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 First of all, apologies to those who’ve tuned in to see open-heart surgery on the cardigan (actually I think of it as a sort of sex-change operation, from a gansey to a cardy—each requiring the steady use of a pair of scissors, if the cartoons I watched as a child are to be believed). But owing to one of those random acts of God that come along now and then and cause untold devastation—e.g., a meteorite strike, an earthquake, a Conservative government—I’m afraid we’re a little behind schedule.
Let me explain: we’re back in Wick after our Easter holiday down south—but our car isn’t. Instead, it languishes in a garage 450 miles away, after the steering lock died outside our friends’ house in Southport (in the process lowering the tone of a very decent neighbourhood).
We only found out there was a problem at 8.30am on the day we were set to leave, said automobile having made the journey there with no difficulties whatsoever; but when I inserted the card in the ignition all that resulted was a sort of sad ticking noise, as though the car was clicking its tongue at the futility of our expectations of getting home. Luckily we had roadside assistance cover, but it took 3 RAC patrolmen over 5 hours to decide that we were beyond help. (It was like watching an episode of “House”, but one where by the time the credits rolled he’d given up and gone down the pub instead of solving the mystery at the last minute.)
 The stack in Staxigoe At times the whole experience resembled Baldilocks and the Three Bewildered RAC Patrolmen: the first thought it was the immobiliser; the second thought it was the electrics; and the third thought it was the ignition. (I just thought it was bloody freezing, and I was the only correct one among us.)
At last a trailer came and hauled the carcase away and we were provided with a hire car to get home, a feat we achieved at 12.15am (after a rather scenic twilight drive through the snow-capped Highlands). If the garage can fix it soon, I’ll take another couple of days off work later in the week and we’ll hire another car and repeat the 9-hour drive south to pick it up—and pay the £600+ repair bill.
As Feste the clown sings in Twelfth Night:
“And when I bought myself a car,
With hey ho, the wind and the rain,
It never got me very far,
For the car it breaketh every day…”
 Staxigoe harbour Anyway. Thank you to everyone who downloaded copies of my books when they were on the free promotion over Easter. I’m delighted to report that there were about 2,000 downloads overall, a record for me.
Finally, as the discerning among you will have guessed, I’ve started another gansey. This one is in Frangipani seaspray yarn. My plan is to knit a generic gansey to donate to the crew of the Reaper, the fishing boat the Anstruther Fisheries Museum uses for educational purposes and which came to the Wick Harbour Festival last year (when the captain told me they were always looking for authentic ganseys to wear).
Since I’m fairly generic myself, I’m basing it on my own size: so a 44”-46” chest. I cast on 388 stitches to make a ribbed welt of 97 ribs, and after knitting about 3.5 inches have just increased into the body to bring it to 430 stitches. The pattern will be based on Matt Cammish’s gansey, a Filey pattern recorded in Gladys Thompson’s book (picture on p.21, directions on p.24). I’ve had to change it slightly to fit the number of stitches I have, but it’ll be essentially the same. More on this next week, though.
Meanwhile, spring has come to Wick, in the form of stunning blue skies and crisp sunshine, even if the wind is bitterly cold. In fact it’s so nice we could just jump in the car and go for a dri—
Oh wait.
 It’s never a good sign when anyone says “Oops”, but when it’s your optician and he’s holding a magnifying lens up to your eye and shining a searchlight bright enough to pierce the back of your skull and end up somewhere near Denmark, it’s especially disconcerting.
 I don’t know if you’ve ever had an image taken of your eye? The picture is really weird, like something from the Hubble space telescope, as if say Andromeda was being attacked by a giant space squid with long veinous tentacles. Anyway, in my case, once you get past Squishy Sidney the Space Squid, there’s a patch at the back of right eye (the troublesome one) which is pigmented strangely, looking exactly as though the entire population of China had been dressed in black and deposited on Mars, and were now huddling together for warmth. So it’s back to the hospital for me (hurrah! My favourite).
 Just a short blog this week—a blogette, really—which sounds like it should have a crisp, crunchy crust and go great with onion soup—to wish everyone a happy Easter. By the time you read this Margaret and I will hopefully be visiting my parents in their lovely old canalside house in Northamptonshire; they don’t have an internet connection, so we’ll be out of touch till later next week, making Northants seem curiously like travelling up the Congo, or something. It may even be colder down south than in Caithness.
The cardigan has been washed and is being blocked even as I type, pinned out like a torture victim on the rack, ready for the blade.
Finally, just a reminder that all my books are currently being offered free on Amazon till close of play Tuesday, including my latest, The World’s Midnight, part 2 of my Elfael trilogy. Don’t say you weren’t warned.
So all that remains is to say, Happy Easter everyone, and go easy on those Easter eggs.
