Another fairly limp day, but again I got around the garden, this time with David and Helen. He has got to go back to Thessaloniki tomorrow, and was in a state of anxiety about whether he would get his Covid test result in time for the flight. Having suffered through the same anxiety with my sister recently, my guess was that it would turn up. He hopes to be back in February but is fed up with the fuss and the considerable expense involved in all the required testing.

 

Several shrubs are blooming in the garden, as well as the snowdrops and aconites I mentioned yesterday, but I don’t know their names. It behoves me to find out.

 

David and Helen have bought a soup-making machine with which (after 48 hours) they are delighted. They brought me some soup, which I will have soon for my supper.

 

I didn’t get as much knitting done as hoped. The overhead light in the sitting room has now died too so I have had to move entirely into the kitchen. The light is good there, and it’s warm. I hope to do at least one further round this evening.

 

Again, not too bad a day. I felt very stiff and slow – my left hip has not been all it might be for several years now, and it has been having a particularly bad day today. But C. and I hobbled successfully all the way around the garden. The snowdrops and aconites are blooming.

 

And I have moved the knitting forward. I measured it properly this evening, on the kitchen table: I have only a centimetre to go before the chosen spot for the underarm steeks. That’s three rounds, four at the worst; I ought to be able to get there tomorrow.

 

And I may have discovered, at least in part, why I have such a poor record of late, knitting in the evening. Namely, that I need a new high-wattage bulb in the standard lamp. I’ve known that for some time, but today I actually knit a round after dark, and grasped that something must be done.

 

A nice man rang up and tried to book me in for a colonoscopy. Again I declined.

 

Drink: I’ve got a Dry January app on my iPad. Every evening I get to paste an electronic sticker on an electronic calendar indicating a dry day. (After this coming weekend, they’ll begin to stack up.) I take a childish pleasure in this ritual. Today I looked back to the beginning of last year, and was surprised to see that I managed four-days-off, three-days-on without a lapse all through February. It was only in March that things began to fall apart; by April all was lost. So maybe it would be worth trying that again.

 

 

 

It has been a fairly successful day, but goodness! I’m tired of the dark. It was a tad warmer than yesterday, although grey and raw. Daniela and I got once around the garden.

 

I then addressed the questions clustering around the Calcutta Cup shawl. It wasn’t too difficult. C. has measured the actual boy, and also a sweater that fits him well. The length she recommends – allowing for future growth, but stopping well above his knees at present – is the length of the third size of Mary Lou’s Rylan vest, so I might as well run with the sleeve-hole placement on that. It gives me a couple more inches to knit before I insert the armhole steeks. I did a bit.

 

I once did a class with a famous knitter whose name I can’t remember, on Designing for Children. The one piece of information I have retained chimes with the advice several of you have given me: namely that children lengthen much more than they widen as the years pass.

 

I looked at Arne and Carlos, and tried to incorporate the Norwegian way of holding the left-hand yarn, at least. So simple… But I found that it took too much concentration, and I still need all of that I can muster for the Fair Isle pattern.

 

Current Affairs: I am sure Ghislaine Maxell and Prince Andrew and the whole lot of them are unpleasant people, but I am not sure that she deserves life imprisonment. The “victims” in the case largely seem to be healthy women, some, at least, with husbands and children, who have made themselves a heap of money out of this sad business already. Whereas Mrs Sakoolas, whose victim is dead, is walking around free as a bird.

 

It has been cold again. Daniela administered my weekly bath and hair-wash; I wasn’t tempted to go out. I suspect it would not be easy, especially just now, to get such care in a care home.

 

I resumed knitting. I’ve now done 8” of Calcutta Cup vest. Mary Lou has sent me the pattern for her soon-to-be-published Rylan vest, a very nice little number for a toddler and on up. That pattern says 8” to the underarm for the 18-month size, 8 ½ for the next one up. (Hamish will be 2 in May.) Meanwhile C. has sent me measurements in centimetres just now, from a sweater the boy actually wears. I’ll apply myself tomorrow. I’ll also look at Meg’s Fair Isle vest pattern to see the proportion of the sections of sweater above and below the underarm. It all involves too much thinking for this hour of the night.  

 

Here's a picture of my salad factory, exactly two weeks after kick-off:

I took it in the morning before the eerie light went on. 

 

Taxes: We’ve just had a startling preliminary bill from the new accountant.

