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 We’ve been on holiday this week, and for a change pretended we’d come to Caithness on vacation, and resolved to get out and do touristy things. So we’ve spent the week dropping litter, complaining about the weather, asking passers-by where the nearest Starbucks is (Inverness, i.e., 100 miles away), and wondering why we’d come.
 RSPB Forsinard On Thursday we went over to the Forsinard nature reserve, out west on the Caithness-Sutherland border. There’s no direct road from Wick, so you have to go about 30-40 miles north or south to hit the 40-mile long single-track road (the A897) that runs all the way from the north coast near Reay to Helmsdale on the east coast. If you look up “the middle of nowhere” in the dictionary you’ll see a picture of Forsinard. It’s a stunning drive, though, following the river all the way down Strath Halladale, starting among the bleak northern hills, down through Europe’s largest peat bog (rebranded the “Flow Country” by marketing professionals, which always feels as if should be prefixed with the word “Sani”). Head south from Forsinard and you enter a broad, fertile river valley, with lochs, sheep, and fishermen in waders optimistically casting for salmon.
 Stack at Sandside, near Dounreay Of course I got plenty of knitting done this week too. I duly finished the navy Wick gansey, and here it is, all washed and blocked. It still looks kinda weird, as though someone had had the bright idea of combining a pullover with an accordion; but it would make for a nicely snug fit, and, given the prevailing Caithness winds, seems eminently practical.
It’s a double-header of finished ganseys this week, as Judit has sent us pictures of a golden gansey in the classic Staithes pattern, a splendid present to a young lady on passing her Finnish language exam. Staithes is a classic for a reason, and can be scaled up or down to suit and still look great, as this proves. Many congratulations to Judit, and the lucky recipient also, of course, and many thanks as ever for sharing.
 Cliffs near Sarclet The name Forsinard is an interesting combination of Norse and Gaelic, Fors-an-airde (fors being Norse for torrent or waterfall, while airde is Gaelic for upper, higher). Though, given how flat it all is, you wonder where the lower waterfall might be—the whole area resembling the impact crater of a meteorite, possibly the one that wiped out all the haggis. It’s squarely in squishy peat bog territory, a vast wetland ringed in the far distance by the mountains of Sutherland. There’s a futuristic viewing tower about a mile from the road, which you reach by a causeway, and numerous lochans dotted among the peat—if I managed the reserve, the temptation to hide dummies in them with the faces of elves and orcs, like the fallen warriors in the Dead Marshes in Lord of the Rings, would prove irresistible. Other than that, there’s basically a whole lot of nothing. It’s so empty it brings to mind Philip Larkin’s bon mot about growing up in Coventry: “Nothing, like something, happens anywhere…”
 Just a short blog this week, as spring is here at last, I’m on holiday all week and the great outdoors is calling. What it’s calling is harder to say; rude names, possibly.
I was a little perturbed to receive an email this last week headed, “Included in your membership: backstabbing, betrayal and long-buried secrets”—I thought my Guardian Angel had mistakenly sent me his briefing note for how my life should turn out. Then I realised that I’m a subscriber to the talking book service Audible.com, and this was merely an advert for their latest releases.
 Daffodils by the old library They’ve been digging up the roads around Wick the last few weeks, apparently to check the water mains. Though it’s more like an archaeological dig than what you’d normally expect from main drainage works. In brief, they sink a series of exploratory trenches, each one a few yards long by a couple of yards wide, thirty or forty yards or so apart, then put barricades around them and go away, presumably to dig up somewhere else. I can only assume one of them dropped his car keys down there a while back and now they’re all looking for them. Every now and again they come and dig another hole, or else just stare thoughtfully into the deeps, as though listening for a distant voice shouting “You shall not pass!” or “Fool of a Took!”.
