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 So, Halloween. Many people in Britain get annoyed that the American tradition of “trick or treat” has become commonplace over here, displacing native customs like the grey squirrel driving out the red. So I have already started the time-honoured response by boarding over the doors and windows and electrifying the door knocker, while seeding the doormat with landmines (the Tescos superstore really does have everything).
 But I was interested to learn that Caithness has its own variant of the festival, called “Kickie Doorie”. This happens on the night before Halloween, and cleverly avoids giving the victim a choice. Instead, gangs of children go round playing harmless pranks, like egging houses and cars, setting fire to bags of poo, and smearing baked beans on cars and windows. (This was told to me with an air of civic pride, which may be the most worrying thing I’ve experienced since I came to Wick.)
 The Library Crocodile  … and dressed up for his 100th birthday in 2009 On the gansey front, eagle-eyed readers may notice a tragic falling-off in the quality of the photos this week. This is because Margaret has returned to Edinburgh with her trusty camera, leaving me to fend for myself with an aging smartphone and no talent. But hopefully you can see progress from the chevrons, which are slowly accruing like tree rings. My only problem now is that we re-wound the 500g cone into a ball, and after a trouble-free few weeks I’ve reached the stage where it keeps snarling up into a massive tangle, like someone’s dumped an enormous pan of cold green spaghetti into my lap or I’m being attacked by a carnivorous plant from outer space. Imagine someone laying out a giant jellyfish to dry in their living room and that will give you the general idea of my technique for dealing with it.
Special thanks to Sue for permission to show a gansey she knitted for her brother in our “Reader’s Gallery” – looks pretty splendid, doesn’t it? Congratulations to artist and model!
I’ve been asked if anyone knows an American supplier of guernsey 5-ply yarn. Any suggestions? [a quick Google reveals that Kirtland’s Yarn Barn in VA carries Frangipani, as does Churchmouse Yarns & Teas in WA, and Handknitting.com in WY has Wendy Guernsey 5-ply – admin.]
 Snappy & Chompy and friend Highlight of my first couple of weeks at work so far is the time when the cleaner came in on the day we’re closed to the public and I was on my own, and she decided to set the alarm on her way out – so when I stood up all the alarms went off. And the key to the alarm cupboard was downstairs in the library, which was (inevitably) empty and locked (though it is, bizarrely, guarded by a genuine 100 year-old stuffed crocodile all the way from India). Picture me standing there like Oliver Hardy covered in whitewash, looking into an imaginary camera, with a curious persistent ringing in my ears.
Right, time to get the alligators (Snappy and Chompy) out of their crate and into the moat, and then I think my Halloween preparations are complete. All I have to do is try it out by phoning for a pizza delivery, and then we’re in business…
 I think I’ve had occasion to mention before the blessing and curse of the modern world that is autocorrect – whereby your computer assumes it’s smarter than you and corrects what you’ve typed into what it thinks you should have typed.
Long-term readers will recall that this used to happen most spectacularly when I worked in Wales, of course, when my word processor regularly replaced Archyfydd, the Welsh for Archivist, with Archfiend – so that I used to go round describing myself as the County Archfiend, still my favourite job title.
Now, while I’m between two homes, I’m doing most of my computing on my iPad – a fantastic little device that lets you surf the web while supine and/or comatose – but whose virtual keyboard is just a smidgeon smaller than a regular computer keyboard. Throw into the mix my blunt, stubby fingers, and you have an unrivalled opportunity for gobbledygook.
 Big Skies of Caithness Last night I discovered, to my great delight, that through some clumsy typing on my part Darth Vader had morphed into Death Badger. (I defy you to replay Star Wars in your head, replacing the one with the other, and not feel that it makes for a huge improvement.) Anyway, it’s all done so sneakily you don’t always notice – so this partially explains why there are so many typos in comments I’m posting at the moment.
Thanks for all the good wishes on my new job. I won’t pretend it hasn’t been stressful, finding a house to rent, moving up, starting the job, house hunting – and so much of archives work is “stuff you just have to learn” (what collections you hold, what sort of material they contain, the location of every village and hamlet in the county), I’ll be blundering around in a fog for some time to come. But so far so good – in fact, I may even be able to take my analyst off speed dial if things keep improving.
 And in case you were wondering . . . Balerno modeled by recipient It’s almost the end of October, though, so the weather’s unkind. Last week temperatures were only a degree or two above freezing, and the rain fell as hail, then sleet (most of it down the back of my neck). Today it’s warmer, but so windy people are walking around with what I thought were balloons, but it turned out to be small dogs swept up by the wind, tethered by their leashes.
So it looks like I’m going to need a good supply of ganseys. As you’ll see, I’ve slowed down a bit this week – not surprisingly. But you can see the seed stitch/ chevron pattern is starting to emerge clearly now. Now I’m well into it I’m not making any mistakes – one row starts purl-knit-purl, the next knit-knit-purl, and it’s almost impossible to get that wrong, even for the likes of me.
