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 You may recall that I have had occasion – just now and then – to mention the wind up here in Caithness, strong enough to snatch an umbrella out of your hand and twist it into weird and disturbing shapes as easily as you might bend a paperclip, even on a normal autumn day. What did I know? Over the weekend I experienced a genuine Caithness gale.
I was woken up around 3 a.m. by the wind – well, I say wind, but that doesn’t adequately cover it: a gale was battering and shaking the house, pounding the double glazing and even squeezing puddles of water through. (I heard that winds around 80 mph were recorded in the Highlands in the night – I don’t know if this was as strong as that, but it can’t have been far off.) At one point I decided that as I was awake I’d turn on my bedside radio to take my mind off it all. After a couple of minutes I had to check it was actually on – the wind was so loud it drowned out the sound, for all the world like a 747 revving its engines prior to takeoff just outside my bedroom window. (Now I know what the Three Little Pigs must have felt like.)
 Anyway, this is supposed to be a blog about knitting, so it is with some relief that I’m able to turn aside from the delights of Caithness meteorology to actually talk about knitting for a change, rather than the “cut and paste” of my slow progress up the body in recent weeks. For I have, at last – wonderful to relate – started the gussets and the yoke.
But before I get into that, I have a (gulp) shameful confession to make. You see, I’ve never knit a pattern like this before, with a patterned strip up the seams and the rest plain – the bodies of my ganseys have either been all plain, or all patterned. Now I’ve discovered a worrying flaw in my technique: after 10 inches of body, the plain central panel measures almost an inch longer than the patterned strips.
 I wonder why this is? I thought I knit plain stitches tighter than patterns with lots of knits and purls – in fact, I know this is the case, from ganseys I’ve knitted before. Yet here the reverse is true. Have I been subconsciously knitting the seed stitch tighter to make sure it doesn’t end up as full of holes as a string vest? Have I been correspondingly relaxing in the plain stretches? Or is this merely an optical illusion, and it will all look the same once it’s washed and blocked?
 I’d be interested to hear from the more experienced knitters out there, especially if this is a recognised phenomenon.
Anyway, back to the pattern. I’ve made a start on the gussets – just a few rows so far – increasing one stitch either side of the gusset every 4 rows (my standard rate of increase). It looks a bit ugly, as it always does at first, but it will settle down as it widens and grows.
 Now, I’ve already hinted that this is an unusual sort of pattern. Not only does it have the patterned strips up the body seams, it has a sort of “pre-yoke”, triangular shapes that sit immediately below the start of the yoke proper, hanging like bats, or fat icicles from the start of the pattern. I don’t know if you can make them out from the photos – Margaret has fled back to the city lights of Edinburgh and taken her camera with her, so you’ll have to bear with me for a bit – but they’re about half done, so they sort of float in mid-air as if I was trying to knit a Space Invaders game pattern (now there’s a thought…).
I should finish them over the next few days, and then it’ll be time for the big reveal, the yoke pattern proper. Always assuming the big bad wolf hasn’t blown my house down in the meantime, of course…
 One evening in May towards the end of the 19th century, at around seven o’clock, the Sheriff Substitute of Wick (the deputy sheriff) was summoned to a druggist’s shop in Wick, where he found a young man lying injured on the floor. A couple of doctors were in attendance and they gave their opinion that the youth – a cooper who had just turned 17 a couple of months before – was losing so much blood from a wound in his neck he was unlikely to live.
 The Sheriff Substitute advised the young man to make a statement while he still could and, from his position lying on the floor, he told them that he had been on the quay of Wick harbour earlier that evening when he saw a “chum” of his, a seaman, having an argument with the captain of a vessel tied up at the dock, and threatening the captain with an open knife “in a mad like way”. “I went to him and bade him to put up that knife and come ashore. [He] instantly turned on me saying “I’ll put it in you too” and with that he struck me a blow with the knife in the neck and wounded me as I now am.”
The statement was written down and read back to him, the unfortunate young man being too faint by then even to sign his name – and indeed, he died shortly afterwards. The killer, who was only aged 20, was arrested the same evening, and a year later was convicted of murder and sentenced to 10 years.
 Bores of Duncansby I came across this “dying deposition” in the archives of the local police force, and it made quite an impression on me – I mean, how often do you come across someone’s dying words? Curious, I looked up the case and found a record of the conviction, which also included a description of the killer (long face, fresh complexion, brown hair, no whiskers, long nose, thin cheeks, large mouth, grey eyes, able to write well). It’s hard not to be moved, the poor young man bleeding to death on the floor of the chemist’s shop, surrounded by strangers, struck down by his friend in a blind rage. Sometimes archives can bring the past a lot closer.
