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 After I complained so much about the weather in last week’s blog we’ve been graced by two or three days of sun, as if God decided to trade in his old black and white television set for a colour one, and the world is no longer being broadcast in a grainy monochrome by people in dinner jackets with clipped, posh accents.
 It’s amazing the difference the sun makes, especially up here. As above, so below, as the medieval mystics used to say, and it’s true to the extent that a bright blue sky turns the sea blue too—and when you add to that a fiery sunrise, well, it’s pretty spectacular in a wrath-of-Jehovah sort of way. We had to go to Inverness last Wednesday, and driving down the twisty coast road at around 8.30 a.m. we watched the sun rise behind the clouds like a candle flame shielded behind cupped fingers (while at the same time neglecting to watch the road—which explains why the last words of so many Caithness visitors are, “Wow, isn’t that beautifaaarrrghhh…”).
 John o’Groats Harbour with Stroma in the distance Some good news—I’ve finally got a hospital appointment later in February for getting my eye sorted, the one that’s afflicted by posterior capsule opacity. (In retrospect, I wish I hadn’t read the article about how it’s fixed by firing a laser at it, punching a series of holes round the circumference of the lens until the film is punched out, like a tax disc or a postage stamp.) It’s not without risk for me, so it’s going to be a nervy few weeks.
 The corner of the whipped cream. Border finished, starting the inner frame. Meanwhile I’ve subdivided the front of the gansey, and have embarked on the shoulder straps. As it’s a cardigan, I’m not as worried as I usually am about a deep neckline—the buttons or zip will allow the wearer to determine the height of the neck as they see fit. So there’s only 5 stitches indented to shape the neck over 10 rows. As the width of the gansey is 210 stitches, each shoulder strap is 70 stitches wide. I’m going to replicate the herringbone from below the yoke, knit it all from the front and join it so the seam is on the back.
Finally, did you know that most migraine sufferers get migraines at weekends? No one knows why, apparently, but it’s thought to be connected to relaxing after getting through the working week. (Mind you, in my case, it’s probably got something to do with spending so much time staring at sunrises over the ocean…)
 Spring seems a long way away right now as Britain is paralysed, buried deep under layers of snow. We’re feeling a bit left out up here, Cinderellas at the nation’s snow party, because in Caithness we’ve had the heavy grey skies, the sub-zero temperatures, the ice and the gale force winds – everything except the snow. So we lie in bed at night as the house shudders and shakes around us, helpless as astronauts re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere. Even the gravel on the driveway is frozen, as though children had come in the night and glued all the stones together for a joke. But no snow.
We’ve had the occasional flurry of those tiny ice spicules, the kind I think of as the devil’s dandruff – propelled into your unprotected face by a 40 mph wind it’s like being stung by a swarm of wasps whose orders included the phrase “terminate with extreme prejudice” – but it’s not the same. You can’t have a snowball fight with ice pellets, it’d be like throwing cold sand.
 At least it’s appropriate weather to be knitting a gansey. The body is long enough now to serve as a lap-warmer, heavy and warm and inert as a cat resisting arrest, so it’s already being put to good use. As you’ll see from the photographs I’ve now started on the third and final panels on the front, and by mid-February I hope to get the shoulders joined and move on to the collar.
 Margaret’s been knitting whipped cream Speaking of cats, I saw the world’s most graceless cat in action yesterday. I was out raking the last of last season’s leaves from the back yard when the neighbour’s cat decided to show off and climb our big old tree. The only problem was, it didn’t give itself enough of a run-up, so after a couple of metres of frantic, scrabbling ascent it ran out of momentum and ended up just clinging there, spread-eagled like a cartoon flying squirrel that’s missed its aim. After about a minute of desperate hanging-on its claws gave way and it began a slow, juddering slide to earth, accompanied by a shower of splinters and the raucous jeers of several seagulls who’d stopped to watch. When it reached the ground it slunk off, affecting as much nonchalance as it could under the circumstances, and vowing revenge on the world.
 Mmmm cream I’m still persevering with the anti-migraine pills the doctor prescribed, the ones that rhinoceroses take when they want to chill out. As I hadn’t had a migraine for a couple of weeks I thought I’d try an Indian takeaway, which is one of my known triggers, in a spirit of scientific enquiry – just to see. As it turned out, it was the equivalent of testing a bullet-proof vest with a rocket launcher, and I spent most of the weekend flat on my back speaking in tongues, wondering who’d stolen my legs when I wasn’t looking. Still, at least now I know.
Time for a quick check: outside the branches are thrashing in the wind like evangelicals being moved by the spirit of the Lord, and the waves are crashing against the harbour walls in showers of spray. Nope. Still not spring…
 Recto You’ll have to excuse me if I’m a little distracted this week, a little off my game. You see, the doctor has prescribed me some medicine to prevent me getting so many migraines—four or five a month is considered by experts ‘too many’, she said (she should try it from the inside sometime). So the number of brightly coloured pills I have to take has increased by one; and as a result the world has slowed down.
Rather a lot, in fact. Honestly, I had to check to see if they’d mixed up my prescription with elephant tranquillisers by mistake. I now have such a tendency to slump forward over my desk that the cleaner is demanding extra payments to keep my keyboard free of drool; or at least a bucket to wring out her cloth. My colleague keeps a spoon handy so she can hold it up to my lips to see if I’m still breathing. Like someone in an Edgar Allen Poe story, each time I close my eyes I expect to open them on a sealed coffin lid.
