That picture is 25 years old. It shows a shooting party about to depart from the back door of our house in Kirkmichael: James, Alexander (in the moustache), Ed (in a Fair Isle sweater of my manufacture belonging, I think, to his wife Rachel), our tried and trusted friend Captain Duncan Ellin, R.N., and Duncan’s son Julian.

If memory serves, they didn’t hit anything.

Julian phoned on Monday, just after we got back from Loch Fyne, to say that his father is dead.

My husband isn’t very well – the kind of sub-flu, we think, which can afflict old people who have had their precautionary injection. We’ll get medical help today. I hope at the very least he will be well enough for me to leave him behind for a day and go up for the funeral.

It hasn’t been a good month.

We had a grand time over Easter, though.

Here are Alexander and Ketki’s sons, James in the Wallaby adaptation I knit for his birthday last year, Thomas in the new Araucania sweater which has turned out not as big as it should be. Their parents say that the boys are tall for their ages. I’ll have to aim higher next time.

Ketki, in her gansey.

Rachel, in her striped Koigu, roughly the design I mean to imitate, without stripes, in the pink Araucania sweater I have just cast on for myself in Kirkmichael.

And here’s what I got done – KF socks for Ketki. I cast the first one on, on the train to Glasgow on Friday. It shows what can be achieved, even by a slow knitter, in an idle and irresponsible weekend.