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 You can always tell when it’s springtime in Britain. First of all, the clocks go forward (as they did last night), leaving you with a dull, leaden, jet-lagged feeling and causing you to stumble stupidly around the streets like an extra in a low-budget zombie movie, as though someone had turned up gravity while you were asleep; and secondly it starts to snow.
Forgive me if I’ve told you this before – at my advanced age the memory starts to go – but snow made my twenty-first birthday party especially memorable (and yes, we’re talking about the previous century here). Well, it was memorable for the snow, plus the lesbian couple who had a blazing row when one of them tried to seduce a (male) guest in a side room, which rather broke things up with “most admir’d disorder” (Shakespeare). But that’s another story entirely. Ah, youth.
 My birthday falls near the end of April, so no one was expecting a blizzard. But about 8 o’clock it began to pither, then quickly turned into a full-scale storm – big fat flakes that settled and soon turned everything white. The party was at my parents’ house which is out in the Northamptonshire countryside, all winding country roads, so after an hour or so the guests had to admit defeat and “shog off” (Shakespeare again, so it can’t be rude, can it?) or they’d have been stranded. By 10.30 they’d all gone, and I was left alone with the clearing up, Bob Dylan’s Slow Train Coming LP, and a magical, snow-filled night.
 Drummond Square daffodils My parents live in a splendid old ex-public house which backs onto the Grand Union Canal, and I went out into the garden and walked over to the canal, cold wet snowflakes melting on my face and hair. The only light came from the back door, so by the time I reached the edge of the canal it was almost totally dark, just a faint yellow glow to pick out the drifting flakes, the only sound the irregular slap of water against the banks. I stood there for some minutes. The contrast between the profound stillness then and the empty noise of the party earlier couldn’t have been greater. I was only 21, the age when everything’s possible, and alternate futures radiate out ahead of you like spokes on a bicycle wheel.
I didn’t make any grand, life-changing decisions – I was fortunately saved from youthful portentousness by the cold snow running down the back of my neck – but I think that was the moment I decided I’d at least stop pretending I liked parties.
Meanwhile, halfway up the front of the gansey. Soon it will be time to decide when to start the neck, and what to do about the shoulders. But for now, time to get the thermals out – and wait for summer, since spring seems out of the question right now.
 Spring has come at last. I know this because we went to a friend’s house for lunch on Saturday, and – I know this will be hard to believe – they actually made us go for a walk. (Well, I say a walk – given the conditions underfoot it felt more like a recreation of the Battle of the Somme, but I daresay they meant well.) So we got to see where William Wallace fought the battle of Stirling, and where he subsequently sited his oil refinery.
 Somehow over dinner, as you do, we got onto the topic of the Trojan War, and the famous horse inside which the Greeks concealed themselves in order to sneak out at night and open the gates of the city. And I found myself speculating about what might have happened if this had taken place in another country – Mexico, for example. And all at once the vision of a giant Trojan pinata came into my mind, only instead of sweets tumbling out when it was split open, fully armed Greek soldiers emerged. (At which point I realised I should probably go easier on the coffee.)
I wonder what the British equivalent would be? (A giant Thorntons chocolate Easter egg? A pie with four and twenty blackbirds baked in it? A large chest filled with darjeeling tea?) Anyway, when I start my stand-up routine at next year’s Edinburgh Fringe, I’m thinking of working this into the set (trust me, it’ll be funnier when you see the mime that goes with it). Unfortunately if you ask most people what they’d call a large thing out of which soldiers jump, they reply “a Black Hawk helicopter”, which kind of spoils the joke.
 Ahem. Back in the real world, the back is now finished (except for the shoulders, which I’ll do all of a piece as part of the front, as discussed last week). Time to turn it over and start on the front. I’m secretly rather relieved and – si fas est, as my good friend Catullus used to say – a little bit cocky, that my calculations proved correct and the yoke is more or less the right height – i.e., that I got the maths right! (Regular readers of this blog will appreciate that this is not necessarily a given.) In truth, it’s a quarter inch shorter than planned, but still close enough for jazz.
 I’m going to make the front central diamond slightly smaller than the one on the back, by starting it 2 rows further up the panel. If nothing else it will help distinguish the front from the back. But everything else should be the same. I haven’t thought through the neckline yet – how deep to make it, and what effect this will have on the pattern – plenty of time to worry about that later.
Meanwhile I get to enjoy Spring in all its glory – by turning on the television and watching programmes about people hillwalking…
 So here’s the thing. Just when you think the modern world has thrown at you all you can take, you come across online job applications. And you think, hey, this is impressive, I can answer the questions without having to print the whole catalogue of my life out and post it, this is progress. And you write your 1,000 word essay in deathless prose on why they should give you the job, and you check it carefully, double check it, and finally press “send”. Only then do you get an email with a copy of your application, and what do you find? That the system has swallowed the last two words of your essay; so that now, instead of ending with the triumphant cadence of the contribution archives can make to “the learning and community agendas”, it ends rather more enigmatically with their contribution to “the learning and.” I think, though, that it has a curiously wistful quality, not inappropriate for as big a fan of the novels of Joseph Conrad such as I.
