment – a row of carrots and another of beets so sparse (thanks to the slugs, I’m sure) that neither will produce even a plateful. And, of course, no salsola soda whatsoever. I re-sowed, although experience teaches that seeds-in-July rarely if ever succeed.

On the very substantial other hand, the garden is on stream. We’re eating. The lettuces I bought in last time have flourished. We had daily salads, augmented with my own rocket/arugula. We had another sorrel soup. We had two meals with mange-tout peas. Next weekend, when the Greeks are here, we should have real peas, and will certainly have the wherewithal to attempt a summer pudding. (Recipes are all like the one in the link – but my husband is adamant that the fruit should be red currants only.)

The climbing beans are climbing – and the runner beans are in bloom. Surely there will be some beans by Games Day? I usually enter the “collection of four vegetables” class (took a Second, once) and the object is to be able to do it without including potatoes. That I rarely achieve, but with runner beans I might make it.

Knitting

Despite sloth, I am well advanced with the second sleeve of the Child’s Cardigan, and should advance still further today. I must have knit most of the Princess under the influence of cider, but don’t feel that lace grafting is compatible with it now. That’s for tomorrow.

I was touched to find how many people have been following her progress. I don’t feel any exultation in having nearly-finished. I miss her. Those last few repeats were like coming to the end of a book – my first reading of “Brideshead Revisited” is the example I can think of – which you want to go on reading forever.

I must have some lace, and I think James’s jabot is the direction to go. The cashsilk is here. Far too busy a week looms to think of going to Leith and looking at jabots at Kinloch Anderson, but I could try charting a Christine Duchrow jabot in modern terms and having a wee shot at it.

There you are. Finished. Four years and two months.

Not an FO yet, of course. There’s the grafting of the End to the Beginning to be done, and the repair of that moth hole, and loose ends to be tidied, and finally the blocking. I must do the grafting and moth-holing next weekend when we get back from Strathardle, while the edging pattern still precariously lodges in my mind. And I think I see a window of opportunity for the blocking: I’m due back from CT on the morning of Tuesday the 28th. Granddaughter Lizzie is going straight on down to London. My husband won’t return from London until the next day. That should leave me an unencumbered afternoon, on one of those days or the other, even allowing for sleep.

And my job in Strathardle this week, apart from my dear vegetables, is to knit the cardigan with single-minded fury.

Thank you for the advice about those sleeves, Lorrie. I always found when my children were small, that designers made sleeves too long. Or else my children had exceptionally short arms. And they (the children) weren’t terribly clever about rolling sleeves. Don’t worry here. If I shorten at all, it will only be by an inch or so, and shouldn’t be obvious to a judge as a design peculiarity.

Non-knit

Yesterday’s excitement was the arrival of my driving license.

We oldies have to re-apply every three years, and a good thing too. My old license expired, I think, at the end of June. I applied in April. My honest answers to the medical questions prompted them to send a supplementary medical questionnaire, which I answered in detail (with names and addresses of medical personnel) in May, on the day it arrived. All about eyes and Retinal Vein Occlusion and laser treatment.

So I’ve been anxious lately, hearing nothing, the more so because one of my magazines (cooking, not knitting) has recently failed to arrive. But here is the license. All is well. And the publishers are sending another copy of “delicious”.

So, we’re off to Strathardle and the vegetables. This is the big one: success or failure will be obvious, and it's essentially too late for remedial footwork. It was a long, cold, dry spring on the whole. When we left a fortnight ago, things were in great need of some warm weather to let them put on a growth spurt taking them forward to a stage where the slugs could wound but not kill. We got it (the warm weather) but so dry as to be thoroughly alarming – see the Fishwife’s report. These last few days have been warm and showery, perfect growing weather. What will I find?

Opium poppies grow as weeds among my vegetables – they seek out bare, cultivated ground as unerringly as pussy cats do. I love them, and always let a few grow and bloom. And wither in situ, so that there’ll be seeds for next year. (They’d probably get through even if I tried to root up every one, there are so many.) This year, I haven’t seen a single one. I know the tiny seedlings well and can recognise them from a very early stage.

Climate change?

See you Sunday, insh’Allah.

The Wimbledon men’s final was as exciting as you could ask a tennis match to be, and Mr Roddick was gracious in defeat, an over-used adjective here well-deserved. So that’s that for another year.

And where am I? The first sleeve of the Child’s Cardigan is about 10” long, out of a prescribed 14 ½”. I may shorten that a bit, as is my wont with children’s sleeves. The Princess is where we last saw her.

The vegetables on the doorstep are growing at an alarming pace. The “before” pictures were taken on June 23 – less than a fortnight ago.





















The Fishwife warned me that the tomatoes (her gift to me) would have to be staked. I hoped they could hold out until we got back from Strathardle at the end of this week with some proper sticks, but they are growing at such a rate that I have tried to hold them up with skewers.

What will I find when we get there? Not growth like this, I am sure. I can only hope that the slugs have left me something.

I was suddenly gripped last night by one of those panics. Three weeks from today I should be in CT, and the wedding will be over.

Thank God for the Internet. This morning I have ordered from Artyarns the skein of Lang Jawoll Silk I will need to finish the pair of socks which have been designated as airplane knitting. I located it long ago, but never actually got around to ordering. I have also booked my husband’s rail ticket to London, for Wednesday the 22nd, and bought from Amazon a copy of “How to Beat Your Dad at Chess” which I hope to work on in Strathardle with my Greek grandsons next week.

So I feel a bit better.

FiberQat, thank you for your congratulations to Thomas-the-Elder. I am told that his picture will soon appear on the Chambers website, but it doesn’t seem to be there yet. He had to have one taken before the decision was known, striking the right note of youthful competence without overdoing it. I look forward to the result, and will let you know.

And don’t worry too much about my weight (yesterday’s comment) – the point here is that I have been following a maintenance diet ever since Feb., not too hard, as Janet says. And weight has been coming off. I’m never hungry, or if I am, I eat, having given some thought in advance to laying in a stock of not-too-damaging snacks. A small tin of Green Giant sweetcorn, eaten straight from the tin, is a favourite. No calorie counting, no hunger, no bad temper (an under-reported side-effect of Real Dieting). It will be interesting to see what the final plateau is, weight-wise. I miss my cider sometimes, though.

But, hey! it’s Sunday!

Knitting

Don’t worry, FiberQat, the Princess will be finished, and soon, although little was done yesterday and less, probably, today, what with cider and the men’s tennis final. I zipped along with the cardigan sleeve yesterday. I hope I can finish the basic knitting this week in Strathardle. That will leave considerable making up and edging and perhaps collar-ing to be done.