 

Jeanfromcornwall, I do agree about the advantages of comparative poverty. Last year I filled out a form on an HMRC website that Alexander referred me to, and it said I didn’t need to file a return or pay any more tax. So I didn’t. Do I believe it? The tax man knows where I am, and hasn’t sent me any letters the way he used to when my husband was alive. But it will still be a comfort to have it all done professionally at least once.

 

Kirsten, congratulations on getting yours done for Christmas. And I was sorry to hear about your cat. Perdita had a bad fall once when she was a young and slender cat. She fell from a high shelf in the kitchen. She was still limping a couple of days later, and protesting in pain when her hip was touched, so I took her to the vet, like you. She was anaesthetised and x-rayed and was found to be fine. She came home that evening very cross, and I rather poorer. Now that she’s a stout, middle-aged, sterilized cat she doesn’t climb the way she used to.

 

Marion, thank you for the Arne&Carlos link. I’ll address that tomorrow, too. I found one at least that showed me how Arne holds a single yarn in his left hand. It looks so simple….

 

If the point of all this abstinence is rejuvenation, I can only say that it’s not working yet. Helen came over this morning to help with the Income Tax. She is heroically taking that dreadful burden on her own shoulders. We have hired an accountant, but at this stage that hardly helps. She (the accountant) just demands papers and numbers like HMRC. We didn’t do much, but by the time we gave up, I was prostrate. Helen is a hard taskmaster, so out we went, but I could do no more than get across to the garden and sit for a while. It’s turned cold, which in itself has rather a debilitating effect.

 

And that was about it, for today. No knitting.

 

The knitting went better today, but I still haven’t recovered the pleasure and ease with which I used to knit Fair Isle. Here it is, slightly blurry:

 

I’d better measure tomorrow and make a tentative decision, at least, about when I want to start the armholes.

 

I still found it difficult today. I couldn’t let my thoughts wander at all – which is the whole point of knitting – or I’d find that I was confused about whether I was in the expanding or the contracting diamond. But I think it was getting slightly better in that respect before I stopped.

 

I wish I had mastered a better technique when I was young enough to do so. Somewhere Arne and Carlos have a video that shows clearly how they do it. I remember that it’s important to keep the left forefinger down low. (Mine isn’t) I’d like to find it and look again but don’t know how to start hunting. I just find myself in a wilderness of Christmas ornaments.

 

The salad machine continues well. Soon I’ll be able to start tasting. Everything salad-y I get from the supermarket this time of year must have been grown under cover and probably under eerie blue lights. I am fully persuaded that everything tastes better if grown in the open air under God’s own sunshine.

 

Shandy, no, I’ve been drinking my usual ration of cider since I got back from the hospital. The NHS and my sister disapprove, and I think my children mutter behind my back. The hospital sent me an Alcohol Counsellor who virtually said that if she was as well as I was at my age, she’d go on drinking too. She said there’s lots of Alcohol Counselling to do at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, and they had just taken on an extra member of staff. Drugs must complicate the issue nowadays. My difficulty is that I don’t think I can cut down – I’d have to cut it out altogether like your youthful mother, Shandy, or like my son James. He stopped drinking beer because he found that he always wanted one more than he was allowed. He’s taken in his belt a couple of notches and looks extremely well.

 

After my perfect January last year, I got most of the way through February on four-days-off, three-days-on but couldn’t keep it up. Or, at any rate, didn’t.

 

 

 

 

 

Briefly, this evening:

 

I didn’t feel well this morning, and so didn’t walk. That was a shame, as it was a nice day. It’s beginning to sound stormy out there now.

 

I knit on, but not very far. My fingers aren’t doing as well as I boasted yesterday, but I hope they’ll get the hang of it soon. The pattern is an easy one: I think that makes it harder. A picture wouldn’t hurt, to get us all back in the saddle. Tomorrow.

 

Crochet66 (comment yesterday) – yes, indeedy! Measure the boy! I have emailed C. with a note of the measurements I want. She looks after him a day or two a week, while Mummy works, so that should be perfectly feasible. Other suggestions yesterday were helpful too, and will be taken into consideration.

 

My salad machine continues to make rapid strides. I think it will be a fortnight on Wednesday since I launched it. I’ll take a picture of it then.

 

The hardest part of Dry January is now behind me. Henceforth it’s just a matter of the long slog.

