I am sorry to have worried you, and I take the point about treating you henceforth as family members. Not that I did any better with them, in this case.

Archie was here for the weekend. That shouldn't have made much difference to my limited supply of time and strength, but somehow it did. It was good to see him, and he seems well. He says he has left his big sweater behind somewhere – my job is to find and measure it. He agrees that grey-on-grey stripes will be acceptable for the one I knit him. He says his A-Level Spanish classes are being conducted in Spanish and he's finding it tough going.

Not much progress has been made with knitting. I've finished knitting Rams & Yowes. That sounds better than it is. The next instruction is to hem the inside of the border down, “sew[ing] down each live stitch to its corresponding white purl bump on the back of the work”. That doesn't work (for me) along the steeked edges, because I picked up stitches for the border on the front of the work and that's where the purl bumps are. It's all right top and bottom, where there is a single-colour row before the colour work gets started. But where I was picking up stitches through a double layer of fabric, the purl bumps didn't get through.

I must have done something wrong, because Kate D. is meticulous. But there it is. I have cast off the entire border and am now hemming it down. I've done one side. I think it's going to be all right.

Released from the needle, it looks huge, or at least pretty big. No wonder it took so long to knit.

Non-knit

Persecution from PUP-FNK continues. I am trying a switch back to Internet Explorer to see if that will cut down on the pop-up ads, at least. Archie says he doesn't have virus protection (!) and has no trouble with any of this stuff. He thinks the blameless-seeming internet sites I visit must be responsible. Waitrose? Ebay? Amazon?

We are recovering from the referendum. It now seems a distant dream, but in fact has left the country sadly divided. Mr Salmond is proving a very poor loser. Last week, the “sovereign will of the Scottish people” was everything. Now, he's talking about a plan to have the Scottish parliament (in which his Scottish Nationalist Party predominates) simply declare independence, contrary to the national will. Shades of Ian Smith and Rhodesia and UDI.

They had a big Service of Reconciliation at St Giles Cathedral on Sunday, with the Moderator of the Church of Scotland preaching peace. This must have been planned well in advance of the referendum, with invitations issued to all the high hied yins. They were all there, except for Mr Salmond and his deputy Nicola Sturgeon. [History buffs: St Giles is the spot where Jenny Geddes threw her stool at the minister.]

You've seen Alexander's referendum picture, sunset over Cairndow, U.K. I had long hoped to take a more upbeat one the next morning, and here it is, taken when I went to buy the papers on the 19^th. Mr Hussain was an ardent No. His two sons wavered – the elder is reading Chemical Engineering at Strathclyde, the younger starting on an A-Level course (like Archie) at the Edinburgh Academy. Mr Hussain claims to have talked them into line.

He was newly married when we first moved to Edinburgh. His wife Sara is Edinburgh-born. They married in Pakistan (they are first cousins) and it took two whole years before he got permission to join his wife here. False marriages are not unknown as a means of seeking entry to the UK, but the dimmest of immigration officials could see at a glance, if they'd looked, that the Mirtazas were not a family to let their sister make a false marriage, especially as a pregnancy followed (the boy at Strathclyde). I remember the day Mr Hussain first appeared at the shop. I told Sara, who was behind the counter that morning, that he was well worth waiting for. I have remained very fond of him.

I was disappointed that the Scotsman didn't rush out a special edition saying NO. This will have to do.