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 The completed back (it’s not really purple, though…) And we’re back—or I am, anyway: Margaret’s staying out in New England for another couple of weeks, which I think of as time off her sentence for good behaviour.
Meanwhile, I have this whole jet lag thing to work through. When the alarm goes off my eyes tell me it’s 7.00 am, but deep down my body knows it’s 5 hours earlier. I’m shambling through the day like a precursor to the zombie apocalypse; I’ve already run two loads of laundry forgetting to add detergent, and last night got frustrated when my soup wouldn’t heat, only to find I’d turned on the wrong burner.
Of course, the weather doesn’t help. I’d left Massachusetts with the temperature in the mid-60ºsF, blue skies, sitting on the deck watching the bees drift about aimlessly and listening to the birds in the trees; I woke up on Saturday to 48º, strong winds and rain lashing the windows as though someone had positioned a cannon on the driveway and was firing bags of water at the house instead of grapeshot. Any bees foolish enough to stick their heads out of the hive would find themselves heading for Greenland at about 40 mph before they could even get their backside in position for the SOS emergency waggle dance (“Quick! What’s the abdomen signal for Brace! Brace!?”).
 They drive on the which now? At least the flight was memorable. You see, we approached Heathrow at about 5.45 on Friday morning, and had to circle around at 10,000 feet for a while until there was a landing stage for us. It was still night, but the moon was out: it was full, and lit up the city like a spotlight. In fact, at that height the whole of London looked like a model—but, in the dark, it was a model of a city on the moon. It was as though the moonbase in 2001: A Space Odyssey had grown into a city, strange and wonderful, the heart of England transformed into a desolate lunar landscape.
 Holiday weather on Cape Cod (sob) I flew from Boston to Heathrow, then on to Edinburgh, and finally to Wick, arriving after a journey of 12 hours, the aircraft getting progressively smaller and noisier (I think we travelled to Wick in something modelled on Baron von Richthoven’s biplane). I knew we were home when I looked out the window and saw the great turbine blades of the wind farm near the airport going round like giant acrobats turning cartwheels in slow motion.
The back In between yawning a lot I have been doing some knitting, as you’ll see from the pictures (apologies for the poor quality, by the way; you’ll have to wait for Margaret to come back for something approaching reality, I’m afraid). In fact, I’ve finished the back, and only have the shoulders to do and then it’s on to the front. Still on my first 500g cone, too, which isn’t bad.
And now it’s time to rake up the leaves, or as I like to think of them, “tree dandruff”. The wind has stripped the tree out the back so bare it’s shivering, pleading for its own bark-warming gansey, and all its leaves are lying on the lawn thick as lava from Vesuvius. Except that unlike Pompeii I’ll probably unearth the petrified forms of snails, caught in a sudden eruption of leaves and forever trapped in their last moments, expressions of surprise and dismay on their sluggy features. (Or I could just go to bed. Hmm—the coin of fate spins: heads it’s the leaves, tails it’s bed. Heads. OK, best of three, then…)
 Well, just when you think it can’t get any worse, what with network crashes and servers not responding and all, our website was hacked on Sunday night by some group campaigning for a Saharan republic. (I can tell you, they just lost my vote!)
Quite why they think the readers of a blog about knitting fishermen’s sweaters would make likely converts to their cause, I am unable to say. (Though for all I know knitted hump-warmers in 5-ply for The Camel Who Has Everything may be all the rage in the desert these days.)
 It was a bit of a shock, to be honest. But—and this is the strange part—the new web page actually had the courtesy to tell us it had been hacked, and by whom. It was a bit like being mugged by Jeeves (“Excuse me, sir, I’m most awfully sorry, but I really must ask you if you wouldn’t mind terribly handing over your wallet”).
Anyway, luckily we’d just switched service providers to one that offered better tech support (though what we really require is something more like a Samaritans hotline), and we keep regular backups, so it was a relatively simple matter to restore the site.
 But what with one thing and another it’s been a very frustrating few weeks, and has turned the blog from something which was just supposed to be a bit of light-hearted fun into Really Not A Lot of Fun At All, especially for Margaret (who could be seen up on the roof most nights dressed in a white coat waiting for a lightning storm and shouting, “Give my creature LIFE!”).
Well. Hopefully everything is sorted once and for all and we can say, like D.H. Lawrence, “Look! We have come through!” (A book title sniffily dismissed by one critic in the phrase: “They may have come through, but why should we look?”)
