How can people live in such splendour? Where is the domestic grubbiness that seems authentic to my home?
Now I am astonished. My house is exposed, or featured, in May's edition of Country House. It turns out I live in an opulent, elegant and tidy home. Every adjective persuades me the author was writing about some other domesticity yet the photographs of this ordered and sophisticated building do seem to resemble my friendly but scruffy residence.
Taking photographs of buildings is a rarefied professional skill. In my case, the illusion of smartness was created by Jennifer Collins from Jedburgh. I am impressed, even if doubtful, about her veracity.
Miss Collins also humbled me with her bold solution to our shared grim experiences of the long dark Borders winter. I mutter about fleeing to the toe of Italy or perhaps the Canaries while the winds and frosts blight us all. She has bought a house in Sri Lanka and simply flies away after New Year until we get the first daffodils. Her Borders pounds go so much further in the tropical greenery of Ceylon that she says she saves money by being absent – including her airfares. I wonder if her adventurous idea is a foretaste of a future wider trend?
I have long argued it is preposterous we all fly off for our family holidays in June, July and August when the Borders are at their very best but then shiver through the three frozen months.
Gordon Brown wants us all to think up ideas for help to fund the retirement years. I think Miss Collins shows us the way. Our pension funds or savings may reduce us to constricted living styles in Scotland, but fly away to remote and warm locations and we would all be wealthy.
I can't urge the Prime Minister to export our crumblies. It will have to be voluntary.

I regard the arrival of summer not so much as the angle of the sun in the sky but two moments of ritual confirmation: the arrival of the swallows, and the erection of the huge tent at Carfraemill, the Borders second-best hostelry. This year my own swallows have been frightened from their ancestral nests as crows have occupied the building and frighten off every other species. I may have no resident swallows – or martins or swifts – but they dive and swoop over my roof in the tireless hunger for midges and other creepy crawlies.
Mrs Sutherland's huge marquee doubles her ability to entertain hungry and thirsty travellers but it also tokens my annual humiliation at the Marie Curie dance, where I have to pretend to both understand and enjoy the version of rugby termed Scottish country dancing. I can enjoy the display of tartanry and the excuse to touch so much female flesh, but I have no sense of rhythm or pleasure.
I can remember Carfraemill as a model of dreadful Scottish hospitality under previous owners. My father always stopped there for refreshments before striking north to the Highlands or south home again. He used to wonder if the brown Windsor soup would be diluted by water or simply tepid. Most years it was both. Their skill at making inedible variations on the theme of mince took a perverse flair.
Under Jo Sutherland's guidance the food now invites a lingering visit. Her staff seem to giggle a lot – a sign of high morale.
Happiest of all, the Lauderdale swallows choose to vote Carfraemill the best base for their homes – meaning the marquee has to be given a good scrub after it is demolished again at the end of the summer when obligatory dancing also ends.

I tried to celebrate the 60th anniversary of Israel. I put up bunting on my hillside. I washed and ironed by Star of David flag. I ran it up my pole and gave it a salute. I had a temporary panic thinking my little medal for military service was nicked but found it where it wasn't meant to be. I granted myself a glass of Aldi's fine peach schnapps.
I am the custodian of a very obscure but crucial insight into the birth of Israel. It is a link between the drama of the new nation and the south of Scotland.
When the Zionists went to Arthur Balfour, the Tory foreign secretary and the nephew of the Marquis of Salisbury (hence the nepotistic acclaim "Bob's your uncle") they found this august, whiskered Protestant aristocrat knowledgeable and thoughtful about the diaspora. Hebrew history did not normally divert people of his time or class. Why was Balfour open to the notion of a Jewish homeland when such an idea was utterly unfashionable, and even outlandish?
The answer is his parish minister was a scholar of Judaism. He had engaged the sympathy and imagination of Balfour from his sermons, conversations and from lending him books. How odd that a clerical appointment to Whittinghame should lead to the Balfour Declaration of 1917 favouring the creation of a homeland for Jews. I don't think Balfour envisaged a state, or the displacement of Palestine.
Balfour was a supremely clever and witty man who occupied most high offices of state over a 50-year political career, yet he is now almost forgotten. His In Defence of Philosophical Doubt is a timeless book far beyond the Numptie-ism of today's Scottish Conservatives. Balfour was wonderfully funny about "devolution". He termed it Home Rule. He argued it would reduce Scotland to a mere local authority. He predicted it would be petty and expensive. Was he not perceptive?
In one sense, Israel's birthday is better placed at the time of Balfour's letter to Lord Rothschild in 1917, rather than the UN resolution of 1948.