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 Can it really only be five weeks that I’ve been knitting this ganseyette? Apparently it is, yet here we are already on the first sleeve. (Sooner or later I’m going to have to knit again for Big People, and it’s going to come as a shock.) So that’s the front and back finished and joined, the collar done, and the pattern band at the top of the sleeve almost completed. Ideally I’d prefer the pattern to be maybe another inch deeper, but I’m restricted by the size of the tree I used on the yoke; I’ve tried to extend it unobtrusively by adding a couple of blank rows before the ridge and furrow band and I don’t think it looks too bad.
 Rainbow over Wick It was Winston Churchill who in 1916 described Admiral Jellicoe, commander of the British fleet, as “the only man on either side who could lose the war in an afternoon”. This phrase has always stayed with me as a reminder of how quickly and dramatically your life can change. Sometimes in as little as twenty minutes. I went to the hospital this week to see the consultant about my persistently hoarse voice. If I say that having a metal tube with a camera on the end inserted up a nostril and fed down my gullet so she could examine my vocal cords wasn’t the worst part, you’ll get an idea where I’m coming from.
 Riverside hawthorns The tubey-camera part didn’t hurt at all, though it was cold, and I was definitely aware there something metallic inside my face, the closest I’ve come yet to joining the Borg Collective. This was so distracting I forgot to breathe, and had to be reminded by the doctor. She had a student in attendance, so not only did I have to sit there, breathing and making a variety of farmyard noises so she could see my vocal cords in action, I had to do it all twice for the benefit of the student (“Say heee—look, it’s vibrating, do it again!”). Afterwards she told me what I’d suspected, it was acid reflux interfering with my voice box, and the only mitigation is really to eliminate acidic foods from my diet. Doesn’t sound too bad, I thought. Ha. Alas, it means no more tea, coffee, cocoa, chocolate, onions, tomatoes or orange juice. (It also means cutting out fatty bacon, but after being vegetarian for 30-plus years I’m pretty sure I can live with that.) Not even peppermint tea makes the cut. I asked her what I should replace them with and she said, in the tone of a member of the Inquisition telling a heretic they were going to be burned at the stake for the good of their soul, “Water”. Death, one asks, where is thy double-shot latte with sprinkles and extra cream?
 Winter Sunset But even that wasn’t the worst part. Apparently there’s a small growth on one of my vocal cords, which she said is probably benign but needs to come out asap. So that means a trip to Inverness, and another assignment with my old military nemesis General Anaesthetic. It’s a simple procedure, you’re out the same day, but you can’t travel far in the immediate aftermath which means an overnight stay somewhere local. (“You can always stop with friends in Inverness” she said helpfully, to which I said that I didn’t have any friends before hastily remembering to add, “Er… in Inverness”.) So there we are. I may not have lost the war in an afternoon but, sitting here cradling my mug of cinnamon tea* and trying to remember to breathe, it doesn’t exactly feel like victory either.
[*Actually coffee. My current plan is to join a Trappist monastery and that way I get to still drink coffee and not have to speak – honestly, it’s win/win.]
 We had our Covid booster jags the other day. It was down at the Assembly Rooms, and ran like a military operation—unsurprisingly, as several army medics were taking part (dressed in desert camouflage, which I can’t help feeling isn’t going to help them much if a foreign power decides to invade the far north of Scotland—a country not, to my knowledge, noted for its hot, sandy terrain). As I stood in line to get in some people happened past across the street, and a lady ahead of me in the queue, who obviously knew them, shouted out a greeting and asked if they’d had their jags already. They said that was the case and, clearly uncomfortable to be accosted in so public a manner, started to move on. Whereupon she called after them (to much hilarity), “Aye, rank has its privileges, right enough!”
 Late afternoon on the path Inside the hall I was met by a nurse with an iPad and a list of questions. I was rather nonplussed to be asked, “And what can we do for you today?”, but it turned out they were offering a flu jab as well the booster, presumably on the ‘buy one get one free’ principle. Well, in for a penny, I thought, and was directed to a table where another nurse was waiting. I duly got the flu shot in one arm, the Covid one in another, and then I was directed to the seating area to wait fifteen minutes before I could leave. Here I was amused to observe that most people after about five minutes realised that (a) just sitting around in case bad things happened is very boring, and (b) no one was actually watching, and so they furtively snuck out whenever the nurses were otherwise engaged. I shook my head at their folly… until I too got bored after five minutes and sheepishly followed them outside.
 Lichen & Haws Meanwhile, the back of the denim gansey is finished, and I’m onto the front. It’s zipping right along, and obviously the secret of fast knitting is to aim for the more svelte type of figure. It’s going to be a seven-and-three-quarter-inch armhole, though these things are always something of a lottery. And what a great colour denim is: it’s no wonder so many people choose it. Next week I should have the front finished, hopefully even the collar.
