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 We’ve paid off mortgages before, but as far as my fading recall can tell, only when we’ve moved house. Late last week, having decided it was a Good Idea, I phoned the building society for a redemption figure. It was about what I’d expected, and the next day the payment was set up to redeem the mortgage on Tuesday. The mortgage was originally due to be repaid when Gordon retired, in just under two years. I reasoned, Gordon is effectively retired now, so I may as well pay it off and reduce monthly outgoings.
 Stormy Shore It should be a joyful occasion, but it felt like just another transaction. Maybe it will sink in when the paperwork is completed. But I did my best to celebrate: I bought an iron. I’d been looking at it for months, watching it become unavailable, then available, then the price spooling up and down like a yo-yo. The old one, bought in 1985, gave up the ghost last summer. This sturdy old iron was a good hefty weight for pressing seams. Of course, I don’t really need a new iron – the backlog of Gordon’s shirts, which were about the only things ironed regularly – were ironed at the end of last year. Those shirts hung on a door for months, glaring at me as I went up and down the stairs to my office. I had to iron them, it just wasn’t right to hang them in the wardrobe unironed. And now, to justify the purchase of the new iron, I’ll have to carve time to sew out of my flabby schedule.
 St Fergus at end of day And what exactly is a ‘mortgage’? Where does that strange word come from? The OED, always a go-to source, says it comes from Middle French – ‘mort’ + ‘gage’, or ‘dead pledge’. The explanation gets a bit complicated after that; the concept seems to be that the loan (pledge) is ‘dead’ after it’s been paid off. But I’m happy enough to know that it came from French.
 Looking South from The Trinkie There has been better progress on the gansey this week. I was able to do a good tranche of knitting on Saturday afternoon, when I visited a friend. We sat in the sun lounge listening to music and knitting. I’d taken the gansey along, just in case. It was windy and cold, not a great day to wander the muddy back lanes of Caithness. But even with the chilly weather, I was thankful. Looking through photos yesterday, I saw that last year at this time there was snow and ice on the ground. We were supervised in our knitting by the wise old cat Solomon. Though I’m sure he must have been a young, silly, and carefree kitten in his earlier years, chasing leaves around the garden and being the terror of the bird population. Now he watches them from the comfort of his favourite chair in the sun, cursing them for their flightiness.
Which reminds me of a bit of trivia I heard the other evening: a collective noun for kittens is ‘kindle’. It comes from Middle English, and was apparently revived in the 20th C, according to the OED.
 It’s been more of a rollercoaster week than some. This week’s ‘potholes’ were mostly aural. Over the past three months, I’ve listened to the radio more. We’ve always been regular listeners, mostly the classical music stations. It would wake us up gently in the morning and send us off to sleep in the evening. Now, I’m tuning in more frequently, mostly to keep me company while I’m brushing my teeth or cooking or another household task. But generally, most of the listening is done while I sit in bed of a morning, slowly gathering speed to start the day.
 Snowdrops on a bank Monday’s aural pothole was the CanCan, from Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld. I am sure you all know the tune. Just pause, for a moment, to visualise it being sung by dancing cartoon cats – meow, meow meow meow meow, meow meow meow-meow meow-meow . . . . This is the image that would appear in our heads whenever we heard it. It comes from an episode of the cartoon series Futurama, where alien talking cats take over the world by feline cuteness in order to reverse the earth’s spin. The power thus generated would cause their stationary home planet to resume its rotation. This chorus line of singing, dancing cats never failed to amuse Gordon; it was one of his favourite scenes from the series.
Monday also brought a minor pothole with ‘Never Weather-beaten Sail’, an Elizabethan piece with a beautiful tune and mournful words. It’s not a tune I ever associated with Gordon; its sadness is what was affecting.
 The Bremner Monument Last Sunday and Thursday mornings had the same pothole, in slightly different forms. Sunday was a choral version of John Dowland’s Frog Galliard, and Thursday’s was the version on lute, also known as The Earl of Essex Galliard. I made it through the lute version, the choral version I had to mute, because of the words:
Now, O now, I needs must part,
Parting though I absent mourn.
Absence can no joy impart:
Joy once fled cannot return.
While I live I needs must love,
Love lives not when Hope is gone.
Now at last Despair doth prove,
Love divided loveth none.
The rest of the verses are here.
