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 There are some words you don’t want to hear in an optometrist’s, and near the top of my personal blacklist is: “Oh well, at least the other one’s in pretty good shape”. (At the very top would probably be, “Hold still, I saw where it went and I’m sure I can pop it back in in a jiffy”.) Regular readers will be aware that I suffer from myopic macular degeneration in my right eye. This means that I have a blank spot right in in the centre of my vision in that eye, not unlike the cheesy special effect for an energy being in the original Star Trek. (If I’m reading, it’s a space about the size of the word “the”.) My peripheral vision’s still partly there, so when I’m having an eye test I have to sway my head around like the snake Kaa in The Jungle Book trying to hypnotise its prey just to read one of the big letters.
 Swirl of Daisies It’s all because I was born so short-sighted. My eye sockets are deeper than usual (30+mm deep, as opposed to the average of 20+mm), which stretches the blood vessels servicing the retina, particularly those to the macular, which is the bit that does all the work. Some of those have just become stretched to breaking point. (Or the way I look at it, some of the LED lights in the tv of my brain have blown, and they don’t make replacements any more.) It’s very weird. Straight lines bend around the blank spot, so if I look at grid pattern it resembles an illustration of a black hole distorting the fabric of space-time (look up “Amsler Grid” to see what this looks like; like I say, it’s weird). And it’s deteriorated quite a lot since my last checkup.
 Photobombed by a Swallow Still, it’s been this way for a few years now. It is what it is, and, as Gandalf so wisely observed, “All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us”. (In his case this meant overthrowing the Dark Lord of Mordor, whereas I prefer to spend my time on the couch knitting; each to their own.) So I continue to make progress on my olive gansey. I’ve finished the half-gussets, and divided front and back. This is always the payoff moment, when everything goes twice as fast and you can see the pattern really come together. I may never knit another cable pattern ever again, mind.
 Budding Hawthorn And anyway, even if one eye’s a crock I’ve still got another which is, I’m reliably informed, in pretty good shape. The consultant who first diagnosed my condition told me that it might never develop in this eye too, or “it could happen tomorrow” (I’m sure he meant to be reassuring). So as far as I’m concerned every day’s a bonus, and every piece of knitting is literally a stitch in time. And if the absolute worst should happen? Well, so long as they can find it and pop it back in I should be all right…
 If anyone asks me why I study history, I tend to stare thoughtfully off into the distance and try to look as much like Gandalf as possible—the Gandalf who stroked his beard a lot and gave wise counsel, I mean, not the one who went skydiving on terrors from the ancient deeps in his dressing gown. I then, rather pompously, go on to say that I want to understand where we came from, and what we can learn from those who went before us. It’s not remotely true, of course. Mostly I study history to learn weird stuff, like the fact that the Ancient Romans allegedly used mouse brains as toothpaste.
 Summer Flowers I like to think that a Roman patriarch would keep a cage of tame mice by the bathroom sink. At bedtime he’d reach in and select one, hold it up to his toothbrush, and give it a firm but gentle squeeze. All over Rome the citizens must have known it was time for bed by the chorus of short, high-pitched squeaks that rang out across the city, thus doing away with the need for clocks to be invented for several hundred years. (Though as advertising slogans go, “breath as a fresh as the inside of a dormouse” feels like it maybe needs work.)
Setting oral hygiene aside for the moment, Judit has come up trumps again, with a very stylish sleeveless slipover in blue. It’s mostly plain, with decoration around the armholes, collar, and a band running all the way down to the welt. And very nice it looks too, bathed in some fine spring sunshine.
 Daisy amid the Horsetail My own gansey project is also making good progress. I’ve just started the underarm gussets, and may even divide for front and back later this week. My only concern is the way the sheer number of cables are pulling it in width-wise. Some pulling-in is to be expected, of course and I tried to compensate from the start by making it half an inch wider per side. It may not be enough, though. If I were Gandalf I’d be stroking my beard thoughtfully.
 The Old Lifeboat Shed And did the Ancient Romans really use mouse brains as toothpaste, even dried into a powder? I rather doubt it. I mean, why use mice anyway, which are not to my knowledge especially renowned for their cranial capacity, even if they do have white teeth? (Bit of a faff getting the tops off them, too, I’d imagine.) I suspect it’s like the urban myth that they used urine as a mouthwash—the Romans, I mean, not the mice. The evidence for that is pretty slim, and it mostly consists of Romans claiming it’s something the barbarians do, to show how uncivilised they are. No, I think the Romans were too smart to use mice in toothpaste, and instead turned to [*checks internet*] ground up bones, ox hooves, pumice, eggshells, bark and, er, charcoal. Oh. On second thoughts, it’s nearly bedtime—just pass me that mouse, will you…?
