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 On Friday It was Midsummer Day, the longest day of the year; and here in Caithness, when we say longest, we really mean it: the sun rises just after 4.00 in the morning and sets just before 10.30 at—if you can call it that—night. The days are so long the birds have to take it in shifts to sing or they get tired out, packing up around dinnertime and going back to bed with sore throats.
It’s been such a rubbish summer we celebrated the solstice by turning on the central heating for an hour, so the towels—and the house—could maybe get dry for a change.
 Escargot a go-go So, it’s back to a diet of hot, nourishing winter soups, and porridge for breakfast. In fact, I’ve been doing some research into porridge. I always thought that there were only two kinds: one which was made with water and seasoned with salt (the Scots or, as my father would say, “correct” way), and the other with milk and sugar (the incorrect way, also known as “spawn o’ the devil”)—and that, no matter which you adopted, you still ended up with something that looked like a pound of snails pureed in a blender.
Turns out I was wrong (though not about the snails). Since time immemorial porridge has been made with oatmeal, i.e., untreated ground oats boiled in liquid for half an hour or so to a consistency of wallpaper paste. But in 1877 the Quaker Oat Co. discovered a method of steaming the oat grains and rolling them flat (to make rolled oats), which means they absorb moisture more rapidly and only take 5 minutes to cook.
 And so, alas, even the sludgy world of porridge now has its schisms. The oatmeal purists despise the rolled oats-eaters (did you know that rolled oats are banned from the porridge world championships?), while the rolled oaters shrug their shoulders, happy in the knowledge that they’ve saved themselves 25 minutes’ saucepan-stirring a day. (One of the little-known causes of the First World War was the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand just minutes after devouring a bowl of rolled-oat porridge, shot down by an incensed pinhead oatmeal fanatic.)
 Sunset, 18 June – 10:48 PM As for me, I refuse to take sides: either is fine, so long as there’s plenty of sugar and cream at hand—and my father isn’t around to see.
I’ve been making good progress on the gansey, and in a day or so I’ll be dividing for the neck and shoulders of the front. The neck will be indented by 1.5 inches, or half a diamond, so it shouldn’t interfere with the pattern too much. Then it’s onto the collar and picking up stitches around the first sleeve, something which is outlawed in several states as a cruel and unnatural punishment.
Meanwhile, we sit and shiver and regret the rash impulse that made us switch to the summer weight duvet just because the sun was shining. It’s so cold I’m thinking of forming the NHWBA, or National Hot Water Bottle Association. Its motto? “You can take my hot water bottle when you pry it from my cold, frostbitten toes…”
 Apparently medieval mapmakers gave the name “Ultima Thule” to the land that lay beyond the region of the known world; after last weekend, I call it Sutherland.
If you look at a map, you’ll see the far north of Scotland rising above Inverness like a jauntily-perched top hat: if Caithness is the feather, a small fingernail-sized area at the top right, then Sutherland is the crown; it’s big, covering 2,300 square miles, but—unless you count the mountains—very empty, with a population of just 13,000.
 The hills of Sutherland, June 2013 We took an excursion along the north coast road to the Kyle of Tongue, just under two hours from Wick. The terrain changes as soon as you leave Caithness, from flat grasslands to a barren, lunar landscape of bare rocks and distant, looming peaks, the road a single track with sudden descents on either side. There were occasional sheep, which stopped grazing to stare frowning at us as we passed, as if trying to remember where they’d seen people before. Or perhaps they were desperate convict sheep who’d escaped the chain gang but got lost in the wilderness, and were thinking of hijacking our car (the origin of the expression “being fleeced”, of course).
 We stopped in Tongue at a cliffside cafe overlooking the ocean for lunch, 20C in the sun. We ate our sandwiches outside with the desperate heroism of British people on holiday everywhere, but you had to be alert: the wind kept snatching away any potato chips that weren’t anchored down with cutlery, so if you looked away for a minute your plate resembled a time-lapse film of a forest being cut down.
