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 I’m usually quite fond of tempting Fate – in small things, I mean, where it doesn’t really matter if Fate decides to teach me a jolly good lesson. I’ve learned that my rational self is little more than skin deep, and I’m actually rather superstitious: bad things do come in threes, I don’t walk under ladders if I can help it, and I touch wood for luck, even becoming mildly uneasy if there’s none to hand. Caithness fishermen wouldn’t wear anything green, it was bad luck, and by an amazing coincidence I don’t have a green gansey in my collection.
 Flag Irises after the rain So when I wrote last week about how dry it’s been, I thought I knew exactly what I was doing. And sure enough, Fate heard me, and on Wednesday it rained. On paper the plan worked. But you can’t really trick Fate, who decided to pay me back and dump an entire month’s rainfall on us in an hour. The light became crepuscular, as though God needed to put another shilling in the meter, and 58mm of water fell – that’s 2.25 inches in old money. Lord, but it was wet! Rain cascaded off the rooftops in torrents, potholes turned into lochs, and the centre of Wick actually flooded. Thunder boomed and rolled like an artillery barrage, with cracks of lightning loud enough to make you spill your coffee.
 It all got a bit Biblical – at one point I noticed various sheep and crows in the field opposite lining up two by two, in case I decided to build an Ark – but then after an hour it stopped as suddenly as someone had flipped a switch, the point being made. The sun came out again. A couple of hours later the ground was back to bone dry. And now we really could do with some more rain. But I’m not going to be the one to say it, not this time: after all, I wouldn’t want to tempt Fate…
 Boats decked out for RNLI Lifeboat Day TECHNICAL STUFF
This week I’ve finished the front, joined the shoulders, knitted the collar and started the first sleeve. It sounds like a lot but really these are the quick wins, the reward for persevering with the long haul up the body, where things come together in a rush and the gansey starts to take its proper shape. The sleeves will be the exact same pattern as the body, but with a diamond panel at the centre (I’m going to continue the pattern all the way to the cuffs on this one, just because). My plan is to get the gansey finished by the end of July. We’ll see.
 In Twelfth Night, Feste, an experienced weather forecaster, declares that “The rain it raineth every day”. But while this is usually a pretty fair description of Caithness in early summer, right now the ground’s parched. It hasn’t rained for weeks, not that proper, solid, god-fearing presbyterian rain where it just falls all day dripping from the eaves and cascading from the trees in miniature waterfalls. I mean, the ground up here’s supposed to be soft: I’m used to walking across grassy fields in Caithness in squidgy squelches, the water sometimes rising to my ankles. These days I just bounce. It’s as if we’d moved to California and I hadn’t noticed
 We went up to Duncansby Stacks, those great triangular sea stacks rising up beside the cliffs like God’s Toblerone. The walk over the headland is usually pretty squishy, as though the grass isn’t anchored to earth but just floats on the water table like plankton. I keep expecting to see people roped together in case someone is sucked under in a Grimpen Mire sort of way. Not this time. The soil was dusty, watercourses you normally have to jump over were all dried up, and the sheep followed us around in hopes of catching stray drops of sweat.
 Sea thrift carpeting the shore TS Eliot probably had us in mind when he wrote, “Here is no water but only rock/ Rock and no water and the sandy road/ The road winding above among the mountains/ Which are mountains of rock without water”. Except for the rock, the sand, and the mountains, and the roads having potholes you could lose a battleship in, it’s an almost exact portrait of Caithness. But surely the dry spell can’t last for ever—this is Scotland, after all—and I see some rain is in the forecast. Till then, as Feste would say, the sun it shineth every day…
 A glimmer of light in the shadow TECHNICAL STUFF
As you will see, I’ve almost finished the front of the body. One shoulder is complete and has been joined to its counterpart at the back. (I find it easier to join the first shoulder as it is completed, rather than put it on a holder until both are ready to be joined.) The other has almost reached the shoulder strap.