 There are few things more tedious than people relating their dreams: so bad luck everyone, because here’s a rather unsettling dream I had a few days ago. I still haven’t shaken it off.
In my dream I am walking down one side of a vast, uneven crater, like an enormous open cast mine. Many miles across. A dry, desolate, empty landscape, no buildings. Mounds of spoil. Stones and gravel underfoot.
It is dark: grey, twilight, gloomy. When I look up, I can’t see the sky. When I look down, the bottom of the crater disappears in deep pools of darkness.
I’m part of a group of maybe a dozen or so; it’s hard to be sure in this murk. We are the only people. We’ve been walking for ages, following a path zig-zagging down the side of the depression, and don’t seem to be making any progress. Maybe this is because of the sheer distances involved, or maybe it’s just dream logic.
I believe that we are underground, and that for some reason we all have to live underground. I believe that somewhere high above me, hidden in darkness, is a ceiling of solid rock, like we’re in an enormous cave deep below the surface.
At some point I turn to the person walking beside me and say, “Why do we have to live underground now?”
And he says, “This isn’t underground. We are all dead.”
And I wake up.
 Along the riverside path Weird, huh? And, it has to be said, just the tiniest bit creepy. “Where do you go to, my lovely,” Peter Sarstedt asked back in 1969, “when you’re alone in your bed?” It’s a good question, Peter, thanks for asking: turns out I go to the land of the dead, which, somewhat surprisingly, appears not to be Caithness after all.
 Cliffs near Sarclet It’s not often that I compare myself to Hamlet—except we’ve both been called fat and scant of breath—but when he says, “O God I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space; were it not that I have bad dreams”, I reckon I know exactly what he means…
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TECHNICAL STUFF
Here’s the pattern chart. As I said the other week, the only change I’ve made is to have the cables and ladders every seventh row, instead of every eighth as in the original. It’s a great combination, and the narrow bands and the number of cables really make for a highly distinctive effect without being too “busy”. (Though all those cables every seventh row does sometimes feel like getting detention.) Anyway, we’re getting there, and maybe later this week I may even be in a position to start the underarm gussets.
 We’re recruiting for a couple of posts just now, and I’m getting flashbacks to some of the skeletons in my own personal Closet of Interview Horrors. The most unpleasant was at an archive in the City of London back in the early 90s. It’s usual to show candidates round an archive before interview, and then ask them for their impressions as a lead-off question. Not this time. I was shown straight into the boardroom. Across the table was a panel of grave, besuited middle-aged men in cufflinks. Cufflink No.1 blithely began by saying that they expected anyone who wanted to work there to have already paid a visit in their own time, and, presuming that to be the case, what were my impressions? “Actually I’ve never been here before,” I replied. “Oh dear!”, he exclaimed. After a ghastly silence, during which they all bent over their assessment forms to write, as far as I could tell, “Oh dear”, it was Cufflink No.2’s turn: “In that case, can you tell us why you’ve applied for this job?” He asked, before adding nastily, “Apart from the money, that is.”
 The Launch of the Isabella Fortuna Another gem was the time I was interviewed by the entire Library Committee of a certain council in Wales, about twelve people in all. This time they gave the candidates the questions beforehand, so we had time to prepare. When I was called in, the Chairman read out the first question. I said I’d like to take the first two questions together—not trying to be clever, but because it genuinely seemed to make sense to merge them in one answer. The committee heard me out in silence. After a lethal pause the Chairman picked up his list of questions again. “Thank you, Mr Reid,” he said. “Now then, question two…”, which he then proceeded to read out in full, leaving me feeling like I’d just trodden on a rake.
I’ll pause it there, to build up suspense before revealing the interview that still haunts my dreams, and turn instead to the current gansey project. The pattern is starting to reveal itself nicely: panels of open diamonds and ladders interspersed with cables. The “rungs” of the ladders and the cables come every seventh row (this is the only change I’ve made from the original as recorded by Michael Pearson, where both happen every eighth row; I just like seven-row cables). It’s an easy pattern to knit, but a spectacular one nevertheless—the only downside is having to make eighteen cables every seven rows.
