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 One of the side-effects of the kind of migraines I get is that I find myself doing really dumb things. Incredibly stupid ideas suddenly seem not only sensible, but imperative. It’s a bit like being drunk, only much cheaper, and you don’t have to queue so long at the bar.
I’ve mentioned the time a few years ago when I decided to explore the depths of a light fitting using a screwdriver without turning off the electricity first. I was blown across the room, and spent the next several minutes wondering if I was dead, and my brain just hadn’t realised it yet, like a decapitated chicken. (Sometimes I wonder if I’m still lying there, and this is all just a dying hallucination.)
 This weekend’s migraine-induced stupidity was nowhere near as dramatic as that. I decided to try on the gansey, needles and all, just to reassure myself that I’d got the fit right. Apart from looking like I’d come from an explosion in an acupuncture clinic, there were no alarms until I turned my head to see how the shoulder looked and got a double-pointed needle up the nose.
Two thoughts came to me then. The first was, For God’s sake, don’t sneeze. And the second was, would this be the most humiliatingly stupid death since Hans Steininger of Austria, who died when he tripped over his own beard in 1567 and broke his neck?
 Orkney from near John o’Groats Very slowly I drew my head back and freed myself. I managed to extricate myself from the gansey, struggling like a man fighting off a swarm of invisible bees and, possessed for a minute by the ghost of Buster Keaton, in the process managed to stab myself in the ear. When I’d got it off I discovered that one of the needles had fallen out, dropping all its stitches. In some ways a screwdriver in the light socket would have been simpler.
Moving on. Usually by the time I get to this stage of a gansey I just want to get it finished, and this time it’s no different. So I’ve got my head down, knitting when I would otherwise be reading, or writing, or honing my celebrated impersonation of a narcoleptic trying to cocoon himself in his own drool.
 Duncansby Stacks I’m about halfway down the arm, the hard yards behind me, and enough stitches decreased to complete a row in less than 10 minutes. Next weekend I expect to reach the cuff, and then it will be, as Private Hudson from Aliens would say, Game over, man, game over. So long as I don’t get any more migraines.
I got an email from Ben yesterday telling me this site is a Googlewhack. I looked it up, assuming it was something illegal in Texas involving rubber goods, but apparently it’s a real thing. I’m not sure we count, but it’s a fun idea.
 I’ve got a new gansey. Or rather, not a new one, exactly: an old one I’d forgotten I had. You see, we’re still slowly sorting out our stuff and unpacking, and Margaret found it buried in a suitcase (and in the process inventing the science of gansey archaeology). I must have knit it back in the eighties or nineties, in the innocent days before blood pressure, hip-hop, or reality TV had been invented.
 Lord, I feel old: can you imagine, I’m approaching the end of my third decade knitting ganseys? This jumper is probably older than most of the England cricket team. It’s like finding a photograph album in the attic, all the ghosts of your past waiting behind the door of memory to jump out waving party streamers, clutching a bottle of Theakston’s Old Peculier and shouting “Surprise!”
 The “I” who knit it—bless me, so tightly it could probably stand upright on its own—is trapped in the aspic of time along with the gansey itself, long ago. But one thing I do know: it’s not my size, and could never have fitted me, unless I planned to use it as a corset. (Although, now I come to think of it—gansey lingerie; could it catch on, do you think? Possible marketing slogan: “The Rough With The Smooth…” Really, it sells itself.)
 The Icehouse, John o’Groats Ahem. Turning our attention away from transvestite fishermen for a moment, my current, present-day, loosely knit gansey for the chap with the comfortable figure, is finally entering the end-game. I’ve finished the first sleeve and have embarked on the second. I ended up with 108 stitches just before the cuff which I decreased down to 100 stitches, comprising 25 ribs. (I like to be able to push my sleeves up, and that number of stitches with the turned-over cuff keeps a nice grip on my wrists without being too tight.)