One more thing for me to order might be the yarn for Cully’s Hat from Schoolhouse Press. The two knitting categories for the Games this year, you will remember, are Child’s Cardigan and Knitted Hat, and it might be fun to try that one. I am finding it extremely hard to keep two deadlines in mind at once. I don’t have to finish the cardigan before the wedding; I have grasped that. But how much time does that leave? The Fourth Saturday of August is on the 22nd this year.

That’s any minute now.

Happy Fourth, everybody. As a general rule of life, I much prefer it not to be a holiday, but as holidays go, the 4th of July is a good one. You don’t have to love anybody, or buy them anything, or even cook for them. And there are fireworks.

Tennis

That was disappointing. I had been looking forward to sipping tomorrow’s cider as I watched him lose to Federer. I wonder again, as I did when he went out to Nadal last year, whether he’ll ever get quite to the top. He’s very, very good – but, great?

Rachel’s younger son Joe is working at Wimbledon – a rich source of temporary employment for the young of south London. (Joe is third from the left, in the bright blue sweatshirt, in the Grandchildren picture in my sidebar. He has just finished his first year at Nottingham University reading politics.) His job, as far as I understand it, is handing out champagne and canapés in one of the hospitality suites. He phoned in some excitement last night to say that he had met Virginia Wade, and she’s very nice.

Next time I see him, we'll be in CT. Joe is to be a groomsman at the wedding.

My blameless life

A new landmark at this morning’s weigh-in. I started off, you will remember, at x stone 12. This morning, I reached w and one-half stone: w stone 6 ¾, to be precise. (There are 14 pounds in a stone.) I think it is now permissible to say that I’ve lost 20 pounds, especially as the regime began on Ash Wednesday, a week before the weigh-ins started. No-one seems to have noticed, but the results are beginning to be very slightly perceptible.

The profile view in the bedroom mirror remains unappetising, but no longer terrifying. Waistbands have eased. There’s less of an obstacle between me and my shoelaces.

If I can continue to live blamelessly (lo-cider, no sugar, careful with the fat) forever, and I don’t see why not, really, I might hope to dispatch another 10 pounds. Below that looms scrawniness.

I wonder how QueerJoe is getting on? He reported a 10-pound loss in early April, using McKenna’s book and an MP3 player, but hasn’t mentioned the subject since.

Knitting

Interesting what you say about the Kinloch Anderson jabot, Tamar. I must get out there and have a look. I went ahead and ordered a skein of Cashsilk yesterday – if I can’t knit with it (cf Franklin and that DMC cotton) I can revert to the leftover Gossamer Merino from the Princess.

I’m halfway through the penultimate edging repeat. I could finish today, I suppose. I don’t want to.

I also got a cardigan sleeve started during yesterday’s tennis. I mean to take it along when we go to Strathardle next week, and this time I mean to knit.

“Pshaw!” I remarked yesterday to my fishmonger. “World No. 1 and I have never heard of her? Venus will blow her away.”

Mr Bee begged to differ, but I think he may have had Safina mixed up with the beautiful and formidable Dementieva. (You couldn’t make up a name like that.)

One of the many things I like about the Williams sisters is the slight air they have, in those little interviews, of finding the whole thing rather ridiculous.

I didn’t get to watch much yesterday – my husband abhors all sport except the most boring one of all, the Boat Race. And besides, he won’t go out if I don’t totter along with him, and he needs the exercise. And besides, again, there were things that needed doing in town. Today is another matter. Providentially, we’ve got to wait in for the delivery of some computer paper.

Knitting went well yesterday, too. I did a repeat and a bit of the Princess edging – only two rows and two repeats to go. And finished the body of the Child’s Cardigan, back and fronts, this time with the shaping correctly placed. The most we can hope for today is to cast on a sleeve.

I think the next thing to do is to order some Cashsilk and start messing around with jabot-design. Clearly, there is no single way to do it. The set (jabot and cuffs) offered by Kinloch Anderson looks particularly fruity.

Big news on the family front: Thomas-the-Elder has finished his Pupillage at 4 New Square and become a full-scale barrister with a tenancy there. I don’t know what most of those words mean, but I know that this is a major event. No more hurdles to leap. Now he just has to win cases.

In some haste – all well here. Mr Murray won, and briskly enough that he had all yesterday evening to recover, as well as all day today. (In the Good Old Days, even the players at the top went on out to the outer courts and played doubles after their singles matches. Today’s breed must be a feebler lot.) But Mr Federer also won briskly, looking more dentist-like than ever. I don’t see how Murray can beat him – although he has done it in the past.

The whole nation is involved in this. It’s rather sweet. The Queen is here in Edinburgh doing various boring things, but it was reported that she got home to Holyrood Palace yesterday afternoon in time to watch the match.

I have, for the moment, finished my struggles with the Palm. I think it might be a good idea to bring it back for a file-squirting session once a week or so, just to keep it on its toes.

Knitting has been slow, but not entirely neglected. I discovered last night that I had put the neck shaping on the armhole edge of the first front of the cardigan. Blame Wimbledon. I remember doing exactly the same thing on a v-necked school sweater for Alexander in Leicester in the 1970’s. What you see here is the second front finished, and the first one taken back to the point where I must try again. The yarn is fine, crisp stuff, easy to pick up.

It'll be fatter and shorter after blocking.

But I will also press on with the Princess. I sat down just now to finish the 4th-repeat-from-the-end, but my hands got too sweaty to proceed after six rows. I’ll be back.

Don’t miss Helen C.R.S.’ account of a wonderful day at Woolfest.

The Palm is back in operation – for the moment. Again, thanks for advice and sympathy.

As I said on Monday, I tried deleting everything from Documents to Go and starting again, letting it create “handheld versions” of each file as we went along. That seemed to be helping, but it wasn’t enough.

So I took a deep breath and deleted everything from the Palm. But instead of squirting files into the empty space, Documents to Go found ghostly copies of the deleted files there, and declared itself surprised and pained before aborting the HotSync.

So I thought of doing a hard reset of the Palm and starting again from scratch. Couldn’t figure out how to do it. But I did figure out how to delete “Documents” from it, and off it went, taking its ghostly files with it. Then I reinstalled it, and now we’re in business. When I have re-introduced another 80 to 100 files to Documents to Go -- it's slow work -- and done another HotSync, we’ll be back to where we should have been on Sunday afternoon.

Another little crisis yesterday evening when I caught my foot in some of the Palm wiring under the desk – it plugs in to the electric socket as well as into the computer -- and pulled it to the floor during a HotSync – and then couldn’t re-establish the connection.

I knew that the computer knew the Palm was there, because it gave that little two-note sound it gives whenever I pushed or cancelled the HotSync button. But Documents to Go stood there with its arms folded across its chest and refused to acknowledge it. I solved that one by re-booting the computer.