 If you open your windows and listen carefully – assuming there isn’t a howling gale blowing rain and sleet in your direction – unlikely if you live anywhere near Wick, but you never know – you may just hear the faint sound of distant trumpets carried on the breeze.
 This will be the fanfare I have arranged to be blown every hour, on the hour, throughout the day, to celebrate the end of the knitting phase of the gansey. The garment has now been handed over to our Cardiganification Department for washing, blocking, scissoring and buttoning, and probably an anti-glare coating and wax for the finish as well.
I didn’t expect to get it done so soon, to be honest. But it always catches me out how quickly you get to the cuff once the end is in sight. And, as ever, I can’t really remember knitting most of it (if it wasn’t for this blog I’d just have assumed the Gansey Fairies visit me in the night every 6 months and leave me ganseys in exchange for my youth and some of my hair, like something from Grimm’s fairy tales).
 That’s better – the reknit shawl centre Looking back on this blog, it occurs to me that I’ve been doing this for rather a long time. T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock measured out his life in coffee spoons – in my case it’s ganseys. There’s a classic Welsh novel about a man who comes back to the house he grew up in after his mother’s death to sort out her effects, and every chapter is based around the memories of a different object – the mangle she used when she had to take in washing after her husband died, etc. I feel a bit like that with the pictures in the gallery, except there are still so many patterns yet to try.
 Gordon’s in the blue shirt, on the left. Artist Joanne B Kaar displays the “Portable Museum of Curiosity”, inspired by the Robert Dick Herbarium at Caithness Horizons I had a (predictably) fun day on Saturday at the Caithness Science Fair Family Fun Day. We took a bunch of photographs of old maps from the archives and put them on my iPad so people could look up their neighbourhoods in 1903 (of course several children tried to use it to hack into the internet instead, but I found I could reach their ankles quite easily under the table – a steel toecap is the gift that keeps on giving – so that was all right). But oh, it’s been years since I spent a day on my feet like that. All day Sunday I needed a sort of block and tackle system to get me out of my chair, like Henry VIII in his armour having to be winched onto his horse.
 I’m publishing another book on Amazon kindle for Easter, The World’s Midnight, the long-awaited sequel to The Wraiths of Elfael, in which Mair, my heroine, journeys to an alternative version of medieval Wales to recover the stolen spirit of her friend. It’s a fairly dark little tale, I must admit, but I like to think of it as my Empire Strikes Back before the final part of the trilogy ends happily with cuddly child-bears armed only with spears and rocks overthrowing a ruthless totalitarian regime (hey, it could happen).
Speaking of Star Wars, I wonder why no one had invented the laser equivalent of a machine gun by then? Or even carried machine guns and grenades? (Bit tricky for even a Jedi to deflect the splinters from a fragment grenade or even a flamethrower with a light sabre, you’d think!)
Where was I? Oh yes, books. All four of my other books plus the new one will be on a free promotion on Amazon from Friday to Tuesday over Easter, so if you know anyone who might be interested please let them know: you see, the more people read them for free, the more reviews they’re likely to get, and the more reviews they have the higher they go in the rankings. So it’s a win-win for me (so long as the reviews are positive!).
Finally, Judit has sent pictures of another splendid gansey she’s made, which you can see here. This one is based on a Filey pattern in Rae Compton’s book (page 64); note the initials above the welt.
In fact, maybe if I give my trumpeters an extra shilling they’ll play something from Sibelius’s Lemminkäinen Suite as a kind of joint celebration for both our ganseys…?
 I flew down to Edinburgh last Sunday for a day of meetings on the Monday. I met my colleagues at a pizza chain on Sunday night, and at one point the person next to me looked up and said, ‘You know, I’ve never seen snow falling horizontally before. Or fall up, for that matter.’ (‘Welcome to Scotland,’ I said as I nonchalantly speared a leaf of rocket from my plate.)
In truth the weather was pretty wild, strong winds gusting the snow around like we were living inside a snow globe. (Heading south, the tail wind was enough to shave 20 minutes off an hour-long flight.)
 It wasn’t a great trip, to be honest. Apart from the horrid weather, the citizens of Edinburgh seemed to be taking turns outside my hotel room through the night to shout explicit anatomical instructions, some of which I discovered to be quite hard to achieve on your own. The room’s double glazing was warped and didn’t quite fasten – handy if you wanted to preserve a side of beef for a few days, say, but not to take a shower in comfort (my progress to and from the bathroom resembled a firewalker who’s just discovered halfway down the ramp that someone put a live mouse in his shirt for a joke).
