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 It’s Festival time in Edinburgh, which is nature’s way of telling me not to get out of bed in the morning, and under no circumstances to go into the city centre without a machete. Alas, I’ve been suffering from tinnitus these last few months, so the hospital thought it would be amusing to invite me to a hearing test on Saturday afternoon – which meant crossing Princes Street, the Mound and the Royal Mile, which swarm with tourists like bees in a hive. The pavements were packed, resembling those futuristic movies where a zombie-like humanity shuffles hopelessly into vast factories. At one point just ahead of me a Japanese tour ran into a French tour and it was like watching cells multiply under a microscope (I suspect some puzzled French tourists are even now on a flight to Japan and vice versa).
 Interestingly,the biggest crowds were outside the Elephant Tea Room where I heard one woman explaining to a party of thrilled children, “And that’s where JK Rowling wrote Harry Potter…” – something I find curiously pleasing.
 The hearing’s fine, by the way, I just have to put up with a constant high-pitched whine like the sound of a dentist’s drill as heard from the waiting room. But I had no problems listening to a performance of Mahler’s 2nd symphony last night at the Usher Hall, one of the two Festival treats I’m allowing myself this year. Mahler’s 2nd is a piece that never fails to move me – a representation of death, the day of judgment and then a blazing, transcendental finale (with full choir, tubular bells and floor-wobbling organ) to show the soul received into bliss. It was pretty loud in the hall, though I was a little surprised it wasn’t louder – until I blew my nose, my ears popped and suddenly the volume seemed to double! (Oh, you mean that organ.) Mahler wanted his music to encompass the whole world and there are times when I think he succeeded, this world and the next.
  We took an excursion out to Crail last week, a sweet little fishing town on the east coast of Fife just a few miles on from Anstruther. (At least we thought it was sweet until we stopped for lunch and discovered the 2 panini and 2 drinks were costing us £20 – that sound you can hear is the clicking of shears as another tourist is fleeced.) But it has a charming working harbour and strong smell of seaweed, which are two of my criteria for a satisfactory fishing town experience. No ganseys, alas, but that’s only to be expected in these fallen days.
My own gansey project is racing towards the finish line. I’ve finished one sleeve, just the other to go. With no novel on hand just now, though I have several ideas I’m playing around with, I find I’m in the mood to relax and just do something manual. So I’m zonking along. I decreased down the sleeve by 2 stitches every 7th row – on the cable row – to the end of the pattern. This gave me 122 stitches by the cuff, so I decreased by 14 to give me 108 stitches for the cuff, or 27 ribs of 4 stitches (kkpp). As usual, I knit a 6-inch cuff so my uncle has some flexibility as to how long he wears the sleeve.
I’m still determined to get the hang of croissants, so I’m trying different recipes. The problem is, if you don’t get it quite right, you end up with what is, in effect, bread dough fried in butter (how can something that tastes so right be so wrong?). Anyway, here’s my latest batch. Try not to think of the 500g of butter when you look at it…
Also, here’s another batch of the bread I gave the recipe for last week. This time I used 950g of white bread flour and 50g of wholemeal flour to give it a slightly deeper flavour and texture. But just to show it works!
Finally, to all our readers affected by Hurricane Irene, our sincerest commiserations. I know it wasn’t as bad as it might have been, but we’ve followed the reports of flooding and wind damage, power outages and discomfort closely over here, and we hope things get back to normal for you soon.
 Sometimes we all must face up to the realisation, as PG Wodehouse said, that life is stern, and life is earnest. In my case, this usually happens every time I have to pick up stitches around the armhole for a sleeve. But there’s nothing for it but to take a deep breath, play some calm, relaxing music – Bach, perhaps, or The Pixies – and, after entering a zen-like trance, the mind free of illusion and distraction, grasp the needle, and the nettle.
The armhole for this gansey measures 8.5 inches from the gusset to the shoulder join, or 17 inches in the round. At a stitch gauge of around 9 stitches per inch, that gives me 159 stitches. It fought me every step of the way, for some reason – I would normally expect to pick up those stitches in 45 minutes to an hour, this time it took me an hour and a half – but they all came up cleanly and of course once the pick-up row is out of the way you’re off and running.
 159 stitches gives me a central chevron panel flanked by two diamonds per side, each of 19 stitches, interspersed with cables. I’ve decreased the gusset at the same rate as it was increased, 2 stitches every fourth row. After that, the decreases happen on the cable, i.e., every 8th row. Now it’s just a question of actually knitting the sleeve and as you can see, I’ve made pretty good progress.
