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 I’m writing this with my feet in a basin of hot water, a mustard poultice wrapped around my head, bathed in such a quantity of steam and towels I look like Lawrence of Arabia climbing into a Turkish bath. For alas! my cold has returned. In fact, we’re both suffering just now. The neighbours have told us to paint a large cross on the door and only come out when—or if—we survive.
I may say, however, and without hyperbole, that like Pheidippides, who ran 26 miles to bring the news of the victory over the Persians at Marathon to Athens and then expired, I managed to last long enough to complete the gansey before succumbing to my cold. And here it is.
 Blocking has opened up the trellis panels so you can see the moss stitches underneath, and I must say this makes for a very pleasing combination of patterns, the patterns themselves showing nicely through the colour of the yarn. I’m not saying I’d be in a hurry to knit it again anytime soon, but I’m glad I did: it’s very effective.
The past, they say, is another country. In this case it turned out to be another county, viz., Sutherland. We visited the ruined broch of Cârn Liath the other day, a stony mound on an exposed stretch of the Moray Firth south of Brora. It was a cold, grey, blustery day with rain in the air (or “spring” as we like to call it), and I must admit I didn’t have high hopes—it lies beside the A9 and I’d driven past it any number of times, just another lump in a landscape of lumps.
 Cârn Liath Well, I couldn’t have been more wrong: it was dark, brooding, full of Iron Age shadows and atmosphere. Although the roof and most of the walls have gone—it now stands 12 feet high, but once was three times as tall—you can still go inside and get a feel for what it was like. Brochs are circular towers with two concentric walls and a space between them for stairs, and would once have had several levels divided by wooden floors. Standing at ground level in the central space, enclosed by the massive stone walls, even open to the sky as this was, you felt cut off, enclosed, secure.
 Cârn Liath stairwell, seen at right in above pic The lintels and ceilings are all very low, the guard chambers beside the doorway tall enough for a child of 13 to stand upright in; all of which of course lends support to the current archaeological theory that Iron Age Scotland was colonised by dwarves from the Lonely Mountain after the dragon destroyed their home. Archaeologists are even now digging for evidence, and no doubt singing the hi-ho song to keep their spirits up.
Dunnet Beach We archivists are always a bit jealous of archaeologists, who get to grow their hair long and go on tv looking manly (or womanly, as the case may be) and rugged; but on the other hand we don’t get through quite so many pairs of trousers, so it all evens out, I expect. (As they used to warn young archaeology students: better to die on your feet than live on your knees…)
Finally this week, congratulations to Margaret, no less than four of whose photographs have been included in the Photoion Photography Awards 2015 book. Regular readers of the blog and Margaret’s Blipfoto feed will know what a remarkably good photographer she is: but why should we keep it to ourselves?
 Yes, well, I know I said we weren’t going to post over Easter… so here it isn’t.
Instead here’s a picture of some gansey-inspired socks Margaret’s been knitting: partly to show the versatility of gansey patterns, and partly as a kind of teaser-trailer for my next gansey project…
 But since we’re all here anyway, here’s an interesting question: when did fishermen start wearing ganseys? I don’t presume to offer an opinion—as Wittgenstein observed, whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent (or was it, a fool and his money gather no moss? I can never remember)—but I recently came across something that made me wonder.
 You see, we recently watched a BBC documentary series on portraits by historian Simon Schama, and in one programme he showed some superb photographs of the fishermen and women of Newhaven, Scotland, taken by David Hill and Robert Adamson c.1845. The men either sit in carefully posed groups or lounge nonchalantly beside their boats—in their jackets and waistcoats and round hats they look like they’re on shore leave from Nelson’s navy. But, and this is the curious thing, there’s nary a gansey to be seen.
Of course, this doesn’t mean they didn’t wear them—absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence, and all that—but it is interesting all the same, n’est-ce pas?
Well. I’m going back to bed now—we had 65-mph winds all night, so it felt like we were sleeping on the deck of an aircraft carrier during a training exercise—but we’ll see you next week, and in the meantime wish everyone a happy-what’s-left-of-Easter.
