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 I’m afraid you’ll have to put up with the B Team this week, as Margaret is off on her annual holiday and I’m left to come to grips with the camera and blog technology on my own—which is rather like leaving Homer Simpson in charge of the nuclear plant.
Each year at this time she goes off to the south of France to attend polymer clay workshops and visit friends. (At least that’s what she says, I don’t really know. It’s equally possible that they all get together for sex parties involving immigrants from Eastern Europe, or go work for a James Bond supervillain to build a gigantic laser in the Alps to shoot down global positioning satellites, or try to place the tormented soul of Charles de Gaulle in a reanimated corpse, and so bring down the Euro from within. Anything’s possible.)
I am of course safe writing this because Margaret’s away and will never see it. I mean, it’s not like they have the internet or wifi in France, right? (What? Oh.)
Anyway, apologies for the lack of definition in the gansey pictures this week. I have three excuses already lined up. I’m using my iPhone; I have a migraine which keeps me checking in the mirror to make sure I really haven’t been harpooned in the left eye; plus my secondary cataracts (or “posterior capsule opacification”) are making everything blurry and out of focus—so, look at it this way, this gives you a rare opportunity to see the world through my eyes!
(As Yoda might say: “Cataracts lead to blurred vision, blurred vision leads to stubbed toes, stubbed toes lead to … suffering”.)
Anyway. I’m now almost two-thirds up the front of the Filey gansey, just another half inch or so to go and I’ll divide left and right for the neckline. These days I’ve settled on allowing a two inch indent for the neck, give or take, which allows for a nice, graceful curve and doesn’t give me too many stitches to pick up—and it should avoid the “Boston strangler” effect a tight neck on a gansey can achieve. More on this, hopefully, next week, when I should have the shoulders joined.
 I’m including a couple of pictures we didn’t have space for in last week’s blog. One is a rather jolly shot of the boats in Wick marina for Harbour Fest decked out in bunting and signal flags; the other reflects the shock I felt when I stopped over in Edinburgh the other week on my way to London. It’s a picture of Princes Street, dug up yet again for the tramlines. You know that feeling when you meet an old flame who’s really—really—let themselves go? Like that. (Edinburgh, what happened to you, man? You used to be beautiful.)
Meanwhile I’m struggling to settle on a book to read—can’t find one I’m in the mood for. I thought I’d finally found the right one, before realising that Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot (a creepy and very disturbing vampire novel) perhaps wasn’t the most sensible choice; considering I’m on my own in an old house on the outskirts of town, one that creaks and shifts in the night. (“That boarded up old ruin? That’s the old Reid place, that is. No, it never got sold after the events of that terrible night. They say, all that was found was a blood-soaked length of five ply and two 2.25mm needles twisted into the shape of a cross…”) Right: the Wind in the Willows it is, then!
 It’s shameful confession time: not much progress to report this week. This is partly because motivating myself to start the front after I’ve finished the back is sometimes difficult (you mean I’ve got to do all that again?! Aw, man!) But mainly it’s because I had to go to a meeting in London.
Now, if you look at a map, you’ll see that London is not the easiest place to get to from Wick. In short, to attend a 3-hour meeting in Holborn on a Wednesday, I had to leave on Tuesday morning and didn’t get back till Thursday afternoon. Every fight was delayed (over the three days I spent more than 7 hours hanging around in airports and railway stations), and of course you can’t take knitting into the cabin, for fear you might suddenly decide to overpower the flight crew with a garrotte made of hastily-knitted 5-ply.
 Wick to Edinburgh is quite civilised; but the other flights (and rail journeys) aren’t. There’s no seat reservations without paying extra, so there’s a mad stampede when the gate opens, scenes resembling the arrival of an aid convoy at a refugee camp; in the end the stewardesses were forced to restore order by firing machine guns into the air, though too late to save at least one crushed businessman whose trampled Blackberry may never text again (hopefully).