In gansey news, I’m about an inch and half away from starting the yoke and the gussets now, maybe another week’s knitting, depending. I’m close enough that I keep getting out the ruler and staring in disbelief at how little progress I’ve made since the previous measurement. But many drips wear away the stone, as the Welsh proverb has it. Time cures all ills.
 Duncansby Stacks By the way, remember how last week I mentioned John o’ Groats in an unflattering light? Well, I looked it up on Wikipedia and learned that the Lonely Planet guide describes it as a “seedy tourist trap” and in 2010 it was named “Scotland’s most dismal town” – so it’s not just me. Turns out the distance between John o’ Groats and Land’s End is the furthest distance between two inhabited settlements in Britain, but the actual north-east tip of Scotland is Duncansby Head, just a couple of miles further on.
You reach the Head down a narrow road which ends in a car park; there’s a lighthouse, and a pretty good view over the sea to Orkney. But if you cut through the fields, and walk to the south side of the promontory, you’re rewarded with sight of the celebrated Duncansby Stacks, jagged great rocks rising out of the ocean like filed and broken teeth, one of them forming a vast arch. On the day we went it had been raining steadily and the grass seemed to be floating on a lake – it’s the only time I’ve seen grass ripple, in a Grimpen Mire/Marshes of the Dead sort of way – so we didn’t explore too closely, for fear of being sucked below, or finding pale hands clutching at our ankles. We’ll go back next year, when the weather improves; I’m told it really does. Honest.
 I once saw a documentary about X-rays and the way they travel invisibly through our bodies, which really creeped me out at the time – same as those subatomic particles barrelling through the helmets of astronauts and punching microscopic holes as they go. Well, I can now add a new category to all of these – Caithness wind, which I’ve discovered blows straight through my skull without being deterred by any headgear, exiting via the back, and leaving a chilled and shivering mass of shrunken brain behind.
 The wind, I find, is the defining characteristic of Caithness, along with the grey skies and dark winter nights. Walking in a strong wind is like crossing a field full of goats who keep wandering over and butting you from random directions, causing you to stagger drunkenly. People’s cheeks ripple and stretch as though they were in one of those g-force centrifuges the air force uses, and their clothes shimmer as though you’re looking at them underwater. Trees lean tiredly.
Our latest battle with the elements came on Saturday – Margaret’s up for the week, and as it was a sunny day we thought we’d revisit the rugged and spectacular north coast. We thought we’d start with John o’ Groats, which was bleak and deserted this time of year. It’s curious, but no one seems to know how John o’ Groats came to be so famous – it’s not even the most northerly part of Scotland – that’s Dunnet Point just up the coast, which sticks up into the sea like the antenna on top of Bender the robot in Futurama. Nor can it be due to the charm of its architecture, consisting as it does of a ferry terminal and a large car park ringed with touristy souvenir shops, sheds with peeling paint, beyond which the land slopes abruptly down to the ocean. But on a clear day – like this – you get a good view of the island of Stroma, across the Pentland Firth. (incidentally, does anyone know the – pretty tenuous, I admit – connection between the Pentland Firth and the Lord of the Rings?)
 You also get a lot of wind. We went down to look at the waves bursting like artillery shells on the harbour wall, spray like spouting whales, the ocean heaving menacingly like some great leviathan of the deep. But after watching a seagull effectively flying on the spot into a headwind for a while we decided enough was enough. (My new idea is to have car airbags double up as giant hot water bottles for days such as this, so you can at least get warm quickly.)
All of which reinforces the attraction of a gansey, though you’d also need several more layers and some thermal underwear if you were really venturing out. I’m inching my way nearer the start of the yoke, and the body is getting pretty floppy – I’ve got used to knitting ganseys that are patterned all over, so that the pattern effectively serves as reinforcing struts up the body, like the frame on an airship. Suddenly it feels like I have a drunken toddler on my lap, one with attention deficit disorder, or am trying to play a deflated set of bagpipes.
 On Wednesday I gave a talk to the family history society. It seemed to go down well, though as I’m suffering with a nasty cold my voice gave out before the end and I finished up squeaking like Beaker from Sesame Street, and was reduced to getting my points across with hand gestures. As a thank-you they gave me a jar of golden local honey for my throat, which was very nice of them. There’s a possible joke to be made here about how Caithness honey should be cloudy and dark to reflect the weather, but that would be unfair – so long as it doesn’t give you wind…!