 Nationalism is something of an alien concept to me: as someone born in New Zealand of English and Scottish parents, with an American wife, who has lived most of his adult life in England, Wales and Scotland I have, it’s fair to say, divided loyalties. (Except of course when it comes to rugby and movies involving hobbits, two areas in which my homeland leads the world.)
But I’ve been feeling obscurely proud to be British this week. I’ve been reading up on the Second World War, and—apart from the obvious heroism and sacrifice of so many people from all countries—I’ve been struck at the way the British character keeps revealing itself. I mean, would any other nation’s soldiers on capturing a town in Normandy stop and, before putting up any defences or establishing picket lines, sit down for a cup of tea, as the 7th Armoured Division did at Villers-Bocage?
 Stephen Ambrose (author of “Band of Brothers”) recounts how when the British and Germans were fighting in Tunisia in 1943 the commanders of each side came to a civilised agreement: they would radio each other with the names of any prisoners taken that day so the families could be notified; and no fighting would take place after 5 pm.
 River foam One day the German commander discovered that his men had captured a British supply truck after the 5 pm watershed. He ordered them to return it, but it was too late: the goods had vanished. Knowing his enemy he hastily contacted Rommel and cunningly suggested that his unit be sent on a reconnaissance mission at once. Rommel agreed: sure enough, the next night the unit that had replaced his in the line had two of their supply trucks stolen by the British…
 We had a tree removed this week Well. I’ve been cracking on with the gansey this week, and have, somewhat to my surprise, finished the first sleeve. It’s about 19 inches in length, 96 stitches at the cuff, and I’ve made the cuff 5 inches long so that the recipient can adjust it to suit, i.e., just in case I got the measurements wrong (paranoid much?). I just have to—sigh—pick up the stitches around the other armhole, and then it should just be a matter of 3 more weeks’ knitting, a week to wash and block it, and we are outta here.
Incidentally I do have another reason to feel the sin of pride in my adopted country this week. The Natural Environment Research Council has invited the public to vote on a name for its new £200 million research vessel. Usually these ships are named after famous explorers or naturalists—the David Attenborough, say, or the Henry Worsley—but the current frontrunner name is, I am delighted to say, the rather wonderful “RSS Boaty McBoatface”… Isn’t that great? Vote early and vote often is my advice.
We’re taking a break next week for Easter (and to get over the shock of the clocks going forward)—our next post will be on Monday 4th April. See you then!
 On Sunday the sun came out and the temperature reached an astonishing 11ºC, the kind of heat wave we haven’t seen since before the clocks went back. Seagulls dropped fainting from the cloudless skies and the freezer cabinets in Tesco were filled with panting puffins desperate for a bit of coolth. So we decided to peel off some layers and bare our knees and go off in search of something old to look at.
We didn’t have far to go: indeed, one of the more agreeable things about Caithness is that it’s littered with history the way other places have Starbucks, and you can hardly walk across a field without tripping over some ancient monument or other.
Achavanich overlooks Stemster Loch, a middling sized pond nestling prettily in a wide valley deep in the middle of nowhere. It’s a desolate sort of landscape, mile after mile of gently undulating moorland, as empty and barren as though the apocalypse had already happened but no one thought to let us know (wait—was that the Rapture? No, just a crow backfiring).
 Standing stones with loch in the distance The land is more or less peat bog as far as the eye can see, and every time you put your foot down on what looks like solid ground it sinks with a nasty sucking sound and dirty water seeps up over your shoe. The grass isn’t anchored to the land but seems to float upon it, like a shag carpet lying on the surface of a swimming pool.
Cairn and boggy approach It’s a stunningly beautiful location, eerily quiet and lonely. We could hear some larks fizzing about overhead, and there were several frowsty sheep sleeping off the ovine equivalent of hangovers in a nearby field, but that was all: otherwise it was just us and the breeze, and about 36 jagged, broken, weathered standing stones which have stood there for a mind-boggling 4,000 years. The stones don’t quite make a full circle but are arranged in a horseshoe: the open end almost points towards the remains of an even more ancient cairn, now collapsed into ruin, like a great Megalithic soufflé.