Whirl of Grasses In gansey news, there are now just over 7 inches done above the welt. The gusset starts at 12 inches, so it’ll be a few weeks yet. Following suggestions in the comments last week, I’ve learned the Norwegian purl, which I’ve known of for some years but hadn’t yet learnt. Alas, it’s not for me. There’s too much gymnastic wiggling of the needles and then catching the dpns in the work.
Finally, I have totted up all the blog donations over the past three months, so thank you very much for your generous support. With your donations, and those collected at the Service and donated privately, I will be able to give generous donations to the Johnston Collection of the Wick Heritage Society and Cancer Research UK. Many thanks again. You’re the best.
 Curtains. Until the other day, they were not a nemesis.
As a bit of background, when we new windows were installed last summer, the lounge curtains had to come down. I planned to get them cleaned or, even, possibly, to get new curtains altogether. The curtains had been very nice curtains once, but after multiple owners (they came with the house), they had seen better days. After being taken down, they were piled on the floor, then pushed into a corner, and finally taken to the dry cleaners in the autumn. It was about three weeks before they were ready, due to their size and weight. By this time, Gordon had gone into hospital. Expecting he’d be back home by Christmas, I thought how nice it would be if the curtains were up when he came home. They would have to come down again when the painter came to paint the bare wood surrounding the new windows, but I thought it was worth the effort. But of course, Gordon never did come home from hospital, so the curtains didn’t go up.
 View from the end of the path At the end of January, the painter started work, and is now nearly finished. The lounge was finished on Friday, and we re-installed the new, uber-sturdy curtain rail. Saturday afternoon I rehung the drapes, using the painter’s stepladder, which he had kindly left for my use. Being both taller, sturdier, and less wobbly than mine, it made the task easier. The curtains still don’t look the best, due to missing curtain hooks, so there are unexpected bulges. But they slide silkily smoothly on the new curtain rail, compared to the old plastic curtain rail, which was not really up to scratch for supporting big heavy curtains.
 More snowdrops As I was descended the ladder, I remembered my initial intentions for hanging the curtains, and understandably it made me very sad indeed – that Gordon wouldn’t be here to enjoy the new blinds in the lounge, nor the newly hung curtains, nor the new windows, nor the immaculate paintwork. He had been quite pleased with the blinds, which he’d specifically requested. The lounge faces south, and at certain times of year the sun is blinding. With his eyesight difficulties, the blinds were the perfect solution. So now when I go into the lounge, I look at the windows, and think how Gordon would have appreciated and enjoyed the rather swish combination of new windows, freshly painted surrounds, new blinds and cleaned and rehung curtains.
 Ovine Indecision The gansey is coming along, and every week there’s a better sense of the glory of this dark pink shade. The body is only a few inches longer than last week, but even so the length above the ribbing is nearly halfway done. I expect progress to slow significantly when I get to the yoke and start the stitch pattern. Although I knit more quickly than Gordon – using the continental style – I am knitting less in terms of time. But one advantage of doing miles of plain knitting is that my continental knitting is getting more efficient, so I’m going even faster. Hopefully this will carriy over into the stitch pattern, where maybe I can get faster at purling too.
 It was St Valentine’s Day this past week, a day for pairs. This of course can create potholes in the path of those un-paired or de-paired. When I entered the local supermarket on Tuesday morning, I was as mentally ready for it as I could be. I’d seen the red and pink displays in previous weeks, lurking in wait just inside the front doors. There was still a twinge, although we never really ‘celebrated’ St Valentine’s day – perhaps we’d buy ourselves a small treat, like a book or a craft item. It was simply a reminder of a pairing that had been lost, a de-pair-ment.
 Storm-tossed Further into the store, the next eye-catching display was for Easter – chocolate bunnies, creme eggs, chocolate chicks . . . and Easter Eggs. Little ones in little bags, medium ones with a surprise inside, big hollow ones with extra chocolates. It caught me unprepared. Gordon always wanted a big chocolate egg for Easter, and it was mandatory that I have one too. After a few deep breaths and wiping tears away, I passed by – there was nothing on this aisle I needed.The gansey is coming on, a bit more slowly this week.
