This final week of Life As We Know It starts under leaden skies.

Today, at last, I've got pictures for you. Here's the one we've been waiting for,  Mungo in his kilt:

Here's the one from the walk my niece and I took in Glen Roslin recently. This was the moment, in the agonizing outward journey, when we spotted Hawthornden Castle on the other side of the river, and therefore could fix our position on the map. Not as far along as I had hoped, was the answer. The castle is just discernible through the foliage. C. is pointing to our place on the map.

And here are the pictures from Games Day. The best bit of it all is when the baronet, with drawn sword, leads the pipe band followed by the committee across the bridge to the Bannerfield. Here they are marshalling in the garage forecourt:

Here's the procession:

And here's the knitting, in the Home Industries Tent. The categories were slippers and a hat, the latter to be donated to a charity:

Here is a close-up of the hat that didn't win any prize at all. It's the one I would have picked, if I had been homeless and was offered a hat by a charity. I wouldn't mind having it anyway.

Clarification

When I captioned that bit about Ian Paisley “There'll always be an England...” yesterday, I didn't mean that he was an Englishman. Perish the thought. It's a phrase the New Yorker used to use as a column-stopper over an item which made the difference between American and British life particularly stark. I thought the idea of desperate thugs on a hillside in the middle of the night brandishing pieces of paper to prove that they were entitled to bear arms, was particularly funny. It's not like that in the Ku Klux Klan, for example.

And finally...

The Sydenham Mileses were in Glasgow at the weekend, taking Alistair up for his first term at university. James went to see St Peter's Partick, his first school. He was there for only a month before we moved to Leicester, Alexander for a whole year – or was it two? It was a wonderful school, pretty rough, very Glasgow. It is sad to see it like this.