Incidentally, The Lord of the Rings has a genuine echo in Wick, as there’s a point on the north side of the bay across from the harbour called Proudfoot, and a modern road that’s been named after it. Every time we see the sign, the pavlovian response proves impossible to resist and we call out in unison, “ProudFEET!” after the elderly hobbit at Bilbo’s birthday party.
As for spring, I’m firmly in Virginia “Big Bad” Woolf’s camp when she said, “Yes, I deserve a Spring—I owe nobody nothing.” You and me both, Ginny, you and me both…
 The ‘Soldiers’ Tower’ =================================
TECHNICAL STUFF
This is another pick-up-and-set-down project I’ve been working on for several months (and no, it’s not really “week 1”; not even I knit that fast!). I said the other day that my plan is to knit up a number of Caithness ganseys, taken from the Johnston Collection of historical photographs, many of them of Victorian and Edwardian fishermen. The originals are glass plate negatives, and are often so sharp and clear that you can see every stitch. There are 50,000 photographs in the collection, though only a tiny fraction feature ganseys.
 More creels by the harbour Caithness ganseys come in three main types: the really fancy ones, like that worn by Fergus Ferguson, my last project, which rival their Hebridean kin for ornate decorativeness; simpler patterns, such as diamonds and chevrons or double moss stitch; and very simple patterns, effectively just ribbing from welt to shoulder. This gansey is almost an exact replica of one worn by Malcolm Campbell when he had his picture taken in 1912, and features double moss stitch panels alternating with cables, and a plain panel on each side. I’ve tried to make the stitch count exactly the same, though with chunky late-period Wendy yarn it’s inevitably knitting up rather bigger than Malcolm’s original. I didn’t bother with a pattern chart, this being the sort of pattern I can do in my sleep.
The obvious stand-out feature is the ribbing, which reaches from welt to yoke—obviously to create a snug fit around the waist. Quite a few Caithness ganseys do this. Because I’m knitting this gansey for show—if anyone will be interested in showing it, that is—and not to wear, I’ve kept it in. I’m not a big fan of the look, myself; if I wore something tight round the middle like this I’d look like someone bursting out of a cake, and while Debbie Reynolds could pull that off I’m not sure I could. The other feature is of course the saddle shoulder, with the cable running along the shoulder from collar to bicep. These are always fiddly to get right, but they really do catch the eye once the gansey is washed and blocked and draped over a well-shaped shoulder.
 And here it is, the Wick Fergus Ferguson gansey, washed and blocked and unpinned and ready for its time in the sun. It really is a stunning combination of patterns, with something to catch the eye wherever you look. It’s knit in Graeme Bethune’s Caithness gansey yarn, and I wish you could reach into your screen to touch it, and feel how lovely and soft it is. It is, of course, far too nice to wear, and I hope it will one day find a home in Wick Museum alongside the big, blown-up photograph of Fergus that they have on display. There are many more Wick patterns I intend to try, but none finer than this.
 Crow in the Snow It’s Easter in a few days, which means it’s time for me to get irrationally annoyed at pagans claiming the festival for the goddess Ēostre. I say irrationally because I keep catching myself out in the sort of logical trap that Captain Kirk used to confuse intelligent robots in Star Trek. The reason, of course, is that there is only one historical reference to Ēostre (or Ostara in German) which comes in the annals of the Venomous Bede written in the early 8th century. Bede said that Easter was originally a Saxon pagan festival in her honour, but that it had died out and been replaced by the Christian one. And it’s it. There’s literally no other reference to her before the folklorists got hold of her in Victorian times, and made up a whole bunch of stuff involving hares and fertility rites, at which point it all gets bit mucky.
 Impassable These same loony Victorians came up with the idea that she was also the Goddess of the Dawn, because—and how I wish I was making this up—east in English, or ost in German, means literally east; the sun rises in the east, and—well, I guess that’s what passes for scholarship in these matters. Mind you, I’m not saying there wasn’t a Saxon goddess of spring called Ēostre—after all, there’s no other explanation for the name Easter in German and English (unlike other languages, which tend to use a version of Passover for the festival)—just that all we have is the name, and even that’s open to question.