 Harbour entrance, Wick In other news, we’ve just passed the summer solstice, the longest day. (Time to start thinking about that Christmas list now the nights are drawing in…) Caithness has largely escaped the mini heat-wave the rest of Britain is basking in just now—we’ve got grey skies, cool winds and that sort of persistent mizzle that makes your windscreen wipers howl like a wookie who’s just hit his thumb with a hammer.
And I’ve got to decide what to do with this new/old gansey. I feel a bit like Viktor Frankenstein if he opened a chest and found a cadaver he’d been working on decades ago—do I put it back in its suitcase? Unravel it and knit something else with the yarn? Start dieting? Or else bury it in the garden in the dead of night with a 2.25mm needle through its heart…?
 The office was infested with a swarm of blowflies last week, not in the strongrooms thank heaven, but all the public areas. It’s been like a zombie apocalypse, only with buzzing insects instead of the shuffling undead. We slaughtered them like orcs, keeping score much as Gimli and Legolas did at Helm’s Deep. (“My score is now nine enemy slain,” Sharon said, brandishing a can of Raid; “Not bad,” I replied, “but my tally is now twelve; it’s been paper towel work on the kitchen window.”)
 I expect Gimli the dwarf enjoyed a bit of light knitting of an evening while he rested from the day’s battles, and so it’s been with me. I’m zonking down the sleeve, and may even finish it this weekend. (Maybe not, though – I plan to do a six-inch cuff.) I’m decreasing at a rate of two stitches every 7th row, and should end up with c.96 stitches for the cuff – if I’ve got my maths right.
 Chanonry Point Lighthouse If you’re ever in the Highlands I recommend a visit to the Black Isle, just north of Inverness. It’s not really an island, but somehow the “Black Peninsula” doesn’t quite have the same ring. It’s fertile and green and wooded, not really words that you can apply to Caithness with a straight face, and with its yachts and marinas and general air of prosperity looks like a little bit of Cape Cod in Scotland.
A view up the Great Glen The Black Isle also has Chanonry Point near Fortrose, a long spit of land jutting out into the firth. We were there last weekend – it’s supposed to be a great place to see dolphins, and although there were none frolicking while we were there, we did spot a rare ice cream van, which in many ways on a hot day was even better.
And now it’s time to take up Anduril, my trusty paper towel, and return to the fray against the sworn enemy of my people, the blowfly. And because we men of the North believe in honouring our fallen enemies, we shall gather the bodies and burn them in a funeral mound at sunset, like the riders of Rohan, while singing sad laments (Where now the fly that was buzzing/ To where can the insect fly?/ Where now the stropping of feelers/ While it feasted on my blueberry pie..?”)
 We’ve had a taste of summer this last week, with blue skies, high fluffy clouds, sunshine, and the kind of heat that makes a Highlander strip to a T-shirt and shorts—as if there wasn’t enough sadness in life—yes, we’re talking a sweltering 15ºC. Even someone as sun-averse as I have been lured outdoors, so that my head and neck are now bright pink, while the rest of my body remains the colour of semi-skimmed milk—when I take my shirt off I look like a partly-eaten coconut ice.
I read this week that the White House made the classic mistake of hitting “reply all” to an email, and so revealing the name of the CIA’s top man in Kabul to everyone on the mailing list. I’ve never done anything quite this crass on email—I prefer to be dumb and gauche up close and personal, face to face.
A Sunny Day in Caithness . . . Once upon a time we were Morris dancing at a festival in York, when the city was full of tourists. The various sides were supposed to take turns dancing in a public square, once dance each. We were up next, but frustratingly the side before us decided to do several dances, hogging the limelight and keeping everyone waiting. I was pretty keyed up, we all were, because if you’re a Morris dancer your usual audience is a couple of resigned people and a dog outside the pub, so to perform in front of hundreds of tourists with cameras is quite a big deal.