 

It has been a pretty good start to the year. The day was warm and sunny. Helen came and we got around the garden. I got re-started on the Calcutta Cup vest – not much actual knitting was done, but a little, and I’ve got the rhythm of it back in my fingers. The next thing is to decide how long I want it to be to the underarms. I don’t have a pattern. You’re absolutely right, Tamar, that it’s length a two-year-old requires. Does anyone have a suggestion? He’ll be two in May and is a well-grown boy. The Calcutta Cup for ’22 will be contested in February. I don’t want it to be ridiculously long. That will be its big day.

 

I watched an interesting video about Mary Lou’s herb-grower, called an AeroGarden. It’s a hydroponic system, meaning no soil at all. No wonder fertilizer is required. Whereas the “lingots” in my Veritable system presumably supply nourishment, although I think the roots are going to grow down through them into the reservoir below. My little plants are growing faster than they would in nature, but the AeroGarden ones are apparently faster yet. Is it due in both cases to that eerie blue light? All great fun.

 

Facebook has relented and has resumed notifying me most mornings when Franklin has posted.

 

 

So much for 2021. I don’t think any of us will be sorry to see it go.

 

I looked up your AeroGarden, Mary Lou. Thank you. It’s very similar to my salad factory. And ads for similar machines have started popping up amongst my Promotions. It must be an idea whose time has arrived. I like your idea of re-using seed pads, choosing seeds ad lib. You’d have to add fertiliser of some sort in the water, presumably? Here’s mine, today:

 

 

The seeds are stuck in little holes in the so-called lingots by some magic glue. In the third from the right (or second from the left, if you prefer) the seeds have somehow come loose from two of the little holes. Maybe they will turn out to be around somewhere, and come up anyway. Maybe three plants will be enough to fill the space – I think that’s probably one of the lettuces. Otherwise 100% germination. And I think you can see, if you peer, that true leaves are beginning to show. It remains great fun.

 

Helen and David and their son Mungo (the Arabist) came to lunch today. Mungo cooked. It was pleasant to sit talking.

 

I’m planning a Dry January, like last year. I’m hoping for rejuvenation, but not expecting any. It was sometime in the middle of Dry January this year, which I kept very faithfully, that I started using a stick to walk about indoors. Now I can scarcely get across the room without it. I like the way the calendar counts the days with me. You don’t get that in Lent.

 

No knitting. I’ve located all the yarns for the Calcutta Cup vest, though, and it’s absolutely top of my resolutions for next year. Or perhaps that's walking, the Calcutta Cup vest second. I didn't go out yesterday or today, although the weather was perfectly possible.

 

 

 

 

 

All well, more or less. C. and I got to the garden this morning, but it was raining briskly and therefore muddy and slippy underfoot so we came back again. At least we tried. Helen and her family are still in Strathardle, where they are not only wet but very cold. The deer have been at our trees.

 

It’s time to resume wee Hamish’s Calcutta Cup vest. I’ve retrieved the knitting, most but not yet all of the colours, the book, the stitch pattern. The body of the Machu Picchu is now 12” long, which may or my not be enough, but it’s time to lay it aside.

 

Mary Lou, please tell me about your herb-growing machine, or anyway tell me its name and I’ll look it up. You must be freer than I am – I can only use “lingots” already supplied with seeds and organic fertilizer. There are 50 or so different varieties available, which should keep me going for a while. I didn’t fancy the ones supplied with the machine – parsley, chives, thyme, rocket – too tame; I’ve got thyme and chives on the doorstep. So I also ordered another set – two lettuces, basil, and something else. But they can be purchased separately from the Veritable website, and I’ll do that next time. Chillies, coriander, salad leaves, as I've already mentioned.

 

We’re getting on fine. Picture soon.

 

I had to look “Let’s Go Brandon” up on Google to see how it could be an insult to Biden. I was disappointed. I had expected wit.

 

I’ve always liked Boxing Day, my fave, perhaps, of the 365. It doesn’t have a name in the US – or didn’t, at least, in the household in which I grew up. After the stress of the last few weeks, it brings with it a delicious sense of ease, of job-done. There’s always plenty of food left over from yesterday. The year is on the turn – there’s a sense of looking-forward. Little of that applies to me nowadays, but I’m still fond of it. We had a family quiz on zoom this morning.

