I am truly sorry to have worried so many of you by disappearing without explanation. Tomorrow, we are going to Strathardle where Greek Helen and her son Mungo will join us. This will be a great treat, all due to Mungo's generosity. He has had his first taste of school life in the wilds of Perthshire and would probably prefer to spend his long weekend in Edinburgh rather than in more Perthshire wilds. Archie will join us on Saturday evening and drive back with us on Sunday while Helen nobly closes the house. After a number of intervening excitements, it will be interesting to get back to the question of whether Mungo is learning Latin.

I'll probably put in a brief appearance tomorrow morning, but if not, that's what I'm occupied with. Then on Monday a woman who is helping to catalogue the Royal Collection, or something like that, is coming to lunch because the Queen has a number of pictures by my husband's artist. How am I going to manage that? So, no blog on Monday. On Tuesday we have what constitutes for him an early hospital appt to see a physiotherapist about his rheumatic right hand. I ought to be able to blog a bit on Tuesday morning. Wednesday for sure -- insh'Allah.

Knitting: I have now hemmed three sides of the border of Rams&Yowes. I should finish today. Things got to the point last night where I had to KNIT so I did a bit more of the Pakokku sock. It's at the delicious half-way-down-the-leg stage where no thought (and no ribbing) is required.

Referendum

I promise to abandon the subject soon.

The idea now seems to be that it was predominantly the young who voted for independence, so once we oldies fall of the perch, all will be well. A common fallacy. The trouble is, that while we're doing our perch-falling, the young will be getting older, acquiring families, going into business or starting their own businesses, getting mortgages and savings accounts. They will look at things differently from that viewpoint.

I don't mean that the economic arguments were the only ones that swayed me, although they accounted for my personal fear. Scotland would be spiritually diminished by separateness.

On the other hand, the notion that ideas change as the generations pass has a good deal of validity in the purely intellectual sphere. Nothing much happened to “prove” Darwin's theories of evolution in the decades after he published. But the middle-aged and old who were horrified died off and the young who were more receptive took over the world.

Never was a man so well-served by his title. Natural selection and gradual adaptation to circumstances are now universally accepted but we still don't know much about how separate species originate.