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 And here we are, the last blog of 2012. After the storms last night I wasn’t sure we’d make it to post today—it seemed at one point as if our house might slip its moorings and drift down the river out to sea, and the next you’d hear of us we’d be broadcasting from Norway, or Iceland, living on gull eggs and fried Norwegians. But no: we survived.
And we’re past the shortest day! It’s been so dark and grey up here in northeast Scotland I’ve come to realise that Caithness actually defies the laws of physics, so that the sun sets at least an hour before it’s supposed to rise, thus doing away with the need for daylight at all. I’ve set up playlist in my music library consisting of just one song, “In the Bleak Midwinter”, on constant repeat. It seems appropriate, somehow.
 I’m finishing the year with another book on Amazon. It’s a collection of fifteen of my short stories, called The Dragon of Stroma and Other Tales. Some are straight fantasy, some are science fiction, some feature my cold war of angels and devils fought out on earth, others are just plain weird. Three or four are inspired by places in Caithness (as you might guess from the title). If nothing else, it will give you a pretty good idea what’s going on inside my head most of the time, as well as a desire to see my medication increased.
It will retail for $1.99, but as a Christmas treat I’m giving readers of this blog a heads-up that it’ll be free through Boxing Day.
In fact two more of my books will be also be free on Christmas Day and Boxing Day, An Inquisition of Demons and The Wraiths of Elfael. (I’m hoping that some lucky recipients of brand new kindles or tablets will be looking for quality free books to get them started.)
By the time we post again I should have finished the back of the gansey, and be well embarked on the front. As I’ve mentioned before, I shall knit the shoulder straps from the front so that the join comes at the back, safely out of sight. (The shoulders will be the same herringbone as the central pattern.) It’s got to the floppy stage, so my knitting technique is starting to resemble Donald O’Connor dancing with the dummy in Singin’ in the Rain.
I’ve got an apology to make, to Martha, who posted a few weeks back to the Suppliers page. In all the Christmas excitement I never got round to replying to her email: she’s looking for a US supplier of British Breeds Guernsey 5-ply yarn. If anyone has any suggestions, please can you post below, or on the suppliers page, please? Many thanks. (And Martha—sorry!)
Gansey Nation will be taking a break over Christmas and the New Year (we’re flying down to stay with my parents in Northampton over Christmas, where there is nary an internet connection to be had). So we’d like to thank everyone for making this blog such a fun place to be over the last year. And thanks to everyone for all your support.
So, as Tiny Tim is fond of saying: God bless us, every one! (I don’t know how Tiny Tim got his nickname, but I did hear him protesting loudly the other day, something to the effect that size wasn’t important…) Anyway that’s good enough for me.
See you in 2013!
 It’s not often that dear old Wick makes the news once in a week, let alone twice; but this has been a rather remarkable few days.
First of all, we were battered by storms and spring tides, culminating on Saturday in one of the biggest storms to hit the north-east coast of Scotland in living memory. (In my case, of course, that’s only just over a year.) Wick, helpfully described by the BBC as “near John o’Groats”, just in case you thought it might be in Cornwall, was pummelled, and the footage of tidal waves engulfing the lighthouse and breaching the sea wall is pretty spectacular, in a terrifying sort of way.
We decided to go up to John o’Groats (the one near Wick, in case you were wondering), which not only had rather good waves but also decent coffee, my prerequisite for facing the awesome power of nature. The harbour was swamped, and anxious fishermen could only watch helplessly as their boats were tossed about like toy ducks in the bath, the water foaming and heaving alarmingly, waves crashing over the walls or exploding in spray like artillery shells.
Wick was also in the news this week because the Nuclear Decommissioning Agency has finally given the green light (if you’ll pardon the expression, which seems a bit glow-in-the-dark-ish for all things nuclear) to build an archive for the records of the whole nuclear industry here. It’s due to open in 2016, by which time you won’t be able to throw a brick in the town without hitting an archivist. It’s good news for us, because the Caithness Archive is going to be housed there too, albeit in much the same way, given our relative sizes, that Jonah was housed by the whale. Suddenly the future exists.