Next week the clocks go back and it’ll be Hallowe’en, so I suppose I’d better gear up to tricked or treated by the local gangs. I may even dress up in my own costume – who knows? I could always appear as Death Badger…
 I hadn’t realised how much simple pleasure you can get by writing old songs and substituting one word for another – in this case, “Caithness” for “Christmas”. It works with just about any song or carol, but is perhaps most effective with the soundtrack to the Muppet Christmas Carol. (“A cup of kindness that we share with another/ A sweet reunion with a friend or a brother / In all the places you find love it feels like C-a-i-t-h-h-n-e-s-s.”)
 For I am typing this blog in Wick, on Sunday night, having moved up here a few days ago to get settled in before starting work on Monday. I’m renting a nice little house on the outskirts of town for a few months. Quite a change from the centre of Edinburgh – from the bedroom window I get an unrivalled view of Tesco’s (at night it’s lit up like an alien landing strip) and open fields stretching away to the far horizon. People up here talk about the “big skies” of Caithness and I can see what they mean – sort of like the plains of the Midwest USA but with more midges.
Initial forays to the supermarket are encouraging – not only do they have oodles of fruit and veg, they also sell those imitation burgers and sausages that let vegetarians masquerade as normal people at barbecues like alien pod creatures disguised in human shape. The store is so big I suspect they could hold town meetings there and fit most of the population inside, and I have an urge to replicate the scene from the Blues Brothers movie and drive a car up and down the aisles. So we won’t starve anyway.
 In between looking at possible houses to buy and trying to figure out the subtleties of a new heating system, I’ve been making the most of my free time to get some knitting done before work swallows my spare time. The pictures are from a camera phone, so apologies for that. (The blog’s going to be held together with chewing gum and sticky tape for a few weeks till we get settled.)
But hopefully you’ll get an idea of the general rate of progress and be able to see some of the detail of the moss stitch and chevron panels running up the sides of the seam stitches. Already it looks distinct from the usual type of yoke-pattern ganseys where the body is entirely plain – so long as you don’t lose concentration and just knit through the patterned panels, as I’ve already done several times! Ah well.
Well, it’s late, so I suppose I’d better go and prepare myself for work tomorrow with a night’s vigil of fasting and meditation, like some medieval knight on the eve of his investiture, but with a sharp pencil instead of a sword. Thanks to all of you who’ve sent me good will messages, it’s much appreciated.
So picture me tomorrow, skipping to work like Pinocchio on his way to school, and singing a merry tune – after all, there’s only one more sleep to C-a-i-t-h-n-e-s-s…
 I first came across the term “displacement activity” in Desmond Morris’s bestselling book of popular sociology from the 1970s, Manwatching (along with some rather racy photographs that helped me through adolescence – well, the internet hadn’t been invented yet, we had to make our own entertainment). A displacement activity is anything you do that brings comfort while at the same time puts off some other activity you don’t want to face up to.
So, faced with a mountain of laundry, you might decide to have a cup of tea first, or write a shopping list, or arrange your fish knives in alphabetical order, or (ahem) write a blog – anything that helps you avoid facing up to reality. This week, faced with the logistical nightmare of moving up to Wick, my displacement activity has been knitting – which goes some way to explain how much I’ve got done. (Hey, it’s not like I haven’t done anything – I’ve started a list. That’s got to count for something, right?)
 As I said before, I cast on 388 stitches. After 3 inches of basic knit 2/purl 2 ribbing I increased to 432 stitches. My basic stitch gauge is about 9.25 stitches to the inch on 2.25mm needles, so that should give me something in the region of my target width of 46 inches or so. (The yoke pattern will involve cables, which will pull the chest in a bit, and there will be purl columns running the length of the body, so I should have some flexibility when it comes to block it in, oh, about three years’ time.)
 I’m going to follow one of the Humber “keel and sloop” gansey patterns from Michael Pearson’s book (the old edition, not the new reprinted one, since when I went to order it from Amazon UK I found it had already sold out, after just 3 days, dammit – so congratulations to Michael on a successful launch). I plan to adapt Mrs Jackson’s pattern from p.102, one of the really elaborate ones.
 It’s one of those ganseys with a plain body and a patterned yoke. I’ll post the yoke pattern when I come to it (in other words, when I’ve worked out what it’ll be!) but one of the elements of this pattern that’s a little unusual, and which I wanted to explore, is a narrow patterned panel either side of each seam stitch (see pattern chart). This consists of a section of moss stitch bordered by a 15-stitch chevron panel – the rest of the body is plain. These strips run the whole length of the body, and continue uninterrupted into the yoke, and on up to the shoulder. It’s too early to tell how they’ll look – I’m barely an inch into the body – but already it helps break up some of the endless knit stitches you get with a completely plain body.