 

The big news, however, is that there are little green leaves in my salad machine. The first set appeared yesterday, a wonderful Christmas present. Two more have joined it. That leaves one of the four bars still inert – but it hasn’t even been a week yet. My guess is that that’s the basil. I didn’t keep track of what went where, probably a mistake.

 

Monday the 27^th

 

I wrote that much last night, but didn’t get as far as posting it.

 

No advance on the salad machine. The little green leaves which were already with us are moving boldly forward, but haven’t been joined by that fourth bar – although I think I can see that the seeds are sttrring. I’m planning the next lot, in six months’ time: chillis, cilantro (coriander), salad leaves. The problem then will be to give them eight hours of darkness. It’ll be May if not June by then, and that’s more darkness than we get in those delicious months. I’ve got a couple of walk-in cupboards: but they lack electric points. I think they’ll have to stay in the sitting room – where I much enjoy having them to hand – with the curtains drawn in a most un-May-like fashion.

 

C. came this morning, and we got as far as walking across to the garden and sitting for a while on a damp bench. She’s coming again on Wednesday, and we’ll hope for better. On Christmas Day, cheerful and sunny, I didn’t get out of the door with Helen and her family. They’re now in Strathardle, too cold to move.

 

I watched the Fruity Knitting episode with the second half of their Kaffe Fassett interview. He has been awfully successful in finding his niche and exploiting it. 

 

 

 

 

 

Here I still am, I’m afraid.

 

I was overtaken by something that felt like panic, and didn’t want to leave the familiar and the cats. I’ll be fine tomorrow by myself. I think Helen and David are coming to walk around the garden with me. They’ll ring the doorbell and stand well back. They’re also well-tested and clear. This damn disease is clearly getting out of hand. Rachel has got it, -- at any rate, has tested positive. She was planning to come up after Christmas with some family, to stay a couple of days at Loch Fyne and then come here overnight. But that’s off. She says her son Joe is much better. That’s something.

 

Loch Fyne: I signed up for Kate Davies’ new club yesterday. It’s called “The Secret Shore of Argyll” or something very like that. I was surprised to see that signing-up had started early in December. How had I missed it? The answer is, I hadn’t missed it. Yesterday’s membership was my second. I heard from Melanie this morning. I apologised, and have already got the refund. This is a worrying memory lapse. There were several reasons that that should have been memorable, including the fact that Loch Fyne is in Argyll, not far from the coast. (It is a sea loch.)

 

I’m having a wonderful time with my salad-maker. Here is a picture of it. 

The lights go off for eight hours out of the 24. It is watered by means of wicks drawing from a reservoir at the bottom. The lights will flash gently when I need to refill it, every fortnight or so. The photographs and instructional drawings show the lights at different heights. I am told that that will happen automatically. My first contribution (other than watering) will be to harvest/subdue the plants when they threaten to get too big.

That's not a real radiator (which would be ill-advised). It's an oil-filled plug-in thing, enormously heavy, which we inherited with the house. We managed to get rid of one or two. We have even, occasionally, in hard winters, plugged it in.

 

So now all I can do is to wait for Heaven’s contribution – the appearance of the little green plants.

 

 

 

Now the overhead light has gone in the room where I sit. I’ll have to move the computer – it’s a laptop – elsewhere until I can get Archie in with a new bulb. It’s possible to write by the light of the screen, but not pleasant.

 

My Christmas toy came. It’s a salad-growing machine. I set it up this morning and took some pictures of it for you but can’t figure out how to get them over here. I think the iPad (where the pictures are) has updated its software recently. So that, too, will have to wait for the visit of a grown-up. I have planted it with two kinds of lettuce, basil, and rocket (arugula). It is absurdly more expensive than buying those things in a supermarket, but I hope more fun. Its name is Veritable, if you want to look it up. It’s French. But avert your eyes from the price. Better than buying more yarn and not knitting it, I suppose.

 

And Tesco delivered still more food. The slot was 8-9 p.m.and they came at five past 8, so I got to bed in good time. Even Daniella is beginning to laugh at me for the quantities of food. I’ll take some smoked salmon to Loch Fyne and maybe can find a couple of other suitable things for them.

 

Tomorrow will have to be spent packing and resisting the temptation to skip the whole thing and crawl under the duvet with a cat. I’ve got to administer a Covid test to myself as well, and am nervous about that. About the discomfort, and about doing it right.

