Flamborough: Week 4 – 22 May

As there’s only so long a person can be expected to survive without access to shops and really good Italian restaurants – I’m pretty sure this is covered by the international convention on human rights – we had a wee mini-break in Edinburgh last week. Edinburgh’s just a lovely city to be in, or at least the bits they’re not digging up are, and it helps that we lived there for a while so we know our way around. Plus we’re old enough to qualify for bus passes, the only advantage I’ve found yet in being over 60.

Our room in the guest house was rather on the small side – an injudicious turn of the head would see you carom off the walls, and I expect to be laid to rest in a box more spacious than the bathroom turned out to be – but the city is wide as all outdoors, and I don’t go on holiday for the bathrooms, or not quite yet anyway. The highlight of the trip was reacquainting ourselves with the Botanical Gardens, an oasis of almost oriental tranquillity amid the bustle of the city, and the perfect antidote to being surrounded by half a million people.

Himalayan Poppy at the Botanics

We returned home just in time for our water to be cut off while Scottish Water worked on the mains. Luckily it was just for a few hours, though it made turning the taps on afterwards a bit of lottery. There would be a sort of hacking cough from down in the pipes – not unlike my own coughing fits in recent months – followed by a sort of watery explosion that drenched any bystanders within a 3-metre radius. It was like those occasions when you’re invited to admire a newish baby, and just as you’re leaning in with a friendly “izzy wizzy den” trembling on your lips, the little perisher sneezes and sprays you with whatever it happens to have in its mouth, together with most of the contents of its stomach. (I’ve come to realise that mothers use babies in much the same way that clowns use squirting flowers in their buttonholes.)

And so now it’s back to Wick, back to work, and, with regard to both the water mains and the course of antibiotics, we wait for things to return to normal; though I’m always reminded in these situations of that great quote from The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy: “We have normality. Anything you still can’t cope with is therefore your own problem…”

I managed to get a fair bit of knitting in around the Edinburgh excursion, and my gansey project has reached the gusset stage after just over 12 inches of pattern. The gussets will run for 3 inches before I divide for the front and back, increasing at the standard rate of 2 stitches every four rows.

Finally this week, Judit has been busy again. She’s sent us some photos of two Staithes pattern ganseys, one in white and another in a very fetching blue. This is the first pattern I ever tried to knit back in the mid-1980s, and I still think of it as the foundation stone of the gansey knitting tradition: although it was first recorded in Staithes, there are variants in almost every gansey-knitting community. I love it very deeply, it is simple yet elegant, and, as Judit’s example show us, it makes for a lovely jumper. Many thanks once again to Judit for sharing.

A (reed bunting) Bird in the Bush