 Coming up Daisies And now we come to my worst interview experience. No, it’s not the one where my presentation wouldn’t load, and I ended up giving the talk using finger puppets, grim though that was. This one was in Liverpool, in an old council building. As I was shown into the room I saw the panel waiting inside, sitting in chairs in a row (there wasn’t a table this time). As I was looking at them, and assembling a friendly, non-threatening smile to greet them with, I neglected to notice a fatal step up to the room. This I duly caught with my trailing foot. My entrance was therefore rather more exciting than I’d intended, as I stumbled several paces before losing my balance completely… and ended lying face-up in the lap of the lady who was head of libraries, looking right up her nose.
But let us avert our collective gaze with a shudder from the tragic scene. Like Agent Kay in Men in Black, these are all several of a hundred memories I don’t want; in fact, if anyone out there has a standard-issue neuralyzer and would like to come over and flashy-thing me to erase them all, just let me know…
 Gorse at Helmsdale
 It’s May Day as I write this—though saying it out loud makes it sound like a cry of distress—and nothing gets your Sunday off to a good start like realising that you’re snugly tucked up in bed while a bunch other fellows have already been up for hours, dancing the sun up. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a huge fan of honouring ancient customs; and while I’ve no reason to believe the sun won’t rise if no one is there to greet it, it’s not something I feel we should leave to chance. It’s just that, in my case, as Hamlet said, it’s a custom more honour’d in the breach than the observance. In fact, in modern parlance, I like to think that nowadays I’ve “outsourced” it.
 Plum tree in bloom Back when I used to Morris dance (in England; the last Morris dancer in Scotland was hunted to extinction around the time of Bonnie Prince Charlie) I rather enjoyed getting up at 4 a.m. on May Day. We’d gather at the Market Square for sunrise, which came a little after 5.30 a.m. There’s something special about being up at that time, when the day is so fresh and new you feel you’re getting first use of all the oxygen. I especially used to treasure the last few seconds before the first dance, happy in the knowledge that everyone sleeping within a radius of about a quarter of a mile was about to get the rude awakening of a lifetime. And afterwards it was in to the pub for an early breakfast, sausages and coffee hot-and-hot.
Snoozing in the sun Now I’ve made myself hungry: to distract myself till lunchtime, I’ve just started a new gansey project. This one’s for the partner of a colleague at work. It’s Mrs Hunter of Filey’s pattern, taken from page 43 of Michael Pearson’s first edition. It’s knit in Frangipani olive yarn; this is the first time I’ve used it, and I like it a lot already. Though ever since I learned that the local fishermen didn’t wear green because it was considered unlucky, I’ve rather avoided the colour, stupidly. After seeing this, I might reconsider.
 Colourful creel As for my dancing days, well, that was then and this is now. Time has done what time does—for instance, my younger self had knees; these days I need three strong men to help me up after loading the washing machine, like Henry VIII in his armour being winched onto his horse. And so has geography. The sun rises early here in the far north of Scotland (and every day it rises earlier, until in a few weeks it will hardly set at all). I achieved a sort of Buddhist enlightenment when I realised that I could still dance the sun up: it’s just that the sun whose rise I’m celebrating is the one over Boston, Massachusetts (sunrise, 10.39 a.m. UK time); and by “dancing up” I mean “getting slowly and painfully out of bed”. Thus I play my own small part in welcoming in the summertime and the May-oh, and ensuring that the crops will grow for another year. No, honestly, I don’t want any thanks—sometimes virtue is its own reward…
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There are some words you don’t want to hear in an optometrist’s, and near the top of my personal blacklist is: “Oh well, at least the other one’s in pretty good shape”. (At the very top would probably be, “Hold still, I saw where it went and I’m sure I can pop it back in in a jiffy”.) Regular readers will be aware that I suffer from myopic macular degeneration in my right eye. This means that I have a blank spot right in in the centre of my vision in that eye, not unlike the cheesy special effect for an energy being in the original Star Trek. (If I’m reading, it’s a space about the size of the word “the”.) My peripheral vision’s still partly there, so when I’m having an eye test I have to sway my head around like the snake Kaa in The Jungle Book trying to hypnotise its prey just to read one of the big letters.
