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 Dunbeath is another small harbour down the coast from Wick, built around 1800 and once the home of upwards of a hundred fishing boats all crammed tightly into the shelter of the bay, now open to the sea and the sky and the kittiwakes nesting in the cliffs—and to the occasional busload of shivering New Mexican tourists stopping off on their way north to Orkney.
We were there on Saturday, and it was cold and grey, with a bitter east wind (early summer, in other words). I have a friend who tricks her dog into going out in the pouring rain by standing in the doorway and throwing a tennis ball; the poor New Mexicans had much the same look of betrayal as her dog as the wind hit them like a hail of machine gun bullets and they realised the tour guides had shut the bus doors behind them.
 It’s another beautiful Caithness coastal location, not hemmed in by cliffs like so many of the little coves used for fishing, but spaciously wide and open. Visibility was exceptional, offering a fine view of the North Sea oil platforms, plus another large, square building like an offshore multi-storey car park I haven’t noticed before. (It’s either another oil installation, a James Bond supervillain headquarters, or a secret military base; if this blog mysteriously vanishes in the next few days you can draw your own conclusions.)
 The Icehouse Dunbeath is still a working harbour, but only for the odd creel fishing boat. There’s a large fishing store, a salmon bothy and an ice house back from the days when they used to collect ice from the river to store the salmon. It’s another great place to visit, perfect for wandering along the pier and thinking of the good old days—unless perhaps you’re from New Mexico, in which case you add another pullover and plan a messy and painful revenge on your tour guides.
 On the gansey I have now finished the back, and started on the front. As I mentioned in the comments last week, I decided at the last minute to opt for the traditional rig ‘n’ fur shoulders, as opposed to a Scottish patterned shoulder strap. I was concerned that the jumper was already quite intricate, especially with the double diamond lattice patterns; I think a shoulder strap would be too much, and detract from the overall effect. The simpler knit and purl ridges will hopefully offset the body and sleeves and allow them to shine.
Finally, I see we’ve been getting a number of visitors referred this way from the Knitting Paradise website, and the excellent gansey group. I’d just like to say welcome to new readers, and I hope you find the website useful. If you ever want to get in touch directly, or want to query anything in the ‘Knitting techniques’ section, just drop us a line via the contact form.
 This week I’d like to share with you two bits of Caithness gansey lore, courtesy of George Bethune of Dunbeath and Harry Gray of Wick, each of whom had fathers who fished the herring and wore ganseys—and what these two gentlemen don’t know about the history of Caithness and the fishing industry could probably fill the space on a postage stamp, but only if you wrote in big, capital letters.
George contributed to the Moray Firth Gansey Project, and his story is recounted in their book, along with a picture of his father in his gansey, on page 37. But it’s so interesting I think it’s worth repeating here. We were talking about ganseys, and the way the Scottish ones had buttons on the neck to keep them tight; and he said that the buttons would always be on the other shoulder to your main hand—in other words, if you were right-handed, the buttons would be on the left side, and vice-versa.
 Harry Gray and Gordon The reason was that when loading the boats the men would heave the nets up onto their shoulder, like men pulling a cart. And if the buttons were on the same shoulder as the nets, they’d run the risk of snagging on them—as indeed George says happened once to one poor fisherman in Dunbeath: when the nets were being loaded, they caught in his buttons and he was pulled violently down and broke his neck against the harbour quay.
Harry is the Chairman of the Wick Society, which runs the Aladdin’s cave-cum-museum in town, and he came in to collect the Caithness-patterned gansey I knitted recently, and which I was donating to the museum.
He said that in the old days the fishermen used to wear their ganseys next to the skin—except for old newspapers, which they’d wrap round their chests as a sort of under-layer to keep the wind out. “It made you crackle when you moved,” Harry said, “but it didn’t half keep you warm.”
 Meanwhile, my own project moves on apace, though slower now I’m back at work. I’m seven-eighths of the way up the back, and it’s almost time to get the slide rule out to start calculating how much space to allow for the shoulder strap (which will be 22 stitches wide). Sometime in the next week I’ll hopefully start the front.
In parish notices, many congratulations to Sue Rees for a splendid Staithes gansey, which can be seen here being stylishly modelled by husband Paul. As I’ve always said, this is in many ways still one of the most effective patterns.
So remember: next time you’re thinking of throwing away that old newspaper, spare a thought for those fishermen who used them for keeping more than just their fish and chips warm; and the stories that lie behind even simple things like buttons on the neck…
 Many years ago I discovered I was allergic to penicillin when I broke out head to toe in red spots. When I went back to the doctor next day he got me to take off my shirt and trousers then said, “Excuse me a moment” and left the room.
He returned with two nurses and, while I stood there feeling the draft and horribly aware of my bulging midriff spilling over my nether garments like a loaf in the oven overflowing its tin, proceeded to point out interesting features on my person with a felt-tip pen, as if I was a relief map of Germany and he was planning a bombing raid.
Well, this week I discovered I have an adverse reaction to another antibiotic, doxycycline, which sounds like a circus act involving prostitutes on bicycles but which in fact the doctor prescribed for my chest infection. I took the dose in the morning, felt very light-headed and had to lie down; but then, after an hour or so it seemed to pass and I felt well enough to get up and have lunch.
 But, just like John “Chestburster” Hurt in the movie Alien, I had been lulled into a false sense of security. Like John, I ate a hearty meal—then felt ill and collapsed—and, just like John, an alien substance exploded from my chest. (In his case it was a baby alien—in my case my lunch—but the principle is the same.)
