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 Spring has come early to the north Highlands of Scotland and so, lured outside by a weather forecast promising sunny intervals and light winds, we ventured out to Noss Head, just north of Wick. Of course, light winds in Caithness mean the sort of arctic gales you could stand up against, like a man leaning on a bar waiting for his pint—and to be fair, Noss Head is rather exposed, a promontory jutting out into the North Sea like a narwhal’s tusk—but when you recall that a year ago Britain was being frozen by the so-called “beast from the east”, it wisnae so bad.
 Castle Sinclair Girnigoe The fields were absolutely fizzing with larks, the harrier jump jets of the avian kingdom. It always looks like such hard work, being a lark: they seem to be pedalling frantically, like a cyclist going up Ben Nevis in fourth gear, just to get airborne. I’ve always assumed their song is some kind of mating call or territorial claim, but it’s probably just the sound of desperate wheezing, the equivalent of the sort of noise I make going up a flight of stairs. I wonder what normal blood pressure is for a lark? And if any of them ever explode at, say, thirty or forty feet?
 Gordon models the latest gansey at Ackergill Across the promontory to the north lie the rocky cliffs and sea stacks, home of numerous seabirds, fulmars and shags and the like. These birds seem to delight in showing the larks how it’s done, effortlessly riding the wind as though strung on invisible wires. I can watch them for hours as they serenely glide, circle, swoop and dive; it’s as relaxing as stroking a cat, and much less hard work.
In gansey news I’ve finished the front of the pullover, joined the shoulders, knit the collar and picked up the stitches on the first sleeve. This is the stage when it always begins to look like a gansey, and you get a proper feel for the pattern. This pattern is one of my favourites, and this one is for my keep pile. It’s not the first time I’ve knit it: you can see the previous version (for a friend) and pattern chart here. The yarn is Wendy’s atlantic blue, which I happened to have in my stash, second-hand from Ravelry. It’s not only my favourite colour, it’s also the colour of the banger car team I supported in my youth—Daventry—so I’m experiencing disconcerting Proustian flashbacks while I knit.
 Cloudy & dull by the river And now the sunny intervals have gone, but the wind remains. Robert Louis Stevenson, who spent time up here, wrote: “In Wick I have never heard any one greet his neighbour with the usual ‘Fine day’ or ‘Good morning.’ Both come shaking their heads, and both say, ‘Breezy, breezy!’ And such is the atrocious quality of the climate, that the remark is almost invariably justified by the fact.” On the plus side, I always remind myself that this is Scotland; and if it wasn’t for the wind we’d have that other matter to deal with, the far worse plague of midges…
 It’s a strange thing, giving a talk: you sweat for hours getting it just so, tweaking the script and adding a slide here, removing another there, playing around with the structure; and then when you stand up in front of the audience, you ignore everything you were going to say and instead just make it up as you go along. Such, at least, is often the case with me.
Of course, it only works if I’ve done the preparation beforehand and actually know my subject. Ask me to hold forth for half an hour on the battle of Waterloo or the inner workings of a gas-cooled nuclear reactor and before long the hall would be empty and the organiser would be leaving me alone in a room with a bottle of whisky and a loaded revolver, together with a hint that the caretaker will be along shortly to lock up. But when it works—when the spirit moves you, the words come and you seem to soar on a rising thermal of goodwill—then it’s a joy.
 Some off-the-cuff remarks… I duly gave my talk on ganseys at Wick Museum last week. Most importantly, the audience seemed to enjoy it. Mind you, it helps immeasurably having the Johnston Collection of photographs of Victorian fishermen as your subject; and besides, the finest ganseys in the collection simply speak for themselves. And, for the second time since I moved to Caithness, I had one of these conversations: a lady came up to me, holding a copy of Rae Compton and Henrietta Munro’s booklet on Caithness ganseys, They Lived By The Sea. She showed me the picture of Donald Angus and his pattern and said he was her grandfather; and that her grandmother had knitted the same pattern for her as a little girl. It’s a timely reminder, when we look at these photographs, that it’s not just a record of ganseys and patterns but a catalogue of people’s lives; and that in recreating the patterns, we are honouring the knitters who made it all possible, so many of whose names are sadly lost to us.
 Full House – Standing Room Only Well, it’s time to unmask my batteries and reveal a new gansey. Of course I haven’t knit all this in a week: I started it back in December, over Christmas, and have been knitting it on and off ever since, as a sort of light relief from the intricacies of John Macleod’s gansey. It’s another of my favourite patterns, elements of which are recorded in Scottish Fleet and Yorkshire (it’s a variant of the celebrated Matt Cammish pattern). It’s another gansey in chunky Wendy yarn, Atlantic Blue. I’ll say more about it next week.
Tree Full o’ Birds In parish news, Judit has sent through some more pictures, this time of a very natty green gansey based on John Northcott’s pattern from Cornwall, for her grandson. This is one of the family of patterns like Vicar of Morwenstow, The Lizard, or the Shackleton ganseys, which rely on basic geometry for effect, and what a striking effect it is. Congratulations once again to Judit. (Hmm. Maybe I should dedicate my retirement to devising a system that organises ganseys, not by place but by grouping together similar patterns? Then again, maybe not.)