So I feel pretty pleased with myself, although this doesn’t explain what went wrong in the first place.

Cathairinmyknitting, it sounds as if the “Treo” you mention may be the new version of the Palm I discovered on the internet. It sounds great.

Lisa, I have a kludgy Palm of my own, the gift of a dear knitting friend who was upgrading to something more Third Millennium. I simply love it. Like you, I never try to HotSync it, for fear, in my case, of confusing the computer which needs to keep its mind on my husband’s one. It is especially useful for information which I need to write down and remember and know where I put the note – the name of the new woman at Cr*ft of Dounie who grows vegetable plants for sale, seed ideas for next year, books I read reviews of and want to remember, the opening hours, month by month, of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Edinburgh; all manner of things.

Well, this is supposed to be about knitting. I’m down to the last four (rather like the tennis) Princess edging repeats. I think I am dragging my feet a bit, for fear of finishing. We hope to go to Strathardle next Tuesday for a last wallow in solitude, silence and squalor before the summer invasion. I think I will aim to have the Princess finished by then, the lace grafting done and that moth hole mended. Then I can think about blocking: can space be found here? Or will it have to be done there?

Meanwhile I have finished one front of the cardigan and made a good start on the top part of the second. I like it a lot – but will the judges think it too big? I am aiming for an 11 ½-year-old granddaughter, and I think it’ll fit well. But it looks more small-adult than child when smoothed out on the floor.

I have plugged the Palm into the USB port usually reserved for the camera – so no illustrations until the current phase of that eternal job is finished.

Well. I couldn’t have knit a garter stitch scarf during that match. But does Mr Murray have anything left for the rest of the week? Mr Federer, au contraire, sets about his work rather like our dentist, calm and supremely skilful, without any needless expenditure of energy.

I adore the Williams sisters, but I think I can relax today and let them get on with things without my help.

Hat, I remembered Virginia Wade after I posted yesterday. Yes, indeed. By an interesting coincidence, my husband was greatly smitten with her, too, although he never got any closer than the wrong side of a television screen.

Tamar and Mary Lou, I am grateful for your sympathy as I struggle with my husband’s Palm and Documents-to-Go. I failed yesterday after a considerable time-consuming struggle, although I think I may be making progress and I have a couple more ideas for today. Mary Lou, important question: how does a Blackberry change things? Can you email files to it from a desktop? Does it run a word processor?

The idea behind this wretched Palm of ours – and a good one – is to have an easily-pocketable device which can be taken along to libraries when matters of detail are being checked. There in your hand, instead of endless print-outs, is the whole thing. You can see what you’ve written and what you need to discover.

The intention was never for anyone to read the Palm version, although there was once when my husband’s publisher was here – this was in the days before the Kindle – and I went into the study to get them for lunch just as my husband was showing off the Palm, and the publisher saying, “Tell you what, H*mish – we won’t publish it, we’ll just give everyone one of these.” The day may come.

One of the things I regret about the Modern World is the death of the computer manual. It was a form of literature I used to adore. I am sure if I had a Palm manual and a Documents to Go manual which I could take into the bath with me, I could work things out in a trice. The Palm manual is available in .pdf format, and for Documents to Go there is only wretched Help. It’s not the same.

You’ll have gathered that not much knitting was done yesterday. Still, I did most of a Princess edging repeat, and the left front of the cardigan has nearly reached the neck shaping. Progress. There was an article in the Scotsman yesterday about Kinloch Anderson which has solidified my intention of going to see them to study a jabot.

Not much knitting done yesterday, either, but at least I have finished the back and embarked on one of the fronts of the cardigan, and knit a pleasant six rows of Princess border this morning.

So largely non-knit today.

Tennis

I tend not to get excited about affronts to one sex or the other, but I have been much struck with repeated assertions in the press that if Mr Murray should win Wimbledon this week (and he’s got a long way to go), it would be the first British win since Fred Perry in 1936. It would not. Ann Jones of Birmingham, a neighbour of ours at the time – although not an acquaintance – won it, and I think there may have been another English woman winner since the war. Ann Jones beat Billie Jean King in the final – a victory worth having.

I love the Wimbledon fortnight, but I also tend not to get excited about the latest British player, of either sex. Mr Murray is an exception. Four years ago, when he first made his mark on Wimbledon, the First Saturday coincided with my first cataract operation. I was concerned, throughout the operation, with the need to get back to the ward where I could, if not watch, at least listen to the tennis. Murray won his first two sets that day, and lost the next three. Our parallel ordeals created a bond (at least on my side) which persists.

Last year I thought, he’s never going to make it, he’s too scrawny. I gather his mentors thought the same thing, and have prescribed body building.

Documents to Go

One of my tasks in life is to keep a version of my husband’s magnum opus up to date on a Palm. The filter program, which can take files from Microsoft Word and massage them and squirt them into the Palm, is called Documents to Go. It won’t (in the version we have) do footnotes or endnotes, so part of my responsibility is to copy the endnotes for each file into the real text, and also insert real numbers for them.

I’ve got a bit behindhand with my husband’s recent revisions lately, and have resolved to do better. Yesterday I attempted a “hot sync” to bring us up to date, or nearer up to date than we were, and I failed. The program gets a certain way and then aborts, complaining that there are too many files.

I know how it feels (there are hundreds), but that’s silly. There are just as many files as there were last time – it’s only that some of them need to be updated.

So I am struggling. I am proceeding at the moment on a version of the old solution of turning it off and then on again – deleting all the files from Documents to Go, and re-identifying them to the program. It’s slow work, as each one is laboriously converted into a “handheld version”.

A 2009 version of Documents to Go will do footnotes – but it needs a 2009 Palm to squirt them into. We may be forced into that solution.

I didn’t knit much yesterday – scared to finish the Princess? – but I find that the back of the cardigan is only ½” short of the desired length this morning, so today should see one of the fronts well advanced. It’s cider-on-Sunday again (with a good weigh-in this morning) so I’ll leave the Princess altogether alone.

Janet, what I meant was that my husband deserves a knitter-wife with a thoroughly scholarly and inquiring approach to the subject, not one prepared to bash ahead with designing and knitting a jabot without even considering the historical dimension. Tamar, I think that anybody who marries anybody is going to learn a whole lot by experience. Enthusiasm sweeps us along or we’d none of us dare embark upon it.

The piper at yesterday’s Drummond Place Garden Party used to wear a jabot, he said, but he found it uncomfortable and gave up. His wife, an efficient and reliable woman, is going to set about looking for it and failing that, make enquiries among friends. She is sceptical about whether knitting can produce a suitable fabric, and said it would have to be something of wedding-ring-shawl fineness. Precisely. And I don’t believe that Cashsilk would be uncomfortable.