 This weekend was the Wick “Harbour Fest”, a charity event to celebrate the Queen’s Jubilee and raise money for the local lifeboats. On the Saturday there were stalls all round the harbour – the Moray Firth Gansey Project was represented, nice to see Kathryn and Stephanie again – and ships to explore. So we got the chance to wander over a superbly restored old herring drifter, the Reaper, up from the Anstruther Fisheries Museum. (I didn’t spend long below decks: the boat heaved unnervingly even in the mild swell and that, combined with having to walk hunched over like Grouch Marx, a sort of reverse limbo contest in a malfunctioning elevator, sent me scuttling back up the companionway to fresh air; I had enjoyed my breakfast, but seeing it once was enough.)
 On the deck of the Reaper The Reaper at sea On Sunday, most of the ships in the harbour (fifty or more) put out to sea for a celebratory spin round the coast – and while most of them were, of course, small pleasure craft, there were enough larger craft to suggest what it must have been like a hundred and fifty years ago when the fleet put out. There were over 1,000 boats fishing out of Wick in the 1860s, and to see sail after sail (or engine) round the harbour wall, turn gracefully and head out to sea was like stepping into an old black and white photograph (an impression aided by the weather: grey skies, grey clouds, grey ocean – as if someone had adjusted the colour dial to sepia for a day). We stood on the south river pier, shivering in our ganseys, as one by one, lost in the haze and the horizon, blown by a bitter north wind, the boats disappeared from view – round the headland, out of the present and back into history.
The Isabella Fortuna leads the flotilla Of course, eventually they turned round and came back, ruining the symbolism completely. But by then we were on our way home, looking forward to hot coffee and central heating. (The past is all right for a short visit; but you wouldn’t want to live there – not till they start serving cafe americanos, anyway…)
A rainbow at sunset Finally, another completed gansey to celebrate – from Joy in Staffordshire, it’s a Staithes made from hand-spun yarn (see the gallery page for an image). The pattern comes out really clearly in that yarn and goes to show, again, how effective the core gansey patterns can be.
Where, the poet TS Eliot once famously asked, is the summer, the absolute zero summer? Of course, to make it all the more poignant, Eliot was talking about how remote summer seems in the depths of midwinter – not a few days before the longest day – but it’s still a good question.
Because after a couple of weeks of glorious sunshine Britain has been pounded by wind and rain, with storms going round giving everything a good kicking like a bored motorcycle gang in a 1960s out-of-season seaside town. The south of England has gone from being a designated drought area to underwater in just a few days. (A typical British summer, in other words, I hear you say.)
 Here in Caithness it’s all very confusing. One the one hand, it’s broad daylight till after 10.30 at night (which makes drawing the curtains at bedtime seem just wrong); on the other hand we’ve dusted off the hot water bottles and have the heating on. Migrating birds give you accusing stares as you pass them by, huddled and shivering down by the river, as if you’re personally responsible and this wasn’t what they were told to expect from the brochure.
Suddenly knitting ganseys doesn’t seem so incongruous. I have finished the back, consisting of an 8-inch armhole topped with another inch of “rig and fur” shoulder strap (purl, purl, knit, knit, x 3). The front will be exactly the same, except for the neckline. I tend to get the knitting equivalent of Stockholm Syndrome during gansey projects, so I fall in love with each one and think they’re the best ever – I’m told mothers experience something similar – but I am very impressed with this pattern. And it should be warm: the myriad ridges caused by the steps, or ladders, will provide lots of pockets for warm air to nestle next to the body.
Well, it’s been a month since my novel was launched on an unsuspecting world, and astonishingly it’s still selling (I’ve almost earned enough in royalties to buy a takeaway to celebrate – mind you, at 30% of 99 cents a time, it’s gonna take a while). Many thanks again to everyone who downloaded a copy, and especially to those who took the trouble to write a review. The book has now garnered a gratifying six reviews – three on the Amazon.com and three on Amazon.co.uk.
