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 It’s not often I compare myself with Shroedinger’s Cat, but this is definitely one of those times.
You see, Margaret and I are due to fly to the USA this afternoon for a holiday – first we catch a flight from Edinburgh to London, then from London to Boston. But – and how unfair is this? – the volcanic ash cloud from Iceland is currently drifting back over the UK, and is affecting (you guessed it) airports in Scotland and London. Edinburgh airport is currently closed till 1pm, and our flight is scheduled for 1.45pm. Tension mounts.
And this is where the cat comes in. If you remember, Schroedinger’s Cat is a thought experiment, devised to show how bizarre quantum theory really is. The cat is in a box, with a container of poison, and a small quantity of radioactive particles which have an equal chance of decaying or not. If they do decay, then a mechanism releases the poison and the cat is killed; if they don’t, the cat survives. The weird thing is, according to quantum theory, the cat is both equally alive and dead until the box is opened and it is observed – when it is found to have been either dead the whole time, or alive. But both states exist until it is observed. Or something like that.
 Sleeve detail  Body detail So with me and this blog. By the time you read this, I will either be off to wild fun and excitement in the States, or sitting at home thinking some very black thoughts indeed (though I may not interact with any poison – you can take a metaphor too far sometimes). Both futures are, at present, equally possible. Of course, the challenge you will have is observing me – especially if I don’t leave the flat – but that’s another matter.
Meanwhile, I paid a return visit to the Ear, Nose and Throat department last week where they stuck that wire coat hanger up my nose again. The fun part was, this time I got to watch it on TV. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the inside of your nose in close up? Mine was very pink, rather unpleasantly hairy in parts, and disconcertingly squishy in others – like poking a strawberry blancmange with a biro. On the whole, I have come to the conclusion that humans look at their best when seen from the outside. The upshot is, I am now on the waiting list for a septoplasty – I’m afraid you’ll have to look it up, as after having the after-effects explained to me (in which the words “crusting” and “discharge” featured once more, but this time with illustrations) – I don’t really want to think about it right now.
 It’s been hard to concentrate on knitting with all this going on, but as you will see I’m progressing slowly down the sleeve. It takes about 5-6 minutes to do a row at this stage, and as I’m decreasing on every 5th row, I tend to work in blocks of 5 rows at a time, or about 30-35 minutes at a stretch (which is conveniently the same length as a Mozart piano concerto!).
When I come back from America – if I get there – expect some exciting, possibly foolhardy news about my career plans. Now I’m off to observe some cats, and hope that at least 50% of them survive the experience.
Next scheduled post to this blog will be on Tuesday 1 June 2010, deus vult.
 Apologies for the brief disappearance of the blog recently – the web host foreclosed the mortgage, basically, but we sent them round a basket of vegetables from the allotment and offered to wash their car, and in the end they relented and we’re back on line.
Aren’t penguins fun? Last week was Margaret’s birthday, so we made an excursion up to Edinburgh zoo, to see all the arctic animals feeling right at home, basking in a typical Scottish spring. Lord, it was cold!
The special attractions weren’t very special (ordinary attractions?) – it was out of season, so the famous penguin walk was more of a 3-metre waddle; the big cat habitats were being rebuilt so they were absent; and the aviary where you can buy a pot of nectar and have birds flutter down and sip it from your hand had just had a new air conditioner, which meant that the birds were hiding somewhere in the rafters sneering down at the visitors and making rude suggestions.
But it did have lots of penguins, and a day in which penguins feature is never wasted. I particularly like the way they just stand still with their flippers dangling, their heads on one side and their lower beaks hanging open like a rather vapid, slack-jawed member of the upper classes waiting for the rain to stop. They’re sort of like aquatic cats, funny and unpredictable, and you never know what they’re thinking (though I suspect it’s along the lines of: “Fish! Oh, a stone! Fish! Hey, a shiny thing! OK, I’m going offline now”). Watching them on their celebrated walk was like watching a three-legged-sack race at a village fair.
  Other highlights included the sleeping koalas, with their scrunched-up, origami faces, and of course the otters, who are practiced media whores, rolling over on their backs and obligingly rubbing their tummies for the cameras, before signing autographs and talking to their agents on cell phones.
Otherwise I knit and bake bread. I tried a new recipe for pain de campagne over the weekend, a French wholemeal-rye bread that requires a starter at least a day in advance of baking the loaf. I made the mistake of just following the recipe, and added all the water in one go – big mistake! Instead of the thick, moist dough I was promised I achieved a sort of primordial soup. When I poured it out to knead it flowed across the counter like lava from an Icelandic volcano.
