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In The Lord of the Rings Gandalf the wizard warns Frodo that the dark lord Sauron intends to “break down all defences and cover all the lands in a second darkness”. And I found myself wondering: If they lived in Caithness in winter, how would anyone know?
Yes, the clocks went back this weekend. Winter has arrived, and in the mornings pitch blackness is replaced with pitch greyness, as if the sun has developed cataracts. Afternoons, too, are now a thing of the past. I like to think of Gandalf waking from his afternoon nap and dashing off to confront Mrs Gandalf, who is probably in the kitchen plucking a hedgehog for dinner:
Gandalf: It’s as I feared! Sauron has arisen in the east! The world is covered in a second darkness!
Mrs Gandalf (not looking up): What are you on about now?
Gandalf: Darkness! Sauron! The dark lord has reclaimed his fortress of Barad-dur! Orcs are massing in the Misty Mountains—
Mrs Gandalf (wearily): The clocks went back.
Gandalf: What?
Mrs Gandalf: The clocks went back yesterday.
Gandalf: Yesterday?
Mrs Gandalf: It was on the TV: “News From Bree at Ten”.
Gandalf: You know I stopped watching that after they replaced Jeremy Paxman with the Mouth of Sauron. Now it’s all fake news! No, I must summon the White Council. Where’s my wizardly staff?
Mrs Gandalf: It’s propping up that wonky bookcase on the landing. And before you ask, your robe’s in the wash.
Gandalf: In the wash?
Mrs Gandalf: Yes. It looked like you’d been sleeping in it down in a mine—minging, it was. There’s that bathrobe in the dresser my Mum gave you, you never wear. The one with the rabbits.
Gandalf (darkly): I know what is the matter with me. I need smoke! I have not tasted it since the morning before the snowstorm.
Mrs Gandalf: You quit, remember? After you developed that cough. You sounded like a dragon with hiccups.
Gandalf: Just a minute, just a minute! What do you mean, the clocks went back? Clocks haven’t been invented yet…
 Into the woods so wild (not) But let us draw a veil over this domestic scene and turn to happier matters. It’s time to unveil the latest project, a navy gansey in Wendy yarn. I’m de-stashing, using up some of the yarn I’ve accumulated down the years. I had nine balls of this yarn lying around: a full-size gansey in my size (“archivist extra large”) uses just under ten, so I decided to knit the welt using yarn from a leftover ball of Wendy navy, but another dye lot. It’s noticeably different in a certain light—the yarn on the welt is darker, with a dash of indigo—but it will become less so as the gansey grows; and besides, if all else fails I can always wash it with a new pair of jeans, and let the colours run amok.
Happy Halloween I started this a few weeks back when we went down to Northampton, and I’ve been working quite hard at it: I’d like to get it finished in time for Hogmanay. The pattern is one of my absolute favourites, one of the first I ever knit. I’ve said before that I want to revisit some of these classics—in my end is my beginning, as Mary Queen of Scots sadly embroidered during her long English imprisonment—before I eventually hang up my needles for good. And it’s fun to look back down the years and remember the me who knit this twenty years ago—a stranger to me now, with hair and a waistline.
More about the pattern next week. Now I’ve just noticed these fiery letters appearing on my circular needle: “Nine balls for mortal men, doomed to dye… / One needle to cast them all on / One needle to fit them / One needle to cable and purl / And in the darkness knit them / In the land of Caithness, where the shadows lie…“
 Have you ever heard of rope core memory? No, me neither. But in effect it means hand-knitted computer software, and it was used to navigate the Apollo moon landings safely to the Moon and back.
We first learned of this when we were driving through the beautiful (but damp) Border country on our way to the English border (driving time from Wick: 8 hours), listening to classical music radio. Sadly the BBC is under the impression that no one nowadays wants to listen to classical music for more than ten minutes at time, so they fill up the Radio 3 schedules with prattle: at such moments I usually switch it off, harrumph and write letters in green ink to the Times (or at least the Radio Times) bemoaning the collapse of Western Civilisation; but as I was driving, with all those badgers and red deer and wildebeest to avoid, and not having my fountain pen to hand, the moment passed.
Well, the programme was fascinating. As I understand it, conventional computer memory back then just didn’t have the capacity for the complicated processing required to navigate such vast distances. But, as we all know, knitting is essentially binary: replace knit and purl stitches with ones and zeroes and you can perform (literally) astronomical calculations. Teams of experienced knitters were employed to weave copper wire either through a magnetic core (a knit stitch, or 1) or around it (a purl, or 0). As a result you could store about 18 times as much memory per cubic foot than conventional methods.
The engineers referred to it as “LOL memory”, for “little old ladies”—be still my aching sides—but the astronauts at least seem to have valued the women’s contribution to the Apollo missions. And how could they not? Their lives were (again, literally) in those ladies’ skilled hands. [and here’s a short video on YouTube.]
In gansey news, we have lift off too, in a manner of speaking. I finished the Scottish-bepatterned gansey while we were down in Northampton, and it’s been washed and blocked and handed over to its new owner already, driven off the forecourt and out into the world. This is very much a Scottish “Sunday best” sort of gansey, and the colour really shows off the elaborate pattern combination. But as ever, I’m already onto the next project, in navy—not sure what the pattern will be yet, but probably something a little simpler—something that doesn’t involve a slide rule, let alone rope core memory.