I’m preparing my next novel, The Bone Fire, for publication in August, doing the final proofing. I now have software that lets me more easily export documents as kindle-friendly files, so what I’d like to do is offer readers of this blog the opportunity to get an advance free copy; all I ask is that you undertake to try to read it before the middle of August, and then – if you like it – post a review on Amazon when it’s published, to hopefully give it a boost. (Of course, if you don’t get round to reading it, don’t like it or finish it, don’t worry – this is just an experiment. We won’t fall out over it!)
Anyway, if you’re interested, just drop me an email at gordon@ganseys.com to register and I’ll send you the book in kindle format as a .mobi file in the next week or so.
 Bread. Not bagels, alas (sorry Tamar) – I had a migraine this weekend, so I wasn’t up for anything complicated. Instead, I made some flatbread, yeasted bread you roll out flat like tortillas and cook in a skillet. They don’t need any oil, but I had a bottle of olive oil in the cupboard, the kind you spray like underarm deodorant (n.b., be very careful not to get your boxes mixed up when moving house, cos one time… Well, anyway. Not as bad as the time I confused the tube of shaving cream with toothpaste, but still). The oil adds a sort of smoky barbecue flavour to the flatbread (not to mention your eyebrows), and it’s all very quick and easy; and, the way the summer is going, it’s the closest we’ll get to a barbecue for quite a while…
 Ha. When I joked last week about the Plagues of Egypt, little did I realise what I was in for. I am now in the middle of my own Plagues of Wick.
It all began, you will recall, with the Plague of the Crashed Internet. Then came the second plague, The Nasty Cold (mostly better, thanks for asking). Next up, the Plague of Irritating Insect Bites. Now I’m suffering the Stiff Neck. What’s next? I dread to think. (Not sure if Running Out Of Milk on a Holiday Weekend counts, but that’s in the mix too.) I double-checked the house today, just in case I’ve been accidentally imprisoning any Israelites so I could officially let them go, but didn’t find anything…
Just a short blog this week, as today’s a holiday for the Queen’s jubilee, in which an entire nation congratulates the richest woman in Britain for still being alive. Walking round Wick yesterday we noted a distinct shortage of street parties and bunting, which seemed a shame as this was apparently just about the only part of the country not being rained on.
 We watched some of the flotilla of boats on the Thames on tv, and great was our rejoicing when we discovered that we could select a satellite feed that gave us the pictures and sound without the commentary by the BBC’s presenters, who yapped away like a kennel full of puppies when it’s time for walkies.
I used to be something of a republican in my youth, but I’ve mellowed in my old age: I’m now in favour of keeping the monarchy but abolishing tv presenters.
 Knitting. Free from earth’s gravity—or at least free from the gusset and knitting in the round—the second stage of my gansey is sailing majestically and rapidly on. As usual, it takes me about 15 minutes to do a row once the gansey is separated, so I’m managing four rows an hour. If I’m lucky I’ll get the back finished next weekend—maybe—depending on what Fate has in store for me.
For I’m well aware that I’ve only had four plagues so far. Other plagues lurking in the wings include The Plague of the Bit of a Headache, The Unexpectedly Large Heating Bill and The Chip in My Favourite Mug. These would, of course, all be bad; but worse by far than all of them combined would be The Plague of Making a Knitting Mistake When Margaret’s Not Around To Fix It… The horror!
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I’m afraid you’ll have to put up with the B Team this week, as Margaret is off on her annual holiday and I’m left to come to grips with the camera and blog technology on my own—which is rather like leaving Homer Simpson in charge of the nuclear plant.
I’m including a couple of pictures we didn’t have space for in last week’s blog. One is a rather jolly shot of the boats in Wick marina for Harbour Fest decked out in bunting and signal flags; the other reflects the shock I felt when I stopped over in Edinburgh the other week on my way to London. It’s a picture of Princes Street, dug up yet again for the tramlines. You know that feeling when you meet an old flame who’s really—really—let themselves go? Like that. (Edinburgh, what happened to you, man? You used to be beautiful.)