I’ve decided to apply for the job in the Outer Hebrides, in case you were wondering, which is about as far north as I can get without having to train my own huskies (and, as the old joke has it, going clubbing involves controlling the seal population and not drinking in bars). They’re looking for someone to get their archives service started from scratch for 3 years, after which time you hand it over to a trainee archivist. If I get the job I’m looking forward to practicing my Star Wars emperor voice so I can constantly refer to “my young apprentice” to an extent that will probably count as bullying and harassment at work.
For the rest of it, I’ve been immersing myself in the symphonies of Gustav Mahler, something I haven’t done for years. I have a complete set conducted by Bernard Haitink and I’ve been working my way through all 10 of them, reminding myself that there’s so much more to his music than the beautiful, famous “Death In Venice” adagietto. (About 15 hours more, in fact.) And at the same time I’ve been doing a lot of knitting.
 As you will see from the pictures I’m well on my way to finishing the back, just another few inches to go plus the shoulders (you’ll notice the upper patterns replicate the lower panels, as was traditional). I’ve been debating what to do about the shoulders, though. Regular readers of this blog will be aware that my default is the “rig and fur” shoulder strap, bands of k2/p2 stitches that come to resemble a ploughed field, which has the advantage that the cast off row in effect becomes another ridge down the centre. Occasionally I flirt with the cable shoulder that runs continuously down the arm.
The Scottish way was to stop at the top of the back, but to knit a panel from the front which covered the entire shoulder, casting off where the shoulder meets the back. That way you can create a complete patterned shoulder strap with no disfiguring cast-off join in the middle – the join comes where the shoulder meets the back. I’m undecided, but am thinking I should make this as traditional as possible.
Anyway, there’s something pleasing about knitting a Hebridean gansey and applying for a job on the islands. It might make the difference at interview, you never know. Failing that, I’ll just have to talk knowledgeably about the learning and
 I’ve fallen in love with the Count of Monte Cristo – the novel by Alexandre Dumas, of course, just in case any of you thought I was taking advantage of Margaret’s absence to explore other sides of my personality – which I’d never read before. I’ve been listening to it as an audiobook downloaded from iTunes – 50 hours for £6 is pretty good value. It’s perfect to knit to, since it’s just a well-told story; by which I mean, it’s a ripping yarn and you don’t have to concentrate on the words to get at the meaning as you sometimes have to do with, say, Hardy or Conrad.
 It also has the huge advantage that it’s all about a well-planned and executed revenge for a terrible wrong, which I feel has some relevance to my present situation (as I prepare to leave my job in April). All I need is an astonishingly large fortune and I can wreak a dreadful vengeance on those who have wronged me – for, as the Klingons say, “revenge, like strawberry blancmange, is a dish best served cold”.
 Meanwhile, back in the real world, I’m now two-thirds of the way up the back of the gansey. I must confess, I don’t quite have the hang of the yarnovers yet – the chevrons are fine, but I’ve made a couple of mistakes on the central diamond which I was more or less able to rectify – if you don’t look too closely. (The difficulty is that, with Margaret being away, I’ve been operating without a safety net, and as my usual technique for dealing with problems is to drop and pick up stitches at random in the hopes that sooner or later I’ll get lucky. A high risk strategy, I admit.)
 The feeling on discovering a yarnover in the wrong place on the previous row (which is in reverse, of course, like a negative image on a photograph) is not dissimilar to realising that you should have carried the 1 at the start of a lengthy calculation on the existence of dark matter – a sort of hot flush that starts at the shoulders and rises gently till it reaches the eyebrows, while a cold sensation spreads down the spine like a slug which has just escaped from devouring your salad in the fridge.
Still adjusting to life without the cat. One of the after-effects of all my eye problems has been a sort of periodic flash in the corner of my right eye, which looks like movement – imagine a glimpse of a rat scurrying quickly past and gone – and now I keep looking round thinking it’s her. Damn it.
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You can always tell when it’s springtime in Britain. First of all, the clocks go forward (as they did last night), leaving you with a dull, leaden, jet-lagged feeling and causing you to stumble stupidly around the streets like an extra in a low-budget zombie movie, as though someone had turned up gravity while you were asleep; and secondly it starts to snow.
My birthday falls near the end of April, so no one was expecting a blizzard. But about 8 o’clock it began to pither, then quickly turned into a full-scale storm – big fat flakes that settled and soon turned everything white. The party was at my parents’ house which is out in the Northamptonshire countryside, all winding country roads, so after an hour or so the guests had to admit defeat and “shog off” (Shakespeare again, so it can’t be rude, can it?) or they’d have been stranded. By 10.30 they’d all gone, and I was left alone with the clearing up, Bob Dylan’s Slow Train Coming LP, and a magical, snow-filled night.
