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 It’s been a lovely few days in Caithness, blue skies, light winds and temperatures up into the high teens. The town is full of tourists, easy to spot both by their cameras and the looks of slowly dawning horror on their faces as they realise the bars don’t open for another six hours, and every time they turn around there’s another dozen seagulls perched on the wall behind them, flipping coins and sneering.
 The funfair. Not tacky in the slightest. Summer also means the funfair’s back in town, down by the river. Each evening the peace is shattered by flashing lights and loud music, as though the mother ship from Close Encounters had arrived—always assuming that the aliens, instead of abducting people, just wanted to put them in centrifuges decorated with pictures of skinny women wearing only bikinis, Stetsons and cowboy boots.
With a whoop and a holler, embracing my inner cowgirl, I’ve finished re-knitting the first sleeve, so that now the gansey has two different sized arms; when I try it on I look like Quasimodo’s stuntman. The new sleeve hasn’t been blocked yet, so the crinkly reused yarn makes the stitches look a bit uneven—though I know this will all come out in the wash, so to speak, and even up.
I didn’t like the way the pattern continued right the way down to the very cuff before—with such a busy pattern I felt it was a kind of overkill—so I stopped a few inches short this time and had a stretch of plain knitting before the cuff, an effect I’ve always liked. Plus it’ll be handy if I ever start wearing gauntlets.
Our copy of the Fall issue of Knitscene magazine arrived this week, the one in which our blog is featured on the back page. Thanks to everyone who flagged this up last week, and a warm welcome to anyone who’s visiting for the first time. Because ganseys take a while to knit, it’s probably best to think of the blog’s archives as a sort of time-lapse snapshot of a gansey nursery.
 Fame at last! (Or, if not fame, slightly less obscurity at last!) And of course many thanks to Linda and her team for such a splendid feature, and for sportingly agreeing to use the archive picture of me taken while I still had a waist.
Wick Harbour. The sign reads: “No HGV Parking” In parish notices, Gansey Nation will now be taking a short summer break. We’ll be back on Monday 11 August—by which time I might even be feeling strong enough to tackle the other sleeve…
The Ravelled Sleeve of Care
Bertie Wooster once complained of Jeeves that “Round about the beginning of July each year he downs tools, the slacker, and goes off to Bognor Regis for the shrimping.”
It’s exactly like that with Margaret, only instead of Bognor she heads for the south of France, and rather than shrimping she lazes around the pool with other members of the beau monde, sipping cocktails and eyeing up the bar staff before hazarding the mortgage at the roulette tables. (Possibly. Or, on the other hand, possibly not.)
The biggest challenge when this happens is remembering that I’m cooking for one. So I unconsciously put twice as much coffee as I need in the cafetiere, and am left with eyes as wide as Bugs Bunny’s and a tendency to finish other people’s sentences; I also seriously underestimate pasta, with its remarkable capacity to expand like an inflatable life raft, and I end up so full I find myself bouncing down the stairs like a beach ball, or a very happy elephant seal who’s found a canister of helium washed up on the beach.
Anyway, Margaret’s absence explains the sudden drop in quality of the photographs—my technique is not so much point-and-click as point-an-iPhone-and-hope.
The daily commute I’m about 12 inches down re-knitting the first sleeve, and so making good progress, though it does feel a bit like being kept in for detention after school; or the modern equivalent of forcing prisoners to pick oakum. I’m decreasing this time at 2 stitches every 4th row, a far more realistic rate than before. (I may take a short break after this sleeve is finished and start laying the foundations of my next project, just for a change; diamonds may be a girl’s best friend, but trust me, after knitting so many, they do rather lose some of their lustre.)
Oh, and come January, when I’m snapping icicles out of my beard and using orphan street children to stop the wind whistling through the cracks round the windows, and the eternal hyperborean darkness means that the sun pops out and vanishes again like a cuckoo in a clock, remind me of this week: for the south of England’s been suffering a heatwave, temperatures a sticky and enervating 30+ºC; while here in Wick it’s been breezy, damp and cool, just 16ºC or so, with only a spot of sea fog (or “haar”), rain and a funfair to worry about. Grey skies have never been so welcome…
An overcast Wick Marina  Judit’s Gansey Finally this week, Judit has sent a picture of the recipient of the green gansey we featured the other week modelling the garment, the orthopaedic surgeon who operated on her foot. (Finland, the country where even the surgeons look like models. And you thought rugged, blue-eyed Dr House was just fiction.) What makes Judit’s work even more impressive is that she sizes her ganseys by eye—no measuring involved. Remarkable.
 I’ve got some good news and bad news this week. The good news—I finished the other sleeve of the denim gansey, sewed in all the loose ends and Margaret blocked it out to dry. The bad news? The sleeves are too big and I’ve got to rip ’em out and knit ’em again.
D’, as Homer Simpson might say, ’oh.
