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 Well, that’s midsummer over with. The spinning top of time has passed its zenith and already a wobble, imperceptible but there all the same, has crept into the rotation of the Earth. The nights draw in and the sun rises a minute or two later every couple of days. Meanwhile summer continues to frolic innocently, like a child playing in the park whose mother’s just snuck a first glance at her watch. My phone tells me there are only 184 sleeps till Christmas.
 href=”http://www.ganseys.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/18Flam180623-1.jpg”> The Circus Comes to Town[/ Time’s been on my mind recently, prompted by the news that Who Framed Roger Rabbit is 30 years old. 30 years! Sleeping Beauty must have felt like this when she woke up from her long slumber. (“Wait— Sergeant Pepper was how many years ago now? Seriously? What about Dark Side of the Moon? No way! By the way, honestly, I’d love to stop for another kiss but does this castle have a bathroom?”) I find myself trying to see if I’ve overlooked a decade of my life somewhere, maybe in my forties when I wasn’t paying close enough attention. But they all seem to be accounted for: it’s just the years and months and days that’re a bit hazy.
 f=”http://www.ganseys.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/18Flam180620-1.jpg”> Summer Flowers[/capt I was on a training course last week. There was a stunned silence when I revealed that not only had personal computers not been invented when I was at university, I can remember when pocket calculators came in. The first portable cassette players appeared at our school in 1971, and I can remember sitting hunched by the radio, fingers hovering over the “play” and “record” keys, to pirate songs off the Sunday night Top 20 countdown; listening as carefully as a safecracker for the infinitesimal pause when the DJ stopped talking before the music began. Now I can hear a song, look it up on my phone, download a copy, then stream it through my hifi, all by just flexing one thumb.
![]() ttp://www.ganseys.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/18Flam180620-1-2.jpg”> Caught in the Rain [/caption]In gansey news I’ve finished the collar and started on the first sleeve. There are 151 stitches in the sleeve, slightly more than I usually have, to compensate for the way the pattern pulls in. (This is a result both of the cables, and all the purl columns.) After the gusset, I’m decreasing at a rate of 2 stitches every 5th row. The more eagle-eyed among you will already have spotted that the diamonds are two stitches narrower than on the body (an aesthetic choice—but it was also not unusual for sleeve patterns to be smaller than body patterns).
And so I carry a jumble of memories inside me, a certain mindset, invisible as tree rings, but which date me just as certainly: such as looking at the track listing on an album and instinctively breaking the songs into Side A and Side B. On the plus side, I’m old enough not to feel the need to understand hip-hop, or modern opera. On the down side (or Side B, as I like to think of it), I fear I shall carry the lyrics of “Donald Where’s Your Troosers” with me to the grave…
 There’s a memorable scene in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas where Hunter S. Thompson is in a hotel room with his attorney, both of them off their heads, as they are for most of the book, on drugs. The attorney is soaking in the bath, and demands Thompson play Jefferson Airplane’s song White Rabbit at full volume; and, when the song peaks, throw the player into the bathtub, electrocuting him.
Thompson, surprisingly, has just enough sense not to go along with this. Instead, at the key moment, with the attorney lying in the tub, eyes closed, expectant, he throws the biggest grapefruit in the fruit bowl into the bath. For a few seconds the attorney actually believes he’s being electrocuted. “My attorney screamed crazily, thrashing around in the tub like a shark after meat, churning water all over the floor as he struggled to get hold of something.”
Yes, it’s the (football/soccer) World Cup, and this sort of frenzied ecstasy exactly describes the BBC’s relentless coverage. Every journalist seems as excited as a five year-old who’s been given a surprise birthday party and a whoopee cushion. It’s exhausting.
So instead, let us avert our gaze and turn to a story that’s had the archives world shaking its collective head: the White House’s records. Did you know that the Presidential Records Act requires every document the President of the United States handles to be preserved in the National Archives? No, me neither; but as an archivist, I heartily approve—it’s just the way the world should be.
 View towards Wick from upriver And then along comes President Trump. Apparently he can’t be persuaded not to rip up papers of all kinds when he’s done with them—some of them just torn in half, others into “hundreds of minute pieces”. But you can’t outwit archivists like that: we have special training. So it’s the job of White House staff to go through Trump’s waste paper bins and retrieve the shreds of paper and stick them back together. (Now I think of it, I’m pretty sure I saw the Penguin do this in the 1992 movie Batman Returns, so you’d think someone might have invested in a decent shredder by now.) Still, so long as they’re using special archival non-acidic preservation tape, there’s no harm done, eh? “We got Scotch tape, the clear kind,” an aide said. Oh.
The steps to Dunnet Beach In gansey news I have put in a few hard yards this week. As a result I’ve finished the front and both shoulders, joined them with a standard three-needle bind-off, and started on the collar. Several of my recent ganseys have featured traditional non-shaped necklines (partly because I have a mind to offer them to a local museum if they’ll have them); but I prefer a bit of freedom around the old larynx myself, so this time I’ve gone for a shaped collar. I made it quite deep, i.e., one diamond, or 30 rows. (This equals 15 decreases, if I decrease every other row.)
Gordon contemplates braces The shoulders at the shoulder strap are each 63 stitches wide, with another 63 for the neck. So I put 63 + 15 = 78 stitches on each needle and worked up the shoulder, decreasing every second row, until after 30 rows I had 63 stitches left for the shoulder strap. I then knit 12 rows of standard rig ‘n fur’ for the shoulder strap, and then bound off (is that right, “bound”? Seems a bit sprightly for someone with my knees, but there we are). It makes for a nice wide neckline and a sweeping, gentle curve.
