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Balerno 18: 19 – 25 September

And so, here it is, the Finished Article. As ever, you can’t really see how a gansey’s going to come out until it’s been washed and blocked, and this one, if I say so myself, came out rather well. You can see it in the pictures, pinned out like Lemuel Gulliver being captured by the Lilliputians. Though – as ever – I won’t be able to relax until I see if it actually fits the intended recipient. All that’s left now is to add it to the gallery and move on to the next project or, if it doesn’t fit, to change my name and move to Latin America in disgrace.

Speaking of my next project, my intended target still hasn’t given me his measurements – I’m seeing him tomorrow, and my current plan is to summon a couple of policemen, accuse him of stealing my wallet, and then, while his arms are pinned, whip out a tape measure and stealthily measure his chest and arms. Then run like blazes. It should work, right?

We spent part of last week with my parents in the gentle rolling fields of Northamptonshire, a last visit before we vanish into the Frozen North. As I think I’ve mentioned before, they live in an old ex-pub beside the Grand Union Canal (see picture). The house is getting a bit too large for my parents now – too many stairs – but so much of my life is tied up with it, it’ll be hard to see it go; I can probably still match the various indentations in my forehead to the low wooden beams that cross the ceilings, from the many occasions when I nearly knocked myself out by forgetting to duck (‘But shouldn’t he be breathing, doctor?’).

Suddenly, it’s all go. We’re off back to Wick later this week to try to find me somewhere to rent in the short term, and maybe start scoping out houses to buy. Bizarrely, it’s almost impossible to find somewhere to stay in Wick for more than one night at a time, and if you try to book less than a week ahead all the rooms are full. What’s going on? Don’t get me wrong, I love Caithness and its coast, but this is rather puzzling. What can they all be doing up there? (I’d like to think they’re visiting the archives, but maybe not.) My current theory is that a James Bond supervillain is setting up a secret base in the wilds near Dunnet Head, and that the mists and low clouds are really produced by a screening device to hide it from view; and all these people are his new henchmen and technicians, who have answered advertisements in the Caithness Bugle. I shall of course make it my business to investigate, but if I disappear suddenly, or meet with a mysterious “accident”, make sure the authorities are alerted – and avenge me.

Are any of you going to the Ganseyfest in Inverness this weekend, part of the Moray Firth Gansey Project? If so, you’ll see 5 of my ganseys there, in the exhibition and maybe even in the fashion show (their latest flyer for the fashion show even shows one of mine being modelled by a suitably rugged-looking chap). We’re hoping to look in on the Sunday, but it’s come at the wrong time for us as we scoot from one end of the country to the other. (Inverness is about halfway between Edinburgh and Wick, a 2.5 hour drive for us.) If you do attend, and want to know how to recognise me, I’ll be the bloke.

Coming back to the blocked gansey, I’m thinking of treating myself to a wooly board, or jumper board, one of those frames that you can stretch pullovers on to dry them. Jamieson & Smith do a decent-looking one for about £80. Has anyone any experience of these? We used to own one, but it was plastic and eventually cracked and broke. Do they spoil the welt? How easy are they to use? Any observations gratefully received.

Balerno 17: 12 – 18 September

Let’s cut to the chase – after 18 months of gainful unemployment, I finally have a job!

That’s right. Our visit to Wick last week was not, as it might have appeared, an innocent holiday, giving me an unparalleled opportunity to get my feet and the back of my neck wet. It was, in fact, a job interview (albeit a very wet and windy one).

Ebenezer Place. The World's Shortest Street.

So I am – or will be in a few weeks’ time – the new Caithness Archivist, Caithness being an old county, now part of the Highland Council, forming the very north-east tip of Scotland, and taking in Wick, Thurso and John o’Groats, as well as a lot of spectacular coastline. (It was hard to get a very clear picture since it rained – or perhaps downpoured is more accurate – on each of the three days we were up there, and low cloud and mist pretty much took care of what was left of the view.)

Dunnet Head, where everything is tied down.

The Caithness Archive is quite small, just a couple of rooms in the local library, but it’s my kind of place. I’m really looking forward to it – most of my recent career has been on the strategic/ Government agency side of things, so it’ll be nice to go back to the hands-on, practical side of things again, if I can remember how after all this time. But archives is much like riding a bike in that sense, except the seats are more comfortable.