I went back to Christine Duchrow and find that, with Judy Gibson’s help, I think I could make a stab at one of her jabot patterns if I tried. The English introduction to the books says that it’s going to be tough, and that you have to be prepared to rip – mentioning the additional hazard of mistakes in the patterns themselves. The editor then says cheerfully that unravelling knitting is easy – unlike weaving. Another example of life’s interesting tendency to converge, for this echoes your interesting comment on Penelope’s tapestry, Tamar.

Helen C.K.S. mentions that the forthcoming “Reversible Knitting” book, of which I had been dimly aware, is by Lynn Barr who wrote “Knitting New Scarves”. That I hadn’t grasped, and it puts the new book in the must-have class.

Four and three-quarters top edging repeats to go – I’m going to miss my Princess dreadfully. It’s almost a different craft from other knitting.

Much of my internal monologue yesterday was accordingly devoted to jabot-knitting. My husband says I should go to the Museum of Scotland and get them to show me the ones (if any) in their collection. My husband has a strong tendency in this direction – to set the initial hurdle for a project not impossibly high, but high enough that the whole thing is likely to remain un-done. Enterprises of great pitch and moment with this regard their currents turn awry, and lose the name of action.

However, in this case I am confident of my ground. I don’t care how Bonnie Prince Charlie wore a jabot. I want to know how a modern one is shaped, and how a modern gent attaches it to his neck. The difficulty – and it’s bad enough, as difficulties go – is that I’ve got to visit Kinloch Anderson. And Kinloch Anderson have moved out to Leith, which might as well be in the Western Isles these days. Because the City Fathers are tearing the city apart, slowly, to install trams in it, and the road between here and Leith has been in a state of terrible upheaval for months.

Edinburgh is stuffed with silly kilt shops, of course, but K.A. is the only one I think I could trust in this matter.

However, I had a thought just now. Today is the day of the annual Drummond Place Garden Party. A neighbour usually plays the pipes. He won’t be wearing full fig, it would be inappropriate, but he will be wearing a kilt and it’s worth asking him, in the quiet intervals while he’s drawing breath – does he own a jabot? Does he know anyone around here who has one? I’ll do it.

I got Christine Duchrow out last night, and sank down in despair. I doubt if I’ll ever manage to knit one of her patterns. “In order to knit one of these patterns, you need to find all of its parts,” Judy Gibson begins. On the other hand, I can look at the pictures; I can fire up Stitch and Motif Maker and start sketching some ideas for a roughly trianguloid piece of lace, and I can swatch it in the sample of Cashsilk which Sharon sent with my recent purchase of the Queen Ring Shawl pattern.

The Faculty Meeting Knitter knit her Princess in Cashsilk, and I think Sharon used it for the prototype of the Queen Ring shawl.

Sharon has written an absolutely fascinating letter to the Yahoo Heirloom Knitting Group this morning, quoting at length from “Harley Radington”, a novel by Dorothea Primrose Campbell, 1821. It describes the practice of knitting, and Shetland costume, in what sounds like highly authentic detail – from the time before lace knitting took off. Tamar, maybe you’d better join the group just to read it. It’s more historical than many of the posts to the HistoricKnit group.

Sharon is a serious scholar of Shetland knitting, as well as a serious technician when it comes to understanding how a particular piece of lace was constructed. My husband should have married her

What Housework? has a good post on happiness this morning – and a good idea for sowing peas. I, too, grow a low variety of real peas (in addition to high-climbing mange-touts) – why leave room for weeds between the rows? I’ll remember that, next year.

Mary Lou, thank you for the kind words about the Princess. (I hugely enjoyed your Twittery account of your day, posted on June 9.) I’m very happy with the present scheme – one repeat of the edging pattern, then on to the cardigan. I do best with the edging when I’m reasonably fresh. Of late (except for yesterday) it has been going remarkably smoothly, no little tink’s or presences or absences of unaccountable stitches. The cardigan is perfect for tiredness and cider-on-Sunday.

I’ve thought of a niggle – uncharacteristically perfectionist, for me. At the end, I am supposed to lace-graft the edging I’m knitting to the original first row. Surely it would be a good idea, therefore, to finish with row 19 and try to create row 20 with the grafting? That has the additional advantage of having the working yarn at the outside edge when the grafting starts. Maybe I’ll post a query to the Heirloom Knitting group about this. There has been a certain amount of correspondence about finishing the Princess and lace-grafting, but I don’t remember anyone touching on this point.

Here’s the current state of the cardigan – not all that far from the upper edge of the back. The new Schoolhouse Press adult-baby-child (ABC) Surprise pattern includes, amidst much else, the possibility of an i-cord bind-off, new to me, I think. I will leave the shoulder stitches live, with that as a possibility. Or at least a three-needle bind-off, an effect I love.

The Faculty Meeting Knitter (she who recently finished her Princess) has introduced me, virtually speaking, to Yarn Market’s Impressionist Collection. Golly. Life is definitely too short.

A good day yesterday, generally.

I got my thing at auction – Theo and Jenni’s wedding present, after two previous ideas had come to nothing. I had your message before I left the house, Dawn, and it added a spring to my step.

Auctioneers – you probably know this – print an estimate for each item in their catalogues, a range of prices (£8-£10, shall we say) in which they think the final bid will fall. It doesn’t commit anybody to anything; it’s just a guide.

In this case, I had to get my prize at or below the bottom rung of the estimate. Beyond that, it would be too dear. Yesterday’s auctioneer was either selling a great many things to bidders who weren’t present but had left bids (that’s common), or else she was withdrawing items which didn’t reach their reserve – the minimum price specified by the seller. Not all items have reserves. The bidder doesn’t know.

She would name a price, for item after item, and if she didn’t get a bid, instead of asking for a lower bid, she’d knock it down (a technical term) at that price, and move on. You don’t have to worry about her going to bed hungry – some items went to two or three times the top estimate. When my one came up, she named a price below the estimate, I bid – still below the estimate – and that was that. She knocked it down to me.

We’re terribly pleased with it; we could always give Theo and Jenni a food mixer.

You understood the situation with the charges aright, Tamar. I must have been unusually lucid. 25% was added to the amount I bid – that sum went straight into the auctioneer’s pocket. Then 17.5% was charged on that premium as value-added tax. The item itself was untaxed, presumably because of age or pre-ownership. The auctioneer will have charged the seller a percentage of the hammer price, as well.

Now that that considerable anxiety has been resolved, it is time to make and start executing a final list: shoes, tights, hair, restraining undergarment, US currency, jacket.

On top of that success, the weather was good (and is so again today) so the external painting is moving on at a fair clip; and I lined up a remorselessly efficient local woman to clean the Strathardle house before Helen gets here.