The estuary at Tongue, June 2013 On the way back we made a detour to John O’Groats for ice cream, sitting in the sun sneering at the seagulls which worked over the tourists much like Fagin’s gang of thieving street urchins in Oliver Twist.
And all the time the reflection kept hitting us, like waking up and remembering you’ve just won the lottery: Bloody hell, this is where we live.
I’ve finished the back of my gansey, and the back half of the ridge-and-furrow shoulder straps too. I added a couple of plain rows above the pattern so the cables had room to breathe: I prefer not to end a pattern on a cable row, as they always feel a bit constricted, a bit tight, as though they want to unscrew.
 Not snow: Cotton grass (Eriophorum angustifolium) near John o’Groats As it’s 214 stitches wide, I made each shoulder 71 stitches and the neck 72. The “rig ‘n’ fur” shoulders are, as usual, 2 purl rows, 2 plain, 2 purl rows, 2 plain, 2 purl rows and 2 more plain, making 12 in all. I then slipped each shoulder and the neck from the needles onto some spare cream gansey yarn, so I shouldn’t impale myself in a tender spot when I come to do the front—which I’ve also made a start on.
 Gorse and coastline between Tongue & Strathy Point I haven’t come across any gansey patterns from Sutherland—I suppose there weren’t any harbours, let alone herring down the west coast—but I can tell you an interesting fact about the name. It means, of course, “the south land”, which seems odd, as it’s as far north as you can get in the UK without swimming. But it dates from the days when the Highlands were ruled by the Norse, from Orkney; and everywhere must have felt south to them.
So maybe I should start thinking of it as “Penultima Thule”…
 Each night, as I soak my dry eyes in a warm cloth, I listen to 10 minutes of Proust as an audiobook. The books aren’t so much a novel as a fictionalised autobiography, an extraordinarily detailed meditation on time, childhood, and how we behave when we’re in love (so far, at least: I live in hopes that it may contain scenes of wacky nude alien mud-wrestling later on, but I’m only on book 2).
I find it strange how fascinating Proust’s narrator finds his own life, sent spinning back through the years by a piece of madeleine soaked in a teaspoon of tea; for in my own case, I try to avoid thinking about the past as much as possible.
In fact, it wouldn’t be too much to say that I regard my own memories as a sort of asylum for the insane, each recollection firmly locked away—but in the night I can hear them howling and banging on the doors to their cells, demanding to be let out.
You think I’m exaggerating? Suppose we open a door at random, lulled by the silence within, in the hopes of finding a docile patient.
 The River at Helmsdale Here is the café in Birmingham New Street railway station one dreary, wet Saturday afternoon in 1979, and here is our hero, sitting at a table, waiting for his connection home after the ugly termination of some commonplace affair or other. In front of him is a big cup of coca-cola of the kind you find in movie theatres, untouched.
A smart wedding party enters the café, which is crowded, and settle at his table. Just then, our hero hears his train called and gets to his feet—and in doing so, with the inevitability of Greek tragedy, knocks over the cup of coke. A tidal wave of black, sticky liquid is launched across the table, directly towards the middle-aged lady opposite: it resembles the blast wave of a nuclear explosion as seen from the air, or one of those animations of the Black Death spreading across Europe in the 1340s.
 Gorse in bloom above Helmsdale Everyone freezes and stares, fascinated, as it pours remorselessly across the surface, reaches the lip, and cascades in a frothing waterfall directly into the lady’s lap… And when the mist clears, our hero realises that his well-intentioned attempts to dab up the stuff with a napkin have left glistening handprints on her dress in places that…
But no. Best we close the door again, and leave this inmate to rave on in dark seclusion. And after all, if I’m going to spend my time reminiscing, I think it’s best if it’s somebody else’s life, such as Proust’s; mine is a bit too, well, personal.