 Twenty-nine hours of train travel gives you lots of time to knit. Meanwhile, I soldier on. By straining every sinew I can just about manage a tree a week, about 2.75 inches: and to my surprise and delight yesterday I managed to finish the first half of the gussets and divide front and back. So I’m now romping up the back, only another couple of trees to the shoulders.
 Detail. Note how the colours differ from the photo on the kit I’m enjoying it while I can, for it’s all about to come crashing to a halt. You see, we’re away on holiday later this week, and I’m not taking my knitting with me (it’s large and heavy and troublesome enough to count as a small child on the plane). We’re off to the States—I’ll be there just over a week, Margaret’s staying rather longer—so there’ll be no blog for a couple of weeks.
And remember, if you try to access the website and find anyone trying to persuade you that several million hectares of sand would make a great foundation for a new republic—just say no…
Gansey Nation will (probably) return on 28 October. Allahu Akbar!
(Note: when this blog first went live comments were inadvertently disabled. We apologise for the inconvenience.)
 How many trees make a forest? You know the old adage, It never rains but it pours? Well, leaving aside the fact that it’s missing the crucial words “when Gordon is walking to and from work”, I have conclusive proof of its veracity today.
You see, as if all our network problems weren’t enough, my phone has now decided to do the cell phone equivalent of deciding to forsake the world, and join a religious community, spending the rest of its days in fasting and meditation—all because of a faulty software upgrade. Anyway, because of all this, it’s just a short blog today.
The conversation between my computer and me went roughly as follows:
Computer: ‘Oh dear. There seems to be a system error. You’d better try again.’
Me: ‘OK. How’s that?’
‘H’m. Looks like you’d better perform a restore operation. Of course, you’ll lose all your data if you do.’
‘Do I have a choice?’
‘It depends. You could smash your phone with a hammer, for instance. Would you like to try that?’
‘All right, all right, you win. At least you can restore it from a backup, can’t you?’
‘Sure, no problem.’
(20 minutes later) Computer: ‘Phone restored. Hey, this seems to be a new phone. Would you like to register it?’
Me: ‘It’s not a new phone! I thought you were going to restore it from a backup?’
‘What backup?’
‘From one of the hundreds on your hard drive!’
‘I don’t have any backups.’
‘Yes you do!’
‘I so do not. You fibber.’
‘But I backed it up every day.’
‘Prove it. Bet you can’t.’
‘What—you really don’t have any backups at all?’
‘Would I lie to you?’
‘Oh. Well, I guess I could manually add all the songs and apps and photos and—’
‘Yeah, yeah. Spare me the whining self-pity. Do you want to get started? Or would you rather get the hammer?’
‘No, you win. I’ll start now.’
‘Heh, heh. Sucker.’
‘What?’
‘Oh, nothing. Just performing a diagnostic subroutine, or something…’
Mind you, all conversations with my computer end up like that, so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.
Margaret’s away (yet) again, so it’s just me and my stripped-down camera phone once more, I’m afraid. I’m still keeping up my pretty good rate of progress up the body, averaging roughly a tree a week. I’ve just started the gussets, though, which will slow me down a little from now on.
As we’ve said before, apologies for the continued difficulties in accessing the site. When Margaret comes back we’ll start looking into finding a service provider that can actually, well, provide a service. If anyone can recommend such a thing, please let me know.
 Wick Harbour Lighthouse Also—I’m trying to find some grey gansey yarn. Does anyone know a supplier?
Now I’m off to find a hammer and see if I can persuade my computer to see reason…
 There’s an old joke about the Government sending out letters to people about something important, like tax; and on the envelope there’s a message saying, If you can’t read this, get someone else to read it for you.
Well, this is going to sound a bit like that message. You see, we’ve been having website problems, with pages either not opening at all, or taking so long to open you get timed out. We’re looking into it, and are trying a couple of fixes, but we’d really like to know if they’re working, or if you’re having trouble accessing the site. (Of course, like that joke, if you can’t access the site you’re not even going to be able to read this, but one thing at a time.)
 You can either let me know in a comment, or email me directly at Gordon@ganseys.com.
Meanwhile, I knit away, and at the same time try to answer an ancient philosophical conundrum: if an archivist blogs on the internet and no one can read it, does he still exist? (We’ve also added the Seaspray Filey gansey to the gallery; if you can access anything, you can access it here.)
Fancy, a shag This week I’ve completed another tree, and am about halfway up the body. I’m really enjoying this pattern, partly because it looks damn fine, but mostly because it’s very easy to knit. Once you start a row and get the number of plain stitches between the half-diamonds and the trees in each pattern repeat sorted out, you just keep going. It’s the least stressful gansey to knit I can remember: there aren’t even any cable rows to count.
