Mrs Laidlaw 9: 28 October – 3 November

This week’s blog is dedicated to Annie, a shaggy Gordon Setter belonging to Margaret’s sister Gail and brother in law Bill in the States—a sort of canine floor polishing machine with an overactive battery, twitching and shuffling and jagging as if moving to music only she can hear, broadcast on a frequency only audible to dogs.

When Annie wants to sit down she just picks a spot and collapses, like the soldiers in Goldfinger pretending to be gassed. When I made the mistake of riding in the back of the car with her I got hit by her tail so regularly as she spun giddily round and round, unable to decide which of the four windows offered the best view, that it was like being assaulted by a ninja with a feather duster. She became a sort of hairy perpetual motion machine: hook her up to a battery and you could power a small township for months.

Perhaps her most endearing trait is a sort of misguided belief in her powers of hypnosis. If you’re holding something she wants, say a piece of bread, she just plants herself down in front of you and stares intently, like a canine version of Thunderbirds’ The Hood, as if that will be enough to get you to hand it over. (Though, now I come to think of it, I actually ended up handing it over more often than not. Hang on a minute…)

Annie considers her next move…

I’ve had some bad experiences with dogs down the years. Perhaps the worst was when I was 16 and had a Christmas postal route in my village. There was this really classy lady-of-the-manor type I had to deliver a parcel to one day. As I went up the front drive I saw she was round the back in the courtyard (yes, really) with her dog.

As soon as the dog saw me—it was a giant black slavering monster, the sort of thing Sauron would keep to fetch his slippers and morning paper—it gave an excited bark and bounded towards me, trailing strings of drool like party streamers. I just stood there and waited to be savaged and shaken to pieces, but instead of annihilating me it skidded to a halt on the gravel and buried its nose in my groin, where it proceeded to root around like a pig after truffles, making happy slobbering noises until hauled off by its mistress.

Collar and shoulder detail

If you take your dictionary off the shelf and look up “mortification” you’ll see the following definition: “The emotion felt by Gordon Reid when he looked down and noticed the large damp patch on the crotch of his trousers steaming in the bright winter sunshine, and then caught the amused smile on the face of the lady. See also incontinence pants and rubber sheets.”

Moving on from today’s dose of deep trauma therapy, you will see from the photos that I have finished the shoulders and the collar, and have started on a sleeve. The collar came out rather well, nicely rounded and indented; it’s about an inch, or 12 rows plus cast-off row high.

Sunrise over Wick Harbour

I had a decision to make regarding the sleeve pattern. The original only has the traditional “Betty Martin” check pattern on the upper arm, but I wanted to use the body pattern again if I could (I just think it looks better). The only problem was, one tree would be too small, but two would be too long. So I’ve decided to go with one tree, and I’ll use the purl half-diamonds as a sort of border below it, which should give me what I’m looking for. Hopefully you’ll see what I mean next week.

And now, as I see the weather for today is for heavy rain showers, winds gusting over 30 mph, and a temperature that “feels like 2ºC”, I shall close my eyes and go to my happy place: the deck out back of Bill and Gail’s in the autumn sunshine, watching Annie, the eternal optimist, stalking bees in the hopes of making friends…