You see, it was always going to be a size too large; knowing the winters we get up here, I wanted something big enough to fit over a thermal vest, a flannel shirt and an under-jumper, and possibly a layer of lard, a bearskin and a Persian rug as well. And the body is fine, just what I wanted. But the sleeves…
Let’s put it this way. They’re so big that if I jumped off the top of a giant redwood, or maybe a poplar, supposing for the moment there were trees in Caithness instead of the desolate post-apocalyptic wasteland I see from my window, I could spread my arms and coast for up to half a mile with a following wind, like an overweight bespectacled flying squirrel with a fondness for Scots tablet. If I was buried wearing it archaeologists of the future would assume they’d found the missing link between birds and portly archivists.
Sherlock Holmes would no doubt describe the mistake as elementary, just before I punched him on the nose. As you may recall, I’ve been trying to knit more loosely, lowering my stitch gauge from 9.25 to about 8 stitches per inch. Like Tiger Woods changing his golf swing after years of winning majors I’m having to rebuild parts of my technique, and calculations, from scratch. If I’d been knitting with the old gauge I’d probably have been fine.
Back to square one . . . How does it feel? You remember the time when NASA lost a £78 million space probe after it travelled 400 space miles because they forgot to convert the calculations from imperial to metric? Well, this is worse.
Oh, well. It’s not all bad. Reasons to be cheerful, number one: the Commonwealth Games are being held in Glasgow this month and, just like the Olympic torch, the baton is travelling all over Scotland. This week it came to Caithness and, like so many tourists, it dropped into Wick on its way south from Orkney via John O’Groats, where it had stopped for an ice cream and a selfie in front of the famous signpost.
It passed the end of our road, and it passed the library where I work, and it passed the bloody great articulated lorry that the police had forgotten to stop earlier and which now had to squeeze into the bus stop in front of the hospital to let the baton runners past, blocking the view of the staff and the patients who’d been waiting for over half an hour just for that moment…
Reasons to be cheerful, number two: Judit’s sent another great gansey photo, this one knitted for a friend in Oulu. And if the picture doesn’t make everyone want to move to Finland I don’t know what will; really, Judit should be on commission from the Finnish Tourist Board. It’s another great gansey, too.
Reasons to be cheerful, number three: er—I don’t have to buy any more yarn for a few weeks while I re-knit the sleeves..?
 If you’ve ever wondered what working in the Caithness Archives is like, picture the scene in the Lord of the Rings where Gandalf goes looking for an ancient text among the Minas Tirith records. It’s exactly like that, except that occasionally—once a month, say—we have a bath and comb our beards, unlike certain wizards I could mention.
Archives work is not always as glamorous as the movies would have you believe; most of the time, to be honest, we deal with the equivalent of Victorian supermarket receipts. But this week I’ve been handling some genuine crinkly-crackly parchment deeds dating from the 1550s, touching history with my own hands.
 A rare photo of Gordon at work Parchment is stretched cow skin. Like your own skin, it has a rough, dark outside (the hair side), and a smooth side which never usually sees the light of day while the animal has a pulse. It’s such amazing stuff that the words really do read as fresh and clear as if they’d been written last week.
 Courtesy of Highland Archives And unlike modern paper, parchment lasts for centuries. Which brings us to my favourite fact about the medium: it’s so durable that the nuclear industry is putting some of its most vital information onto parchment, because they know it’s going to last. So one day the Gandalfs of the future will be searching for records of radioactive waste by candlelight, not rings – though I suppose it’s all about power in the end.
 Despite some heroic knitting this week, I didn’t quite finish the gansey. (Disclosure: summer caressed Caithness with light fingers on Sunday, so we went for a walk on Dunnet beach. It was stunningly beautiful, but since the summer breeze didn’t so much make me feel fine by blowing through the jasmine of my mind, as make it hard to keep upright while it stripped the bark from trees, we didn’t linger.)
I’ve an inch and a half to go on the cuff, and then all I have to do is darn in the ends and wait for autumn to arrive. (About a fortnight, on current evidence.) I’ve deliberately made this one a nice, roomy fit, so that if I ever fall from an airplane I have an emergency parachute handy.
Finally this week, commiserations and congratulations to Judit from this parish – commiserations because she’s recovering from an operation to her foot, and congratulations because she’s finished another stunning gansey, in violet, which you can see here. The pattern is from Rae Compton’s book, page 56, George Mainprize’s gansey.
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It’s been a lovely few days in Caithness, blue skies, light winds and temperatures up into the high teens. The town is full of tourists, easy to spot both by their cameras and the looks of slowly dawning horror on their faces as they realise the bars don’t open for another six hours, and every time they turn around there’s another dozen seagulls perched on the wall behind them, flipping coins and sneering.
I didn’t like the way the pattern continued right the way down to the very cuff before—with such a busy pattern I felt it was a kind of overkill—so I stopped a few inches short this time and had a stretch of plain knitting before the cuff, an effect I’ve always liked. Plus it’ll be handy if I ever start wearing gauntlets.