I just had an awful thought. If the BBC’s coverage of the World Cup is this bad now, what will it be like if England actually go on to win it? I might have to emigrate. Either that, or take desperate measures. (Now, where did I leave that copy of White Rabbit…?)
 Middle age affects us all differently. Some people develop a hitherto unexpected interest in radio programmes about gardening; while others, usually of the chappish persuasion, splurge out on sports cars or motorcycles. In my own case, however, I find I am afflicted with braces.
A word on terminology. I’m talking about those elasticky thingies that go over your shoulders and hold your trousers up, not the metal attachments to straighten teeth, nor the lacy bits that enable young ladies (in old films and on websites dedicated to particular tastes, or so I’m told, not that I’d know from personal experience of course, especially during work time after the unpleasantness) to keep their stockings up.
A dull day at John o’Groats I first started wearing braces a year or so back when my various mental health issues saw my weight fluctuate by over half a stone in a few months. My profile resembled an animation of the phases of the moon, waxing and waning with the pull of the tides. At my heaviest you could have lain me on my stomach, put a magnet in my socks, given me a hearty spin and used me for a compass; at my lightest someone from work, when I refused a piece of cake on the grounds that it was full of calories, glanced at my waistline and said disgustedly, “I’ve seen more fat on a chip!” No belt could stand the strain.
Yellow Flag Iris, Iris pseudacorus Along the way I discovered that braces used to be considered underwear, and were discreetly hidden under the waistcoat; only when waistcoats went out of fashion was it acceptable for braces to be visible (a sensible development, I feel, given the alternative was the potentially more shocking sight of men shuffling about with their trousers round their ankles). The belt didn’t really take over until World War Two, when it was used in army uniforms, and then in the low-slung jeans look of the 1950s and 60s.
 Great Hall, National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh All other considerations aside, I prefer to model my style on that of the Soggy Bottom Boys in the film O Brother, Where Art Thou? The height of sartorial perfection, one feels.
Now, every now and again, when knitting a gansey, the gansey fairies (another web search I don’t recommend you to make at work) smile on you and things just click. I decided when I started this gansey that I wouldn’t try to calculate the number of diamonds I could exactly fit on a side: I’ve tried this before and it never works out. This time I thought I’d take it as it comes, and if that meant I was left with a half- or quarter-diamond, then so be it. But lo! Imagine my pleasure when I reached the top of the back and found that, give or take a quarter of an inch or so, I have exactly eight diamonds. So my heartfelt thanks to the gansey fairies (Cable, Purl and Gusset, good names for cats now I think of it) and it’s on to the front.
Finally this week, the phrase “belt and braces” of course refers to a safety-first approach, leaving nothing to chance. Leaving aside the fact that, in braces etiquette (who knew?), one should never wear a belt with braces, the last word on this was surely said by Henry Ford: “How can you trust a man that wears both a belt and suspenders? The man can’t even trust his own pants.”
 What’s your favourite scientific theory? At the moment I’m torn between two. One is that black holes are stars that have collapsed in on themselves and are now exploding back into stars but, owing to relativity, too slowly for us to be able to detect it yet. The other is that time is just a way of measuring the exchange of heat from hotter to colder objects (e.g., from a hot water bottle to my feet); and that where there is no friction, no heat exchange—the orbit of the planets round the sun, for example—the whole notion of time becomes irrelevant.
 Sarclet harbour I don’t remotely pretend to understand this, of course—I just like the sheer mind-boggling wonderment of it all. Modern physics seems to be mostly equations on a blackboard, where forgetting to carry the 1 can profoundly alter our understanding of the universe; and equations and I have never really been friends. I remember being quite energised by medieval philosophy at university, right up to the point when the professor said, “If we represent the goodness of God with the symbol a, and the nature of evil with b, then we have a – b equal to…” And my tentative understanding collapsed in a heap of jumbled logic, never to recover.
When I did my archive training there was a nun on the course. Her attitude to medieval philosophy was rather refreshing, dismissing it as an argument over “how many pins you could stick in the head of an angel”. (Mind you, her attitude to most things was refreshing: one day she came into the common room carrying a bunch of flowers. One of the students asked her, “Do you want something to put them in?” She eyed him appraisingly for a moment, then said, “All right, then. Bend over!”)
Dredging in Wick harbour In gansey news I have divided for front and back, half-finished the gussets, put them on holders, and am now embarked on the back. My respect for the pattern grows apace—it’s as easy to knit backwards as forwards. (Apologies for the quality of the photos this week; as you’ll have guessed, Margaret is away just now. Normal service should be resumed next week, but it’s tricky to get the colour right on an iPhone.)
Gorse at Helmsdale Finally this week, I’d like to share with you one of my favourite poems by Matsuo Bashō, the great Japanese poet who could say more in three brief lines than most of us manage in a lifetime. We’ve had a taste of summer in Caithness, an explosion of light and colour and, of course, birdsong. This summer poem always lifts my spirits—physicists and poets, each bringing us closer to a kind of truth:
Skylark
sings all day,
and day not long enough.
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Well, that’s midsummer over with. The spinning top of time has passed its zenith and already a wobble, imperceptible but there all the same, has crept into the rotation of the Earth. The nights draw in and the sun rises a minute or two later every couple of days. Meanwhile summer continues to frolic innocently, like a child playing in the park whose mother’s just snuck a first glance at her watch. My phone tells me there are only 184 sleeps till Christmas.
