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 Well, here we are, the end of August and autumn is, if not actually knocking at the door, at least paying off the taxi and trying to figure out the lock on the garden gate. Morning windows glisten with beads of condensation, while evening windows are shrouded in darkness as the nights draw in. The plums are ripening on the bough, or would be if the local avian population didn’t regard it as a sort of sparrow delicatessen, and hosts of spiders and woodlice appear to be recreating in our living room the great folk migrations of Goths and Vandals that did so much to lower the standard of spoken Latin across the Roman Empire. Summer’s lease seems about paid up, eviction notices posted.
 Hawthorn berries The last Monday in August is a public holiday in England and Wales, but not in Scotland (which takes the first Monday instead; hence that famous line from Braveheart, “Our enemies can take our lives, but they’ll never take our bank holidays!”). Nevertheless, I’ve taken a few days’ leave. The plan was go off and explore the north Highlands, parts of which we haven’t seen since the before times, pre-pandemic. Alas, our car had other ideas. Turning the key in the ignition produced a rapid series of click-click-click-click noises, which I now realise is the sound of my guardian angel sniggering, but nothing else. Reader, the battery had died. (Though, as it was the one it was born with nine years ago, my only real complaint is the timing.) To make matters worse—fate showing the kind of fickleness that Thomas Hardy, had the idea occurred to him, and had Jude the Obscure driven a Kia and made plans for a motoring holiday, would have got 20,000 words out of at the very least—the garage was sent the wrong battery, so the car’s been off the road the whole time.
 Stacked creels Meanwhile, in parish notices, we’ve been sent pictures of another couple of splendid ganseys this week. First up is Hannah, in Frangipani Moonlight with a pattern adapted from Beth Brown-Reinsel. As Hannah explains, “the pattern bands and bottom plain section are all the same size on the body (sleeve patterning also adjusted to match). Garter edges were swapped for ribbing (personal preference) and seam stitches were reduced from 6 to 3 but otherwise the pattern is largely intact. The bands appear to take their inspiration from various different patterns from Yorkshire and Scotland, but adapted to run horizontally rather than vertically in bands.” Many congratulations to Hannah for a cracking gansey, which shows just how effective these pattern combinations can be.
The other is from Judit, a gansey knit in “Betty Martin” pattern. Now, this is interesting in a different way, for Betty Martin is a feature of Yorkshire ganseys, and elsewhere, but it’s usually part of a wider combination of patterns, or used with cables. But Judit has given it its moment in the sun by making it the centre of attention, standing alone. It works really well and the yoke, which isn’t divided into bands, resembles the classic Scarborough pattern, which is one of my favourites. Well done as ever to Judit, and thanks to both Judit and Hannah for sharing.
 Thistle seedhead One good thing about the car being off the road, I don’t feel guilty about occupying the couch and watching baseball knitting. So my own gansey is settling into the pattern nicely. (I’ll post the chart in a quieter week.) The shade (Frangipani Moonlight) shows the pattern distinctly, one which is easy to remember and keep track of.
Autumn has always been my favourite season: and, like the North Ontario town in Neil Young’s song Helpless, it feels as though “all my changes were there”, so it’s tied up with a lot of memories. Mind you, in the same song Neil sings about how “in his mind he still needs a place to go”: but then, drat him, he probably has a car with a working battery to take him there…
 Well, here we are, a new week and an exciting new gansey to explore. I’m knitting this one in Frangipani Moonlight, one of my favourite shades. It’s for another work colleague (and bearing in mind that my place of work now employs over sixty people, if your next question is, Are you going to knit a gansey for all your colleagues, the answer is, Possibly not). The pattern is inspired by another gem from Flamborough, illustration 79 on page 58 in Rae Compton’s book (Amazon affiliate link). It’s a standard Flamborough combination of ropes, moss stitch and diamonds, but with a heart pattern running up the centre. I’ll post the pattern next time when hopefully it’s a little more advanced.
Meanwhile, last Saturday dawned cool and damp so we decided to go for a walk under the shelter of the trees of Dunnet Forest. We took along Legolas the Elf, as you never can tell when you might run into a raiding party of goblins if you travel too far from the sanctum of Wick. But this proved a big mistake, for almost at once he turned all fey and eldritch; it seems there’s nothing quite like a forest to bring out an elf’s inner drama queen.
 Spider’s Web after rain We hadn’t gone more than a few yards into the shadow of the trees before Legolas stopped and held up a warning hand.
“This forest is old,” he said. “Very old.”
“Uh, I really don’t think so. I mean, they literally grow those trees to sell them every Christmas.”
He narrowed his eyes, which made me wonder when he’d last visited an optician. “It’s full of memory… and anger.”
