Again, a need for speed, and little to report. I’ve started recovering the neck stitches for the Aran sweater and hope actually to start knitting the neck today.

James is still with us – his family went south from Pitlochry on Thursday, and he will travel down tomorrow. We spent yesterday afternoon, all three of us, in various graveyards in what developed into pouring rain – James is interested in family history and wants to know, in particular, where Mileses came from. He has traced them back through the 20th and 19th centuries, in a remorseless succession of Jameses and Alexanders.

This weekend he has found two stones he hadn’t previously seen – a great-great-grandmother, and an Alexander Miles at the beginning of the 19th century, son of a so-far-mysterious Charles Miles who seems to have started it all, at least as far as residence in Edinburgh and Leith is concerned.

I wondered if it wasn’t sort of spooky, seeing his own name on a stone, but apparently not.

We went back to Kinloch Anderson on Friday for a fitting of the Montrose jacket to be worn eventually with last year’s jabot. A final – final, we hope – fitting is scheduled for tomorrow morning before he catches the train south.