Back in the present, this weekend we went for a jaunt south down the coast to Helmsdale (which always sounds to me like it should’ve been besieged by an army of slavering orcs in The Lord of the Rings); it’s a scenic fishing village just over the border into Sutherland, with a harbour and a museum—which was the reason for our trip.
 There’s gold in them thar hills? The museum has a modern feel, open and airy, well worth a visit if you’re in the area: it’s not bursting with exhibits, but the ones they have are well displayed. (Or at least I presume they are: when we went they were having trouble with the lighting, which kept flicking on and off as if a 10 year-old with ADD was operating the switch; such was the effect on epileptics that the foyer resembled the “Atlanta wounded” sequence from Gone With The Wind.)
I’d been told they didn’t have any ganseys, but we were delighted to find that this wasn’t the case—there was one on display, knit in that lovely old-fashioned silvery-grey yarn you don’t see any more. It had a buttoned collar and the body consisted of an open diamond pattern; the shoulders were patterned with a > > > > .
(By the way, strange but true, did you know there was a short-lived gold rush in the hills behind Helmsdale in 1869? Over 600 prospectors piled in and a shanty town of huts sprang up in the bare uplands. But the gold ran out, winter set in and within a year most had gone back to the herring fishing. You can still buy a licence and go prospecting up in the hills, though whether you’d find even enough gold for a filling these days is an open question.)
Finally, the gansey: I’ve almost finished the back—just 3 more rows and it’s on to the “rig ’n’ fur” shoulder straps. (I’ve also, mirabile dictu, just finished the first cone of Frangipani yarn, something I was beginning to doubt would ever happen: like those magical goblets of wine in Irish legend that replenish themselves when emptied I thought I’d discovered a cone of fairy yarn.) Hopefully by next week I’ll have started the front.
And now it’s time to go soak my eyes, and listen to some more reminiscences. As the great Bob Dylan says in one of his songs, “Maybe someday I’ll remember to forget…”
 And then you get a day like Saturday, when the wind drops and the clouds part and the sea is so flat and calm it shimmers like taffy cooling in the tin. It was one of those days when the sky is as blue as a child’s painting, and clouds of delicate white butterflies, disappointed in love and tired of life, try to end it all on your car windscreen as you drive past.
I was in a reckless mood myself: I drove with the car window open. Well, it was 13C—we may not see temperatures as high as these again, so it’s best to make the most of it.
 The ocean off Mey (yes, it really did look like that) We went up to the Castle of Mey’s teashop for coffee and cakes. I had a piece of chocolate cake so dense it had its own centre of gravity, like an imploding star, and started to attract cutlery from across the table; what I had taken at first to be icing turned out on closer inspection to be an event horizon. Afterwards we did our best to impersonate a bus tour, since it’s embarrassing when the staff keep asking if you’re enjoying your trip to Scotland and you have to tell them you only live 20 miles away…
 I’ve been making good progress on the gansey while we’ve been offline, reaching the halfway point on the gussets and dividing front and back. I’ve made these gussets slightly smaller than I usually do, 15 stitches wide instead of my usual 19-21, just to see how it works out. The body will be 7 diamonds long, shoulder to welt, so as you can see I’m not far off finishing the back. Meanwhile I’m still having a lot of fun knitting the pattern, which is almost foolproof (even for me), and which is rapidly becoming one of my favourites—certainly one I’d recommend to a beginner.
 Many thanks for all the suggestions for eye drops to treat my dry eye condition. I still have to talk to a pharmacist, but in the meantime I must admit I rather enjoy spending ten minutes every evening with a warm flannel pressed against my closed eyelids, a sensation not unlike being licked by a very affectionate bison.
 I spend the downtime listening to an audiobook. In another life I might be meditating, or praying; in this one I’m listening to Proust. In some ways I find it resembles a traditional religious service: I have no idea what the words mean, but they sound nice.