 

Thank you for all your Christmas greetings, The same to you, with knobs on. I suppose I’d better pack in blogging until some time next week. See you then, insh’Allah.

 

Well, here we are indeed. We got round the course again. The solstice was nearly two hours ago.

 

I have concurred with all your sage advice, and committed to going to Loch Fyne. Helen can come and see the cats on Christmas day. She and her self-isolating family are then going to Strathardle which is pretty brave and hardy of them. I trust I’ll be back on Boxing Day. So now all I have to do is pack some knitting. Although many days pass here when I don’t touch the needles, as you know, the thought of 48 hours away with no knitting to hand, fills me with horror. I’ve got a Christmas sweater. It’s just a matter of digging it out and hoping the moths have spared it.

 

 More deliveries tonight – my Christmas present to myself: I’ve been tracking it all afternoon, when not dozing, and it’s nearly here. And the final grocery order. I got rid of some food this morning – Helen popped in, masked and at a safe distance, to pick up some mosaic material from the study where she had been working recently, and I was able to offload some frozen meals I had bought for James and not used when he was here. She’s got a houseful of boys who consume everything.

 

Here we are – solstice tomorrow. I don’t understand the solstice, although I’ve often read explanations. It doesn’t seem to mean that the sun will rise a moment earlier or set a moment later on Wednesday. I continue to worry that whoever is in charge – especially since the rules seem to be so complicated – will forget to throw the switch. If all goes well, we’ll see a real difference by Groundhog Day.

 

No excitement here. Alexander rang up and suggested that I go to them for Christmas. I’m thinking about it. I feel that I’ve ordered an awful lot of food and have a responsibility to stay here and try to eat it. The cats would miss me. It would mean an awful lot of driving for the Mileses: three hours or so each way: four trips, by the time I was transported there and back.

Some more food has just arrived...

 

 

Well.

 

Not long after I finished writing to you last night, I found that Perdita was walking on three legs, holding her right forepaw against her side as if someone had been twisting it behind her back. All thought of Christmas dinner was banished. How could I have been thinking of myself, when…

 

Eventually I realised that she had caught a claw in the matted fur on her back, just in front of the tail. A vet shaved it off once (at enormous expense) but she let it happen again. I tried to set her free, while she growled and hissed at me. I gave up. C. was coming this morning. With two of us, one could hold the cat while the other cut the fur. So I went to bed, uneasily.

 

The first thing I do every morning is feed the cats, Paradox prancing in front of me, Perdita hanging back. This morning, no Perdita. I didn’t search, but she wasn’t visible in any of her usual places. I spent an uneasy couple of hours, with Paradox, as you can imagine, saying “Why are you worried? You’ve got a perfectly good cat. We don’t need that other one.” I watched the Andrew Marr show – the last one ever – while working out how to explain all this to C. First, we would have to find the cat…

 

But, ten minutes before she arrived, there was Perdita. She had solved the problem by herself. She wasn’t even limping. C. and I walked around the garden. We went clockwise this morning, instead of widdershins as usual. So all is well for the moment. 

I have managed to get a Tesco delivery spot for 8-9 p.m. on Tuesday evening, better than nothing. The order will include a spatchcocked poussin which will do well enough for Christmas dinner (and a good deal cheaper than last year’s French Black Chicken which I don’t think I ate much of). I’ll also have sprouts & cranberries & kale in a recipe I found recently which I tried to make for my sister when she was here. I messed it up that time, but I think it’s worth trying again.

 

I did a bit of knitting, during the Andrew Marr show. Next is measurement.

 

Language

 

I was gratified to learn, Mary Lou, (Comment yesterday), that Google has heard of “mitigate against”. I feel pretty sure that I’ve never seen it in print. Nor have I ever been aware of a confusion between “home” and “hone”. I’ll watch for that one.

 

No walk today. It was colder, although still open and dry – but I didn’t feel well. I’m coming around now.

 

Three more days until the solstice.

 

However, the main excitement of the day is not any of that, but the arrival of Helen’s youngest son Fergus from Bristol University yesterday evening. She stopped off here with some eggs for me, on the way to the station to meet him. He tested positive for Covid last night – presumably at her instigation – and again this morning, so they are all self-isolating. Her husband David is going to come back from Thessaloniki anyway, as planned, and isolate with them. I think he’s due on Thursday. I don’t know what their middle son Mungo is going to do – he was due home from London one day soon. Meanwhile Fergus feels fine. We think he had Covid last year, when he first went to university.

