On Thursday I told them to be sure to be in the Market Place at 7pm the following evening. I was there as well. I don’t go round behind the band, and only occasionally to the concert.

But I wouldn’t miss that moment when the doors open and this year’s Standard Bearer emerges. It’s a bonus when the man in the chair is as handsome as Guy Blair (“Every Standard Bearer is handsome,” said someone to whom I made this observation on Friday. Well, they say beauty is in the eye of the beholder …).

I like the somewhat defiant spiky hairdos of this year’s – and last year’s – Attendants. Did they get together to decide to strike that note of modernity? Did they run it past the Common Riding Trust? Were there some oldies in the crowd who thought it not quite proper? And some year, is there a possibility that the standard bearer and his attendants will have their official photograph taken without the bowler hats that look, in the 21st century, quite simply bizarre?

When we moved to the Borders more than 40 years ago, the fact that it is the best riding country in Scotland was one of the attractions. When we were introduced to the Common Ridings, I took to following the flag on horseback immediately and that was the perspective from which I first took part in them.

It was all so different from the riding I’d known.

In Dunblane, during the Fifties, there were three of us who owned ponies. Although we would meet up to ride in a twosome or threesome, most of my riding was solitary. Even at the riding schools I’d attended, we never rode out in parties of more than a dozen.

Suddenly, there was this sense of companionship and the whole concept of making acquaintances and friends in the saddle. And my companions were always informative and enthusiastic guides to the niceties of the traditions and etiquette.

Perhaps I was lucky, as an outsider, to learn my way around the Common Ridings from the back of a horse. Those summers when I was 24 and 25, I followed the Selkirk Standard Bearer, the Lauder Cornet, the Braw Lad, the Kelso Laddie and the Jethart Callant. I learnt to know the Borders from the back of a horse as well as from on foot, or behind the wheel of a car. How lucky I was.

Sometimes I come across people who have moved into Selkirk – or other Border towns – who are gravely disappointed when the much-talked-of day comes around. Then they are simply lost.

One young mother told me about how her young son’s school friends talked of nothing else, but never asked him to join them.

“Not even to the shows,” she added.