 One of the dancers in this side wasn’t very good. As time passed, the tension in our party grew; so by way of relieving it I began to be extraordinarily witty at this guy’s expense: I criticised his posture, his coordination, his balance and his dancing, everything from his galleys to his capers. I didn’t really mean any of it, of course. But the Devil took possession of my mouth and I flew…
…right up to the point when a woman standing in front of me turned round furiously and snapped, “That’s my son you’re talking about,” and stalked off.
The echoes of that moment will resonate across the universe until the light of the last star has perished in icy darkness. Sometimes when I read of scientists detecting what they think is a faint trace of the Big Bang, it’s really just the ripple of that moment, travelling through interstellar space at the speed of shame.
 Turning hastily to ganseys, I’ve finished the neck and started on the first sleeve. The armhole measured 8.75 inches from gusset to shoulder join, and I’m knitting at about 8.75 stitches to the inch, so I cast on 151 stitches in the round, using the famous “suck it and see” approach. I’ve just decreased the hell out of the gusset, and am on the sleeve proper, which will eventually be about 18 inches long plus a 3 inch cuff; I’m decreasing at a rate of 2 stitches every 7th row, so I should have in the region of 90-something stitches by the time I start the cuff.
 . . . and a stormy one Finally, I’m indebted to my friend Dav for the news that Glasgow University is looking for a knitter-in-residence this October, if you’re feeling adventurous. “Knit is”, they say, “the pin-up craft for sustainability, creativity and authenticity”. I shan’t be applying as my days as a pin-up are, sadly, long behind me—that, and when I knit I look like someone impersonating a chicken laying an egg—but if you’re feeling creative and authentic, why not give it a go? (http://knithistory.academicblogs.co.uk/knitter-in-residence/ )
 Spring has come to Caithness, and possibly summer too, with blue skies, light winds, and temperatures in the mid to high teens. (Or at least I presume they are—I have a special Caithness-adjusted thermometer which only goes up to 13ºC, on the grounds that any further numbers are redundant.)
 The air is full of birds, too. The trees are as noisy as school playgrounds, and our car’s been used as an avian lavatory so often it looks like a painting by Jackson Pollock. Swallows are zipping about all over the place, with that weird dipping flight that makes them look as though they’re being jerked along on strings for a joke.
On Saturday we went for a stroll along Dunnet beach, which lies on the north coast somewhere between Thurso and John O’Groats. There we encountered a new breed of dog, a cross between a dachshund and a friendly piranha. If you held out your hand for a neighbourly sniff, the next thing you knew your arm had disappeared up to the elbow in slavering jaws and drool, and you looked like a novice vet trying to conduct a rectal examination orally.
 Not a bouncy castle, or why we were at a standstill for 20 minutes. The road was closed to move this huge piece of equipment. Significant progress on the gansey this week: the front is finished, the shoulders are joined and I’ve started the collar. The jumper is 209 stitches across; so each shoulder is 70 stitches and the neck is 69 (70+70+69 = 209).
I decided to make the neck quite deep this time, some 28 rows, and so—since I decrease on the neck at a rate of 1 stitch every 2 rows—that meant 14 decreases per side. I therefore started each shoulder with 84 stitches on the needle and decreased down to 70 to give a nice, rounded (yet daringly plunging) neckline; and the stitches that were left for the neck at the front were correspondingly reduced to 41 (i.e., 69-14-14 = 41). The shoulders were cast off using the conventional three-needle bind-off.
It usually takes me 6-8 weeks to do the sleeves, so I might actually finish this one by the end of July—in other words, just in time for the Caithness winter…
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One of the side-effects of the kind of migraines I get is that I find myself doing really dumb things. Incredibly stupid ideas suddenly seem not only sensible, but imperative. It’s a bit like being drunk, only much cheaper, and you don’t have to queue so long at the bar.
This weekend’s migraine-induced stupidity was nowhere near as dramatic as that. I decided to try on the gansey, needles and all, just to reassure myself that I’d got the fit right. Apart from looking like I’d come from an explosion in an acupuncture clinic, there were no alarms until I turned my head to see how the shoulder looked and got a double-pointed needle up the nose.