 After adding handfuls of flour to stiffen its resolve, as a builder mixes cement, I finally managed to persuade it to stay in one place, like an over-eager puppy being trained to sit. By this time I was so coated in flaking dough that I resembled one of those Nazis in an Indiana Jones movie who shouldn’t have looked. Then, when I left it to rise it inflated like a football attached to an air hose. The recipe called for it to rise for 4 hours, but after 45 minutes it had doubled in size and had developed its own gravitational field. In retrospect I shouldn’t have baked with it – I realise now that I’d inadvertently discovered Cavorite, the substance from HG Wells’ The First Men In The Moon that defied gravity and made spaceflight possible.
Meanwhile on the gansey I promenade down the sleeve, doing a bit now and then as the mood takes me, and slowly working my way through Wagner’s oeuvre – and, as the man said, people in a hurry shouldn’t be listening to Wagner anyway.
(Sigh.) News just in. First it was the threat of volcanic ash from Iceland. Now British Airways cabin crews have announced that they’re going on strike just when we’re planning on visiting Margaret’s family in the States next week. They’ve got a week to reach an agreement or there’s going to be trouble, I can tell you…
 Well, I duly had my interview for the job working for the Western Isles Council last week – and I didn’t get it.
It’s a disappointment, though unlike the Hebrides themselves, I can honestly say it’s not the end of the world – since there were enough complications to make me a bit ambivalent. It would, for example, have meant relocating yet again for a temporary job, it’s a very long away from my parents who are in their eighties, and then there’s the wind, rain and the endless winters to consider. I imagine it would be like living in an Ingmar Bergman movie. Plus I very much doubt there’s a Starbucks on the islands.
And, as ever in these situations, I tend to feel that somewhere out there is something more exciting than the job I didn’t get. So – I’ve just turned 50, I’m unemployed, and we’re in the biggest recession and public spending squeeze for 70 years – the world, as Terry Pratchett would say, is my mollusc. How bad can it be?
 In the meantime, I’m free to indulge my three great passions (or the ones I’m prepared to discuss in public anyway – and I’ve always maintained, like PG Wodehouse’s Uncle Fred, that a more enlightened judge would have let me off with just a caution): namely, baking bread, listening to Wagner – and, of course, knitting ganseys.
After last week’s herculean effort picking up the stitches for the sleeve, all I had to do next was get the pattern to fit. I wanted to use the same pattern elements as the body, so the gansey would look all of a piece. I’ve replicated the yoke pattern at the top of the sleeve (diamonds flanked with inverted yarn-over chevrons), with below that a narrow band of the diagonal trellis pattern as a border, while the rest of the sleeve will comprise the tree and starfish patterns all the way down to the cuff. Each pattern element is exactly the same as it was on the main body of the gansey (I know some patterns traditionally were knitted smaller on the sleeves, but I’ve decided to keep this one big and chunky). I’ve only made the sleeve “yoke” one panel row deep (the body yoke was 3 panels deep), because I reckon the main patterned part of the sleeve should end above the elbow – or at least I think it looks better that way.
 The gusset decrease was 2 stitches every fourth row, to match the previous rate of increase. Now that I’ve finished the gusset, I’ve switched to a rate of decrease of 2 stitches every 5 rows, so as not to run out of sleeve too soon.
So at the moment I’m doing quite a bit of knitting – as you can tell by how much of the sleeve’s been done – while listening to Wagner and waiting for the dough to rise. Now I’ve got used to baking with fresh yeast I’m getting ready for the next great trial: preparing a sourdough starter with wild yeast and keeping that alive indefinitely to bake with. (I already keep back some of each batch of dough to use in the next loaf, but it’s not the same.) And then my final challenge – a harvest loaf (Google it if you don’t know what they look like) – and then a gansey made out of bread…
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It’s not often I compare myself with Shroedinger’s Cat, but this is definitely one of those times.
It’s been hard to concentrate on knitting with all this going on, but as you will see I’m progressing slowly down the sleeve. It takes about 5-6 minutes to do a row at this stage, and as I’m decreasing on every 5th row, I tend to work in blocks of 5 rows at a time, or about 30-35 minutes at a stretch (which is conveniently the same length as a Mozart piano concerto!).