 Meanwhile, progress continues on the gansey: I’m almost two-thirds of the way up the back yoke and you can start to see how it’s going to look. (Of course, until it’s blocked you won’t see it properly—the way the stitches pull it out of shape resembles a plastic model of the Millennium Falcon melted in the microwave—but you get the general idea.) I’ll stop when I get to the shoulder strap, so I can knit it from the front and make the join at the back.
I’m down to about 3/4 of one eye now, the right one, which makes knitting and using a computer a little tricky, but still possible. I’m revising the sequel to The Wraiths of Elfael, which is now essentially finished, just a tweak here and there—and preparing my collection of 15 fantasy short stories for publication at Christmas.
 Dive! Dive! Dive! The collection is called “The Dragon of Stroma and Other Tales” after the lead story, and will be launched on Amazon for kindle on Christmas Eve. It will be available for free 24-26 December, along with Inquisition of Demons and Wraiths of Elfael on 25-26 December, in the hopes that people who get kindles for Christmas (or tablets with kindle apps) and who are looking for high quality free stuff to download and read, might be tempted…
My friend David in Edinburgh, for whom I knitted the bright fireman red Filey gansey, has yielded to my incessant nagging and sent me a picture of him wearing it. To my intense relief it seems to fit! (I’ve asked him not to wear it when he eventually visits the National Nuclear Archive, just in case someone mistakes him for a meltdown in the core reactor…)
Finally, don’t forget to check out our Gansey Nation store at Zazzle. Only seven days till Christmas! Think of the childish glee on their faces as they unwrap the present, then watch with malicious amusement as their delight melts away like an ice cream in summer when they find they’ve got a Gansey Nation coffee mug instead of the iPad Mini they were expecting…
 Strong winds have come to Caithness, and the house feels as if the Big Bad Wolf is prowling around, huffing and puffing for a way in. (Lucky we didn’t buy that house made of straw after all, despite the estate agent’s sales talk.)
And it’s starting to feel like Christmas, or nearly. The decorations have gone up, and the tree. When we lived in Edinburgh we were, if you recall, on the top floor of a tenement, a climb of over 50 steps; lugging a pine tree the size and shape of a dead yeti all the way up there for Christmas never really appealed. This year we could have got a nice big real tree, but as we’ll be away visiting my family “dyne sythe” in England between Christmas and New Year, we opted instead to take the scrawny artificial one out of the box.
This could have been a mistake. Under the high ceilings of our lounge it rather resembles an undernourished chicken on a plinth. The branches are made of flimsy wire, so even the little cardinal bird ornament which is supposed to perch jauntily on the top and crown the ensemble has bent the branch with all the elegance of a turkey balancing on a blade of grass. We’ve found we can position it in one of two ways: either its beak is pointing straight at the ceiling, like an intercontinental ballistic robin, or else straight down, like it’s about to plummet into the carpet in a screaming suicidal death plunge. Neither is, to be honest, altogether Christmasy.
On the gansey, I’m about halfway up the back yoke, and the pattern is settling down. I’m alternating the anchors and trees in the panels to keep the pattern consistent; I didn’t want to introduce a different pattern at this stage as I thought it might look at bit too busy. Fancifully, the yarnovers always remind me of ghosts, the holes like the mouths of wailing spirits. (Idea for story: The Haunted Gansey; a man buys a gansey in a second-hand clothes shop, and is haunted by the ghosts of all the herring the original owner was responsible for killing. Okay, it needs work, I admit.)
I’ve been contacted by a gansey knitter, Ronald, who’s looking for either Poppleton 5-ply, or the closest alternative – something smooth and shiny is what he’s looking for. Any recommendations?
Finally, we’ve added to our range of Gansey Nation collectibles over at Zazzle, now including teapots, mugs and a rather natty gansey-themed Christmas ornament. It’s something we’d like to develop in future as a way of helping to fund the website, so if you have any comments or suggestions, we’d love to hear from you.