Wick is a little harbour town of around 7,500 souls, on the east coast. (The only other town is Thurso to the north, pop. 9,000 – so, given that the total population of Caithness is under 24,000, don’t expect to find a Starbucks when you come visit!) Inland it’s mostly lowland fields and almost no trees, similar to mid Wales in some ways but with far more ruined stone crofts crumbling slowly to rubble in the fields. Turn around, though, and you find the restless, heaving ocean and, if you look to the north, the Orkneys looming out of the mist like Leviathan coming up for air.

The Orkneys peep out

The best moment? We decided, rain or no rain, that we’d go out onto Dunnet Head, the peninsula that extends north past John o’Groats and really is the northernmost edge of Scotland. The rain stopped as we neared the Head, but instead we found ourselves driving into low cloud, thick as a fog. Fearing the worst, we arrived at the car park, navigating mostly by echo location, when suddenly the mist began to clear, visibly blown aside by the wind like a curtain being drawn across the ocean. Patches of sunlight appeared out to sea (I thought for an instant that an arm clad in purest samite was waving a magic sword out of the water – it was that kind of moment – but it was just a gannet), and the Orkneys materialised like a SF special effect. After that, it didn’t matter that by the time we were back at the hotel it was raining again.

Duncansby Stacks

Wick also has a little airfield, with flights to Edinburgh and Aberdeen every day except Saturdays, which makes it a little more accessible than the 256 mile drive from Edinburgh would suggest. It also, bafflingly, has one of the largest supermarkets in Scotland – Stop ‘n’ Shop size – bigger than the ones in Edinburgh. Very strange.

No ganseys, alas – in any case, everyone was wearing oilskins or other waterproofs – but I’ll be on the spot in future to keep my eyes open.

The next few weeks are inevitably going to be a bit hectic – I have to find somewhere to live, and we’ll be looking to buy a house – so please bear with me if I don’t respond to comments or emails as promptly as I’d like. I’d hoped to finish the gansey last week, but as you can see from the pictures, I’ve still got 1.5 inches of cuff to go (it’s hard knitting on a hotel bed!).

And my next project? Possibly a Wick or Thurso pattern…

Balerno 16: 5 – 11 September

As I type this on Sunday evening the advance guard of ex-hurricane Katia is rattling our doors and spattering our windows with raindrops hard as machine-gun bullets. And this is especially bad news because tomorrow we’re travelling up to Wick on the far northeastern tip of Scotland for a few days (think John o’Groats, then turn right, stopping before you hit the ocean and then down a bit) – just when the main force of dear old Katia is supposed to arrive like a Biblical plague (frogs for preference).

The forecasters are talking about 70+ mph winds and the possibility of flooding, though to be fair they do rather tend to take a pessimistic view. (“It’s going to be a hurricane, well, more of a tropical storm, but anyway, definitely a flood – did I say a flood? I meant heavy rain; either way, there could be puddles, some of them quite deep – though not so much rain now I come to think of it, more a sort of drizzle, definitely a mist. Look, be on the safe side, take some sunblock just in case.”) Actually, the worst of it’s supposed to hit the central belt and the west, so as we’re going north and east we should be OK.

I paid yet another visit to my favourite hospital last week to see a consultant about my tinnitus and a blocked sensation I get sometimes in my ear, as when I used to play rugby and someone’s knee would collide with the side of my head – which was rather a feature of my rugby-playing days, alas. First they made me take a hearing test, which involved putting on a set of headphones and pressing a button when I heard each of a series of bleeps and boops – not unlike listening to King Crimson LPs in my youth – and I was delighted to be told that there’s nothing wrong with my hearing (except the constant noise like a dentist’s drill buzzing away).

Then came the consultant, a sort of anti-House, terribly nice but curiously embarrassed, like an elderly vicar about to judge the wet t-shirt competition at the village fete. He peered inside each of my ears with a gizmo resembling Doctor Who’s sonic screwdriver, looked down my throat, then stood behind me with his hands round my throat and asked me to open and shut my mouth several times to see if my jaw was out of whack. After which he told me he was sorry, but there was nothing pathologically wrong with me. Ten minutes after I arrived I was standing on the pavement wondering if that was really worth the four-month wait, and looking for the road works only to find that was the tinnitus again. (At least, I thought, House actually cures his patients, even if he abuses them in the process and almost kills them first.)

