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 I’ve lost my voice, and as the old joke goes, my nearest and dearest have phoned the doctor and asked them to come urgently in a month; maybe two. There go my dreams of a career as a ventriloquist. On a good day I sound like a cross between Muttley from the Wacky Races and a Darth Vader choke hold victim. Other times it’s more like that glop-glop sound just after the last drops of water have vanished down the plug hole.
 Blackberries It disappeared just over a week ago; I’ve looked in all the old familiar places – down the bottom of the sofa and in all my old coat pockets, the back of the cutlery drawer, everywhere – I’ve even put missing posters on telegraph poles – but there’s still no sign of it. I’ve made a mental note, and when it’s time for his next performance review I’m going to have some harsh words with my guardian angel, who’s been rather slacking on the job lately.
 Elderberries Ah, well, luckily one doesn’t need vocal cords to knit. (Though they come in handy for swearing when you drop stitches or discover a mistake 24 rows back.) I’ve finished the front and the shoulder straps, joined both shoulders and picked up stitches round the neck for the collar. As ever with Flamborough patterns, the more of it there is, the better it looks. And Frangipani Moonlight really shows up those moss stitch panels to advantage.
With perfect timing, my voice vanished just in time for our late summer holiday, staying with my brother near Towcester and visiting family. Conversation with one elderly aunt proved especially awkward and offered a pretty good indication of the challenges we’re likely to encounter when we make first contact with an alien species. I gave up ordering food in an Italian restaurant when the waiter got as far as, “Sounds like… sounds like… Meets a? Beats a? Nope, still not getting it.”
 Flower stalks by the canal Oh, well: I’ll get it back one day. It’s reached the point where all I can do is notify the police and wait for the ransom note, and meanwhile pray that maybe one of the neighbours has taken it in and is feeding it up until it’s strong enough to return…
 If you ever feel like humiliating yourself and destroying any residual self-esteem you might have – and supposing there’s nothing on tv and it’s raining – I can recommend reading a verbatim transcript of yourself being interviewed, with every pause, ellipsis, fumble and hesitation left in. I’ve always rather prided myself on my ability to be coherent; it’s one of those attributes, I felt, along with my ability to sink in water and not be attracted to rotting meat, that distinguished me from the insect kingdom. No longer. If you open your window, stick your head out and listen closely, that noise you can hear is that of another illusion shattering.
 A sloe day by the canal I sounded like Boris Johnson’s inebriated twin brother, only with less Greek. It fell about on this wise. I was being interviewed by a student whose dissertation was on visual impairment in the cultural sector, a subject I am, alas, well qualified to talk about. Or so I thought. At the time, God help me, I thought it went rather well. That lasted until I read the actual transcript… A typical utterance went something like this:
“Well, the, er, the, er, the thing about, er, visual, ah, visual impairment is, of course, that, ah, the, um, the, ah, traditional model of a, ah, a, uh, librarian, or even an, uh, an, ah, an archivist is that they are expected to, uh, to, uh, to, as it were, to-to-to, ah, to read the materials that they, as it were, they, er, they have, you know, in their, in their, er, in their, uh, their keeping…”
 Trees by the river But let us draw a veil over the rest and hastily turn our attention back to the much safer world of ganseys. I am at the top of the back, negotiating the topmost diamonds with all the aplomb of a steeplejack trying to position a weathercock on top a church spire in a gale. In fact, I’ve adopted the common Caithness practice of running the pattern up the shoulder straps, which is a nice variant of ridge and furrow (and avoids the awkwardness of a half-diamond at the top, hem-hem).
 Narrowboats at Gayton marina Meanwhile, after my recent experiences I find myself wondering about birdsong, given we are told it too is a form of communication. I now picture the blackbird in our garden merrily trilling something along these lines: “I say! This is my, er, my, ah, my patch, doncherknow, my, ah, my actual territory, so to speak, and, er, yes, so you chaps jolly well, ah, clear off, and, er, if there are, you know, any blackbirdettes, of the, of the, uh, the female persuasion out there, well, er, you know, we could, as it were, um, well, let’s just say if you play your, ah, cards right, some nesting could be, er, could possibly be involved…”
 I’m not frightened of spiders, as such; it’s just that someone posted a video on Facebook of a tarantula shedding its exoskeleton and now I have to go to sleep with the light on for a while. It’s irrational, I know: British spiders are, on the whole, pretty harmless (if you’re a human, that is; not so much if you’re a butterfly), and if I find one in the bath I usually dispose of it humanely by trapping it in a plastic tub and releasing it into the wild. Though I blindfold it first and spin it around a few times to disorientate it so it can’t easily find its way back inside; I’m not daft.
