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The funfair’s back in town, on the meadows down by the river near where they used to dry the fishing nets back before car parks were invented. If it wasn’t for a merciful row of trees lining our street we could see it from our bedroom, but if we can’t see it, we can certainly hear it. Imagine the type of music you like the least—let’s say jazz, since nobody really likes jazz—played over loudspeakers at very high volume, and you’ll get the idea, not so much a funfair as a sort of psychological warfare with moving parts. There’s usually an amplified voice shouting over the beat, too; it’s probably inviting us to roll up, roll up, but I can’t make out the words and it sounds disconcertingly like a drunken Dalek singing along to Led Zeppelin’s Immigrant Song.
 Fog rolls into Sarclet harbour But then, I’ve never liked funfairs, amusement arcades, or any form of entertainment involving candy floss and motion sickness. Not that I have anything against candy floss qua candy floss; it’s just that once you grow a beard any chance eating it with dignity disappears (see also: cream cakes). This puts me at odds with my fellow men, as I know the return of the funfair is eagerly awaited each year, so I just have to lump it for a few weeks every summer. Many years ago I shared a flat with a vegan friend who had studied philosophy at university, majoring in logic. Although he was healthily emotional in many respects, when it came to reason he was as cold and logical as Mr Spock. One night the flat across the hall was having a party, and by 3.00 a.m. it was still impossible to sleep over the noise. My friend offered to go and tell them to turn it down. Ten minutes later he returned, with the music, I noticed, continuing as loud as ever. “What happened?” I asked. “Oh,” he said, “it’s a question of the greatest good to the greatest number: since there are more of them than there are of us, they convinced me they should leave the music playing…”
Lochans in the peat bog at Forsinard [Editor’s note: Margaret’s off on her travels just now, so all photographs are courtesy of me and my iPhone. Can you tell? Normal service will be resumed in a couple of weeks.]
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TECHNICAL STUFF
Alert readers will have noticed that the designated pattern has changed from last week. This is because, having previously agreed I’d knit another pattern from the Johnston Collection held by Wick Museum for my charity project, I promptly forgot all about it and defaulted to a Filey pattern, only for Deb G to remind me. D’oh! Not that it will make any difference to the project, as I hadn’t started the pattern yet; and in fact I do this quite often, starting projects and changing my mind before I get to the pattern, or indeed starting a project and leaving the choice of pattern open until I get to the yoke, to see what mood I’m in when I get there. It’s only having to show my hand in the blog that forces me to declare the pattern upfront. (Now I think of it, this is a perfect illustration of quantum indeterminacy, where anything is possible until I make a choice and the waveform collapses into a single project. There you go: I’ve invented a new discipline, quantum knitting. Now, where’s my research grant?)
Anyway, we’ll have to wait a couple more weeks to see it, but this is a very nice pattern of alternating horizontal bands of chevrons and open diamonds in a lattice. Meanwhile, I can relax with lots of nice, gentle, plain knitting, none of which, thank heaven, requires me to remember anything…
 It’s Sunday lunchtime as I write this, and the servers on which this website is hosted have been down for four long days now. I imagine that for a website this must be the equivalent of a general anaesthetic: one minute you’re awake and alert, and the doctor is asking you to count down from ten, then there’s a cold sensation running up your arm and suddenly you’re in a state of non-being. The hosts promised that things would be back to normal in three days, and yet, as the saying goes, here we are. Or rather, here we aren’t. Even now someone is probably reaching for a defibrillator, while a voice asks helpfully, “Have you tried turning it off and on again?”
 Raindrops on Grass Because of this, the blog this week is in the nature of a message in a bottle: I have no idea how long till anyone will be able to read it. So I’ll keep it short. Our thoughts and prayers are with all our readers caught up in the current heatwave sweeping up from North Africa, set to push temperatures in England and Wales up to an unprecedented 40ºC. It’s not forecast to make it this far north (we might get as high as a balmy 18-20º, something to remember in January when the sleet is piling in horizontally on bitter, 70-mph gales).
To keep your spirits up, I recommend following the election of a new leader of the Conservative and Unionist Party, and de facto Prime Minister, a process so drawn out it makes the ending of the last Lord of the Rings movie seem abrupt. The first televised debate had the contestants playing tug of war over an abyss, with the losers plunging to their deaths—no, wait, sorry that’s Squid Game. Though now I think of it, it would certainly liven up political debate considerably…
 Thistle trying to hide ==========================
TECHNICAL STUFF
This gansey is being knit for charity. The idea came from Deb Gillanders of Propagansey fame, and I’ll be giving Deb a guest spot to say more about this is future weeks. First, though, I have to knit it.
It’s in Frangipani navy yarn, and the pattern is taken from the Johnston Collection of old glass plate held by Wick Heritage Society. It’s the gansey of one George Bremner and I’ll say more about the pattern when I reach the yoke. There are lots of these caithness patterns still to try, so I’m grateful to Deb for the opportunity to knit it up. (In my affably muddle-headed way, I agreed to knit a Caithness pattern and then promptly forgot and started a completely different pattern, from Filey. So if you see that the title of this project has changed since you saw it last, don’t worry!)
 The Funfair is in town I’ve been contacted by a few people in recent months interested in knitting a gansey for the first time. So I thought I’d use this gansey as an opportunity to talk through the process in some detail, from start to finish (assuming we have a functioning website to share this on). For now I’ll just say that it’s for a finished gansey chest size of about 22.5 inches across when blocked, so I’ve started by casting on 328 stitches for the welt. At the body this is increased by 34 to 362 stitches (so, if you deduct 2 stitches for the fake seams, this gives 180 stitches per side.)