The indented neckline is achieved by decreasing every other row on the inside, or neck edge. This indent is over 28 rows, so a decrease every second row means 14 decreases: so, each shoulder needle starts with an extra 14 stitches on it taken from the centre. These 14 stitches are decreased away over 28 rows, so that by the shoulder straps there will be the same number of stitches as the back (if that makes sense) And the centre needles lose 14 + 14 stitches, of course, to compensate. I find this makes a nice, rounded neckline. I usually also knit the first stitch of the decrease row, and then do the decrease on the next two: because that first stitch “disappears” when it is picked up during the foundation row of the collar, you’re left with the nicely delineated angled decrease stitches making a V to either side.
 Enjoying the view from the Trinkie
 If you travel north from Wick as far as Castletown, about 14 miles, then turn east towards John o’Groats, you come to a little turning on the left just before the Castle of Mey, signposted to Harrow. The single-track road points due north again for maybe a mile, taking you through flat fields dotted with farms and houses, before forking again: left for the hamlet of Skarfskerry (Old Norse for “cormorants’ rock”; the Vikings evidently running out of names at this stage) and right to the harbour. The harbour road cuts through some cliffs (Harrow Braes), over a boneshaker of a cattle grid, and then it’s just you and the open ocean.
 Despite being renovated back in 1979 and officially reopened by Jimmy Page, lead guitarist with Led Zeppelin (whose Caithness-inspired hits include “Whole Lotta Fish”, “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You Some Herring”, and of course, “Stairway to Harrow”) a solitary lobster boat, looking rather sorry for itself marooned at low tide, is all the industry that remains. But when we visited the other day, it was home to a colony of seals, lumpen and awkward by land and so graceful in the water, who crossed the bay to check us out before retiring in disgust when they discovered we hadn’t brought any fish. Everything goes better with seals.
 Sprucing up the sheds by Wick Harbour And yes, like so many Caithness harbours, this one has seen better days. But you’d be wrong if you thought it was the decline of the fishing that was behind it, despite the vaulted ice house cut into the cliffs: no, Harrow harbour was built by the earl of Caithness back in the day to take advantage of the local flagstone industry. The stones were cut by hand originally, which sounds like fun, later by a steam-powered saw in one of the tumbledown sheds on the high ground overlooking the sea, and then loaded onto ships which sailed out into the wild grey yonder. It’s impossible not to stand on the harbour flagstones and think of all the people who have come and gone, come and gone, leaving just broken monuments behind, and wonder where that leaves us; and how much it matters, if at all.
 Waves near South Head, Wick TECHNICAL STUFF
First of all, in parish notices, Sigrid has sent us pictures of another stunning cardigan in ice blue, which she appropriately calls “Hoofprint, or The Sea”. The pattern takes its inspirations from Di Gilpin’s book, and features hoofprints, waves, ropes, starfish and anchors, all associated with the sea (as so many gansey patterns are, of course). Many congratulations to Sigrid, who is setting quite a high bar here, and many thanks to her for sharing.
My own gansey project has seen the back finished, with shoulder straps of 12 rows rig ‘n’ fur on either side. Without wishing to appear cocky, I am quietly smug in a terribly British understated sort of way at getting the diamonds to finish at just the right length.
 Muckle Skerry from Duncansby Head
 I was delighted to learn this week that medieval scribes believed in a demon called Titivillus, whose job it was to introduce errors into their work. So if you made a mistake copying a manuscript, you could simply blame it on him. (“I say, Brother Eczema, you’ve copied antidisestablishmentarianism wrong again!” “It wasn’t me, Brother Hashbrown, honest, it must have been Titivillus, the wee imp”.) Whereas the Jackson Five didn’t blame it on the sunshine, the moonlight, or the good times, but blamed it on the boogie, we know who was really responsible.
And when you think about it, it makes a lot of sense. I used to think my guardian angel was slacking on the job, I make so many silly errors; little did I realise they were Titivillus’s doing. (I’d like to say that Titivillus is the origin of the modern slang phrase for when things go wrong, that they’ve gone “Tit’s up”, but alas that’s not true. The world can be a bit disappointing sometimes.)
Oystercatchers In his spare time Titivillus also collected idle chat during church services, as well as instances of the minister skipping or mispronouncing words. These he put in a sack and took down to hell, ready to be used in evidence at the day of reckoning; they were, he said, when asked about it one day, “stolen from God” – at which point I think back with a twinge of unease to my schooldays and the larks we young scamps got up to when we should’ve been attending to morning service.
