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 It’s the winter solstice, that ancient festival devised by our pagan ancestors to celebrate the fact that there’s only four more sleeps till Christmas. (Sunrise in Wick, 9.01; sunset 15.21.) Normally Margaret and I’d be heading south around now to spend the holidays with family in England; but this year, like everyone else, we’ll be hunkering down and having a quiet Christmas at home. I’m on leave until the New Year, with plans for a little reading, a little writing and a lot of knitting as I listen to all my Christmas CDs.
 Captured Christmas Baubles My navy gansey project ended just before the year did, and I must say adding cables to the yoke worked a treat. Next up—but that would be telling. We’ll just have to wait till next week.
In the meantime, we’d like to wish all our readers a very merry, very safe Christmas, and we’ll see you next week for the turning of the year.
Now it’s that time absolutely no one everyone’s been waiting for, the traditional Gansey Nation Christmas singalong. All together now…
We three kings at John o’Groats are
Wishing we hadn’t stopped for a jar,
Did too much drinking,
Now we are thinking,
Where did we park our car?
We tried to follow the star through the rain,
The sat nav packed up somewhere near Tain,
Now it’s increasingly clear,
Bethlehem’s nowhere near,
And Balthazar’s drunk the champagne.
Oh, star of wonder, star of light,
It’s far too cloudy to see you tonight,
So Caspar eats a
Takeaway pizza
While Melchior hopes for a bite.
 We lost the frankincense and myrrh,
And spent the gold on some hookers* at Bower,
Moving at speed,
We stocked up on weed,
Now everything’s just a blur.
The evening quickly got in full swing,
Ended up in a mass Highland fling,
We got too merry
And missed the ferry,
Now we’re stuck here till spring.
Oh, star of wonder, star of light,
Star that’s always just out of sight,
Oh we of little faith,
Here in the Ness of Caith,
Grant us our wish tonight…
- Look, we signed up a couple of chaps to play in the number 2 position in the Nazareth and Judea Combined Rugby Union Team, all right…?
 On Saturday Margaret and I strapped on our wellies and made for Dunbeath, about half an hour’s drive south of Wick, to visit Graeme Bethune at his farm of Ballachly. You may possibly remember that back in 2016—I’m now starting to add the suffix “BC” to historic dates, which stands for “Before Covid”—I knit a gansey for Graeme’s father George. The Bethunes have lived in Dunbeath for almost two centuries, and a photograph of Graeme’s great-grandfather in his gansey appears on page 37 of the Moray Firth Gansey Project book, Fishing for Ganseys. So there’s history there.
 Expectant Faces Graeme is a sheep farmer who trades as Caithness Yarns, and the reason for our visit was his recent foray into gansey yarn. But first we met his sheep, or “sheepies” as I shall now think of them, some of them in an open barn, others out in the fields. Even on a cold, wet, December afternoon, with bands of rain blowing in from the ocean on an icy wind, it’s a beautiful location: the fields sloping down to Dunbeath Strath, the river full and fast-flowing at this time of year, and the farther banks rising to gently sloping wooded hills, all exposed beneath the wide, sweeping Caithness skies. There are, you feel, worse places to be a sheep. The main breeds are North Country Cheviot and the smaller, horned Castlemilk Moorit, all traditional to the area. Graeme has adopted an ethical approach to his farming—as he says, his main crop is wool, and all aspects of oviculture on the farm, especially grazing, are designed to improve the quality of the fleece.
 Treat time for the Castlemilk Moorits Graeme’s first gansey yarn has been a traditional grey-black worsted, and he’s about to add an Ecru Cheviot and a Cheviot and Castlemilk Moorit blend to his range—what I think of as “cream” and “light brown”. Of course, his yarn isn’t cheap; but sometimes you really do get what you pay for, and what you’re paying for here is a commitment to quality and animal welfare. Like many farmers Graeme’s been hit hard this year, with the cancellation of so many wool festivals and shows where he would normally be able to sell his yarn and tell his story. It’s a good yarn and an important story, and one that deserves our support. So even if you’re not in the market for yarn just now, can I ask you please to spread the word? And when the world eventually emerges from hibernation, keep an eye out for Graeme at the next wool festival; and for the splendid yarn from his sheepies.