 The Lighthouse, reflected Speaking of svelte figures (or not), as I’d stripped for action back in the hall the nurse had cheerfully regaled me with anecdotes of the various men who’d passed through her hands earlier that day—specifically, how long they could hold their breath and their dignity and keep their waists sucked in until gravity inevitably reasserted itself. This turned out on average to be for the duration of one jab but not both (“like a bouncy castle deflating” was how she described one poor chap who’d had to let it all hang out). No man is a hero to his valet, as the saying goes; neither apparently is he to his nurse…
 You may perhaps have noticed that I have something of a problem with the Mel Gibson movie Braveheart. Or, to be more accurate, I don’t so much have a problem with the film, I have dozens; it being, like Tim Vine’s joke about crime in a multi-storey car park, wrong on so many different levels. Let’s face it, Monty Python and the Holy Grail is a more accurate depiction of the Middle Ages, and that’s got a cartoon Edward VII as God. Braveheart strays from the path of righteousness right from the opening titles—King Alexander III died in 1286, not 1280—and alas it’s all downhill from there.
 Old Lifeboat shed and harbor lighthouse But of all the untruths and distortions in that film, the one that bugs me the most is that it presents “droit de seigneur” (or jus prime noctis)—the so-called custom whereby a feudal lord took the maidenhead of a village beauty on her wedding night—as if it were true. It’s not. There’s no contemporary evidence it ever happened. It’s a myth, like the Vikings wearing horned helmets (not much evidence they wore helmets at all), people thinking the Earth was flat (it’s literally a globe on medieval maps) and the Supreme Being looking like Edward VII (absurd; He looks like Ralph Richardson). Aubrey Beardsley did a similar hatchet job on the Victorians when he mischievously made up the story about them covering piano legs because it was immodest, when really they did it to protect the varnish.
 Abstract Waves II Not that Medieval justice wasn’t sometimes bizarre. After all, these were the guys who formally tried animals for crimes. In 1474 a Swiss court ordered a rooster to be burned at the stake for laying an egg, which feels not so much like a miscarriage of justice as a cheap excuse for a barbecue. Other courts sentenced criminals to wear animal masks as a punishment (“Prisoner at the bar, you have been found guilty of murder; which is it to be: hanging by the neck until dead, or the dreaded duck mask?” “Er…duck mask, my lord.” “Really? Are you sure? I mean, we’ve got a nice new rope and everything.” “Still going with the duck mask, my lord.” “Damn!”). In 897 Pope Stephen VI actually had the eight-month-old corpse of his predecessor dug up, dressed in his papal vestments and put on trial (when he was unable to answer the charges he was, with undeniable logic, found guilty). The past, it is said, is another country; if so, the Middle Ages sometimes seem like another part of the galaxy. I suppose I shouldn’t complain. For, as the man in the movie famously observed, “When truth becomes legend, just feel free to make up a bunch of stuff”.
 Seals at Sarclet =================================
TECHNICAL STUFF
 As promised, here is the pattern chart for this gansey. It combines two of my favourite patterns: the trees from Mrs Laidlaw of Seahouses, and the cables of Mrs Laidler of Whitby. There are actually variations on the tree pattern in Rae Compton and Michael Pearson (the number of branches differs), so in the end I went with Rae’s version (five branches, as opposed to six). In order to make the panels fit the number of stitches at my disposal I had to make then each two stitches narrower, so the pointy bits either side of the trees are six stitches wide, not seven. But, to use the current management jargon, the recorded patterns are signposts, not railway tracks; and I feel that altering them at need is part of what keeps the tradition alive. Tune in for next week’s exciting episode, when I divide for front and back…
 In many ways, Caithness seems perfectly suited to this impatient modern age of instant gratification. Take autumn, for example. In other places it announces itself with a suggestion of coolness in the air, a hint of russet in the trees and hedgerows, and about as many fallen leaves as, if they were hair clippings, would maybe oblige a lazy hairdresser to get out the broom. It’s a gradual process of weeks and months, a gentle transition between states. Not so in Caithness: here we get it over pretty much in a weekend, and then it’s straight on to winter, no messing. Such few trees as we have—which skulk about the landscape with a hangdog air, as though they’re runaways from Fangorn Forest and expect the Ents to come along any moment and round them up—seem to have evolved quick-release mechanisms, and at the first suggestion of an autumn breeze drop all their leaves with the unseemly haste of robbers dumping a bag of swag down an open manhole to escape the law.
