Imperfect finish

I think I started work on this in October 2014. In October 2015 I realised I had made an error in the original design but I had gone too far to rectify it. This work is notoriously difficult to unpick. No doubt there will be those who try to comfort me with the theory that there should always be an error in an Islamic pattern because only Allah is perfect. I don't hold with this because it is a geometric design and there is no room for error in mathematics. So I must simply comfort myself that it does what I set out to do, and that is to create an angle of 22.5° on a 90° grid.

In Greek the word for 'perfect' has its roots in the Greek word for 'finished' or 'complete'. This supposes that something is not finished until it is perfect. But not everything can have a perfect finish no matter how hard we try.

As we feared, our younger ewe was indeed carrying triplets. Really she is too young to be a mother and we hadn't expected her to become pregnant at all, so when she grew bigger and bigger we became concerned. She gave birth very early this morning. One of the lambs was stillborn and another had died before we were able to rescue it. We did, however, manage to rescue the third and have put it safely together with its young mother. We had planned to plant a couple of plum trees today anyway so the holes were dug that little bit deeper.

Yes, it was very sad and I cried, but even though I am a peasant I'm allowed to do that so that's OK. I don't have to be as tough as old boots. It is however, in the long run, all for the best. There is no way our two sheep could have supported five lambs between them, we don't have enough grazing for that many animals and our freezer is not large enough to cope with the logical consequences.