 Summer has come to Britain, with most of us sweltering in temperatures into the low 30s centigrade. (I am, of course, using “most of us” here in the same sense that weather forecasters do, i.e., meaning everyone but those of us—sorry, “you”—in the far north of Scotland.) But don’t get me wrong: I wouldn’t have it any other way. Caithness is currently basking in a cool 15-19ºC, with a cool sea breeze, and it’s delightful. After all, you can always add an extra layer if you’re cold; but there are limits to how far you can go if you’re too hot. And while I do possess a pair of shorts, I’m so unused to seeing my legs in the flesh, as it were, that I keep mistaking them for a pair of pink hairy caterpillars that have mutated after a nuclear disaster, and the shock is too much for my weak heart. I still remember the time I opened the door to the postman in my shorts and he shied like a startled mustang, flinging his letters to at least three of the four winds.
 I don’t wear bathing trunks for much the same reason, the overall effect resembling a rubber band stretched round the middle of an over-inflated pink balloon. This is where I always feel the Victorians got the tone just right, refusing to enter any assemblage of water more copious than a bathtub in anything less than a full suit of evening dress, preferably with a top hat and monocle. No, all in all I’ve found my spiritual home in Caithness, where summer means transitioning from a heavy sweater to a light one (though keep the heavy one handy).
 Flowers by the path Speaking of sweaters… here’s the finished picture of the Mrs Hunter’s gansey. As ever, washing and blocking has done its magic and opened it out so you can see the gansey in its true proportions. I don’t have any superlatives left to say how wonderful this pattern knits up, except to say the textures really catch the light: it’s a stunner. And it’s a deceptively simple pattern that pays you back tenfold for the effort you put in. You do have to like cables, though.
 Valeriana pyrenaica And one thing about the sunshine, at least we’ve had nice weather for the fall of the government. Britain famously doesn’t have a written constitution, but instead relies on what is called the “good chaps” theory of government, the notion that decent people will govern us decently. (And I can’t help wondering, as I think back on just about every government since Lord North lost the American colonies back in 1783: oh yes? What good chaps exactly would these be?) Still, two quotes occur to me as we witness the long goodbye of our current prime minister. Firstly, the quote ascribed to Oscar Wilde on the tragic death of Little Nell in Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop (but which only appears some 30 years after Wilde died, so is, alas, probably not true): “One would have to have a heart of stone not to laugh”. And secondly, the one about football managers leaving as they arrived, “fired with enthusiasm…”
 It was some time since I had moved out of our old rooms in 221B Baker Street, but happening to find myself in that neighbourhood one July morning in the year 1897 I thought I would stop by to see my old friend, Mr Sherlock Holmes. As was his custom when faced with an extremely difficult puzzle he was lounging on the sofa shooting discontentedly at the wall with an old service revolver. He seemed to be marking out a message in bullet holes. I could just make out the letters F, U, and what may have been the start of an L, or then again it may not.
‘Ah, Watson!’ he exclaimed, laying aside the pistol. ‘You are the stormy booby of crime. You arrive to find me grappling with a singularly difficult problem.’
‘An illustrious client?’ I asked, glancing the gilded monogram adorning the letter on the table.
‘The most illustrious: her Majesty the Queen herself.’
‘Why, I congratulate you, Holmes!’
He shook his head. ‘The problem she has presented to me is of a unique difficulty. It may be insoluble. Something has gone missing from the heart of government.’
‘Surely they haven’t lost another top secret submarine plan?’
‘No, nothing as simple as that.’
‘Then what?’
‘The government has lost its sense of morality. I fear not even I may be able to locate it.’
 Poking around in a tide pool ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Remember the time you found their missing ethics advisor?’
‘Pah! That was a simple matter. All I had to do was follow the sound of sobbing until I discovered him hiding in the broom cupboard.’
Just then there came a tap on the door and Mrs Hudson entered bearing a tray with three more telegrams. Holmes opened the first two, and groaned.
‘What is it this time?’ I asked anxiously. ‘Surely they haven’t lost anything else?’
‘It’s worse than I feared. Now they’ve lost their sense of shame and of decency!’ He tore open the third, then flung it aside with a cry of despair. ‘This one’s from the Prime Minister.’
‘What’s he lost?’
‘His marbles.’
‘But what are you going to do, Holmes?’
‘In a situation like this there’s only one thing to do.’
He made a long arm and opened the desk drawer. Inside I could just see the tip of a hypodermic syringe, and small bottle marked “Seven percent solution. Do not take if operating heavy machinery”. I sadly shook my head, and took my leave. As I made my way downstairs I could faintly hear the strains of Holmes’s violin, playing an unusual set of chords, in a rhythm quite unlike anything I had ever heard (da-da-da-da, da-dum). Then Holmes began to sing.
‘She don’t lie, she don’t lie, she don’t lie… cocaine!’
Outside, a steady drizzle had begun to fall, and I realised I’d lost the sense of purpose with which I’d set out that morning. I thought of going back and asking Holmes to help me find it, but something suggested this may not be the time…
 St Fergus’ on a sunny day ==============================
But let us turn our minds to happier thoughts. Judit has sent us pictures of another splendid gansey, in a very natty shade of blue, and what—if I mistake not, Watson—appears to be a variant of the classic Staithes pattern. It’s a good reminder of how effective these patterns are in pretty much any colour, and that they’re classics for a reason. Many thanks once more to Judit for sharing!
And finally this week, I didn’t quite manage to finish the olive gansey, but nearly. (And there’s nothing like five or six inches of ribbing at the end of a project to teach you that we’re not put here on earth for pleasure alone.) Next week we’ll post pictures of the finished article, hopefully washed and blocked and ready to be taken for a spin. All I need to find is the motivation… but let’s not go through all that again, eh?
 Grasses in the wind
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