 We occasionally get asked what Margaret gets up to when she isn’t riding shotgun on my various gansey projects. Being rather more representative of the wider knitting community than I, the answer is, pretty much whatever takes her fancy. Here’s her latest project – I think it’s a modified fishing net for catching moths, but I could be wrong.
 After much to-ing and fro-ing, I finally depart for Wick on Thursday 13th, when hopefully I will move into my temporary lodgings (Margaret’s coming up for a few days, but will be returning to Edinburgh until we find somewhere more permanent). So there may be some disruption to the blog over the next few weeks – please bear with us, if so. And I start work on Monday 17th, which gives me a week to try to remember just what it is that archivists do.
Meanwhile I suppose I’d better get started on packing and sorting out what clothes to take – oh, is that the time? Well, maybe after lunch. Oh, and I’ve got to post that letter. Well. Perhaps I could just squeeze in another couple of rows first…
 The warriors in Valhalla  Phew! What a week.
Let’s work backwards. Yesterday we bit the bullet and drove up to Inverness, to look in on the Moray Firth Ganseyfest. (I’m not saying we weren’t keen, but it was Sunday morning, we’d only just got back from a stressful few days in Wick, it’s a 3-hour drive to Inverness and it was pouring with rain: and not just ordinary rain, either, this was hard, angry, Saving-Private-Ryan-machine-gun rain, bridge-is-washed-out, there-goes-grandma kind of rain.)
 ... or at least their jumpers It was definitely worth it, though, not least because we got to finally meet some of the readers of this blog (a special hi to Judit of Helsinki and Alison of the USA, hope you got home safely) and put faces to names (in particular Elizabeth Lovick and the friendly people at Frangipani, who were sharing a stall). We didn’t have time to attend any of the talks or workshops, sadly, but we did get to chat with people over lunch and browse the stalls. Everyone seemed to be having a nice, relaxed time, and I’ve never seen so many ganseys in one place (this was where old ganseys go after they die if they’ve been good, a sort of gansey Valhalla). There were even a few of mine hanging on the rack, trying not to look like hobos gatecrashing a society ball. (You can see some good pictures of the event on Liz Lovick’s blog.)
 My ganseys hanging on their rack. As ever, you can’t judge how well a pattern will work till you see it knitted up, and it was interesting to find several patterns that had never caught my imagination in chart form looking remarkably effective on a vintage gansey. (And it’s curious how fine and soft old wool is; I wish you could get yarn like that now.)
 The rest of last week was spent up in Wick, trying to find me a place to rent. In most towns, you call an estate agent, they look you out a range of places to try, you go visit them and pick one. It’s really not that hard – except, apparently, in Wick. There, the estate agents don’t get their fingers dirty with anything so vulgar as rentals, and instead tell people to advertise privately. So you have to phone round and email loads of people, only to find that the property’s no longer available, or the people aren’t. In the end, with time running out, the choice came down to a flat that even the landlord described as “cheap, but you get what you pay for” – uh-huh – or a nice house on the outskirts of town, near the airport. Reader, I opted for the house! But I’m still waiting for the contract to come in the post, keeping my fingers crossed and sacrificing chickens* that nothing goes wrong now.
 Rather to my surprise it wasn’t raining (most of the time), so we got to see Wick in the sunshine – boats bobbing in the harbour, sunlight glittering on the ocean, birds hanging about the river like bored teenagers – and, like the hobbits in Fangorn forest, we “almost felt we liked the place”. Just one problem – I don’t think Wick is big on vegetarianism (only one chip shop had a veggie burger as an option, and that was crossed out as no longer available!).
Before I throw myself into Caithness ganseys, as I shall be honour bound to do once I’m up there, I thought I’d try a pattern I’ve always meant to knit but never got around to, one of the keel and sloop patterns from the Humber Estuary recorded by Michael Pearson. As you’ll see, I’ve just started – a cast-on row and a few rows of ribbing. It’s knit in Frangipani conifer, and the ribbing consists of 388 stitches. You’ll have to wait for the pattern itself, though, as it’ll be a yoked pattern only this time, and Lord knows when I’ll get that far if I have to work for a living now…
(*or sacrificing Quorn chicken pieces, anyway. Disclaimer – no fowl were harmed during the making of this blog!)
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So, Halloween. Many people in Britain get annoyed that the American tradition of “trick or treat” has become commonplace over here, displacing native customs like the grey squirrel driving out the red. So I have already started the time-honoured response by boarding over the doors and windows and electrifying the door knocker, while seeding the doormat with landmines (the Tescos superstore really does have everything).
But I was interested to learn that Caithness has its own variant of the festival, called “Kickie Doorie”. This happens on the night before Halloween, and cleverly avoids giving the victim a choice. Instead, gangs of children go round playing harmless pranks, like egging houses and cars, setting fire to bags of poo, and smearing baked beans on cars and windows. (This was told to me with an air of civic pride, which may be the most worrying thing I’ve experienced since I came to Wick.)