“That’s a squirrel.”
“The trees have feelings, my friend.”
“You mean, like those passive-aggressive Christmas trees over there?”
 Forest Trees Just then a deep note resonated through the forest. Legolas tilted his head to listen.
“The trees are speaking to each other,” he said.
“Um… Pretty sure that’s a wood pigeon.”
“The elves began it. Waking up the trees, teaching them to speak.”
“Still a wood pigeon, mate. Look, tell you what, let’s forget about the forest and just go get an ice cream.”
So it was that twenty minutes later we three stood at John O’Groats, backs to the wind, looking out to sea, ice creams in hand.
Legolas held up his double scoop with extra sprinkles.
“This ice cream cone is old,” he said. “Very old. It’s full of sugar and modifying agents… and anger.”
“I thought mine tasted funny.”
Suddenly he turned to stare inland. “A red sun rises. Blood has been spilled this night.”
“Oh, you’re giving us the Elf weather now? Hang on a minute though, that’s Thurso over there, isn’t it? Fair enough, then…”
 Chicory
 What’s in a name? That which we call a stinking corpse lily by any other name would smell as sweet, as Juliet so truly observed. But what about fictional characters? Swap them around and I can’t help feeling some of the mystique would be lost.
 Flowers in Dunnet Forest Take Moby Dick. Would Ahab have sought his revenge so obsessively if its object had been a certain Peruvian bear and not The White Whale? I suspect not. “From hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee, O cursed Paddington! And—I’m sorry, what’s this? A marmalade sandwich? Oh, er, thanks. And a paper plate and a napkin? Ahaha. Sorry about all the harpooning and blasphemy and stuff. Er. So, Peru, eh? Funnily enough, that doubloon nailed to the mast comes from the Andes…”
The Teletubbies would make for interesting villains. Would Voldemort be as menacing if his name was Tinky Winky? What if Anakin Skywalker’s Sith handle had been Dipsy instead of Darth Vader? (Or, to vary the theme for a moment, Dweezil or Moon Unit, like Frank Zappa’s children? “Enough of this! Release him, Lord Moon Unit” does have a certain ring.) Doctor No of course becomes Doctor Po, and is terrifying either way.
 Swimmers at the Trinkie This week’s jumpers are a surprise double-header. The first is a Fair Isle, knit by Margaret, using a pattern and yarn from Jamieson’s. It was initially a project for me to knit; I’d enjoyed my previous forays into two-colour Lopi knitting, and wanted to try something more ambitious. Reader, I crashed and burned: having three or four colours on the go did my head in, and the balls ended up like Ahab, entangled in his line. I was forced to give up after a few inches, so Margaret took it on and started again from scratch. Fair Isle knitting can be stunning, and this, I’m sure you’ll agree, is pretty amazing.
The oth er jumper is a Wick leaf pattern gansey, knit in Frangipani navy. Sometimes when I’m knitting ganseys with intricate patterns I like to alternate now and then with one where I don’t have to concentrate so much; so this one was knit on and off over several months. The leaf makes a nice change from the more common herringbone, and the pattern is a personal favourite. Plus there’s only so long I can go without knitting in navy…
Finally on names, there’s the world’s most famous international spy. It’s late, eleven o’clock at night in an exclusive London club. He sits at the baccarat table in evening dress, a cigarette dangling lazily from the corner of his mouth. Before him is a drink, a martini shaken not stirred, and a large pile of gaming chips; he is always lucky at cards. The game is finished and the other players are getting up, considerably poorer than when they sat down. As he leans forward to gather his chips the blonde on his left asks his name. He turns to her with a half-smile, eyebrow cocked, and we see him clearly for the first time. The famous music starts to play as he says, “The name’s Bear, Fozzie Bear, ahaaa, wocka wocka!” At which point his bow tie starts to spin and the blonde snorts so hard stuff comes out her nose.
Well, here it is—the Flamborough gansey in all its glory, washed and blocked and with the pattern properly exposed. The alternating rows of knit and moss stitches running up the length of jumper look like a bead curtain but act as pleats; and these, together with the purl stitches either side of the cables, naturally pull it in and make it narrower. One of the reasons I choose this sort of pattern when I’m knitting a gansey for someone who isn’t me, is that it gives us some flexibility in terms of width: we can block it as wide as it needs to be, without stretching. It wasn’t an easy project to knit, requiring a little too much concentration to be entirely relaxing, but it was, I think, worth it (so long as it fits!). And the colour is, of course, to dye for.