And as for knitting, here’s the Princess, with 7 ¼ repeats of the top edging left to go. I wonder if Penelope, after Odysseus came home and disposed of her suitors, went back and finished that tapestry?

I finally sat down to the accumulated mail yesterday and discovered a letter from Mr G., inviting me to his son Alexander’s funeral last Saturday. It is a good thing we meet in the street on Monday, so that he knows my absence wasn’t due to indifference. Today is osteoporosis-pill-day and I spent my half-hour (no food, no drink, remain upright) writing to them. The sort of thing one often intends but can’t always trust oneself to carry through on.

Today’s excitement – for it’s all go, around here – is the initiation of the painting of our outside woodwork, window frames and front door, and my appearance at a local auction house. The item we want will almost certainly be priced beyond our means, but these are hard times, and you never know. The auctioneer imposes a buyer’s premium at twenty-five percent so I have had to do some preliminary arithmetic to know how much I will actually be spending if I bid, say, £5. (£6.25 – plus VAT at 17.5% on £1.25. The mind boggles, just when steadiness is needed.)

I must get there in time to get my paddle (for bidding with) and settle down and calm down and start knitting, before our number comes up.

I had a grand time lunching yesterday with Helen C.K.S. and the Fishwife. We didn’t even talk about knitting much, except that Helen is about to buy Sally Melville’s “Mother-Daughter Knits”. I’ve got the rest of Melville’s books, and like them a lot although I don’t think I’ve ever knit anything from one of them. I tend to avoid books of patterns these days unless there’s a reason – but Helen says this one is strong on how-to-adjust-sizing. Maybe that, and Melville’s name, is enough of a reason.

That happy pair, Helen and the Fishwife, are going to Woolfest on Saturday.

And the Fishwife gave me three tomato plants – different varieties. Here they are on the doorstep in yesterday's sunshine:

I have never grown tomatoes, and am excited about this. Here, while we are at it, are the rest of the doorstep vegetables. The herb garden:

and a courgette called “Midnight”:

It is a new cultivar from Thompson and Morgan, billed as being sufficiently compact to grow in a pot on one’s patio. We shall see. So far, I’m unimpressed. The plant you see is the sole survivor of six seeds, three sown indoors and three, directly in the pot. It’s not that I chose the best one – this was the only one. However, it looks cheerful enough at the moment.

As for actual knitting, I did my edging repeat on the Princess yesterday, and decided that the cardigan was at last 12” long and so divided it and am knitting the back at what feels like great speed. It’s good Wimbledon knitting.

Alexander G. is dead. I wrote about him here on May 14. I met his father in the street yesterday. Alexander got better from all the things that were wrong, was discharged from hospital and came home, and died in his sleep a couple of days later, 42 days old. So after all that roller coaster of joy and anxiety and hope and despair, his grieving parents had to see him subjected to a post mortem.

I told Mr G about Helen and David’s eldest son Oliver. He died at much the same age. He would have been 14 this year. All I could say was, time helps.

The funeral was on Saturday. Mr G has observed how people at work avoid him because they don’t know what to say. He’s a nice man.

Non-knit

Today is, by local standards, an occasion of wild excitement. First, I must get my husband across town to the Royal Infirmary for a routine respiratory-test appointment. Even in youth, he was not an easy man to activate in the morning. Now that blood-testing and insulin-injecting and pill-popping have been added to the routine, and putting shoes on is hard work, things move – to put it mildly – even more slowly.

Then I am going out to lunch with Helen C.K.S. and the Fishwife. The latter is a formidable vegetable-grower and I have a number of questions to put to her.

Culinary tip: Pakistani mangoes are in season. With most fresh fruit and vegetables, one does better for price and freshness at the supermarket, in a depressing sort of way. For the mangoes, head for a corner shop. I have seen them at Waitrose, half the size and twice the price. The London Street Grocery on the corner of Broughton Street has some particularly yummy ones, if you don’t have a corner shop of your own. There are mangoes and mangoes: insist on Pakistani.

I just tried “supererogation” on Microsoft Word. It recognises it as a correctly-spelled word – but it can’t correct “superogation”.

Knitting

I did my statutory repeat of the Princess edging yesterday. It seems to be progressing rather slowly, although the end is tantalizingly near.

And I knit onwards, with the Child’s Cardigan. It is at a stage which every knitter must have encountered, when it refuses to grow. I lay it flat and smooth it out and measure after every stripe, and it always measures 11". I’m aiming at 12". No doubt, one day soon, it will be 13 ¼". Apart from that idiosyncrasy, I like it a lot.



The new Knitter’s turned up yesterday, the more welcome for being unexpected. I sort of like Rick’s Cumbria jacket, although not his choice of colours. And Sine-Cosine looks fun, once one peers very, very closely at the picture.

The longest day plus one – it’s all over for another year.

We’re back, tired. No frost, I think, or only the lightest touch on the tip of one twig of the apple tree. But cold. Midges and rain, one expects at the summer solstice; I don’t think I’ve ever known it so cold.

The tenderest vegetables, courgettes and French beans, just stood there looking somewhat yellow. I feared that they had had such a check to growth that they wouldn’t be able to pull themselves together when warm weather came.

But a week is a long time in summer gardening – they seemed a bit more cheerful and even a bit bigger by the end of it. It rained like mad, at last – they liked that.

I devoted most of my time and strength to disentangling grass and weeds from the wire fence intended to deter the less adventurous rabbit. With the result that the tout ensemble is looking unusually tidy – not that that makes much difference to the vegetables.

There is no doubt that slugs are on the move in abundance – nematodes have not checked them this year. I think they must be making off with my constantly re-sown lettuces and, indeed, salsola soda. I discovered that Mrs D. at the Cr*ft of Dounie is selling plants she has grown – a new venture, and they are very well grown indeed.

I bought some of her lettuces, to make up for my failures. The slugs killed the weakest one promptly, and started in on the next. I am sorry to have to report that I reached for the pellets at last. I have re-sown salsola soda for the third time, and sprinkled slug pellets generously over the spot.

(I don't think plastic water bottles are much use against slugs -- they tunnel up from below.)

The peas and broad beans and potatoes, meanwhile, grow as cheerfully as if they preferred cool weather. Which they do. French beans in the foreground.

The climbing beans aren't doing much climbing, but they're still alive. The nasturtiums are to provide capers, and cheerfulness.



I didn’t do much knitting, after all. But some. The Child’s Cardigan should reach the armpits today, back and fronts knitted as one. I’ve done a repeat and a bit of the Princess border since we got back. The pattern begins to slip after even so short a break. I’m glad I was persuaded not to put it away.