 Shepherd & Sheep Meanwhile, my current gansey is approaching the finishing line. The first sleeve is completed, and I’m about a third of the way down the other. (This is Wendy’s “A” dye lot, some of the last available, and I’m not pleased to note that I might run out before the cuff—the first time this has happened. Harrumph.) Will I finish it this week? To quote the famously equivocal President of the Neutral Planet from Futurama: “All I know is, my gut says maybe…”
 It’s December, and the days are getting shorter—by which I mean that sunrise happens later every day (8.45 am today), while the dial on the old sunset-o-meter will hover around 3.20 pm for the next month or so. I assume there’s a good reason for this, probably something to do with physics or whatnot, but it catches me out every year. It’s something of a moot point up here in Caithness anyway, “hours of daylight” being something that happens to other people. I tried to change my phone settings to reduce the brightness of the screen at night and was disconcerted to hear Siri cry despairingly, “How on earth am I supposed to tell?“, before muttering something about Cornwall being nice this time of year and what time did the pubs open.
Well, thanks to the miracle of electricity—a miracle in the sense that I don’t really understand it, despite numerous electricians patiently explaining to me why it doesn’t leak out of the sockets if you leave the switch on—I have enough light to knit by. Just. And as I’m still trying to rest my ankle as much as possible, I have the means, motive and opportunity to clock up a few rows. So I’m well advanced on the first sleeve and should finish it this week, when the end will definitely be in sight. By the way, I made the two pattern bands on the sleeve slightly narrower than their counterparts on the body, otherwise they’d have reached further down the sleeve than I like.
 Winter Sunset In parish notices, Judit has lapped all us once again and has finished another gansey: this very attractive reddish number. It’s the classic Eddystone lighthouse pattern from Cornwall, and I particularly like that the intended recipient is a sailor: how thoughtful is that for a Christmas gift? It’s another triumph for Judit, many congratulations again to her, and a reminder of all the cracking patterns hidden away in the books, just waiting to be unleashed and turned into ganseys.
 Distant Rainbow Now, winter is the season for ghost stories, and I had a dream about ghosts the other night. Not that my ghosts were the scary kind; in fact they were just an ordinary family—mum, dad and two kids. Now I think of it, they were obviously inspired by some old photos from the nuclear industry I’d been looking at (I’m trying very hard not to use the phrase “nuclear family” here, but—well, too late). Anyway, I met them in a friend’s house, and they explained that ghosts like staying in people’s houses after the owners have gone to bed, “otherwise it seems such a waste”. They were particularly pleased with internet television, because it meant they could watch programmes on catch up.
 St Fergus Church I bade them good night and walked home, and when I got inside I was surprised to find them in my own living room. “How did you get here so quickly?” I asked. They told me that they used to have to travel on the wind, like the tormented spirits in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol; but now they used electricity cables, which was so much faster. The only thing that worried them, they said, was the change to wifi, because they couldn’t travel wirelessly. At which point I woke up. I honestly don’t know what to make of it. On the one hand, it wasn’t the kind of dream that leaves you too traumatised to risk going to sleep again—I’ve had quite enough of those, thank you very much—on the other hand, I can’t help feeling a touch shortchanged if the movie of my life has the tagline, “I can see dead people… mostly they watch tv…”
“ Life”, Philip Larkin wrote in one of his sunnier moods, “is mostly boredom, then fear”; then age, “and then the only end of age”. (You can see in retrospect why he had to quit his job writing jokes for Christmas crackers.) But I can’t help thinking, hold hard, Phil old chum, you’ve missed a step, much as I did so spectacularly last week. You left out what I now think of as the “warranty expired” stage of life. The part where a hitherto unnoticed light on your body’s dashboard has started flashing, and you’re frantically leafing through the manual to find out if you really need an oil change before Monday.
 Fishing net lines Well, my sprained ankle is on the mend (and many thanks for all the good wishes received on and offline) and my foot no longer looks quite so much like something you’d see sticking out from under a sheet in a morgue. It still hurts, but that’s mostly the bruising. I’ve been resting it as much as possible, working from home a couple of days; yet still managed to—and you’ll laugh when you read this—strain my back as I leant to pick a laptop off the floor. (Lift with your legs, people, not your seventh vertebra!) As a result my feet seem to have receded, well beyond the reach of my arms; my current technique for donning socks is to hop desperately on the good foot while vaguely waving a sock in the general direction of my toes, and hope the two connect at some point. I stagger about like an actor rehearsing Richard III, or an athlete limbering up for the 100-metre lurch. It’s times like these I think, if I had a time machine, I’d go back to the moment the first fish crawled onto land; and quietly pick the little chap up, turn him round, drop him back in the water and quietly advise him not to bother…
 Curlew on the rocks Sprained ankle notwithstanding, this is the moment when the gansey suddenly comes together: the back and front are finished, the shoulders joined with a 3-needle bind-off, and the collar begun. All that remains are the sleeves; I may even get my wish and finish it by Christmas. I do like these simple uniform pattern bands, they always remind me of islamic geometric patterns—well, that and a cheese grater; but then I always said ganseys were practical garments.