Now the equinox has been and gone, we in the northern hemisphere are entering a chilly, damp autumn. But while summer lingered like a favourite aunt we paid a visit to the celebrated Hill o’ Many Stanes (“hill of many stones”), about 9 miles south of Wick. It’s a Bronze Age site, with some 200-odd small upright stones more or less arranged in rows.
 There are many ancient monuments dotted around the Caithness countryside and, to be honest, some of them are more impressive than others. At first sight, this one’s a little underwhelming, even after walking round it and staring at it for several minutes. I’d hoped that it might spell a very rude word if you caught it from the right angle, or work like one of those magic eye pictures, but no such luck: it’s basically just a bunch of rocks in a field.
But the people who lived here several thousand years ago took the trouble to stick 200 stones in the ground in this arrangement. Was it a prehistoric observatory? A rockery? Bronze Age art?
I’ve been re-reading one of my favourite novels by the late Iain Banks, The Crow Road. In it one character tells his children a story about the origin of ancient Scottish cairns: once upon a time there were giant mammoth-like creatures (called “mythosaurs”) that swallowed great stones to keep in their crops, like geese do with pebbles to break down their food. When the creatures died, their bodies decayed leaving only the stones, which we call cairns.
 You decide . . . Isn’t that great? There are many reasons to love Iain Banks, but that’s one of my favourites. And so, in the same vein, I’ve been wondering what might have caused the Hill o’ Many Stanes: flying reptiles dropping rocks on rabbits? A pixies’ cemetery? Someone who noticed the flat landscape of Caithness and thought you could grow mountains like potatoes? A baby troll day care centre massacre when they were all cut down by the sunlight in the middle of a group tai chi lesson…? The truth is out there, people; or if not the truth, something much more fun.
Finally this week, Margaret has been making another of her beautiful lacy shawly creations. At least, I think that’s what it is. I thought at first it might be an elvish fishing net, but I’m slowly coming round to the idea that it’s lingerie for Galadriel…
 Well, that could have gone better. I spent part of last week in bed with what I assume was a cold, finally giving in after a couple of weeks of generally feeling like something the cat had brought in and left on the mat for you to discover (usually a fatal couple of seconds after you wished you’d been wearing slippers).
I call it a cold, but if so it was a strange one: I wasn’t congested, or sneezing, just very tired. I simply had no energy at all, and got out of breath doing such strenuous things as brushing my teeth or waking up. It was like being visited by a frugal vampire and having a bit of blood siphoned off each night, like the butler sneaking whisky from the decanter when the master’s back is turned.
Anyway, I knew I was in trouble when I had to stop and set up base camp while climbing the stairs, and hire some local sherpas who knew the terrain to get me to the top. My chest felt like God was gently squeezing it, like someone feeling to see if a tube of toothpaste is empty.
 So—in case you were wondering—that explains my absence from the website last week. Apologies to those who posted who didn’t get a response, but thanks to everyone who responded to my question about turning the website into books. My current inclination is to go with the majority opinion and release a gansey book that includes all the how-to information from the website, as well as photos and pattern charts for selected ganseys I’ve knitted, about half a dozen or so. That way, the information will always be available no matter what.
 Gordon contemplates life on the edge. The new John o’Groats fingerpost, now free of charge. That will hopefully be out in time for Christmas. But—I stress—all the information will still remain free of charge here on the website.
And then, sometime next year probably, I’ll go through the archive of blog entries back to the very beginning (or in my favourite legal phrase, to ‘Time whereof the memory of man runneth not to the contrary’) and see if I can edit the more interesting ones into a single anthology. This may, of course, result in a very short book!
One thing about being ill, it means that in your lucid moments you can sit up in bed and knit—and so, I’ve made rather more progress this week than usual. I’m now on my third tree, and the pattern is settling down nicely—and so are the stitches on the needles, which no longer want to curl themselves inside out like a gansey entering a black hole, which can happen in the early stages with plain knitting until the pattern achieves its own rigidity (“Look out: those are load-bearing chevrons!”).
 Somewhere over the rainbow . . . lies John o’Groats Oh, and speaking of vampires, there’s something that’s always intrigued me about them: how do they drink the blood of men with bushy beards? Do they still go for the neck and just accept there’ll be a certain amount of collateral follicle-ness involved, like trying to drink a Bloody Mary through a wire brush; or do they select an alternative spot to bite, such as the wrist, or perhaps an ankle, or even—for a be-kilted Scotsman in a strong wind—a knee?
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