 Raindrops on a spider’s web I’m not bothered by other creepy crawlies to the same extent. I find woodlice rather cute—they remind me of those early British tanks from World War One, lumbering over the carpet towards the German trenches and regularly breaking down—and daddy-long-legs just look like nature’s attempt to build a balsa wood kite by natural selection. Maybe it’s because I’ve seen too many nature documentaries; spiders don’t improve in closeup, I find. They can move like the clappers when the mood takes them, too, including, on one memorable night in my childhood, over my sleeping face. By the way, did you know that spiders taste and smell through their legs and feet? Which explains why they don’t wear slippers. They hear through their hair, too. (Hmm. I suffer from male pattern baldness, and my hearing’s getting worse. Coincidence? I think not.)
 A Calm Day In gansey news, I’ve reached the exciting milestone where I divide for front and back. It’s come quickly, but the length of this gansey is only going to be 22 inches. Now, of course, it feels as if progress is twice as fast, since you’re only knitting half the number of stitches per row. As usual, I’ll do the back first, as it puts off doing the maths for the indented neckline till later.
 Looking south from North Head And thinking it over, probably the only creature that can rival spiders in my personal hall of infamy is the shell-less terrestrial gastropod mollusc, or common slug. This is not because I’m gardener and they eat my lettuce. No, this time it’s personal. It all stems back to when we lived in a country cottage in Wales. Coming down to make breakfast one morning in my bare feet I discovered, about five seconds too late, that the kitchen floor was infested with the little perishers. You don’t really know how you feel about a mollusc until you’ve felt it ooze up, cold and slimy, between your big and second toes, a sensation not unlike treading grapes mixed with jelly. My only consolation is that they don’t have an exoskeleton to shed, or build webs, or pop up in my bath. Now there’s a thought. I guess my light’s staying on for a while longer…
 As I get older—and let’s face it, getting older is currently the thing I’m best at—I find myself vexed by the inaccuracies of historical movies. I don’t mean the sort of nit-picking that objects to the colour of a particular train, or the badge on the cap of a particular soldier; I really don’t care if that tank wasn’t used in that battle. I’m willing to overlook the fact that none of the main cast in a medieval movie wears a helmet—fair enough, you’ve got to recognise your talent on screen, even if in reality Henry V would be left wandering the battlefield looking for his nose after Agincourt. I can even just about accept Elizabeth I meeting Mary, Queen of Scots in person, even though she didn’t; they sent each other letters, after all.
 Powderpuff thistle seeds So I’m not a purist. As a medievalist, though, I do rather despair of the way battles are depicted. I mean, think about it. The two sides line up and face each other. There’s a tense standoff, giving our fictional hero (Aragorn, Russell Crowe) the opportunity to deliver a few inspirational lines. Then everyone suddenly goes berserk and runs screaming at each other; within seconds the battle is a whirling chaos of combatants, each in their own space, allowing everyone plenty of room to fight their individual duels. When you kill your opponent you look around and choose someone else to fight. It’s crazy. Apart from anything else, how do you know which side is winning? How do you even know which side you’re on? Most wounds in the battle of Towton (1461) were in the legs, which suggest a rather less chivalrous reality (not much protection below the knees). No, the best way to imagine medieval battles is to think of a rugby scrum, with lots of shoving and jostling until one side gives way; or, perhaps, a collision in the car park between two sets of psychopathic line dancers armed with gardening forks.
 Ruin in Pulteneytown, near the harbour The most inaccurate historical movie of all time, of course, has to be Braveheart, a film which has entire websites dedicated to its flaws. Some of the more egregious include the use of woad (1,000 years too late), kilts and tartan (300 years too early), depicting thirteenth century Scots as living in mud huts, and setting the battle of Stirling Bridge—the clue’s in the name—nowhere near a bridge. Queen Isabella, seduced by Mel Gibson in the movie, was in fact nine years old and living in France at the time, leading one historian to observe that Wallace would have had to be a time-travelling paedophile to make this bit plausible. (John O’Farrell in An Utterly Impartial History of Britain said that the film couldn’t have been more inaccurate if a plasticine dog was added to the cast, and the film was retitled William Wallace and Gromit.) And the sad thing is, the real story of Wallace is way better than the movie. On the other hand, compared with that other Gibson farrago The Patriot, Braveheart is almost a model of accuracy: in fact, I’m coming to think the only really accurate historical movie featuring Gibson is the first Mad Max—which, after all, was originally set in 1984…
TECHNICAL STUFF
In gansey news, I’ve almost reached the gussets. (This is not so much a sign of rapid progress, as of the recipient being somewhat petite—so the length of gansey will be 23 inches top to bottom, instead of my more usual 27-28 inches.) The pattern has settled down, though it’s still too scrunched up to see distinctly—we’ll have to wait till it’s blocked for that. So far the only nuisance is having the hearts (at 17 rows) end on an odd row, which puts them out of synch with the diamonds. Next time I’d probably make them 16 rows and save myself some maths.
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I’ve lost my voice, and as the old joke goes, my nearest and dearest have phoned the doctor and asked them to come urgently in a month; maybe two. There go my dreams of a career as a ventriloquist. On a good day I sound like a cross between Muttley from the Wacky Races and a Darth Vader choke hold victim. Other times it’s more like that glop-glop sound just after the last drops of water have vanished down the plug hole.