 Other than knitting, I’ve been tweaking some writing around. Some years ago, I wrote a Victorian detective story, set during the building of the Elan Valley dams in mid Wales to provide fresh water for Birmingham. It’s a bleak little tale, and I’ve always had a soft spot for it; the story was quite good, but the writing was truly awful – dreadful – as lifeless and bloated as last month’s beached whale. So while I take a break from life in general, I’ve been rewriting this story, and drastically editing it down to just over 75,000 words. The funny thing is, I even tried to give it a happier ending, but it just didn’t work – so finally I admitted defeat and restored the original nihilistic one (Thomas Hardy frequently had the same problem, I understand).
 Finally, after much experimentation, I’d like to share my basic bread recipe with you.
1 kg flour, 10g powdered dried yeast, 20g salt, 680ml warm water, 1 tbsp olive oil. Combine all ingredients in a mixing bowl, leave for 20 minutes to let the flour absorb the liquid. Tip out on counter and knead for 10 minutes or so. Clean the bowl, oil it and put in the dough. Cover with plastic and leave overnight in the fridge. Next morning, take it out of the fridge, do a stretch and fold and leave for an hour in the bowl to warm up. After that, tip it out and shape the loaves (I usually make 4 8-inch baguettes and 6 rolls), leave to rise for 75 minutes or so, then score the tops if desired and bake in a pre-warmed hot oven for 15-20 minutes.
You can add a splash of sourdough to the basic mix, or leave out the oil, or add a spoon of honey or sugar without making much difference. Angels eat this bread for breakfast, with a sort of ambrosia pate in place of marmalade. Fallen angels are cut off from the divine bakeries, and it’s well known that this is their greatest torment, being forced to eat supermarket sliced bread for all eternity, forever tortured with the memory of a crackling crusty baguette.
 Hurrah! The front is finished, the shoulders are joined and the collar is done too. After my faux pas of a couple of weeks ago (mutter mumble mutter), we’re back on track, and there are only the sleeves to go.
 I decided to shape the neck to a depth of one diamond, or 18 rows (1.5 inches). As I prefer a fairly steep curve around the neckline, I set the rate of decrease to be 1 stitch every 2 rows. With a bit of elementary maths (a slide rule, strong coffee and a wet towel), I calculated that over 18 rows I would make 9 decreases, so I moved 9 stitches from each side of the centre needle and placed them on each shoulder needles, and heigh ho, off we go, decreasing every other row. (H’m. Were there ever knitting shanties…?) The actual decreases were made on the 2nd and 3rd stitches of each row to give me clear stitches to pick up for the collar.
The shoulder strap is the traditional “rig ‘n’ fur” and is one of the neatest features of a gansey. As you all know already, each half of the shoulder consists of 12 rows, alternating 2 rows purl with 2 rows plain to give 3 ridges and 3 furrows. By using a 3-needle bind-off, the actual join of the centre furrows creates, as if by magic, a central ridge. I never grow tired of this effect.
 The collar is just over an inch of knit 2/ purl 2 ribbing. The shoulder strap and front indent measure about 4.5 inches, which at my current stitch gauge equates to 40 stitches to be picked up. It’s cast off in pattern, with knit cast-off stitches and purl cast-off stitches, so ensure the collar concertinas properly at the top.
So there we are. All I have to do now is screw up my courage, and/or get blind drunk, and – gulp – pick up the stitches around the sleeve.
I was approached by my optician the other week, to see if I wouldn’t mind being a test subject at an optician’s seminar he’s organising in Edinburgh at the end of the month (my eyes are so weird and fragile they could be the full page centrefold in What Retinal Detachment Monthly). At first I agreed, until I found out that this would involve sitting in a darkened room, having those horrible drops in my eyes (the ones that infect you with Bush Baby Eye Syndrome), and staring into Star Wars laser beams while various opticians peer at me on and off through the day. Reader, I chickened out (buk-buk ba-kaark!).
The weather’s a bit bipolar these days, but on one of the “up” days we went out to the botanic gardens at Dawyck, about an hour’s drive south of Edinburgh last week. There was hardly anyone there, and this was my kind of garden – trees and hills, a river and, overhead, a handful of buzzards circling like vultures just in case the incline proved too much for us. Most gardens are just too manicured for me – this felt more like managed countryside. Recommended.