F inally this week, it’s time for the Bookseller/ Diagram prize for the year’s oddest book title. Regular readers will be aware that this is a source of endless delight—after all, who can forget 1978’s wonderful Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice, or 2003’s The Big Book of Lesbian Horse Stories? The winner this year was an academic work on the use of metaphor by an indigenous tribe in Timor (sensitive readers look away now), A Dog Pissing at the Edge of a Path. The only problem I have with it is that it feels too deliberately quirky to win the award, too knowing. I always feel the best ones are inadvertently odd, like this year’s runners-up, Introducing the Medieval Ass and Classical Antiquity in Heavy Metal Music. Alas, I feel the glory days of odd titles are behind us; for who can hope to match the majesty of 1996’s Greek Rural Postmen and Their Cancellation Numbers, or 1995’s Reusing Old Graves…?
 It’s about thirty years since I last sprained my ankle so this week, in a spirit of scientific enquiry, I decided to find out if it hurt as much as I remembered. (Spoiler alert: it did.) I was coming downstairs; near the bottom I missed a step, skidded over two more and slammed down hard at ground level; at the same time clutching desperately for the banister, so my body twisted in one plane while my foot remained anchored in another. For a few moments my whole lower body seemed to ring like a bell with the shock. I remember reading years ago that Roman forts were surrounded by a steep-sided ditch with a small groove running along at the bottom like a drain; the idea being that if your enemy fell into the ditch, their foot might slip into the groove and twist, snap, or sprain—just the sort of sneaky trick you’d expect from a people whose nouns take five declensions—and I thought, ah, okay, now I get it.
 Skeletal remains of flowers I balanced against a handy radiator and manipulated my foot to make sure nothing was broken, like an ex-ballet dancer addicted to macaroni cheese pies limbering up at the barre. Nothing was broken, but I began to feel unpleasantly faint. A minute later I was flat on my back, more or less unplugged from the rest of the world. I didn’t quite black out, though I’d have been hard pressed to, say, name all the various members of Fairport Convention after 1969. I sweated immoderately, too, all the way through assorted over- and underclothing, as well as the carpet; if we had a cellar, I expect I’d have dripped in there too. As an experience I can’t honestly say I recommend it. And yet, now the shock is over, considered as a sprain it’s not too bad: bit of swelling, bit of pain, lots of bruises (fascinating to observe them slowly spread all the way to my toenails—I expect a time-lapse montage would look like a rather disappointing cuttlefish mating display). It could on the whole, I feel, be worse.
 Mid-day shadows on Williamson Street Still, having to rest one’s ankle and keep it elevated is the perfect excuse to sit and knit. I’ve finished the back of the gansey and have set up base camp on the front. It’s early days, but so far my cunning wheeze of adding cables to prevent “yoke creep” seems to be paying off. Though it was, I realise, a schoolboy error to start a project in navy in the depths of winter, suckered in as I was by a solitary day of sunshine. Last week I dropped a stitch which slipped a few rows down. By the time I’d fixed it I somehow managed to end up with the wrong side facing and had knit the best part of a row backwards before I noticed. Still, I’m past the halfway point, and shall soldier on.
 Odd One Out Finally, to cheer ourselves up, let me end with a Scottish joke—an old one, but it was new to me and made me lol, as young people say nowadays, which adds a whole new meaning to lolling about. An English professor was invited to give a talk at a Scottish university. He thought, I’ll teach them about nationalism, and finished his talk with the words, “I was born an Englishman, I have lived as an Englishman and I will die an Englishman”. Whereupon a voice from the back called out, “God man, have you nae ambition…?”
Happy Thanksgiving everyone!
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It’s the winter solstice, that ancient festival devised by our pagan ancestors to celebrate the fact that there’s only four more sleeps till Christmas. (Sunrise in Wick, 9.01; sunset 15.21.) Normally Margaret and I’d be heading south around now to spend the holidays with family in England; but this year, like everyone else, we’ll be hunkering down and having a quiet Christmas at home. I’m on leave until the New Year, with plans for a little reading, a little writing and a lot of knitting as I listen to all my Christmas CDs.
We lost the frankincense and myrrh,
