The most wonderful time of the year.

The summer school for teenagers has started in the dorm that looks like Hogwarts. Since sunrise the town has been busy with a flow of minibuses bringing up excited youngsters from the airport in Edinburgh. As each group arrives at the front door a piper springs into action.  Some groups get greeted with a burst of Scotland the Brave, others the Rowan Tree. A few get Amazing Grace. The piper is good. I'd assume he's paid well to be up and about at such an unearthly hour. We like the summer school. It's full of wide eyed teens and enthusiastic ( and not much older ) counsellors who understand that the secret to keeping three hundred 16 year olds happy is to make sure they're busy every moment of the day. Soon the new arrivals will be down on the shore by the castle for a character forming dip in the 'witches pool' aka 'The North Sea'. The girls will spend the first week  ignoring the ' immature ' boys and the boys will spend their first week trying to be noticed by the ' suave and sophisticated ' girls. By week two they'll be talking happily to each other about the barbaric idiocy of having a curfew time of 10 pm.

On the Old course an American couple are out for a pre-breakfast stroll with their twins. The children are at that just starting to walk stage. The parents stop, lift their two youngsters out of the stroller and unconcernedly let them crawl across the first green. Golfers play on around them. The father and mother seem completely  oblivious to the risks posed by fast moving golf balls. Two large gulls look on.

A group off the Delta flight from Atlanta have arrived to find their rooms in the hotel aren't ready. They wander over to look at the Martyrs Monument and then shuffle off towards Starbucks. The ferocious jet stream that got us back from Montreal in five hours is getting flights from the US into Edinburgh an hour or two ahead of schedule.  

The farmer has headed off in the Range Rover to pick up his two sons from the Jet Blue flight from Boston. They will have to get used to watching the World Cup matches being projected onto the bed sheet in the village hall.

Today sees the first of the graduation ceremonies. The town is full of polite parents accompanied by young people dressed rather more smartly than they would have been when they were here as undergraduates. The presence of mothers will have this effect. The next five nights will be party central. Marquees are sprouting everywhere as restaurants try to cope with the surge in bookings :https://youtu.be/NiqPTX63K40?t=50

Apes and humans :https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1133034

Moving fast when you have to :https://www.clinicaltrialsabundance.blog/p/why-were-covid-vaccine-trials-so-fast

Would ( could ) you live here ? :https://x.com/zoeloveshouses/status/2070625904317927565

The world is changing and this is an interesting insight :https://kulturaliberalna.pl/2026/06/23/polska-nie-jest-gotowa-na-podmiotowa-ukraine/

Europeans and air conditioning :https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/europes-resistance-to-ac-is-driving

An Australian view of the world :https://strategicanalysis.org/hedging-against-america-ordering-in-a-time-of-disorder/