This week’s bread is a 50% wholemeal, a loaf and some pseudo-ciabatta rolls, softened with olive oil, and with added honey because there’s something about a sweet honey wholemeal bread that just feels right. And it’s possibly the most comforting kind of toast you can make (that doesn’t contain cinnamon, anyway!).
Right. Am off to compose a few knitting shanties.
Heigh ho, here we go,
Decreasing every other row,
Weigh oh, knit it slow,
At least I’m knitting a gansey so I don’t have to learn to sew.
OK, needs some work, I admit…
 In shock news this week I’ve been reminded that I’m still, technically, an archivist (you can take the boy out of archives, but you can’t, etc.). First of all I’ve been approached out of the blue by the professional association of archivists in the UK to be their new Vice Chair.
I did explain to them that I do not, on the whole, seem to see the world in the same way as most archivists, which is one reason I tend to keep a low profile, professionally – the association conference is in Edinburgh this year and I’m still not going (as the great Liverpool football manager said of local rivals Everton, “If Everton were playing at the bottom of the garden, I’d draw the curtains”. Well, it’s not like that with me, but I’ve learned down the years that there’s no point in arguing with people who disagree with you). But like some white-haired Roman senator, sick of the decadence of the imperial court who retired to his country estates to grow grapes and write iambic pentameters, I’ve been called back into service. My first move will be, I think, to propose that we rename the Board “The Parliament of Saints”, and take it from there.
 I also found myself having lunch in the unlikely surroundings of an officers’ mess in a regimental HQ last week. (Note to self: next time, wear a tie, put on your jacket without being prompted, and forget about being a vegetarian…). I’d gone to give them some advice on looking after their archives; perhaps the only collection I’ve come across where “pigsticking” is a useful indexing term.
 They have a really good little regimental museum, too – and I wore out more shoes than I care to remember traipsing round dispiriting local museums in the South West, so I know whereof I speak. They don’t have much storage space and, of course, there’s no money to build more (everything you need to know about the modern world is contained in the fact that they were recently turned down for a grant to build a store on the grounds that it “wasn’t strategic”). So most of what they have is on display, including some splendid old uniforms.
Incidentally, do you feel the same way I do when you see an historic uniform – it looks so small, you wonder how anyone could fit inside? But then, I once saw an exhibition of costumes from Star Trek: The Next Generation, and even Worf’s uniform looked like it was intended for a teenage member of the chess club, so go figure.
Meanwhile, I’ve been recreating the labours of Sisyphus (replacing the enormous boulder he was forced to roll up the hill, only for it to endlessly roll back down again, with a ball of yarn – well, it’s me back, you see) and have – finally! – re-knitted the rows which had to be ripped out last week. So in one sense I’ve only done about 7 rows this week, while in another, more accurate sense, I’ve done about 40. If anyone wants me, I’ll be in my room listening to Pink Floyd with the curtains drawn for a while.
I’ve also finally drawn a line under the “Wars of the Roses with magic” novel, which clocks in at a respectable 71,000 words (something in the region of 270 pages or so if it were a paperback). As usual, I’ve gone from being quietly pleased with it to despairing at its shortcomings in the space of about 3 days. (I wonder if plumbers ever feel this sort of insecurity about a washing machine, waking up days later at 3 in the morning, wondering if the connection is tight enough, if anyone will like the hose? “I tell you Liz, I should have been a novelist, I can’t take the insecurity…”)
Heigh ho, there’s always bread. This week’s bread is one of my most successful sourdoughs to date, light, full of bubbles, soft crumb, crisp, crackling crust, and with that authentic sourdough tang. Maybe I should set up a Bread Museum, like the dwarves in Terry Pratchett? In fact, if I could think of a strategic use for bread, I’d probably get a grant, too…
 Front, before  Front, after As the poet says, man rises on the stepping stones of his dead self to higher things. At the moment I’m sloughing dead selves faster than a snake sheds its skin!
And it was all going so well…
You see, ever since my cataract operations a few years back I’ve struggled to see really fine detail. Hard as it is to believe, sometimes I can’t tell if a stitch is a knit or a purl, especially if it’s a few rows back, and especially if the yarn is a dark colour. (Add to that a splash of colour blindness, just enough to make things interesting, and you can begin to appreciate my problem.)