 Oops Anyway, I can’t help thinking of all the useful numbers I could encode into a gansey. The lock code on my phone, for example. The number of my landline telephone. The date of one’s wedding anniversary, on the remote, very remote, chance that one was, as it were, perhaps the merest smidgeon absent-minded on the subject. The grid coordinates of all one’s assets, buried in a field for one’s heirs and assigns to find and so avoid inheritance tax. Hmm. Now I come to think of it, one gansey may not be enough…
 No matter how thoroughly you’ve explored a place like Caithness there are always new things to discover. The other day I was talking to a visitor to the Archive about harbours and he said, “And have you been to the Bocht?” Well, not only had I not been to it, I’d never heard of it, nor did I even know how to spell it. But as he explained it’s a small abandoned harbour on St John’s Point, on the north coast between Mey and Gills Bay.
To get there you have to drive towards the hamlet of Skarfskerry, park the car by the side of the road and then cross a boggy waste of moorland. The land rises away from you, so it’s a bit of a trudge until you reach the crest and then the whole coastline eastwards as far as John O’Groats and Duncansby Head is suddenly revealed, with the islands of Stroma and Orkney tantalisingly close before you.
Caithness is, let’s face it, soggy. I’ve mentioned before how the ground underfoot feels like a carpet floating on a swimming pool; well, at St John’s Point it feels more like a tablecloth. Within a few paces I’d sunk to my calves, and a cold, brown, slimy liquid began to insinuate itself into my socks. (Hence the county’s tourism slogan: Caithness—putting the quag in mire for over 10,000 years.) We might’ve stayed dry if we’d worn deep-sea diving suits, but I doubt it.
The Bocht, one of those splendid Scottish names that sounds like a Highlander expectorating, is also known as Scotland’s Haven, and it’s quite beautiful, as though Caithness had its very own lagoon. You could imagine it as the headquarters of a James Bond supervillain, with the water sliding back to reveal a rocket launching pad underneath. In fact, as we looked some of the rocks along the sides of the bay seemed disconcertingly to move, until we realised they were basking seals. At such moments time and space cease to apply and all you can do is stand and stare in a dazed sort of wonder. It’s almost—almost—enough to make you forget that your trousers are experiencing a sort of capillary motion and icy peat water is now being transferred up from your socks to your groin in a way that is frankly disturbing.
It’s been a slightly curtailed knitting week, so not a huge amount of progress on the gansey, as we’re off down to visit my family in Northamptonshire again. The good news is, I’ve taken the gansey with me and expect to get it finished in the next few days; the bad news: there won’t be a blog next week. So: happy knitting everyone, and we’ll see you when we get back.
 Scotland’s Haven Gansey Nation will return on Monday 23 October.
 Here’s the good news: my right eye’s been given the all-clear by the optician, who says there’s nothing to worry about (other than not actually being able to read with it). I went back on Friday and he dilated my pupils like a Welsh wizard practicing owl transformations, and then he took a scan of the retina.
I don’t know if you’ve ever seen an image of your retina blown up on a big screen? I’m not sure I’d recommend it. Mine was a veined reddish pink globe, like a Hubble snapshot of Mars, with a large white pimple rising from the surface where it meets the optic nerve, as though Olympus Mons was covered with an unseasonable fall of snow: apparently my eyes are so deep (the reason I’m so shortsighted), the retina doesn’t quite stretch all the way round and there’s a bald patch. Anyway, everything looked fine and the macular, where all the important visiony stuff happens, and which he thought might have been torn by a vitreal detachment, was undamaged. So I can relax. It’s probably just debris blurring my sight. (Probably: there’s that word again.)
It’s a huge relief, of course, especially as the operation to fix a macular tear involves replacing the jelly in the eye; afterwards you have to keep your face horizontal with the ground at all times, even when sleeping, for 2-3 weeks, to keep the pressure on. I’d toyed with buying a magnifying glass so I could pretend I was a detective looking for clues, or telling people I was desperately shy or afraid of ceilings; but none of these seemed quite satisfactory.
A redshank puts its best foot forward Well, as David Bowie almost observed, I sat right down, waiting for the gift of sight and knitting. I’ve finished the first sleeve and started the second, even unto the end of the first (tree) panel. Incidentally, you’ll notice the sleeves have roll-back cuffs for the wearer to adjust according to preference. A fortnight should see it finished now.
Stroma In parish news, Christmas has come early this year with a splendid red gansey by the indefatigable Judit. It’s a very effective combination of chevrons and diamonds and is going to be a Christmas present for some very lucky person. Congratulations as ever to Judit!
And now I find I’m looking at things slightly differently. It’s as if I’ve got new eyes. I sound like those friends I left behind in the seventies: I feel as though I could count every leaf on a tree (this is windy Caithness, mind: the maximum this time of year is about three), or see every blade of grass in a verge. I know it’ll wear off soon (it’s started already), but while it lasts it’s as though the whole world just got closer, sharper, in high definition; almost as though it made sense.
It was David Bowie who asked, “Don’t you wonder sometimes / ‘Bout sound and vision?” Well, sometimes, David, yes: sometimes I really do…
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