Non-knit

Sir Fred Goodwin has given up several million pounds-worth of his pension -- don't worry; he's still got lots -- in order, it is said, to achieve what we’ve got: namely the chance to live peacefully in this beautiful city without being spat upon by neighbours. (He is currently in the South of France under heavy guard.) I doubt if he’ll pull it off, either – too many of us are RBS shareholders whom he has impoverished. So, count your blessings.

Last night my husband wanted to use the word “superogatory”. Checking both Webster’s and the Shorter Oxford, he couldn’t find it. “Here, let me…” but I couldn’t either. I typed it in to the computer and swiftly learned – I can see you smiling up your sleeve – that it is really “supererogatory”. I was puzzled when I was a child and they told me that you looked words up in a dictionary to find out how to spell them. How could you look a word up if you didn’t know how to spell it in the first place? Fifty years later, it would appear that I was right.

Isn’t it wonderful how life sometimes fits together?

I am at this very moment printing out Pandaman’s st st version of the baby surprise, the link that Tamar supplied earlier in the week. I thought I ought to have it for the archives, to be kept with the Schoolhouse Press Surprise leaflet.

It involves double decreases on some of the purl rows.

And only yesterday I read another brilliant blog entry by Fleegle – about purl decreases, including a centered double purl decrease so marvellously simple that I think it should henceforth be known as a Fleegle.

As far as my Surprise is concerned, however, I will adopt Fleegle’s own advice: “My favorite method, not described here in detail, is to avoid patterns that require me to do this.” I.e., my own Surprise, as I said yesterday, will be in the original garter stitch for weight, since I am committed to sock yarn.

I polished off another repeat of the Princess yesterday, and again counted ahead to the end, trying to count the links in the chained border edge in groups of ten, because each repeat eliminates ten of them. I got the same answer, that at the end I will finish a repeat with four links still to go. I think I will skip a link on the very next repeat.

Vegetable-growing

We’re going to Strathardle today, for a whole week if we can stand it. I should be back in position by Monday the 22nd at the latest. Will I find all those poor little beans flattened by frost? I’ll take the cardigan along – it’s perfect tired-gardener knitting, and I hope to bring it back in a nearly-finished state.

Beth, the seedbed roll: we had a mini heat wave with drought in May (I suspect that was our summer). When we got to Strathardle for our two-nighter early last week, I found the earth very dry. I think I carried more water in those two days than I did all the previous summer. It’s heavy stuff.

The one instruction for the seedbed roll is, “keep watered”. I think that’s all it was. The seeds dried up at a crucial stage.

Knitterguy asked how I was getting on with square-foot gardening. The answer, it’s still there, in rather diminished form this year. Maybe I’ll have another look at the texts when I re-join my gardening library later today. One of my “raised beds” was devoted to the seedbed roll, and we know what happened to that. The other is at the moment half square-feet and half rows. A square foot is not quite enough for spinach, so I put in a row of that, the length of the bed. That’s the spinach that bolted before it was big enough to harvest, another victim, I think, of the mini-drought. And a row of salsola soda. Ha.

The square feet aren’t doing much, so far. That’s where the salad things are meant to be, and they simply haven't come up.

Here is a recent picture of Alexander’s vegetables on the shores of Loch Fyne, just to show what can be achieved if you put your mind to it.

Here we are, and all’s well.

Laser eye treatment is not fun, but not so painful that one would be forced to blurt out the codes, if one were a spy being tortured. I was determined to tell the dr about my improved cholesterol, whether he was interested or not. I needn’t have worried – he cast but a glance at my papers and said, “What about the cholesterol?” in the tone of a man asking, “When am I going to see that essay?” So the new, satisfactory level and the fact that it was achieved with “diet” have been recorded.

When I left he said that I wasn’t to read or watch television for the rest of the day. I extrapolated from that, “…or turn the computer on, or knit.” What was I supposed to do? Housework? I spent the day in bed, drifting in and out of sleep and listening to blessed Radio 4 and sustaining myself with sips of cider. In the evening when the effect of the drops had worn off I allowed myself to work on the Child’s Cardigan. The ribbing is finished, and the rib-to-body increases, and I can do it pretty well with my eyes shut.

I am delighted with its progress, and with the feel of the yarn and the fabric. This is the back and fronts being done together. I have included a seam stitch on either side. I think the line of one of them can just be discerned, on the left. The result is going to be pretty colourful:



On Monday, before all this happened, I went ahead and ordered yarn for an Adult Surprise for myself, from Angelika. She seems to specialise in Lorna’s Laces, and her website inspires confidence. Some of them don’t.

There didn’t seem to be any of Franklin’s Panopticon in sport weight, and only one skein in sock weight. So I got that: and some Amy’s Vintage Office – that’s the Curmudgeon’s yarn; I love the look of it, and the idea. And some Roadside Gerry – that’s Annie’s, of course. I keep remembering it as "Gerry's Roadkill" and have to look up its real name every time. And single skeins of several others – Envy, to pick up the yellowy-green element in Franklin’s yarn; Mother Lode and Tuscany and Andersonville; and some Charcoal to hold them all together. Far too much. It should be waiting for me in CT next month.

A sock-weight garter stitch jacket will be a good weight, and will take a lot of knitting. I will certainly centre the decreases.

I pressed on the with Princess yesterday, with my recovered eyes. I have finished edging the centre, and ended at a point in the edging pattern not at all where I had calculated I should end. Did I get it backwards, and increase the rate of picking up stitches where I should have slowed down? Whatever, I got it wrong, and the footwork to make things come out even will now have to be done on the second border edge. An informal assessment suggests that I’ll have to skip over four pick-ups, somewhere or other. That should be manageable.

The car got its certificate needing only new wiper blades. Last year and the year before were far more painful.

There are some interesting questions in recent comments about my vegetable-growing : tomorrow.

A peaceful and successful knitting day yesterday. I finished another repeat of the Princess centre; cast on the new version of the Child’s Cardigan (all in one piece) and made good progress with the ribbing. Picture soon. I love the way the yarn feels in my hands: that augurs well. And Sweater Wizard includes an estimate of how much yardage will be needed. If it's right, I’ve got plenty. I worry a lot on that front – so that’s a comfort.

I am touched at your sadness for the poor Surprise, Janet. But as with most experience, it may not be wasted. I am still churning thoughts around in my mind for Life After the Princess: a jabot for James, a jacket for myself incorporating Panopticon yarn (Adult Surprise? Round the Bend?), another couple of months, like last year, devoted to sock knitting.

I learned from the aborted Surprise that a worsted weight yarn will be too heavy for a jacket for myself. It’ll have to be Sport or even Sock. I also learn, from a trawl just now, that Franklin’s yarn isn’t all that easy to come by. Even Angelika seems to be running low.

I won’t be here tomorrow. The eye appointment is early, by my choice: it gets it out of the way, for me; and finds the doctor at his early-morning best, or so I hope. I plan to come home and go to bed with a bottle of cider.