Finally, here’s Kathleen in her Edinburgh garden wearing the cream Hebridean cardigan I knit recently. Of course, in any other country the beginning of June would hardly be a suitable time of year to wear a gansey—but then, we’ve been through all this before…
[* Gansey Nation is taking a short break and will be back on Monday 3 June*]
How steady are your hands? Steady enough to wipe your eyelids with a cotton bud without poking yourself in the eye? Mine, alas, aren’t, as I’ve been finding out this week to my cost.
You see, I’ve been diagnosed with a chronic dry eye condition (“chronic” just meaning it will never go away). So every night or so I have to soak a cloth in cooled, boiled water and press it against my closed eyes for ten minutes, and then wipe the inside of the softened-up lids with a cotton bud dipped in baby shampoo.
 Cleaning the lower lids is easy; but I find it impossible to negotiate the upper lids without obscuring my line of sight with the bud, which makes aiming it something of a matter of guesswork, like trying to open a high window with a pole while blindfolded. At least once a night I jab myself in the eye, making the cure so far worse than the disease. (On the other hand the sharp pain makes my eyes water, which may be part of the treatment?)
By the way, did you know that the great Isaac Newton –“great” in the sense of stark, staring mad – once conducted an experiment to see if changes in pressure affected the way the human eye sees colour by inserting a darning needle into the back of his eye and wiggling it about? (This is one of those facts that, once known, can never be forgotten.) There are times when I stand before the bathroom mirror, cotton bud poised, when I fear I am just one sneeze away from replicating his experiment…
 In gansey news, I’ve reached the start of the gussets of my Filey gansey. As usual, I shall be increasing at a rate of one stitch either side of the gusset every 4 rows. It’s always encouraging to reach this stage as it means that dividing front and back isn’t far away, the gansey equivalent of the coming of springtime.
Also in gansey news, congratulations to Lynne for completing a rather stunning Eriskay gansey, which you can see pictures of here. (And, if that wasn’t enough, she tells me the temperature was 25C when the photos were taken; it’s a brisk 10C in Wick and the buds on the trees are shrinking again in the sharp north wind like reverse time-lapse photography.)
 There won’t be a blog next week – Margaret will be whooping it up in Edinburgh and I plan to spend the weekend in a paralytic alcoholic stupor – but we’ll be back on Monday 3rd June.
Finally, the cardiganification of the cream cardigan is finally complete. Here’s Margaret to tell us if the operation was a success, and whether the patient will live…
– <> – <> – <> – <> – <> – <> – <> – <> – <> – <> – <> – <> – <> – <> – <> –
 e finito!
The patient will, I think, survive.
Ends have been darned in, front bands have been severely steamed several times, and the buttons have been sewn on. The buttons are unobtrusive, and not as small as feared; they look about right. As can probably be seen from the photos, they’re two-hole pseudo-shell plastic buttons, with a bit of a ripple (from Ribbonmoon. More buttons than you can shake a stick at. And ribbon.) One side is shiny, the other matt, and I chose the matt to be the upward face. I’ve also sewn them on with a wrapped stand, due to the thickness of the fabric.
In the last photo, you can also see the herringbone stitching to secure the facings so they don’t flop about. This should also further protect the cut & sewn edges from wear. I’ll be delivering it in Edinburgh later this week.
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On Friday It was Midsummer Day, the longest day of the year; and here in Caithness, when we say longest, we really mean it: the sun rises just after 4.00 in the morning and sets just before 10.30 at—if you can call it that—night. The days are so long the birds have to take it in shifts to sing or they get tired out, packing up around dinnertime and going back to bed with sore throats.
And so, alas, even the sludgy world of porridge now has its schisms. The oatmeal purists despise the rolled oats-eaters (did you know that rolled oats are banned from the porridge world championships?), while the rolled oaters shrug their shoulders, happy in the knowledge that they’ve saved themselves 25 minutes’ saucepan-stirring a day. (One of the little-known causes of the First World War was the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand just minutes after devouring a bowl of rolled-oat porridge, shot down by an incensed pinhead oatmeal fanatic.)
