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 There’s a seal in the river, and if you’re lucky you’ll catch a glimpse of its sleek head bobbing among the waves like a black rubber duck. It spends most of its time down by the harbour, but when the tide’s high it coolly swims upriver; it was there on Thursday lunchtime as I was walking back to work, and we regarded each other for a while until it remembered it’d left the gas on and swam away.
There’s a wealth of reproachful sadness in a seal’s eyes, like a dog who’s just watched you eat the last digestive biscuit, and there was something doglike about the way it seemed to be trying to understand what I said. (Talking to a dog always feels like trying to start a conversation with a friendly alien; whereas cats act like they’ve already enslaved humanity and the only words you’ll need in future are “tin opener” and “tummy rub”.)
 Seals look so intelligent it’s not hard to see where the Scottish legends of the selkie, the seal-man or seal-woman, come from; but if the souls of the dead are ever reincarnated as seals, from the look of polite disappointment on their faces I presume in life they must have been English cricket fans.
The gansey’s about 7 inches long now, or a quarter of the length. Hopefully you can see the pattern beginning to take shape: the diamond panels stand out quite nicely against the background of cables, moss stitch and ladder. The colour matches a cloudy day at John O’Groats—I’m hoping I’ve patented the “stealth gansey”, which effectively turns you invisible if the sea and the sky are exactly the right shade…
 Dunnet Head Meanwhile, the plumber has almost finished installing the new boiler and shower. We’re going from a shower that was about as effective as holding your face over a fresh cup of tea to something so lethal it’s probably illegal under the Geneva Convention. In fact it reminds me of a Star Trek transporter pad; I keep expecting to find a confused Klingon standing in the bathtub, brandishing a cake of scented soap instead of a phaser.
 Batten down the RSBP shed We were without hot water and heating for a few days last week, so imagine our delight when the boiler was finally connected on Wednesday afternoon. Then imagine our dismay when the northern third of Scotland was plunged into darkness three hours later, over 200,000 homes suddenly without power. As we sat all evening huddled around our two feeble candles, too dark to knit or read by, no tv and a radio with a flat battery, I gradually realised that the entirety of human civilisation is really just a way to keep yourself occupied till bedtime…
Finally, as it’s Easter—Christus resurrexit, apparently—we’ll be taking a short break while we go to visit my parents in furthest Northamptonshire, a journey not unlike that described in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, albeit with fewer Belgians.
All things being equal we’ll be back on Monday 5th May 2014. Till then, Happy Easter!
 We’re getting a new water heater and boiler installed just now, and from the state of the kitchen I imagine the builder decided to take out the old one with hand grenades. It looks like a set from Saving Private Ryan, in fact I had to dislodge three German soldiers from the utility room this morning just to do a load of laundry.
 There used ta be a cupboard here . . . Ours is an old stone house, and although built near the turn of the twentieth century seems to have been designed to repel a medieval army (well, you can never tell when the trebuchet is going to come back into fashion). The walls are surprisingly thick, and the builder kept having to fetch a longer drill to get through, until finally settling on something which was last used to find oil on the North Sea seabed.
 Every surface in the house is now coated with a layer of fine dust, and so, I find, is my morning toast. Sometimes the dust gets up my nose, and the resulting sneeze resembles nothing so much as an explosion in a talcum powder factory.
 And the boiler was here At least we’ll hopefully get an efficient hot water system out of it; that, and a shower which is more effective than a plant misting spray. (If you want to know what our current shower is like, take a baked bean tin, make some holes in the bottom, fill it with lukewarm water and hold it over your head. It’s a bit like being baptised on the instalment plan.)
Still, if the kitchen is a no-go area, the lounge is so far unscathed, and I’ve retreated there and got quite a lot of knitting done this last week.
 As you’ll see from the pictures the welt is but a distant memory, and the body is fairly begun. I’m not sure whether to call the pattern “Flambraser” or “Fraserflamb”, as it’s a cross between elements of Flamborough (the seed stitch and cables) and a Fraserburgh pattern recorded in Michael Pearson’s “Fisher Gansey Patterns of Scotland and the Scottish Fleet” (the diamonds and ladder).
I’m cabling every 7th round. I won’t really know till it’s finished, but as the pattern is going to run the full length of the body, welt to shoulder, it should be quite distinctive. I like the colour, too—it’s Frangipani’s Denim yarn, and like so many gansey yarns seems to change hue depending on the light, from warm sky blue to a sort of steely grey (this being the far north of Scotland, mind you, I’m expecting rather more grey than blue).
Meanwhile, spring continues to edge its way into Caithness. How can I tell it’s spring? Because the rain actually stops every now and then…
 The neighbours have a new dog, a big, boisterous, friendly pointer, and their cats are not amused. One of them coolly dealt with the situation in much the same way my brother handled my arrival as the newest member of the Reid family, by swatting it on the nose and then slamming its head repeatedly in the fridge door until it accepted who was boss.
The other feline, however, obviously abhors violence and prefers simply to keep out of the way. In other words, it haunts us much like the three spirits haunted Scrooge. It lurks in the bushes for you to open the front door and then all you see is a grey streak, like the starship Enterprise going into warp, as it shoots past you and whizzes up the stairs, and you have to go find it—as if life was one long game of hide-and-seek.
 Or else it rolls around on its back on the warm gravel, waving its legs in the air like antennae, as though the other cat had stuck a rude notice on its back, and it was trying to get it off. It knows a soft touch when it sees one, and it’s obviously seen one in me; it collapses as soon as it sees me now, like one of those bendy toys held up by elastic, and waits.
I have to be careful though: I got the two cats mixed up once, and tried to pat the bully in an absent-minded moment. It wrapped itself around my fist like the creature from Alien attaching itself to John Hurt’s face and began to flay my hand like someone going for the world record parmesan-grating championship. I shook it off eventually—my last sight of it was a flying ball of spitting teeth and claws sailing over the neighbours’ hedge with a long-drawn-out r-r-r-o-o-o-w-w-w-l-l-l, like an ambulance siren vanishing in the distance—and ever since then I’ve carried an oven glove, just in case.
 Meanwhile, I realise I’ve become a sort of chain-smoking gansey knitter: I start a new one from the embers of the old. (Am I addicted? Could I really, as I tell myself and my counsellor, give it up any time I liked? Of course I can—I just don’t choose to, that’s all.)
So, yes, I’ve already started the next one. It’s in Frangipani denim-coloured yarn, but we won’t fall out if you call it sky blue. It’s going to be for me, and will hopefully be ready for the autumn, where I have a feeling I’m going to need it. I’ve cast on 388 stitches for the welt, and have just increased by 32 stitches to 420 for the body. I’ll reveal the pattern next week.
And it’s really spring! Or nearly. Yesterday I almost loosened my scarf, which is as good a sign as hearing the first cuckoo. Before you know it I’ll be down to just the one pair of long johns…
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There’s a seal in the river, and if you’re lucky you’ll catch a glimpse of its sleek head bobbing among the waves like a black rubber duck. It spends most of its time down by the harbour, but when the tide’s high it coolly swims upriver; it was there on Thursday lunchtime as I was walking back to work, and we regarded each other for a while until it remembered it’d left the gas on and swam away.
Seals look so intelligent it’s not hard to see where the Scottish legends of the selkie, the seal-man or seal-woman, come from; but if the souls of the dead are ever reincarnated as seals, from the look of polite disappointment on their faces I presume in life they must have been English cricket fans.