 Recto, detail On the other hand, a week has passed and no migraines. So now I have a decision to make: do I live the rest of my life at half speed, shuffling about like an inmate of a retirement home for the recently undead, but free of pain; or do I rejoin the human race, but accept that two or three days a week I shall be as broken as Humpty Dumpty? (There are many reasons why I hope God exists; but increasingly it’s so that I can give Him a piece of my mind—preferably the piece that’s responsible for migraines.)
 Verso It’s had a knock-on effect on the knitting, as my evenings are now spent counting my fingers and falling asleep before I get to ten. Even so, I’m inching my way up the front, about halfway up the yoke. (Incidentally, we forgot last week to include a picture of the completed back, minus shoulders, so here it is.)
Since all my eyesight problems kicked in a few years back, I’ve found nothing goes so well with knitting as listening to audiobooks. Terry Pratchett always works well, as does Charles Dickens—we’re listening to the splendid Our Mutual Friend at the moment. Of course, you have to be careful with modern fiction—few things are more disconcerting than signing for a parcel at the front door while an energetic sex scene plays out in the background, complete with farmyard noises.
 Verso, detail On the parish notices front, happy New Year to Harley and Pat Sutherland—thank you so much for your card! And a special mention to Tamar, Judit and Gracie, who posted the most comments last year (well, after me, but I don’t think I count). I don’t have any special prizes to give out, alas, except that I plan to continue the blog throughout 2013, and it’s the enthusiasm of so many readers and posters that persuades me to keep going.
Thanks also to Evelyn for nominating me for the wholly mysterious Liebster Blog Award. Apparently you’re supposed to recommend five other blogs for your readers to try—but I do that anyway, and selecting just five would be unfair. So can I suggest that readers take the opportunity to suggest other blogs they think people would find interesting?
And so, as the caffeine pills wear off, and I return to my narcoleptic coma, and my strands of drool start to resemble the web of an incontinent spider experiencing a sneezing fit, it’s time to catch up on some z’s.
 As the American poet John Greenleaf Whittier almost wrote, “Of all sad words of tongue or pen/ the saddest are these, ‘It’s time to go back to work after the Christmas holidays”. And how right he would have been.
I hope you all had splendid Christmases, filled with bunting and frolic, assuming that’s still legal where you live. We flew down south to stay with my parents in their lovely old house, a former canalside pub in Northamptonshire (the first shock was finding it got light around eight, instead of nine as it does here in Wick—I’d forgotten about daylight). And en route we even got to see The Hobbit, which was a fun Christmas present to ourselves.
The only problem was the flight. You see, we had to fly down to Edinburgh, stay overnight, then fly on to Birmingham next day. Now, even on a good day I’m not a great flier—I’m the only person I know who demands a sick bag before setting foot in a lift—you think I’m joking—but this was pretty special, as we had to cross the jet stream, which was hovering just north of Edinburgh, waiting for me like the playground bully. And alas the plane from Wick is one of those balsa wood toy planes with rubber bands powering the propellers—not what you’d call robust.
 In short, I got shaken around like a martini for 10-15 minutes. I almost blacked out, sweating, pins and needles in my hands and feet as all my blood retreated to somewhere round my ears. I wasn’t sick, but that’s only because my seat pocket didn’t have a bag in it and the only substitute I could find was one of those child-safe plastic bags with holes in the bottom—well, you can see my reasoning here. I spent the rest of the evening on the hotel bed impersonating a beached giant squid.
Well. It passed eventually, thanks to some splendid anti-nausea migraine medicine which I’ve decided to use as a substitute for sugar in my tea in future, and I was able to have a vertical family Christmas. There’s a song by Neil Young about his home town which has the line, “all my changes were there”, which is how I feel about my parents’ house, which is full of ghosts and memories. Every time I go back I feel like a medium overwhelmed by ghostly voices clamouring for attention, and they’re all me.
 I didn’t take my knitting with me, partly because it’s too bulky to lug about easily now, and as heavy as a wet sheep. So I haven’t made a lot of progress, but I still finished the back and have made a start on the front. The fiddly pattern and the steek up the front slows me down a little—one row on the front (210 stitches, ie) takes about 20 minutes, as opposed to about 15 on a regular gansey. I’ve used the red wool from the Filey gansey as stitch holders, so I’ll have to be careful when I take them out or I’ll get pink stripes!
Thanks to everyone who downloaded my books last year—there were 4,350 downloads from Amazon between them, which is rather gratifying. (And a special thank you to everyone who took the trouble to post a review too—you’ve no idea how much difference they make.) I plan to release two more books this year: the sequel to Wraiths of Elfael around Easter, and my non-fantasy Victorian murder mystery, The Cuckoo’s Nest, in August (make a note in your diaries). Both stories are essentially complete, barring revisions, and my plan for 2013 is to write the third part of the Elfael trilogy. After that, who knows?
So there we are. All that remains is for us to wish you a happy New Year—close your eyes, make a wish, quick—we don’t know what it has in store, but hopefully it’ll be fun finding out…
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After I complained so much about the weather in last week’s blog we’ve been graced by two or three days of sun, as if God decided to trade in his old black and white television set for a colour one, and the world is no longer being broadcast in a grainy monochrome by people in dinner jackets with clipped, posh accents.
It’s amazing the difference the sun makes, especially up here. As above, so below, as the medieval mystics used to say, and it’s true to the extent that a bright blue sky turns the sea blue too—and when you add to that a fiery sunrise, well, it’s pretty spectacular in a wrath-of-Jehovah sort of way. We had to go to Inverness last Wednesday, and driving down the twisty coast road at around 8.30 a.m. we watched the sun rise behind the clouds like a candle flame shielded behind cupped fingers (while at the same time neglecting to watch the road—which explains why the last words of so many Caithness visitors are, “Wow, isn’t that beautifaaarrrghhh…”).