On Wednesday the car must go in for its annual health check – I only just realised that it is due. That appointment is even earlier, but -- assuming for the moment that I can see to drive, on Wednesday -- I should be back here and typing away before the morning is too far advanced.

If not, see you on Thursday.

Sober Sunday

The Tempter has suggested that since (a) I have lost a stone so far this year and (b) laser eye surgery is a relatively rare event, I could afford some cider both today and on Tuesday. I resisted. Likewise, I rose above his suggestion, referred to yesterday, of not swatching for my new attempt at a Child’s Cardigan.

Here, first of all, is the Surprise, on its way to the stash cupboard. Good riddance.



Here is the pile of Lorna’s Laces Shepherd Sport which will, I hope, become a Child’s Cardigan.



Here is the swatch.

It was a useful exercise (surprise). I don’t think it’ll affect size calculations much – I haven’t taken a tape measure to it yet. And anyway, if it doesn’t fit one granddaughter, it’ll fit another. But swatching established that I like the suggested needle size, and like the fabric it produces. The idea, if it can be elevated to that status, is st st stripes separated by black garter stitch ridges. I prefer six-row stripes (top of swatch) to four-row ones (bottom).

The black is provided by some Jaeger Matchmaker DK which happened to be about. It is slightly heavier than sport weight. I don’t think that will matter in the body of the cardigan, but I have decided, as a result of swatching, to do the ribbing in Lorna’s Laces.

In real life, the stripes will be different colours. I don’t have enough of any one.

I don’t see why I shouldn’t [famous last words, those] – why I shouldn’t knit the body in one piece to the underarms. It’ll do away with a lot of loose ends. I hope to cast on today, on that assumption.

Miscellaneous

Meanwhile, the Princess top edging continues to edge forward. Two recent landmarks: I have embarked on the last bunch of 50 stitches from the centre, and I have finished the original purchase of Gossamer Merino and joined in the auxiliary ball I bought recently. I don’t think there is any detectable difference.

Miriam Pittenger has launched a blog about her Princess and other adventures. I signed up as a follower just now, and Google chose to illustrate me, not with the usual back-view-on-the-front-step picture, but with one of Mungo, Archie and Fergus Drake of Athens.

Thanks, everybody, for advice on keeping those lines straight in Surprises. I’ve knit the baby version half a dozen times at least. I suspect that on most of them, I centered the decreases. I’m sure that on at least one, the line wavers. I agree with Janet and Stash Haus that markers are the answer. I had one that came after the Crucial Stitch on right-side -- that is, action -- rows. It involved a certain amount of to-ing and fro-ing with stitches and marker every time I got there on a decrease row, but it worked.

Until I carelessly removed it while unpicking a whole row. I was able to relocate the Crucial Stitch while I was still in decrease mode, but when the same thing happened in the increase section, I was flummoxed.

A distressing day on the knitting front.

I have continued to be dissatisfied with the Child’s Surprise, even in its ripped-back, re-started and improved version. Yesterday I abandoned it, and felt as one does half way through an exam when one realises one has attempted the wrong questions, or half-an-hour before a dinner party when you suddenly grasp that the recipe is too complicated.

I think I know what the replacement will be, after some frantic thinking and stash-searching. I am well-endowed with Lorna’s Laces in various beautiful shades of Shepherd Sock. I’ll ask the Sweater Wizard for a striped pattern, using the information on the ball band for gauge. Hope to cast on today.

What was wrong with the Surprise? Well, to begin with, the beautiful Fyberspates yarn is the wrong colour for a child’s cardigan. Secondly, garter stitch is demanding. I tried to keep up a rhythm and to think peaceful thoughts, but it kept looking like My First Potholder. Blocking would have helped, of course.

But the clincher was when I lost track of the Marked Stitch last night.

On my first attempt – the one I ripped out on May 31 – I centered the decreases, and purled the vital stitch on the wrong side. That makes it dead easy to follow the line and also, incidentally, makes the stitch itself sweep consistently on from the decrease section into the one where you are increasing on either side of it.

But EZ is emphatic about an uncentered decrease (slip 1, k2tog, psso), and can be very dictatorial for a woman so scornful of Blind Followers. So this time I did it her way, and it was my undoing

I had finished the first assignment: cast on 9K, decrease 4 stitches every other row down to 5K. I had started increasing back up to 9K. Then I carelessly increased on a wrong-side row. In trying to unpick and remedy the mistake, I found I had lost hold and couldn’t recover. In garter stitch, a stitch with an increase on either side of it is remarkably hard to follow the course of, or so I found it. I flung the whole thing aside with a wild cry.

There’s still plenty of time. It’s still early June.

The camera battery needs to be charged. I cannot illustrate disaster for you today.

On a brighter note, the Christine Duchrow books I ordered from the Needle Arts bookshop turned up yesterday – and sure enough, there are jabot patterns. I have found two already. (Fortunately, “jabot” in German is “jabot”.)

There is an English introduction to each of the books, with a guide to the chart symbols. Also, Judy Gibson has posted some highly useful information which I have printed out. Was she one of the great names of the Knitlist in the ‘90’s? or am I thinking of Judy Sumner?

The designs are mostly – obviously, not exclusively – doilies. They are beautiful. I would never knit a doily anyway, and contemplating them, I fear they would have to be knit perfectly. I couldn’t do that. My Princess – and, incidentally, I did a repeat yesterday – sweeps the eye of the beholder on with her sheer size, but is full of small mistakes.

Non-knit

I had some automated security calls yesterday -- a new experience for me -- from James’s credit card company. In the course of subsequent emails to and from Beijing, I discovered that the charges under suspicion were perfectly all right, and one of them was for a Kindle. He is about to spend some time in Washington working on an Economist special on Sino-American relations and hopes to find a Kindle waiting at his hotel. Foreign books are laborious and expensive to acquire in China: it makes a lot of sense. And he has always loved gadgets. Maybe he’ll let me have a wee go on it, when we meet in CT in July.

Nature or knitting? Nature, I think. Knitting will keep. I worked on the Child’s Surprise while we were away, and made some progress. Today is the first real day of the New Scheme: work on the Princess until I have finished an edging repeat, then switch. We’ll see how it goes.

Nature Notes

The year took its Great Leap Forward during the ten days we were away. Instead of a struggle to coax it out of hibernation, it’s now all hands on deck to keep it under control.

The bats are back. They swoop silently and mysteriously about in the long, light night, after the birds have gone to sleep. We put up a nesting box for them years ago, high on the garage wall, with a cut-out bat on it to make its purpose clear, but they don’t use it.