Ah, well. As you will see from the pictures, the gansey is almost completed – just the 6 inches of ribbing on the cuff to go. Should be done this week, wind and weather permitting, after which it just has to be washed and blocked. I’m already thinking about my next project – I had planned to knit a gansey for a friend of mine from Musselburgh, but he still hasn’t given me his measurements, the swine. I may have to use underhand, devious, low tactics and ask his wife.

This week’s bread is Dan Leader’s “quintessential French sourdough”. It’s made with white flour mixed with some wholemeal and rye, to which I added some honey to un-sour it a little. The rye flour changes the consistency, so that it’s a bit like kneading a cement made from the ash you find left in your grate after a fire. Still, it gives a nice crackling crust and a chewy crumb with lots of holes – what more can you ask for?

Right, I’m off to start packing for tomorrow. I won’t be able to respond to any messages for a few days but hope to be back in circulation by the end of the week. And on the off chance that anything should happen to us, tell my brother he can’t have my cd collection – I want it cremated with me in a Viking funeral on the boating lake in Llandrindod Wells…

Balerno 15: 29 August – 4 September

It’s the end of another Edinburgh Festival, and last night we went down to Princes Street to watch the fireworks – and very spectacular they were too. Apart from the general whizz-bang-kapop-pop-pop experience, they always have some unusual effects, such as the fireworks “waterfall” which cascades in a golden stream down the castle mound; and the fireworks are choreographed to go off in time to a 45-minute concert of popular classical music in the gardens (which was, in the words of some New Englanders standing behind us, “ossum”).

It was a still night, mild with hardly any wind, so when the rockets exploded into clusters of smaller flares, like a sunburst, their smoke trails hung high in the air for several seconds – and just for a moment it was like looking at a negative photograph of a snow-covered bush in midwinter, until they slowly faded, leaving just a drifting haze of smoke. I thought that was pretty ossum too.

The other bonus of the Festival is all the culture that clogs up the city for a month like a overgrown garden. Alas, being unemployed, I’ve had to ration myself to just a couple of concerts this year: the Mahler I mentioned last week, and a rare performance of Richard Strauss’s fairy-tale opera, Die Frau Ohne Schatten, conducted by the Valery Gergiev and performed by the Mariinsky Theatre orchestra. The plot of the opera is, quite frankly, barking, but the music is wonderful and the sets and costumes were stunning, and – for once – the effects were magical. I’m still on something of a high three days later. (See this YouTube clip to get an idea.)

We’re approaching the gansey end-game now, with about a third of the second sleeve completed. I’ve kept careful records of the first sleeve, so I can make sure that everything is exactly the same. (This works fine until, cough, you get your columns mixed up and spend half an hour panicking, counting and re-counting, only to realise that you’re looking in the wrong column… oh well.) It’s always great to reach this point – with only one arm it looks a bit like an amputee – now it starts to look like a gansey.

This week’s bread is a departure for me – Dan Leader’s Green Olive Sticks (or to give them their Italian name, Pane di oliva verde). It’s a standard dough made with a traditional “biga” starter, with 2 cups of chopped, pitted green olives mixed in. You shape them into little mini baguettes (baguettinis?) of about 70g each, so they’re sort of a cross between baguettes and breadsticks. (These were made for Margaret – I can’t bear the taste or smell of olives, and kneading their slimy, oily little husks into the dough was something of a trial – like trying to replace the intestine of a dead goat after it’d been removed by mistake during the autopsy – but even I have to concede they look good.)

Finally, we had the pleasure of meeting Kathryn Logan of the Moray Firth Partnership last week. (By the way, Kathryn mentioned that Frangipani – who are also going to be at the Gansey Project’s “Ganseyfest” in Inverness on 1-2 October – now supply a pretty good range of 2.25mm needles, too, which is always good to know.) She brought down a couple of the Gansey Project’s original ganseys for us to look at, and they simply blew us away – such fine knitting, and so soft – really makes you regret the fact that you just can’t get that wool any more. As for the ganseys themselves, well, what can I say? They were – forgive me – ossum.