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 And suddenly that’s a whole week gone. I feel like a cut-rate sleeping beauty (albeit rather older and more cynical and with fewer bluebirds to do the washing up), who pricked his finger on a poison 2.25mm needle and fell asleep, forgotten by time, in an enchanted semi-detached castle in Wick.
Reader, I’ve had a chest infection. I felt as though God was squeezing my chest like a tube of toothpaste, and even now my chest froths and wheezes like the last slurp at the bottom of the milkshake and my coughing fits sound like someone unsuccessfully trying to kick-start an old motorbike.
As if that wasn’t enough, on Monday I had my hospital appointment to get my eyes sorted. I should have stayed in bed, but after not being able to see clearly for over nine months I wasn’t going to let the opportunity slip. So Margaret drove me the hundred miles to Inverness, a crisp, clear day, blue sky, sunlight glittering on the ocean, and the start of spring.
I had posterior capsule opacity, a film that can grow over the artificial lens they give you when you get cataract surgery, and which is easily burned off with a laser. First the doctor gave me eyedrops to dilate my pupils so big I resembled a very startled owl. Then she placed a contact lens in the eye to hold it steady and open, directed a very bright light at me that illuminated my skull like a Halloween lantern and began firing the laser much as Han Solo used to shoot down enemy fighters in Star Wars.
It wasn’t a lot of fun, and I think my eyes have only just about stopped watering now, but it was over in ten minutes—and then I could see again. Quite incredible. (You mean this is how the rest of you see the world? Sharp, clear and—in focus? Do you know how lucky you are?) The only problem was, my eyes remained dilated for several hours afterwards, so the drive home in bright sunshine was painful, to say the least, like a migraine hangover.
 Only downside is, I can finally see how uneven my knitting really is. (Perhaps I should hold it further away?) Despite everything I’ve made some progress this week, still plugging away down the sleeve. I’ve completed the herringbone and have started the final pattern section which will carry me down the sleeve towards the cuff. (I won’t run the pattern all the way to the cuff, but will leave a few inches of plain knitting between the two, ending somewhere mid-forearm.)
It’s a bit of a shock being able to see my knitting at all, to be honest. I haven’t been able to identify individual stitches for several months now, but now I can see the single black thread running through the cream yarn I’m using. It’s like I’ve upgraded to a High Definition world. I have an urge to stop strangers in the street and read things out to them. I keep waking up and expecting to find it the way it was, and being pleasantly surprised.
In fact, if you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll go and find something to look at right now—just because I can…
 Just a short blog this week, as I’m afraid my cold has returned with a vengeance and I’m a little the worse for wear: my chest is so tight I might as well be wearing a corset (or, er, so I would imagine, *cough*), and I have a tendency to slump in my chair like a Stephen Hawking who’s really let himself go. Several times the neighbours have gone out to help jump-start a car which won’t start, only to find it was me coughing.
It will pass, but once again God has given me a glimpse of what it’s like to be ninety. My only consolation is, it’s not flu – as a doctor said on the radio when someone asked them how you could tell the difference between a bad cold and the flu: if someone leaves a sack containing a million pounds on your front doorstep, and you’re too sick to get out of bed and collect it – that’s flu.
 Not that the weather has helped. On Wednesday we had 70-mph gusts and sub-zero temperatures, and I trudged to work through rain, sleet, snow and rain again – all in the space of a ten-minute walk. Seagulls on the harbour wall were being skittled like ninepins by the wind and seemed to be wondering why they’d never thought of migrating south in winter (as, by then, was I). When I got to work, the tracks the sleet made on the windows were horizontal, leaving traces like elementary particles in a particle accelerator. Then the library roof started to leak…
 Notwithstanding all this, I’m making steady progress down the sleeve, and have finished the first panel and decreased the gusset out of existence. I’ve just started the herringbone panel, which is something of a relief as I was finding the top pattern a bit challenging in my addled state.
Special thanks to Yasmin at Island at the Edge for sending me a couple of samples of their gansey yarn to try. The more people out there supplying gansey materials the better, I feel, and I’m looking forward to giving this a go, especially the natural yarn.
Also thanks again to Judit for making me a phone case like the one we showed last week. Again, a very innovative use for leftover yarn (this one featuring Caithness flags, a nice touch!). The curly strap reminds me of a chameleon’s tail.
Right. I’m afraid it’s back to bed for me while the blog pixies (aka ‘tech support’) take over from here. I look forward to rejoining the human race in a few days – see you then.
 First the good news: my cold has gone and I’m off the betablockers my doctor prescribed to stop me getting migraines, so I no longer shuffle through the streets like a survivor of the zombie apocalypse with hay fever. The bad news? Oh yeah, the migraines. (I wish now I’d kept the receipt for this body – then I could take it back and demand a new one, or alternatively a refund.)
Thanks for all the cat stories and comments last week. Now the evenings are slowly getting lighter the little beggars have abandoned their camouflage and no longer shadow me up the path; instead when I get to the door they seem to just materialise out of thin air directly between my ankles, as if the Enterprise’s ship’s cats had learned how to work the transporter—the only warning being what I used to think of as a plaintive meow, but which I now believe to be the sound a cat-sized quantity of air makes when it is displaced.
 I have—hurrah—finished the collar of the gansey, which consists of an inch of knit 2/ purl 2 ribbing, cast off in pattern. So that’s the body substantially complete, and just the sleeves to go. As I’ve said before, this for me is when the gansey really starts to come together, and you feel you’re on the downhill straight; like reassembling C3PO in Star Wars, he may not have all his arms and legs yet, but you feel you could attach a head and have a conversation.