 Sunday at the coast But lo! Others have been busy a-ganseying besides me: notably Camilla, who has finished a rather stunning red gansey. The yarn is Frangipani, but the patterns are taken from Alice Starmore’s Charts for Color Knitting and converted, not only to monochrome knitting but also with an element of re-sizing. The end result, I’m sure you’ll agree, is very impressive, and not just for how the patterns were translated. (Camilla’s also sent us a picture of an earlier gansey, knit from patterns in Beth Brown-Reinsel, so if you click on the link you’ll see two for the price of one.) Many congratulations to Camilla!
 Saturday at the Trinkie Here in Wick the summer continues cool, grey and mostly dry—so dry in fact that we’re in danger of being officially designated a drought area, which seems absurd considering how wet, flooded and generally be-thunderstormed the entire rest of the country’s been. Eagerly we watch weather forecasts, which show heavy bands of rain heading our way, only for them to veer off to either side, or mysteriously evaporate before they make landfall. The river’s so dry that anyone wishing to down their sorrows is now officially advised to bring a straw; if I threw myself off the bridge at low tide I think I’d bounce.
 Chicory Meanwhile we’ve been rewatching the three Lord of the Rings movies, which hold up very well, considering we now know the trick was done. But one thing has bothered me ever since I first read the books getting on for fifty years ago: the fact that the king’s duplicitous counsellor is called “Wormtongue”. I mean, you’d think someone might have wondered about that a bit sooner, really. But I suppose we should be grateful that this sort of naming convention more commonly associated with The Pilgrim’s Progress doesn’t apply in detective fiction as well:
Watson: “Good Lord, Holmes, how’d you do it?”
Holmes: “You mean what first led me to suspect Sir Jasper Dastardly Arsenic-Poisoner?”
Watson: “Yes Holmes.”
Holmes: “It was elementary, my dear Watson. But what really puzzles me is this other case, the deadly assault upon Mr Innocent Victim whose fortune will now be inherited by Lord Henry Bludgeon…”
What’s the most embarrassing thing to happen to you this week? In my case it came with an invitation to speak at an information management forum. No problem I said, but I’ve never come across this forum before, can you tell me more about it? The reply when it came was crushing: “You gave a presentation to it last month”. Oops. (If only, one feels, the “reply all” button hadn’t been clicked, causing the exchange to be shared with about 150 others.) In my defence, I have been very busy…
To be fair,  this is nothing new. When I worked in Taunton in the late 2000s I was so overworked at one point my team used to start meetings with, “We discussed this yesterday, but you won’t remember what was said, so let me remind you…” But in truth I’ve been forgetful all my life. I remember one day being jolted out of a reverie to discover I was trying to insert a long-playing record into the tiny drawer of a cassette deck, with no recollection of how I’d got there or, indeed, of the previous half-hour. (That’s an anecdote that will probably require copious footnotes for anyone under forty when this blog is eventually reprinted in the Penguin Classics edition.) Bob Dylan’s late, great song Not Dark Yet contains the lyric, “I can’t even remember what it was I came here to get away from”; and I listen to it and think, you and me both Bob, you and me both.
 A foggy day at the Trinkie It’s partly my faulty memory that leads me to keep track of my knitting with 5-barred gates and detailed notes; left to my own devices I’d be hopelessly adrift, especially when it comes to a row count. It’s a bit of fag keeping count on the sleeves, especially when plain knitting near the cuff with the rows coming thick and fast, but it’s the only way to keep the count accurate; and it ensures that both sleeves are exactly the same length. (I don’t know how it is, but I can measure the same sleeve a dozen times and get a dozen different lengths.) Anyway, I’m almost at the cuff of the second sleeve, and even with six inches of ribbing ahead of me (six inches! *sob*) I should finish it this week.
Emperor Moth caterpillar (about 2″/5cm long) And while some people use memories like chapter headings in a book so they always know where they are in their lives, or the way a mountain climber uses pitons, hammering them home for a surer footing, I live in a fog of recollective uncertainty. True, some memories do loom out of the haze, as sharp and devastating as icebergs, but mostly my mind’s filled with a sort of murky, impenetrable memory soup. And, you know, that’s okay. For as someone said to me this week (one of the 150 who were “replied all”), I should look on the bright side: for even if things go badly, odds are I’ll have forgotten all about it next month…
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Well, here we are, the end of August and autumn is, if not actually knocking at the door, at least paying off the taxi and trying to figure out the lock on the garden gate. Morning windows glisten with beads of condensation, while evening windows are shrouded in darkness as the nights draw in. The plums are ripening on the bough, or would be if the local avian population didn’t regard it as a sort of sparrow delicatessen, and hosts of spiders and woodlice appear to be recreating in our living room the great folk migrations of Goths and Vandals that did so much to lower the standard of spoken Latin across the Roman Empire. Summer’s lease seems about paid up, eviction notices posted.