So I have devised a system to keep track of where I am at any given time. I count off cables with a 7-barred gate and at regular intervals – at the end of every second diamond, say – I check the total number of rows against the number of completed diamonds (so ten 18-row diamonds equals 180 rows, equals 25 cables plus 5 rows). That way, I have a foolproof method of ensuring that I never get too far out of sync.
 Ceiling detail, dome of Vaux-le-Vicomte Foolproof, did I say? Alas the day. You see, I have one final, fatal problem to overcome, which is a tendency for my mind to wander at crucial times – or even for several days. So it was, gentle reader, that I made a crucial error – somehow I skipped a couple of rows, eliding two diamonds. I knew something was wrong at the time, I could see it wasn’t right; but because of my aforementioned eyesight problems I couldn’t tell what it was. (And, since Margaret was off big-game hunting in France, I couldn’t just ask anyone.) So I gave a mental shrug and carried on, slightly puzzled, but not even certain anything was wrong.
 'Spot the mistake' Until I got to the second diamond and discovered that the numbers didn’t add up; I was two rows short. You know that sensation where you go very hot and then very cold in rapid succession? If you imagine a Star Wars robot with blue lightning flickering over the casing just before it falls over, stunned, that was pretty much me. So some 3 inches has had to come out, about 8 hours work. Sigh.
Luckily, knitting for me is always more about process than results. I do it because I enjoy it – discovering completed ganseys dropping off the production line every few months is a sort of unexpected bonus. So I’m taking a few days off to recoup my energy, and then it’ll be as it if never happened.
 Back And at least I have completed the back (successfully – the numbers add up!), so you can get an idea of how the whole thing will look when it’s done.
While Margaret’s been away I’ve just got my head down and put in some 5-7 hours a day on the novel. I’ve almost finished the first draft – the 127th, really, if you count the number of times I’ve gone over it – there’s a just the final tweaking and polishing to go. It’s a historical fantasy, basically the Wars of the Roses with magic, and is also a supernatural murder mystery (who murdered the demon and why?). It clocks in at 70,000 words and I’m rather pleased with it, while accepting that I probably haven’t a hope of seeing it in print.
 I’ve been in a ciabatta kind of mood, experimenting with rolls and loaves. I think they might have come out better if the oven hadn’t gone out halfway through!
It’s been that sort of week, really. And with all these dead selves to stand on, I’m starting to resemble an anxious meerkat on guard duty…
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It’s Festival time in Edinburgh, which is nature’s way of telling me not to get out of bed in the morning, and under no circumstances to go into the city centre without a machete. Alas, I’ve been suffering from tinnitus these last few months, so the hospital thought it would be amusing to invite me to a hearing test on Saturday afternoon – which meant crossing Princes Street, the Mound and the Royal Mile, which swarm with tourists like bees in a hive. The pavements were packed, resembling those futuristic movies where a zombie-like humanity shuffles hopelessly into vast factories. At one point just ahead of me a Japanese tour ran into a French tour and it was like watching cells multiply under a microscope (I suspect some puzzled French tourists are even now on a flight to Japan and vice versa).
Interestingly,the biggest crowds were outside the Elephant Tea Room where I heard one woman explaining to a party of thrilled children, “And that’s where JK Rowling wrote Harry Potter…” – something I find curiously pleasing.
The hearing’s fine, by the way, I just have to put up with a constant high-pitched whine like the sound of a dentist’s drill as heard from the waiting room. But I had no problems listening to a performance of Mahler’s 2nd symphony last night at the Usher Hall, one of the two Festival treats I’m allowing myself this year. Mahler’s 2nd is a piece that never fails to move me – a representation of death, the day of judgment and then a blazing, transcendental finale (with full choir, tubular bells and floor-wobbling organ) to show the soul received into bliss. It was pretty loud in the hall, though I was a little surprised it wasn’t louder – until I blew my nose, my ears popped and suddenly the volume seemed to double! (Oh, you mean that organ.) Mahler wanted his music to encompass the whole world and there are times when I think he succeeded, this world and the next.
We took an excursion out to Crail last week, a sweet little fishing town on the east coast of Fife just a few miles on from Anstruther. (At least we thought it was sweet until we stopped for lunch and discovered the 2 panini and 2 drinks were costing us £20 – that sound you can hear is the clicking of shears as another tourist is fleeced.) But it has a charming working harbour and strong smell of seaweed, which are two of my criteria for a satisfactory fishing town experience. No ganseys, alas, but that’s only to be expected in these fallen days.
