There's the promised picture of our butcher's premises. Quite a few things are boarded up around here, but one doesn't know how much of that is damage, how much is precaution, and how much is bankruptcy. Mr Crombie's window was hit by half a dozen stones, presumably from slingshots. It didn't shatter.

Things seemed quiet in Edinburgh yesterday, although there was a certain amount of argy bargy shewn on the news. We didn't go into the absolute centre. The post office we failed to achieve on Monday, was open yesterday.

So George Bush is in Perthshire, and I am not. And London got the Olympics. Life can be cruel.

Knitting

All well. I have now done 19 repeats of the Princess Shawl edging. I find that I can knit several consecutive rows of the parts with the fewest stitches -- the end of one repeat and the beginning of the next -- without looking at the chart at all, which speeds things up even more. I wonder if I will ever learn the whole thing. The difficulty -- obviously -- is that it is not vertically symmetrical (if that's the phrase I want) -- the declining part of the pattern does not mirror the ascending part, as in most edgings.

And the body of the striped Koigu is finished, the shoulders joined. I think that instead of casting on a sleeve today, I'll finish off the toe of Thomas the Elder's sock and Kitchener the both of them. A university graduate deserves a pair of socks. It will be only the first pair I've fininished this year, showing how little we travel these days.

When we were leaving my sister-in-law's on Tuesday, she asked unexpectedly what degree (i.e., first, upper second, etc.) Euan Blair had achieved. That is the Prime Minister's son who has been at Bristol University (and is now going to Washington to an internship). I hadn't the faintest idea. She didn't ask about Thomas, to whom she is almost as closely related as I am (two of his eight great-grandparents were my mother and father, another two of them were hers) and I heroically didn't volunteer the information. I couldn't have refrained from doing that when I was younger. (Thomas got a first.)