 Behold, as Walt Whitman used to say, the sea itself, and on its limitless, heaving breast, the ships. Or in this case – for we are talking about Wick harbour on a crisp, clear, Saturday morning – the ship, singular (a fishing boat, I think, not unlike the one the shark destroyed in Jaws, putting out to sea and bouncing up and down as though the sea was a giant bouncy castle).
 It seems hard to imagine now, looking round the peaceful, almost deserted marinas, but at one time Wick was the epicentre of the whirlwind Scottish herring industry. In 1900 some 1,200 boats fished out of Wick, and it’s said that the record catch was some 50 million fish landed over 2 days. (Can this be true? Apparently. Personally I can’t visualise 50 million M&M’s, let alone fish, so it all goes over my head, really. But given that the population of the UK was just 38 million in 1900, that’s really quite impressive.)
 I was thinking about this as I picked my way over the slippery stones, seaweed, empty beer cans and plastic bottles along the north shore on Saturday, drawn out of bed by the brilliant sun and the gulls (wearing a gansey, of course, though the old sea dog ensemble was somewhat ruined by the Boston Red Sox baseball cap…), and looking back towards the town. There are old photographs of Wick harbour absolutely crammed with ships – as the old cliché has it, masts thick as a forest – and I was trying to picture what it must have been like, the bustle, the noise, the smell. But it’s too far in the past, in a black and white era, and we live in colour now. Like the First World War, somehow it all happened in monochrome.
 Work on Des’s Humber Keel gansey continues apace. The body’s long enough now that it won’t stand upright on its own any more, but collapses gracefully like a punctured soufflé, or an Edwardian lady curtseying, skirts ballooning like a hovercraft coming to rest. It’s a little over 9 inches long now, 3 inches of welt and 6 inches of body. The pattern, as recorded in Michael Pearson’s book, calls for 10 inches of plain knitting in the body before the fun starts, so if things carry on as they are I should reach that point around the start of December.
After all my preparations I didn’t get a single treat-or-treater, or door-kicker-in-er on Halloween. There were stray bangs and pops all through the evening, both then and on Bonfire Night – I assume they were fireworks, unless Wick has a gang problem with drive-by shootings I don’t know about. But other than that, nothing. Removing the shells from my shotgun, I felt curiously let down.
 Ah, well. There’s something about the ocean (“the old mother sways her to and fro singing her husky song”, as Walt Whitman says) that makes you think. Sometimes these thoughts are profound, like Whitman’s thinking “a thought of the clef of the universes and of the future”; other times they merely remind you how much you’d like a Chinese takeaway. Whatever floats, as they say, your boat.
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[All black & white photos are from the Johnston Collection – a wonderful collection of old photos of Wick. – admin.]
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You may recall that I have had occasion – just now and then – to mention the wind up here in Caithness, strong enough to snatch an umbrella out of your hand and twist it into weird and disturbing shapes as easily as you might bend a paperclip, even on a normal autumn day. What did I know? Over the weekend I experienced a genuine Caithness gale.
Anyway, this is supposed to be a blog about knitting, so it is with some relief that I’m able to turn aside from the delights of Caithness meteorology to actually talk about knitting for a change, rather than the “cut and paste” of my slow progress up the body in recent weeks. For I have, at last – wonderful to relate – started the gussets and the yoke.
I wonder why this is? I thought I knit plain stitches tighter than patterns with lots of knits and purls – in fact, I know this is the case, from ganseys I’ve knitted before. Yet here the reverse is true. Have I been subconsciously knitting the seed stitch tighter to make sure it doesn’t end up as full of holes as a string vest? Have I been correspondingly relaxing in the plain stretches? Or is this merely an optical illusion, and it will all look the same once it’s washed and blocked?
I’d be interested to hear from the more experienced knitters out there, especially if this is a recognised phenomenon.
Now, I’ve already hinted that this is an unusual sort of pattern. Not only does it have the patterned strips up the body seams, it has a sort of “pre-yoke”, triangular shapes that sit immediately below the start of the yoke proper, hanging like bats, or fat icicles from the start of the pattern. I don’t know if you can make them out from the photos – Margaret has fled back to the city lights of Edinburgh and taken her camera with her, so you’ll have to bear with me for a bit – but they’re about half done, so they sort of float in mid-air as if I was trying to knit a Space Invaders game pattern (now there’s a thought…).