 Bunny by the warren But what about my logical paradox? Well, it’s like this: I have to ask myself why I get annoyed when I read about Ēostre and her hares because it’s made up—as if, for example, Thor and Loki and Tiw, let alone Venus and Bacchus and Poseidon, were actually real gods, and only Ēostre out of the whole pantheon is fictitious; as if I’m OK with deities invented fifteen hundred years ago, but not since then. (And it’s not even as if I’m consistent: I mean, I’m so keen not to tempt Fate I even give the word a capital letter.) Well. All I can say is, I have no idea if the goddess is (or was) real (or not), but I do know that chocolate Easter eggs are real, and right now that’s good enough for me. So, happy Ēostre everyone!
 First, the good news: the consultant thinks I don’t have cancer. (And that’s about as good as news gets, to be fair.) It’s three months since she gave me her initial, tentative diagnosis, and so it was back to Inverness hospital last week for a checkup. This, of course, involved another chance to get intimate with the probulator (I think that’s the technical term), the slender articulated metal rod with a camera on the end which goes up one nostril and is then fed down into the throat. It doesn’t hurt, though it is cold and uncomfortable, like being attacked by an octopus who’s been assimilated by the Borg. It’s the sort of thing they use in The Matrix to remove bugs implanted in people (I checked my medication when I got home but none of the pills were red, so I’m afraid we’re stuck in the simulation a little longer).
 Washed ashore The bad news is, the growth on my vocal cords is still there. This is a bit disappointing, as we’d all been hoping it might’ve got bored by now and gone away. But at least it hasn’t grown, and the consultant reckons it’s a granuloma. (This was a new word to me, as indeed are most words relating to the human body, and most of her explanation went so far over my head it collided with the Hubble space telescope. But as I understand it, she thinks a combination of acid reflux and constant coughing/ throat-clearing has inflamed my vocal cords and caused the growth.) She doesn’t believe it’s cancerous, or anything to worry about, and so long as my voice holds up her advice is to let it be. I go back in six months for another probulating and we’ll take it from there.
 Distant rain Meanwhile, one knits. The white gansey is almost finished, just the final cuff to go. Incidentally, I’ve decided to dedicate my declining years to knitting up as many of the “uncharted” gansey patterns of Caithness fishermen from the Johnston Collection as I can. Now, here’s a frightening thought (if I can say this without tempting Fate): if I carry on knitting ganseys at the current rate, and I and my beleaguered eyesight are spared, by the time I’m 70 I will have knit another 40 ganseys. (Hmm. Could this be Fate’s way of encouraging me to buy more yarn? You know, I think it is!)
In parish notices, Judit has sent us more cracking photographs, this time of a gansey in a rather fetching red. It’s going to be a present for a very lucky person. And the pattern is a little off the beaten track: it’s from Rae Compton’s book (pages 45-46), taken from a group photograph on Sheringham promenade: a gansey worn by James “Jim” Dumble, a very neat combination of double moss stitch and ladders alternating with an open diamond. It’s not one of the better-known patterns, though it should be; the books are full of great pattern charts, all just waiting to be knitted up and brought to life, as Judit has done here. So many congratulations to her, as ever, and thanks for sharing.
 Further signs of Spring As for my health, a bit like the joke about not starting any long books, ganseys do rather need you to be there for the long haul. So I’ll end with another very old joke, about the optimist who fell off the roof of a tower block: as he passed each floor on the way down the workers heard him saying, “So far so good… So far so good…” Well. Who can say what the future holds? But—and this is important—so far so good…
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We’ve been on holiday this week, and for a change pretended we’d come to Caithness on vacation, and resolved to get out and do touristy things. So we’ve spent the week dropping litter, complaining about the weather, asking passers-by where the nearest Starbucks is (Inverness, i.e., 100 miles away), and wondering why we’d come. 