The armhole is 9.5 inches high, so with a stitch gauge of 9.25 stitches to the inch that gives me about 88 stitches to pick up per side. The sleeves are going to replicate the body patterns all the way to the cuff, so that it all looks of a piece, which means the section closest to the shoulder will be the same pattern as the yoke (but necessarily shorter, so instead of three trees or anchors in a column there will just be the one).
 As I work down the sleeve I’m also decreasing the gusset out of existence; the rate of decrease is the same as the increases, to get that nice parallelogram shape, i.e., decreasing one stitch each side every four rows. (I used the red yarn from the Filey gansey as stitch holders for the gusset; the only downside is, if you’re not careful, stray wisps of the stitch holder yarn get snagged when you transfer the stitches to a needle. But I’m not worried – I mean, pink stripes in the gusset were traditional, right?)
 Margaret has now finished her magic shawl, fashioned from angels’ eyelashes and sea foam. When it’s stretched and blocked she’s going down to the river on midsummer eve to catch fairies with it.
Judit continues to come up with fun and novel uses for leftover gansey yarn: this time it’s a delicate little mobile phone bag or case which you can see here, which is the kind of thing I imagine archaeologists would be raving about if they found in the tomb of a bronze age princess, assuming her phone was buried with her (not that you’d get much of a signal in a lead-lined coffin, of course). She’s also helpfully tweaked the photo of Dave’s gansey so you can see the rich complexity of the pattern more clearly, so many thanks to Judit for that.
Finally, this week I came across a splendid entry in a register of applications for poor relief back in the 1870s: a woman who was receiving money for looking after an old lady had asked for an increase, on the grounds that she had “grown increasingly fatuous” – I’ve been wondering how best to keep myself amused in my old age, and I must say this sounds like a plan…
 There are, it seems to me, two types of colds. There is the kind where the relatives gather at the foot of the bed, and ask the doctor in hushed tones what is the prognosis—and the doctor, with pursed lips, shakes his head gravely and replies, “Still, we must not give up hope”; and then there is the kind that provokes the impatient response, “Oh, do get up and don’t be such a big girl’s blouse!”
The cold with which I am currently afflicted definitely falls into the second category—bad enough to make me feel like I’ve accidentally got someone else’s hangover by mistake, but not so bad as to elicit sympathy from random strangers or, indeed, anyone. And yet when I sneeze the effect is not unlike an alien monster in a Hollywood movie being shot and exploding in a shower of stringy gobbets, adding an interesting pattern to the wallpaper and creating the momentary illusion on the windows that it has been snowing.
 Have you ever come across the phenomenon of stealth cats? There are a couple of cats next door which their owners have designated “outdoor cats” without apparently consulting the two concerned. So they generally sit outside all day and shiver, and plot. When I come home in the dark they put on their night camouflage and track me up the path like silent ninja assassins, and as soon as the door is open they dart between my legs and slip inside.
There they are thwarted by the porch’s inner door, which acts rather like a medieval portcullis, and for the next five minutes we recreate the scene from Shrek when he first meets Puss-in-Boots as I try to eject them and they, slippery as a pair of feline eels, refuse to be ejected. From the road it must look as though I’m fighting off an attack of invisible bees, or else am in training for the Wick All-comers Ferret Down the Trousers Contest 2013.
 I have finished the shoulders on the gansey and have joined the front and back, which feels as momentous as the Allies and Russian forces meeting at the Elbe near the end of World War 2. As I mentioned before, the shoulder strap uses the same pattern as the herringbone dividing the yoke from the body.
Instead of knitting half the shoulder as part of the back, and half as part of the front, and joining them in the middle, with this style it’s simplest to knit the whole thing from the front and then join it to the back. The cast-off creates a similar effect to 2 purl rows, so it matches the front exactly.
Next comes the collar, and then the sheer unadulterated fun that is picking up stitches around the armhole for the sleeve (see reference to big girl’s blouse, above).
 Just over halfway through the centre square . . . In parish notices I have been sent a couple of pictures by Gracie of a gansey-inspired afghan she made for her sister’s wedding which you can see here, and pretty stunning it is too. (There goes the tenth commandment…)
By the way, did you know that in England in the seventeenth century it was compulsory to be buried in a woollen shroud (the burial in woollen acts, 1666-80)? They were designed to help the wool industry, and you had to pay a fine unless you were very poor, or had plague (or possibly even both). I was reminded of this the other day at work, and seeing Gracie’s afghan made me think how cool a gansey-patterned shroud would be.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not thinking morbid thoughts—as Woody Allen said, I don’t want to achieve immortality through my works, but through not dying—but it’s best to think ahead. (Though now I come to think of it, I have a horrible feeling that just as the coffin lid is being lowered two little streaks of fur will shoot out of the darkness and slip inside unnoticed, on the assumption that it’s got to be warmer than outdoors…)
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And suddenly that’s a whole week gone. I feel like a cut-rate sleeping beauty (albeit rather older and more cynical and with fewer bluebirds to do the washing up), who pricked his finger on a poison 2.25mm needle and fell asleep, forgotten by time, in an enchanted semi-detached castle in Wick.
had posterior capsule opacity, a film that can grow over the artificial lens they give you when you get cataract surgery, and which is easily burned off with a laser. First the doctor gave me eyedrops to dilate my pupils so big I resembled a very startled owl. Then she placed a contact lens in the eye to hold it steady and open, directed a very bright light at me that illuminated my skull like a Halloween lantern and began firing the laser much as Han Solo used to shoot down enemy fighters in Star Wars.
Only downside is, I can finally see how uneven my knitting really is. (Perhaps I should hold it further away?) Despite everything I’ve made some progress this week, still plugging away down the sleeve. I’ve completed the herringbone and have started the final pattern section which will carry me down the sleeve towards the cuff. (I won’t run the pattern all the way to the cuff, but will leave a few inches of plain knitting between the two, ending somewhere mid-forearm.)
