Still hot

I've been sitting in this exact same place for days. It's too hot to move. It's also too hot to stay still, but I'm trying not to run the air conditioning all the time. Not all the time...

Anyway, the crochet is coming on a treat. There's a lot to be said for embarking on a big, repetitive project when you're a relative beginner. Turning a ball of yellow yarn into forty flower centres, and then turning a couple of balls of white into circles of petals around those centres, gets tedious after a while, but I'm already a lot faster than I was, and don't have to focus on every stitch as a I did at first. I made 32 nuggets during last Wednesday's Barcelona-Madrid match!

(Incidentally, does anyone else think Mourinho should be fined and put on notice for bringing the game into disrepute? He's a sour piece of work. Imagine having to work with him.)

And my technique is improving, as is my understanding of the mechanics of making stitches. After struggling to copy either of the two ergonomically correct grips, I decided to stop fretting, on the basis that if I could handle a pen, a knife, a knitting needle and a screwdriver, the grip for a crochet hook should quietly evolve, if I concentrated on making the stitches. And it did. It turns out that you (OK, I!) hold it like a salt pot. There! That didn't hurt at all.

I can see the difference between my first batches and the current one, too: more even tension, better shaped centres - and all the right way up!

Obviously, this isn't ideal, but I am not about to unpick every mistake. My policy is - damage limitation. If I spot an error in the round I'm doing, I unravel it and rework, but if I only spot it when I realise there's something awry in the next round - it stays, and I skip the extra chain space, or squidge in another, so that I don't end up with either nine or seven petals. Martha Stewart, I ain't. I've also decided that my flowerbed will have ladybirds, and perhaps the odd butterfly. Who's to know that the adorable ickle ladybirds hide a small, but perfectly formed mishmash of yarn, or that the butterfly masks a bigger mishmash? Clearly, if I have to resort to Amazonian beauties, or the finished coverlet looks like a testament to biodiversity, I shall review this policy before embarking on my next project, but I am hopeful that I will get away with my disgraceful approach to quality control.

But I'd better order Lesley Stansfield's 75 Birds, Butterflies and little beasts to knit and crochet, just to be on the safe side.

I've currently got 38 fried eggs and 5 golden nuggets, which will soon sit on 43 patches of purple, red, green and yellow, to even up with the blues and salmon. With the other 74, that puts me almost halfway to the requisite 288. Yay.

Howsoever, brain has now recovered from academic year plus summer camp. Or it had until today. I'm working on a story that originated in an EFL project I created around a fictional robbery from an art gallery. As usual, having hit knowledge barriers, I'm following white rabbits down all sorts of fascinating interconnected tunnels. Cornish history and legend. The British peerage. Japonisme. Restorers and forgers. Woman Bathing, by Mary Cassatt

a forged Goya

Van Gogh, after Hiroshige

Every so often, I pop up and do something that affects the word count.

But this patently isn't it.