 It’s December and winter has arrived in Caithness, sub-zero temperatures and ice and snow. Roads and pavements so slippery you see people walking over them as gingerly as if they were balancing on a tightrope with someone twanging the other end. People walking in slow motion, like an army of zombie tai chi practitioners.
With the same degree of common sense that led me once to try to fix a light socket without turning off the electricity first I decided it was probably all right to cut across the car park down by the river to get to work. I got about a third of the way before I realised the scale of my mistake, round about the time I noticed a seagull skating elegantly across the surface of a puddle, finishing with a pirouette and triple Salchow. (Fortunately, a British person’s fear of humiliation is a force strong enough to defy gravity, so I didn’t fall over; but it was touch and go once or twice, and one or two hungry seagulls started following me hopefully, like vultures in the desert.)
 This far north, at this time of year the sun doesn’t get all the way up but describes a low, lazy rainbow arc across the sky, like a hungover college student who can’t be bothered to get out of bed. But at least some of the sunrises and sunsets are spectacular, so much so that I have to turn the radio on to make sure the nuclear power plant up the road isn’t getting frisky.
On the gansey, I’ve divided front and back and progress is once more rapid, if not swift. Or at least it would be if I didn’t keep making mistakes! Part of the trouble is my deteriorating eyesight, which makes it hard to notice if I miss out a couple of pattern rows. Fortunately Margaret is usually able to delve back an astonishing number of rows to fix things for me, like those divers who swim down to the deep ocean depths and come back up with exotic coral. (My only worry now is it’s happening so frequently she’s given me an automated helpline number to call.)
 I’m working on the back first, as is my wont, to make sure I get the pattern bedded in properly first. (It doesn’t really matter, but it means that by the time I do the front, the pattern is in my fingers, as it were.) Like all Hebridean patterns, the rich detail is pretty stunning, like a woollen mosaic.
 Right. Time for some parish notices. First of all congratulations to Lynne for this rather stunning cardigan. It’s from an old Vogue Knitting magazine, and the original designer is Isaac Mizrahi, though Lynne has freely adapted it. Just in time for winter!
Secondly, we get a number of requests from people looking for someone to knit them a gansey (see Sam’s plea here). I’d like to add a page to the site featuring knitters who take commissions. So if you know of anyone who does this (or you do it yourself), please drop me an email.
Finally, and for Christmas, we’ve decided to develop some Gansey Nation merchandise using designs from the ganseys and Margaret’s photographs—coffee mugs, tote bags, baseball caps and even a gansey-themed Christmas ornament. So watch this space—in the course this week we hope to go live with a modest range. If it works out, who knows? But in the meantime, if you’re looking for that elusive Christmas present for the gansey knitter who has everything…
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And here we are, the last blog of 2012. After the storms last night I wasn’t sure we’d make it to post today—it seemed at one point as if our house might slip its moorings and drift down the river out to sea, and the next you’d hear of us we’d be broadcasting from Norway, or Iceland, living on gull eggs and fried Norwegians. But no: we survived.
I’m finishing the year with another book on Amazon. It’s a collection of fifteen of my short stories, called The Dragon of Stroma and Other Tales. Some are straight fantasy, some are science fiction, some feature my cold war of angels and devils fought out on earth, others are just plain weird. Three or four are inspired by places in Caithness (as you might guess from the title). If nothing else, it will give you a pretty good idea what’s going on inside my head most of the time, as well as a desire to see my medication increased.
By the time we post again I should have finished the back of the gansey, and be well embarked on the front. As I’ve mentioned before, I shall knit the shoulder straps from the front so that the join comes at the back, safely out of sight. (The shoulders will be the same herringbone as the central pattern.) It’s got to the floppy stage, so my knitting technique is starting to resemble Donald O’Connor dancing with the dummy in Singin’ in the Rain.