 Autumn has arrived in Caithness wet and cold and very, very windy (as I write this the wind is gusting to 65mph). Looking from my window—for I am not so foolish as to venture outdoors—the trees by the riverside are reduced to bare skeletons, their branches shivering with cold, their leaves already somewhere over the North Sea. The fields are waterlogged quagmires, the roads treacherous with standing water. And the sun, when it shines through the kaleidoscope of clouds that streak across the sky, already seems more distant, dimmer and cooler. No wonder our pagan ancestors indulged in human sacrifice this time of year, especially when there’s so little on tv worth watching.
 Flying to the evening’s roost But enough of darkness! Let us turn to the light instead, where Judit continues to be an inspiration with another splendid gansey. This one is a Filey pattern in lavender, alternating filled and moss stitch diamonds with double moss stitch patterns. The lavender yarn shows the pattern really well and as ever when I see one of Judit’s ganseys I add another pattern to my mental to-do list. Judit tells me it’s going to be a Christmas present, so someone is going to be very lucky this Yule. As ever, many congratulations to Judit, and many thanks for sharing it with us.
 Stormy waves My own gansey project creeps in this petty pace from day to day, as that famous gansey knitter Macbeth once observed. Without trying particularly hard, I’m almost halfway up the body (it helps enormously knitting for people who aren’t very tall). In another inch or so I’ll start the yoke pattern, the charts of which I’ll post next time.
Meanwhile the wind rampages unchecked, and we cower indoors like the Geats in Beowulf huddled in the mead-hall while Grendel prowls malevolently without. Ted Hughes wrote a great poem called Wind which captures the mood perfectly; it has one of the best first lines in English poetry, “This house has been far out at sea all night”, and after last night I know just what he means. And as the wind passes, so does autumn; I fear we might be in for a long winter…
 I was listening to the news in the bath the other day, and was just heaving myself out of the billowing foam when I was arrested by a startling report. I’d missed the beginning of the story—in my younger days I leapt from the tub more like a graceful gazelle than anything human, whereas my method now more closely resembles a mad scientist heaving his latest corpse onto a slab, requiring considerable concentration—and I tuned back in just as the announcer was saying, “The animal waste is dried and processed into pellets which can then be placed directly into the bouillon.” For a moment it stopped me in my (wet, soggy) tracks: a sudden desire to rush to the kitchen and check the ingredients on the packet of stock cubes seized me. Then my brain caught up with reality as the report continued, and I realised that the operative word was “boiler”, and that the pellets were, ahaha, intended as fuel, and not in fact as flavouring for soup.
 Raven on the cliffs And now it’s Hallowe’en, All Hallows’ Eve, or in its Celtic form Samhain, that ancient pagan festival celebrated by our ancestors when they all put their clocks back on the same night. Apparently some modern scholars argue that the tradition of bonfires and dressing up at Halloween derives from a belief that this will prevent the souls of the recently departed returning to earth and generally making nuisances of themselves. I must admit, if I were a recently departed soul—and living in Caithness is as good a preparation for this as any I can think of—I’d probably have other things on my mind. Stephen King probably has an unpublished novel tucked away in which a small town in Maine is besieged by an army of the undead, only for them to be driven away after 800 pages by a bonfire and some children wearing Trump masks.
 Winter light near the Trinkie This year I’m marking the occasion by unveiling a new gansey project. It’s for my friend Elizabeth, in Frangipani Denim. When I get to the yoke it will combine elements of two of my favourite patterns: the cables from Mrs Laidler of Whitby and the trees from Mrs Laidlaw of Seahouses. I hope this works out, otherwise it will be the knitting equivalent of the apocryphal riposte of George Bernard Shaw to Isadora Duncan when she allegedly suggested they have a child that would inherit her looks and his brain; to which Shaw crushingly replied, “But what if it inherited my looks and your brain?”
 Rush in the rain I love tales of folklore and ritual. Not because of what we are told the people who practised the rituals believed, which is mostly patronising and fictitious; but because it’s a glimpse into a lost world before iPhones and GPS and televangelists. A world when people did the thing that was right in the place that was right, because that was what was done, and had always been done, time beyond remembering. And so tonight I shall do my best to honour the tradition, mutatis mutandis—in place of a bonfire I shall light a gas ring on my cooker, ritually slaughter a veggie burger, and keep a watchful eye out for any recently-departed spirits; and if any drop by I shall offer them a hospitable bowl of nourishing, hot—but no; on second thoughts, maybe I’d better not offer them soup…
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Can it really only be five weeks that I’ve been knitting this ganseyette? Apparently it is, yet here we are already on the first sleeve. (Sooner or later I’m going to have to knit again for Big People, and it’s going to come as a shock.) So that’s the front and back finished and joined, the collar done, and the pattern band at the top of the sleeve almost completed. Ideally I’d prefer the pattern to be maybe another inch deeper, but I’m restricted by the size of the tree I used on the yoke; I’ve tried to extend it unobtrusively by adding a couple of blank rows before the ridge and furrow band and I don’t think it looks too bad.