Finally, thanks to Margaret for getting some excellent pictures at the talk. I don’t really like having my picture taken: I’ve discovered that photos taken of me when I’m, as it were, smiling, capture a wild, deranged grimace that makes me look like a praying mantis who’s just about to devour its mate, or else like a praying mantis who’s just had a pint of ice cream dumped down his trousers; either way it’s not a good look. In Margaret’s picture of me above I don’t manifest as a homicidal mantodea, and for that I am forever in her debt…
 Apologies if I’m a little distracted this week—I’m giving a talk on ganseys at the local museum on Thursday…and it’s just sunk in that I’m giving a talk on ganseys on Thursday at the local museum. I’m torn between anxiety that no one will come, and that they will. As things stand, it’s not impossible that the audience will be treated to the spectacle of me standing in blushing, awkward silence while beads of sweat break out across my forehead and my lower jaw slowly sags open like the pod door on Thunderbird 2.
 My career is, of course, littered with spectacular failures in public speaking stretching back over 30 years. There was the time when, in the middle of a presentation at an event where recipients of grant funding got together to share how they’d spent the money, my laptop died, taking my slides with it. This was pretty bad in itself, but then the next speaker stood up and got a huge laugh by saying, “Well, I’d thought of preparing a slick Powerpoint presentation, but having seen the previous speaker I’m jolly glad I didn’t!” (That one still gets repeat showings in the television of my conscious mind, usually around 4am on sleepless nights.)
We’ll pass over the time I stood up to speak at a local history society and an elderly gentleman in the front row fell fast asleep during my introductory sentence, snored throughout my talk, woke up again during the applause at the end and started arguing with me based on what I hadn’t said. Even Billy Crystal might struggle to sparkle under these conditions. Or the time everything broke but the projector, and I was reduced to making shadow puppets with my hands to fill in the time. Or when I had a bad migraine, hadn’t realised how bad it was and had to be helped from the stage because I was spouting nonsense words (“boorbeerians” was one, apparently) without realising it.
Oh well. On the bright side, I put in some extra hours this week and finished the Wick gansey, so it could be washed and blocked for Thursday’s talk. And now that I see it whole, I’m blown away. It’s easily one of the top three ganseys I’ve knitted. My admiration for the old knitters who devised it and knit it in a smaller gauge than I can ever hope to emulate knows no bounds. Blooming, to coin a phrase, heck.
Finally, I said at the beginning that I was distracted. This always reminds me of one of my favourite lines in The Simpsons, in an episode when Homer has to force himself to concentrate: “Can’t get distracted. Hmm, distracted, that’s a funny word. Does anyone ever get ‘tracted’? I’m gonna call the suicide hotline and ask them…”
Giving a talk, eh; I mean, what can possibly go wrong…?
TECHNICAL STUFF
Here is the pattern chart for the cuff, promised last week. It’s a simple motif, and one that appears quite a lot in “Scottish Fleet” patterns (as well as in Whitby, which doubtless shows the influence of the Scottish “fisher lassies” on the local knitters). It’s an effective design—but bear in mind that you have you keep your focus at a time when the end is in sight and you’re freewheeling towards the finish line…
 I’ve been hit by a cold which set up base camp in my chest, so I took a couple of days off work last week while I tried to remember how to breathe. My voice disappeared, my sinuses felt as if they were packed with lead, so that I would slowly lose my balance and topple forwards from a standing position, and I soon learned not to look at the contents of my hankie—some things man is not meant to know—but if they ever need ideas for another Alien movie they know where to come.
Along the path I suppose I should have gone to the pharmacy, but I must admit I’ve been avoiding them ever since I developed that allergy to chilis a year or so back. I first noticed after a Mexican meal that my lips had puffed up and there were little sores on the inside of my mouth, so I went to the chemists’ and asked their advice. The pharmacist inspected my lips carefully, then gave his verdict: “It’s syphilis,” he said. “What!” I cried, aghast, recoiling like the Blessed Virgin Mary when she found an unexpected angel in her living room. At which the man, evidently supposing my depraved lifestyle had also affected my hearing, cupped his hands and bellowed, “SYPHILIS!”, so loudly that the elderly lady beside me at the counter shied like a startled horse and dropped her cod liver oil pills, and the queue behind me took a cautious couple of paces back. Wick is not a large town and I’ve had the feeling that I am a marked man ever since.
 Still, one advantage of staying home with a cold is that you can wrap up warm, prop yourself up with pillows on the sofa, and knit. As a result I have the end of this gansey firmly in my sights, and even though I expect to be back at work this week, I should finish it sometime next weekend. The left sleeve is complete, and note the fancy cuffs: no simple knit two/ purl two ribbing here. It’s a very slick effect, and it’s interesting to see that the knitters of Caithness saw the cuffs as every bit as much of a showcase as the yoke.
Signs of Spring As for my puffy lips, regular readers will recall that, after months of trial and error—the doctor initially thought it might be a sulphate allergy, causing me to change all my toiletries and diet for several months—we discovered the culprit to be chili peppers. (Which, given that my two favourite cuisines are Mexican and Indian, shows God to have a sense of humour after all.) But I’ve been reluctant to entrust my healthcare to that pharmacist again; fully expecting to rock up presenting symptoms of a mild cold, only to be sent away with a treatment for leprosy, or something even worse…
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Spring has come early to the north Highlands of Scotland and so, lured outside by a weather forecast promising sunny intervals and light winds, we ventured out to Noss Head, just north of Wick. Of course, light winds in Caithness mean the sort of arctic gales you could stand up against, like a man leaning on a bar waiting for his pint—and to be fair, Noss Head is rather exposed, a promontory jutting out into the North Sea like a narwhal’s tusk—but when you recall that a year ago Britain was being frozen by the so-called “beast from the east”, it wisnae so bad.
