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 Every now and then I go to the doctor with some minor ailment—a headache, say, or a nagging cough—and come away finding the stakes have been raised rather more than I’d expected. It’s a bit like going to check your balance at a cash machine only to be told that your card has been confiscated, your assets frozen, and to stay where you are as an armed response unit has already been dispatched to your location.
One example of this came many years ago when I lived in Wales, and went to the doctor presenting the symptoms of a severe migraine only to be told brightly: “Gosh, you’re awfully young to have a brain tumour. We’d better get that checked out.” (This was one of the very rare occasions I was actually grateful to have had “just” a migraine.) Another occurred the other day.
 Got milk? I’ve had a cough-cum-cold for a few weeks and it won’t go away, so off I went to the doctor. My morale, low to begin with, plummeted when I pulled up my shirt only for what I laughably call my waist to overflow my belt line like over-yeasted bread rising in a very hot oven. I took some deep breaths while he listened to my chest, answered several questions, and then he delivered his verdict. “Well,” he said, “your lungs seem clear, you’re not a smoker and you’re not coughing up blood, so it’s probably not lung cancer.”
Well, it hadn’t of course occurred to me it might be, any more than gangrene, say, or tennis elbow. I jerked like a gaffed salmon and he hastened to reassure me: probably a virus, give it a few more weeks and it should go away, try using a nasal spray. I departed clutching a prescription and counting my blessings (I stopped at ten; any more and I’d have had to take my shoes and socks off).
Meanwhile I continue the ascent of mount gansey: I’m about three-quarters up the gussets, and have paused to make base camp while I acclimatise. I’ve opted for an open diamond pattern for the centre border panel, the median strip that separates the body from the yoke patterns like an amuse bouche between courses at an expensive dinner, or C-3PO’s tummy.
I’m off to another meeting in London next week. It gives me an opportunity to spend some time with my family, but as this gansey is now too bulky to carry onto a plane I’ll be starting the next one instead. But when I get back I hope to make a start on the yoke; we’ll see. Meanwhile my cough is slowly improving; sometimes, as Freud might have put it, a cough is just a cough—probably…
TECHNICAL STUFF
 Border pattern The diamond pattern in the border comes from page 61 of Sabine Domnick’s “Cables, Diamonds, Herringbone: Secrets of Knitting Traditional Fishermen’s Sweaters“, and is another Scottish Fleet design, so entirely appropriate here. The height of the border is dictated by the number of rows in the yoke pattern (about which more next week), but as it happened I was able to use it just as it appears in the book. There are 12 diamonds per side, each of 13 stitches, with a plain stitch between each; and two plain stitches either side of the seams.
 I might, I sometimes think, have made a passable stage actor; but not, with so much importance laid on the perfect take, a television or screen one. This feeling was reinforced when a film crew came to visit on Tuesday (the building I work in has been nominated for several awards, and so a promotional video had to be made). I watched it all with a sort of detached amusement right up to the moment when a mic was pinned to my lapel, a camera the size of an anti-tank gun was pointed squarely at me, and someone started asking me questions.
My first takes are usually pretty eloquent. Phrases such as “it was the best of times, it was the worst of times”, “April is the cruellest month” and “counterpoint the surrealism of the underlying metaphor” simply trip from my tongue, intoxicated as I am by the exuberance of my own verbosity. Then come the dreaded words, “That was great—but can we just do that again? There was someone moving behind you.”
PG Wodehouse memorably described someone who’d received a shock, “whose demeanour was now rather like that of one who, picking daisies on the railway, has just caught the down express in the small of the back”—and that is the effect those words have on me. My brain empties completely. My mouth just hangs open like the flap on an American letterbox, with a tendency to drool, until the director thoughtfully reaches out and closes it for me; for a time the only sounds I can make resemble someone trying to learn how to play the didgeridoo; and instead of coruscating flashes of lightning wit I hear myself saying, “Er… weeble weeble schlip?”—until someone kindly leads me away and gives me coffee.
Far better to avert our gaze from the tragic spectacle, and focus instead on the new gansey. I’d thought of making it a Wick-Hebrides hybrid, but now I’ve sat down and worked out the pattern(s) I want to include elements from other parts of Scotland too—so I’m just calling it “Scotland”, like the mongrel nation we call home. The Frangipani pistachio colour really brings out the zigzags. The body is adapted from a classic Wick body pattern, distinctive but not so bold that it should detract from the fancy stuff higher up. And in another week it might even be time to think about gussets—not that it’s easy to stop oneself thinking about gussets at the best of times, of course.