The cuckoo, when it first turned up, uttered its characteristic call once or twice and then shut up. Now, it shouts interminably until one wishes someone would come out and shoot it. I wondered – is this fanciful? – whether it was singing to its children. Its interesting domestic arrangements mean that it is at leisure, while everyone else is working his or her feathers off feeding the nestlings. Does a cuckoo perch nearby? and sing to its child, “You’re not really a blackbird. Just wait. I’ll explain everything.”

We’ve had crows nesting in one of our chimneys the last two years. We don’t like them. Last winter we sent a man up a ladder to block access with wire netting. The crows turned up in the spring, bewildered and cross. But they continued to hang around, and we became increasingly suspicious. This time, there was no doubt – both of us heard the baby crows in the chimney, shouting for cheeseburgers. We have been outwitted.

Vegetables

More good news than bad. Start with the bad:

The seedbed roll is a complete failure, I think. The seeds have shrivelled up inside it. The first lesson of gardening is, don’t give up just yet, so I left most of it down and even watered it, but I begrudged it all that space so I dispensed with some and planted the seeds it was supposed to produce for me: carrots and beets and chard.

No salad stuff yet. I re-sowed, like our dentist.

No salsola soda, either, or very little. I am cherishing a few very small tufts of “chive-like leaves”, but they could turn out to be grass.

A promising row of spinach has gone to flower, only three inches high.

And the good:

Peas, broad beans and potatoes continue to flourish. Why do I bother trying to grow anything else? These are the mange-tout peas. There are some ordinary ones somewhere else, also doing well:

The transplanted courgettes have done splendidly in their plastic water bottles – they even have flower buds. The directly-sown ones have germinated abundantly.

The transplanted climbing beans, both runner and Cherokee Trail of Tears, look a bit shell-shocked, but they have survived transplanting, too. And the directly-sown ones are coming up nicely.

The French beans suffered the most from my injudicious exposure of them to the doorstep winds. Only three, at best, now survive. But the directly-sown ones are doing fine. I see from my notes that the one year I had a decent crop, they were sown in the open ground on June 6.


The Great Fear for the next ten days or so, is frost.

I’ve got the computer in radio-mode, about to listen to the President’s interview with the BBC.

We’ve decided on a mercy-dash to Strathardle today, for a two-nighter. We have to be back on Thursday, so that my husband can vote. So I should be here on Friday.

All went well, yesterday. The dentist has affixed what he called a “temporary crown”, although he’s put it in to stay. That was because the state of my remaining teeth didn’t justify the expense of a proper one. Oh, dear. But that’s fine with me – I was almost more worried about the time-consuming repeat appointments than the cost. And now I can smile.

(Mary Lou, I don’t understand how dentistry fits into the NHS. I know that it’s not entirely a successful arrangement. Some dentists are wholly private, like ours, others wholly NHS, some do a bit of both. It’s hard to find a good NHS dentist. Often, it’s hard to find an NHS dentist at all.)

Our dentist is a Dutchman, quiet, not exactly taciturn but his job is dentistry and he gets on with it. We think he is the best dentist in the world. But I discovered yesterday that a question to Mr van S. about his vegetables renders him positively chatty. He lives and gardens in Perth, not entirely irrelevant to Strathardle. He has had a lot of trouble this cold, wet spring with things that simply don’t come up. Just like me. Most encouraging.

And then, in the afternoon, I learned that my blameless life has reduced cholesterol to an entirely acceptable level, and most of that is “good” cholesterol. So no pills. I’ve got an appointment to have the wart frozen off. He said it was a straightforward, innocent wart.

All this charging about yesterday deprived the Princess of some of her time, but progress was made. 53 1/2 repeats of the top edging done. The centre stitches are waiting on lengths of yarn, in 50-stitch bunches. It works well. I have just finished the antepenultimate bunch – so seven repeats, more or less, will finish edging the centre, then there will be 13 or 14 on the second edge of the border. I am even giving a bit of preliminary thought to the footwork necessary to make the whole edging finish on a full repeat.

That bump between the centre and the border will smooth itself out sufficiently -- don't worry. It has also become obvious, only in the last couple of days, that I'm going to need that extra ball of yarn.

I will take the Surprise to Strathardle, and knit like mad with any strength left over from gardening, to justify Princess-time on our return.

So: did the runner beans, French beans, and courgettes survive being planted out? What about the seedbed roll? And the salsola soda? The excitement is almost too much.

(The interview with the President is over. He was good. And what should the following item on the famous “Today” programme be – just as I reached out to turn the sound off – but vegetable-growing!)

OK, so as planned I have ripped out the old Surprise Sweater and started it anew, with the thought of livening up the colours. I sat in the kitchen ripping and listening to Mr. Nadal losing his tennis match yesterday afternoon, and was a bit disconcerted at how much ripping was involved. Knitting it again will take a while. Still, I got it done and started over.

I was struck with how demanding garter stitch is. I found, after the first decrease row, that I was one stitch out in the placing of the decreases. That wouldn’t matter a bit, in fine lace (at least, not to me). A discrete K2tog here, a careful M1 there, and the problem is solved. But garter stitch is much more serious. I tinked back and got it right.

And today is May 31, as far as the Princess is concerned. Dental and medical, in the real world. I have broken a centre front tooth and all my glitzy clothes and svelte figure cannot save me from looking like a bag lady until I get it fixed. It’s going to be expensive; I hope not too time consuming.

Then in the afternoon I see a doctor to find out if my improved lifestyle has reduced my cholesterol or whether I need to take statins like everybody else. And perhaps see about the removal of a new, prominent wart on my upper lip which rather underlines the bag lady effect.

Kate, yours is sensible advice, about dieting and reviling the flesh and constitutionals. Don’t worry – this isn’t a diet I’m on, but an Improved Way of Life. I did it once before, with great benefit to myself, but it ended abruptly when I broke my left arm. Daily cider was absolutely required, and once resumed, not abandoned. This time I hope to go on forever, more or less. And I’m consciously trying to incorporate more striding about, here in Edinburgh – plenty of hills to practice on. In Strathardle, there’s the garden.

(We watched Hannah and Her Sisters over the weekend – one of the characters claims to be a reformed alcoholic. Beer had been her downfall, and I noticed that she said it had made her fat.)

Tamar, I don’t think I had ever heard about Mercury being retrograde. Does the same apply to Mars? which (without having gone very deeply into things) seems to me as if it might be capable of the same phenomenon because of being between us and the sun. Are there any other planets in that position? I could have told you like a shot, when I was 12.

I am dubious, but there is a residual pool of belief in there somewhere. Once when I was middle aged and more energetic, I read Augustine’s City of God (in Latin, too) – I’m not sure I finished it. I was struck with how much time and energy he devotes to refuting astrology: it came before Christianity and from some points of view, looks set fair to survive it.