Titivillus was regarded as the patron demon of scribes, but he’s pretty much out of a job now that we’ve migrated to computers and keyboards. Still, the devil finds work for idle hands, and I these days I expect he’s gainfully employed messing around with the autocorrect function on my phone and creating paper jams on the work photocopier.
 Blooming grasses TECHNICAL STUFF
Given the number of mistakes I’ve made in my knitting recently, each of which had to be patiently corrected by Tech Support (i.e., Margaret), I think Titivillus must’ve been perched by my elbow, dropping stitches, turning knits into purls, and casting purls before swine. Still, despite his best endeavours I’m about three-quarters up the back. The gussets were increased by two stitches every four rows until they were 17 stitches wide, or two inches, when they were put on holders and I divided for front and back.
I should finish the back this week, and then we’ll do it all again for the front; unless of course it turns out that the devil, as the saying goes, really is in the detail…
The Trinkie on a bonny day
 “I desired dragons with a profound desire. Of course, I in my timid body did not wish to have them in the neighbourhood. But the world that contained even the imagination of Fáfnir was richer and more beautiful, at whatever the cost of peril.” The words of JRR Tolkien, of course, and in The Hobbit he created arguably the greatest dragon in all literature, Smaug the Tremendous, Chiefest and Greatest of Calamities (though The Hobbit is set in a time before Brexit, otherwise Smaug would only be the second Chiefest).
 I find people can be divided into two camps: those who yearn in their secret hearts for dragons to be real, and those who see them primarily as allegories. In the former camp are most writers and readers of fantasy fiction, people who had their imaginative horizons enlarged by reading Tolkien and Beowulf and the Viking Sagas and who want more. In the other camp—well, I can’t tell you how disappointed I was to discover that Wagner had written a fantasy opera cycle with dwarves and dragons and magic rings, but that when it’s staged these days, they replace the dragon with something Freudian to symbolise the hero’s repressed Oedipus-complex or something (personally I think I’d be more afraid of a dragon). We live in a disappointingly prosaic age.
 Cliff-clinging wildflowers Dragons of course are majestic, mighty, and cunning. They can unbalance any work of fiction like nuclear weapons in a cold war thriller, which is why they have to be kept offstage for most of the action. In the tales of old they were too powerful to defeat in single combat—I still treasure an old cartoon where two dragons are talking and one describes his fondness for “tinned food”, i.e., a knight roasted in his armour—and even Beowulf is mortally wounded fighting his. So heroes had to be sneaky. In the Sagas Fáfnir was killed when Sigurd hid in a trench and stabbed him in the belly as he walked over him (this is the origin of Tolkien giving Smaug a weak spot in his chest). I read of one Welsh dragon that was killed when it was perched on top of a church and its tail was nailed to the spire so that it couldn’t fly away.
 Nappin’ in the sunshine Like Tolkien, I too desired dragons with a profound desire. And I’ve not altogether given up hope: legend has it that there’s still a dragon sleeping in Radnor Forest, surrounded by five churches named after St Michael the Archangel, who fought the Dragon of Revelation. If any of the churches that surround it are ever destroyed the dragon will wake up. Legend doesn’t say what the dragon will do then; if it’s anything like me it’ll just reset its alarm and go back to sleep. But if anything happens to any of those churches, I’ll be there. On the chance, you know, just on the chance…
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I’m usually quite fond of tempting Fate – in small things, I mean, where it doesn’t really matter if Fate decides to teach me a jolly good lesson. I’ve learned that my rational self is little more than skin deep, and I’m actually rather superstitious: bad things do come in threes, I don’t walk under ladders if I can help it, and I touch wood for luck, even becoming mildly uneasy if there’s none to hand. Caithness fishermen wouldn’t wear anything green, it was bad luck, and by an amazing coincidence I don’t have a green gansey in my collection.
It all got a bit Biblical – at one point I noticed various sheep and crows in the field opposite lining up two by two, in case I decided to build an Ark – but then after an hour it stopped as suddenly as someone had flipped a switch, the point being made. The sun came out again. A couple of hours later the ground was back to bone dry. And now we really could do with some more rain. But I’m not going to be the one to say it, not this time: after all, I wouldn’t want to tempt Fate…