Anyway, I’ll have more to say next week about patterns, but for now I have to go: I think they’re ready for my close-up…
TECHNICAL STUFF
 As I said, this is a classic Wick pattern for the lower body of a gansey. The zigzags are single stitches, which give a sort of bas-relief texture, while the alternating plain panels add a nice contrast, but also help to give the gansey a flow and drape and softness. The panels can be made larger or smaller depending on the width of the body. The 3-stitch border panels are found in many Scottish patterns, as well as in northern England (e.g., the Mrs Laidler gansey from Whitby I just finished).
 I went to the doctor last week as it’s 6 months since I started taking the antidepressant medication. I asked him how much longer I might need to take it.
‘Well, now. Suppose you won the lottery,’ he said, sitting back in his chair and steepling his fingers like Sherlock Homes. ‘Do you think you would still need it then?’ And when I admitted, possibly not, he filled a meerschaum pipe with the tobacco he kept in a lady’s slipper on the desk, lit it and said: ‘Then I think, my dear Watson, that you’ve just answered your own question.’
While I was there I was also going to ask him about this chesty cough I’ve got, but as he said there was a countess waiting to see him concerning the theft of some diamonds I thought I’d better come back another time. (Anyway, I’d got those lottery tickets to buy.)
Meanwhile, the Whitby gansey has been washed and blocked and is drying gently on its boards. What a wonderful pattern it is! And how well navy as a colour suits it. Now I’m impatient to try it on. And my new project, a Wick-Hebrides hybrid in Frangipani pistachio for a friend, is starting to grow nicely on the needles. I’ll post details of the patterns anon, but for now it’s just fun to knit.
 Edinburgh: tourists flock to the coffee house where Harry Potter was ‘born’ And suddenly it’s the end of school summer holidays in Scotland and the football season has started. How on earth did this happen? The last time I looked it was July, and everyone was wearing shorts (yes, I know: even here). Mind you, this is how I feel looking in a mirror and staring 60 in the face, and it’s my own face staring back. Still, there’s one good thing about autumn—if ever there was a time to wear a gansey, this is it. Jeeves advised Bertie Wooster to don evening dress when his morale needed a boost; and this is what ganseys mean to me. I’ve said before how therapeutic knitting has been for me in recent months, but it’s more than that—every gansey I knit now is a statement, an act of defiance, two fingers stuck up against my illness.
As so often, Dylan Thomas said it best, in a little-known early draft of his famous poem: “Do not go gentle into that good night/ Knit, knit against the dying of the light/ But make sure you use a bulb that’s bright/ Preferably one of those ones that simulate daylight…” Can’t think why he changed it, really.
 It’s the height of summer and the hatchling gulls have lost their infant charm and grown into hulking waddling ugly lumps of menace. Down by the harbour Wick seems to be recreating the early scenes of The Birds—every time I turn around more gulls, chicks and adults, are lurking menacingly behind me. Once I thought I caught one working out in the dust how many gulls it would take to overpower me, but before I could get my phone out for a picture it scuffed out the marks with a webbed foot and sauntered off whistling with an air of studied nonchalance.
I only found out recently that there’s no such thing as a seagull, just different species of gulls (ours are mostly herring gulls). It’s also illegal to kill them—or any wild birds. It’s obvious they’ve found this out, hence their swaggering “Yeah? Whatcha gonna do about it, copper?” body language any time they snatch a dripping ice cream cone and guzzle it in front of you on the pavement. They know, all right. It’s only a matter of time now before I’m up before the Bench and pleading guilty to gullslaughter, swearing it was self defence, while a row of gull-shaped heads peer in through the open window, sniggering.
Actually in the UK you can kill certain species of gull under special licence. Grey squirrels too, apparently, as a non-native invasive species (aka “illegal immigrants”, coming over here, stealing our acorns). I can’t help thinking that someone should tell the gulls, thus killing two, as it were, birds with one license…
 Well, I have, as predicted, (just) finished the gansey. The washing and blocking will have to wait another week till Margaret gets back from her travels, but you get the idea. It’s still my favourite pattern, the gansey I’d take into the afterlife to keep me warm, even as a yoke-only pattern. (This style of shoulder strap was something of a Caithness feature, too, though not with cables, and of course it can be adapted to any pattern you like.) I started my next project on my ill-fated trip to London recently, so that’s all ready to go—it’s for a friend and is in Frangipani pistachio.
Finally this week I paid a visit to Caithness Horizons, the splendid museum in Thurso, where I found a set of animal costumes. Ostensibly for children, it seems that it’s adults mostly who’ve been trying them on. Well, I thought, if that’s your custom it would be rude not to…
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Every now and then I go to the doctor with some minor ailment—a headache, say, or a nagging cough—and come away finding the stakes have been raised rather more than I’d expected. It’s a bit like going to check your balance at a cash machine only to be told that your card has been confiscated, your assets frozen, and to stay where you are as an armed response unit has already been dispatched to your location.