 

But all this means that I’ll be on my own again, like last year, on Christmas Day. Dear friends from Birmingham had planned to come – they stay with me while visiting their son who lives nearby in a small house. But they have just begged off, too – not a surprise.

 

I do hope I live long enough to look back on all this.

 

No knitting. I spent the potentially active part of the day feeling ill.

 

Language

 

I am increasingly irritated these days by the phrase “mitigate against”, meaning “mitigate”. It is presumably derived by false analogy from “militate against”. I heard it first (on television) from Arlene Foster, then the Northern Ireland supremo, and put it down to ignorance. But it is getting more and more common, and I have heard it recently from a BBC announcer.

 

I’m feeling a bit braver this evening, although it is equally dark. A smidgen darker, in fact. Daniella and I got around the garden. That’s three days in a row. The weather has been very pleasant and open. And the little green noses of the 2022 daffodils and crocuses are appearing – and even of the 2022 wild garlic, I think.

 

Today’s crisis was that I couldn’t charge my iPad last night. That iPad is the umbilical cord connecting me to the world. It was at that point about 20% charged, which is not nearly enough to get me through a day. Frist thing this morning I ordered a new charger from Amazon, and they promised to deliver it by 10 p.m. When Daniela got here she found my spare in a trice (I thot I had another) so the crisis was over – but now I am faced with sitting up until ten. We have a good-sized letter box, but a charger could well be packed in plastic and then in a cardboard box. Amazon would leave it amongst my pots, but the doorbell would blast me from sleep. It’s all my own fault, too.

 

Perhaps I will have to sit up and knit.

 

A dear neighbour died last week – a well-loved local eccentric who will be much missed. This time of year, already grim, is often freighted with such news.

 

The Covid numbers are scary.

 

My grandson Joe in London has it, or so his mother Rachel says. He is in bed with total feebleness (sounds like me). He’s done a home test, and it’s positive. Otherwise he has had no contact with drs, I gather: which presumably means he doesn’t show up on the statistics. I wonder how many other sufferers are in that category?

 

It was grand having James here. He went off on the train this morning. Apart from anything else, it was a comfort in the ever-encroaching darkness not to have to worry quite so much about falling. For three nights, I could shout for James. He and I got all the way around the garden yesterday; Daniela and I did so again this morning. Maybe I’m a teeny bit stronger?

 

Almost no knitting, but I did a bit this morning, listening to the new Americast.

 

YouTube sends me lots of messages about my “friends” these days, half a dozen a day. But nothing from Franklin. Until recently, his were the only messages that came through to my in-box.

 

The weather has turned milder. Helen came this morning, and we walked all the way around the garden. The secret is just to keep on going. I think I feel less prostrate than I did a week ago when we last did it,

 

And I’ve knit on. A measurement this morning suggests about 11”. I’m aiming for 12, or 12 ½. Progress. This morning I watched the Andrew Marr show, which was a bit of a disappointment, Newspapers suggest that Johnson’s days as Prime Minister are numbered. Marr made it sound less serious. I wonder what Prime Minister says to Monarch, and she to him, in situations like this. They confer every week.

 

I am reading, although I blush to admit it, Stephen King’s “Salem’s Lot”. Inspired by last week’s conversation with Archie. He’s keen on horror, and very knowledgeable on the subject. He has long since left King behind in favour of Lovecraft and Ligotti. I don’t think I had ever heard of either.

 

I was slightly surprised to find Salem’s Lot on my Kindle, therefore free to read. But have I read it before? It doesn’t feel familiar. It’s really rather good. He blends traditional Gothic horror with small-town Maine to telling effect. I find it so scary that I don’t read it after sunset, and am interleaving it with “Pride and Prejudice”. Even there, I find myself a bit uneasy: Lydia has eloped with Wickham. But could he be one of the un-dead?...Or could she?... And they’re coming to Longbourne next week…

 

James is coming here tomorrow. I don’t know the details. I’ve got to go to the GP at midday to have some “bloods” taken. The NHS has a lot to catch up on. Why can’t they leave me alone? And (see preceding paragraph) what’s all this about blood?

 

But anyway, if I’m silent in the next few days, it will be because James is here. I’ll let you know about the ramen in due course.