 I didn’t take the knitting with me – apart from the whole vexed issue of taking needles on planes, the gansey now weighs about as much as a recently dipped sheep, and the prospect of lugging it around Edinburgh didn’t appeal. So I haven’t made as much progress as I’d have liked (by this stage I’m usually impatient to see it done), but am still well down the sleeve. I don’t think I’ll get it finished this week – quite – but I should still meet my target of Easter.
 Next Saturday I’ll be at the Caithness Science Festival Fun Day (‘a day of fun and discovery’, it says on the poster) where the Archives will have a display on maps and mapping from our collections. (‘Archives’ and ‘fun’ aren’t words you usually see in the same sentence, but we’re holding a competition to win an Easter egg – and as scientists have discovered, nothing is more fun than chocolate.)
 Speaking of fun, Nigel has sent some pictures of his gansey sampler taken from patterns in Beth Brown Reinsel’s book, in which you can see Henry the bear posing in his ganseyette. (In fact, I’m hoping Henry will in future emulate the garden gnome from the French film Amelie and appear in a variety of pictures sent back from exotic locations – the Taj Mahal, the Eiffel Tower, Waverley Steps…)
Meanwhile, we scrape the snow off the daffodils and watch the seagulls being blown backwards by the wind, and patiently wait for summer. Or Christmas. Whichever comes first…
 Back view. For a change. It’s slowly beginning to dawn on me that if I wanted to work in a glamorous profession, perhaps archives may have been the wrong choice—at least as far as tv and Hollywood are concerned.
 When villainous Rutger Hauer shuts down Morgan Freeman’s special research department in Batman Begins, he transfers him to Archives—the implication being, this is a dead end for hope and ambition and rocket-propelled motorcycles.
Now I see in Warehouse 13 that when the special agents are looking for a cover, they tell the secret service they work in … Archives. And the secret service make fun of them for being “filing clerks”, and warn them of the dangers of paper cuts.
You see? Maybe I’m being paranoid, but I can’t help feeling there’s a lack of respect here. (And have you ever had a paper cut? I mean, those puppies can sting.) By a spooky coincidence I got a paper cut only last week, and bled over several old electoral rolls without realising it, leaving bloody thumbprints to make it look like citizens of Caithness in the 1950s were tortured for their names and addresses. (In fact, in the archives world, paper cuts are the equivalent of German duelling scars, worn as a badge of pride.)
  It’s officially spring so it’s snowing outside, a bitter north wind sweeping the flakes across the fields under heavy grey skies. It’s just a light dusting—think of icing sugar sieved over a chocolate cake—ah, damn, I just did and now my keyboard’s all wet—but it’s persistent. We went down to the harbour yesterday to watch the wind whip the waves in from the sea—not as spectacular as the great storm of a few months ago, but still pretty good, as the waves exploded against the harbour walls in showers of spray. Spring, eh?
I’ve been in a knitting mood this last week, and have made pretty good progress, for me. I finished one cuff, picked up the stitches around the other armhole and am now about 5 inches down the sleeve. This is partly the result of getting my eyes fixed, of course, because I can now see well enough to knit while watching television—for the last six months it’s been one or the other.
 The shawl, she is finished. May have to redo the centre. Quickly. But sometimes I’m just in the zone, and enjoy the knitting as an end in itself. I definitely blow hot and cold over the duration of a gansey, sometimes I can hardly be bothered to lift a needle—other times, like now, it’s fun. You just have to hang in there through the bad times. I suspect Michelangelo felt much the same over the four years he painted the Sistine Chapel; except in his case he had the motivation of a monetary reward for success, or the threat of the Inquisition and excommunication and/or eternal damnation if things didn’t work out—so no pressure, Mike, knock yourself out.
 I should finish the sleeve in the next fortnight or so, and then it’s scissor time. I’m still mulling over what patterns to try next, as I do towards the end of a project; whatever I finally decide on, you can bet it’ll be simple, after this one! I keep careful records as I go, so I know that I have exactly the same number of stitches on my needles at this point as for the other sleeve, and am knitting the exact same row of the pattern. You have no idea how reassuring this is!
I won’t get so much done this next week because I’m away in Edinburgh from Sunday to Tuesday, attending my last meeting of the Archives and Records Association Board as Vice Chair before stepping down (so I may not be able to respond to any comments for a few days).
Which makes me wonder—if other people get sent to Archives when they’re demoted, where do archivists get sent…?
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First of all, apologies to those who’ve tuned in to see open-heart surgery on the cardigan (actually I think of it as a sort of sex-change operation, from a gansey to a cardy—each requiring the steady use of a pair of scissors, if the cartoons I watched as a child are to be believed). But owing to one of those random acts of God that come along now and then and cause untold devastation—e.g., a meteorite strike, an earthquake, a Conservative government—I’m afraid we’re a little behind schedule.