 Collapsed cairn with standing stones in distance Meanwhile, I’m making good progress down the first sleeve of the gansey, which will be 16 inches long with a 3-inch cuff. There will be five diamonds, followed by an inch or so of plain knitting, and then the cuff. I’m decreasing at a rate of two stitches every fifth row; if my calculations are correct—and there’s a first time for everything—I should end up with some 96 stitches just before the cuff. Watch this space.
In parish notices this week, Judit has once again lapped us all and gone on to win the chequered flag with this splendid gansey, a tree and miniature twin rope pattern, knit in a blue-grey yarn (which is rapidly becoming my favourite gansey colour; it has something of the sea in it). Many congratulations to Judit once again.
And so the stones of Achavanich keep their secrets. No one knows why they were put up. They may have had some ritual purpose (human sacrifice or astrology), or it may have been the Stone Age equivalent of the same urge that leads local councils to erect hideous artworks in natural beauty spots—maybe the locals even complained to the tribal elders’ planning sub-committee. I rather like the fact that we’ll probably never know.
 In the movie Amadeus the composer Salieri describes a piece by Mozart as sounding “like a rusty squeezebox”, and I daresay he’d have used the same simile if he’d listened to my breathing this week, now my cold’s come back. (Though whereas the Serenade for Winds K.361 made Salieri feel as if he was hearing the voice of God, my bronchial problems would probably have reminded him rather of a whoopee cushion in a pigsty.)
Oh, well: there’s always knitting. I tend to regard picking up stitches around the neck and armhole with the same enthusiasm as, say, a trip to the dentist or shopping for a pair of trousers, and as a result I tend to grit my teeth and go at it headlong—just to get it over with. This explains how I’ve finished the front, completed and joined the shoulders, done the collar and started the first sleeve, all in the space of a week. (It also goes some way to explaining why I have 17 unused pairs of trousers in my wardrobe, but let’s not go there.)
 Watercoloury By the way, I followed tradition by dividing each half of the body into three sections, each containing the same number of stitches, for the two shoulders and the neck. It always looks very wide at first, but the ribbed collar draws it in nicely. Next week I’ll explain my calculations for decreasing down the sleeve, but at the time of writing I still have to deal with the gusset.
 Rainbow in snow shower This week I’ve been reading a surprisingly entertaining book by Philip Hensher on the history of handwriting, called The Missing Ink. It’s full of fun little asides such as this splendid footnote about the time when Rupert Murdoch effectively sacked the editor of the Times after one mistake too many, making him Editor Emeritus. The editor asked what emeritus meant. Murdoch replied, “It’s Latin, Frank. The e- means you’re out. The meritus means you deserve it.’”
 Snowdrops in snow Hensher is a keen advocate of handwritten letters. He’s preaching to the converted in my case, of course—I’ve already spoken of my love of fountain pens, despite their annoying habit of getting ink everywhere (on one occasion, adjusting a ticklish nose hair after filling a pen with a startling shade of purple ink, I innocently strolled around Wick looking as if I’d been suffering from an alarming type of nosebleed or snorting iodine).
He suggests writing someone you care about a handwritten letter or a postcard. In this time of email and junk mail, “What could be better than to know that you’ll be the only nice thing in your old friend’s postal delivery that day?” Isn’t that a great thought? It happened to me recently, and I can vouch for it. Time, I think, to buy some fancy writing paper…
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I’m writing this with my feet in a basin of hot water, a mustard poultice wrapped around my head, bathed in such a quantity of steam and towels I look like Lawrence of Arabia climbing into a Turkish bath. For alas! my cold has returned. In fact, we’re both suffering just now. The neighbours have told us to paint a large cross on the door and only come out when—or if—we survive.
Blocking has opened up the trellis panels so you can see the moss stitches underneath, and I must say this makes for a very pleasing combination of patterns, the patterns themselves showing nicely through the colour of the yarn. I’m not saying I’d be in a hurry to knit it again anytime soon, but I’m glad I did: it’s very effective.