‘Ocean currents’. Multiple exposure of foam in the river While I knit, I’ve been listening to talking books, keeping up our custom of listening to one of an evening. The current audiobook is a history of the medieval world. So far it’s covered Europe and Asia, starting with the end of the Roman Empire. The author has elegantly aligned the timelines of the various kingdoms and cultures of Britain, Scandinavia, continental Europe, the Byzantine Empire, the Middle East, and North Africa, eastward to China, India, Korea, and Japan, providing a concurrent view of events. It’s very dry at times, but one little story stood out.
 Back yard snowdrops During the reign of Charlemagne (768-814), King Offa, he of Offa’s Dyke, ruled the kingdom of Mercia in Britain, whose kingdom ranged from the Welsh Marches in the West to the East Anglian coast, from the Humber in the north to the Sussex coast. Late in his reign, he had some gold coins minted. On one side there are mysterious symbols. On the other side, it says ‘Offa Rex’ surrounded by a design – but if you rotate it 180°, it reads ‘There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his prophet’.
 Offa’s dinar. (c) British Museum What happened here? The author Susan Wise Bauer surmises that due to a lessening in political tensions between the Abbasid Caliphate, based in Baghdad, and their neighbours to the north on the shores of the Caspian Sea, Arab traders were able to travel north safely. These merchants took their coins with them, which were stamped with ‘There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his prophet’, in Arabic script. This little coin then travelled north through eastern Europe to the Baltic Sea, and thence westward, eventually coming into the hands of King Offa’s silversmith, who copied the linear designs from the Arabic coin onto the Christian coin of King Offa. And because the silversmith didn’t realise the pattern was a script, he engraved the design on the die upside down.
And finally, last week I forgot to include a pic of the very happy recipient of the last gansey:
I was listening to the radio the other day – a classical music station from somewhere in the world is playing at various times of the day – and I heard a word I’ve wondered about for quite a long time. Since I was in university in fact. The word is ‘branle’, which refers to a line or circle dance common in Renaissance Europe, or the music written for it. In English, it is commonly pronounced ‘brawl’. Which has always set me to wondering – is it actually related to the English word ‘brawl’?
A bit of digging on the internet has revealed some clues. The original word – branle – comes from the French verb branler, to shake or brandish. In English, as a verb it came to mean ‘To agitate, toss about, bandy’ but wasn’t frequently used. It was more often used as a noun, referring to the dance. There are instances of the noun also being used to mean ‘Wavering, agitation, (?) confusion’.
 A Walk in the Snow How does this relate to ‘brawl’, which would seem to have no connection to a dance from the courts of Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries? The Oxford English Dictionary tells us that one meaning of the word is possibly from the French ‘branler’, to move from side to side., and indeed one of the definitions of ‘brawl’ is ‘a particular pace or movement in dancing’. This shows that from the late 16th to mid 19th centuries ‘brawl’ and ‘branle’ can mean the same thing.
Yet if you dig a bit further, the earliest uses of ‘brawl’ in English appear in the 1400s, with pretty much the same meaning it has today, of ‘to quarrel noisily’ or ‘to make a disturbance’. The word has an uncertain origin.
So, during a certain period of the English language, ‘brawl’ and ‘branle’ were synonymous, but at the same time ‘brawl’ could also have its other meaning of quarrel or disturbance. But it isn’t farfetched to surmise that the meanings mingled somewhere in the mists of time, as ‘to make a disturbance’ and ‘to agitate’ are not too distant in meaning.
As keen observers will see, the gansey has reached that awkward toddler stage of tottering on its feet, unsure of how long it will be able to stand upright before falling down plump on its backside. The branle of the ribbing is complete, wavering back and forth on the ribbing, knit two steps forward then purl two steps back. The colour revealing its beauty now there is a good chunk of it – a deep soft hue of pinky-red that is neither girlishly pink nor brashly red.
 Two Ravens The weather, too, has been leading us a merry dance. Here in Wick, we had a coating of an inch; further north in Thurso there was more, and Orkney had up to eight inches. On the days without snow, there were gale force winds. But the aconites and snowdrops are now blooming with abandon, and other plants are peeking through the soil. Caithness is so ready for spring.
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We’ve paid off mortgages before, but as far as my fading recall can tell, only when we’ve moved house. Late last week, having decided it was a Good Idea, I phoned the building society for a redemption figure. It was about what I’d expected, and the next day the payment was set up to redeem the mortgage on Tuesday. The mortgage was originally due to be repaid when Gordon retired, in just under two years. I reasoned, Gordon is effectively retired now, so I may as well pay it off and reduce monthly outgoings.