 I almost fainted, but didn’t quite. I sweated profusely, and I saw something remarkable: I was lying on the floor, unable to move, and my right arm lay before me, with the wrist only a few inches from my eyes; every single pore had a tiny bead of sweat in the hollow, so that my skin looked like a spider’s web on a dewy morning. (When was finally able to stand up I left a Gordon-shaped damp patch, as if my evil shadow had mysteriously been transferred into the carpet, and I remember wondering in the night if it could escape and come after me.)
Anyway, as I say, it was only an adverse reaction, not an allergic one, thank goodness; but between that and the chest infection I’ve been off work all week, sleeping mostly, and wheezing like an old bellows if I did anything energetic, such as breathing. (Sitting and watching television, on the other hand, I’ve got rather good at.)
 Calm day on the river I did an awful lot of knitting. So much so, in fact, that I have finished the first half of the gussets and divided front and back. (Incidentally, for those who keep count, at the point where I started on the back I had just 40g left from a 500g Frangipani cone.) The gussets are 3 inches long, with an increase of 1 stitch either side of the seam every 4 rows, and are 15 stitches across at the widest point.
I went back to the doctor today, and she took a blood sample to see if it’s a virus or an infection that I’ve got. If the former, I just have to tough it out; if the latter, I get to play Russian roulette with another antibiotic. And now I don’t know which I’m more afraid of: another adverse reaction to the drugs, or more time exposed to daytime tv…
 Another short blog this week, as it’s back from our Easter jaunt down south with a cold and a chest infection. (It wasn’t exactly the birthday present I was looking for, but to be fair it’s so hard to find a suitable gift these days.) So now gravity seems to have increased, it feels like there’s an invisible baby orang-utan clinging to my chest, and my breathing sounds like Darth Vader finishing a milkshake.
I think that’s the real secret of growing older—after about 40, each birthday counts double or treble—so I now appear to have the mind of a sprightly 54 year-old trapped inside the body of an octogenarian, and a crotchety one at that.
I read once that the U.S. Civil War Commodore David (“Damn the torpedoes!”) Farragut used to turn a handspring on his birthday each year, even into his sixties, saying that when he found it difficult he’d know he was getting old. Well, I perform a similar sort of test, except in my case it involves removing the silver paper from a chocolate Easter egg. (Yup, still got it.)
 Being laid up this last week has at least meant that I’ve got rather a lot of knitting done. In fact, I’m about 14 inches up the body, and in another inch will start the gussets. (The gansey is going to be some 27 inches long, viz.: body, 15 inches; gussets, 3 inches; yoke, 8 inches; shoulder, 1 inch.)
I’m also trying to teach myself to knit more loosely, and am getting my stitch gauge down from about 9.25 stitches an inch to something in the region of 8.5. It helps my fingers relax more as I knit, and the finished garment seems softer, and drapes more easily. It also seems to use less yarn.
 Finally, when you’re ill you need things to cheer you up, and I found just the thing in an article in The Guardian newspaper online, about the dangers of formatting books for e-readers, such as the Kindle.
Everyone who’s downloaded an ebook knows that they can be bedevilled by typos, in part because often the printed text has been scanned in using optical character recognition software, and then not proofread. Now it appears that two words that the software can’t actually distinguish between are “arms” and, (ahem), “anus”.
This has apparently come to light in the course of scanning vast quantities of romantic fiction for e-readers. As the article points out, it now appears that a genre in which the hero has a tendency to “take the heroine in his arms” may never be the same again…
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Dunbeath is another small harbour down the coast from Wick, built around 1800 and once the home of upwards of a hundred fishing boats all crammed tightly into the shelter of the bay, now open to the sea and the sky and the kittiwakes nesting in the cliffs—and to the occasional busload of shivering New Mexican tourists stopping off on their way north to Orkney.
It’s another beautiful Caithness coastal location, not hemmed in by cliffs like so many of the little coves used for fishing, but spaciously wide and open. Visibility was exceptional, offering a fine view of the North Sea oil platforms, plus another large, square building like an offshore multi-storey car park I haven’t noticed before. (It’s either another oil installation, a James Bond supervillain headquarters, or a secret military base; if this blog mysteriously vanishes in the next few days you can draw your own conclusions.)
On the gansey I have now finished the back, and started on the front. As I mentioned in the comments last week, I decided at the last minute to opt for the traditional rig ‘n’ fur shoulders, as opposed to a Scottish patterned shoulder strap. I was concerned that the jumper was already quite intricate, especially with the double diamond lattice patterns; I think a shoulder strap would be too much, and detract from the overall effect. The simpler knit and purl ridges will hopefully offset the body and sleeves and allow them to shine.
This week I’d like to share with you two bits of Caithness gansey lore, courtesy of George Bethune of Dunbeath and Harry Gray of Wick, each of whom had fathers who fished the herring and wore ganseys—and what these two gentlemen don’t know about the history of Caithness and the fishing industry could probably fill the space on a postage stamp, but only if you wrote in big, capital letters.
Meanwhile, my own project moves on apace, though slower now I’m back at work. I’m seven-eighths of the way up the back, and it’s almost time to get the slide rule out to start calculating how much space to allow for the shoulder strap (which will be 22 stitches wide). Sometime in the next week I’ll hopefully start the front.
