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 There’s an inlet just south of Wick on the old maps with the wonderful name of Dog’s Haven. Legend has it the place got its name when a ship was wrecked there ages back—all the crew were lost, but the dog alone survived.
I was trying to think what this reminded me of, and then it struck me—when Dracula reached England he came by ship, to Whitby. In the story the ship ran aground, all the crew were dead, the captain’s body lashed to the helm, and a great dog (i.e., Dracula) sprang ashore and disappeared towards the ruined abbey.
 And just for a moment I wondered… Suppose there had been another vampire on a second vessel, one who was hard of hearing, and who’d misheard Whitby as Wick. I like to imagine this vampire—Eric, I think his name was—stranded, wandering disconsolately round Caithness, doing odd jobs, unable to fly south to rejoin Dracula in bat form because of the winds.
 He tried his hand at the fishing but kept getting sacked when they found he could only kill herring one at a time (and then they came back to life, vampire herring escaping the barrels by dead of night to go and bite other fish). In the end he married a local girl and settled down, but perished on the morning after his wedding when she innocently flung open the curtains to let the sun in and he crumbled to dust.
Meanwhile on the gansey I’ve started the yoke pattern and the gussets, always a red-letter day. (I’ll post the pattern next week when I’m a little further on, so you can compare the theory with the practice.)
 Half the shawl. Photographing the whole thing means getting the stepladder out. I had to re-do a couple of rows when I discovered I’d miscalculated the number of stitches I needed (something that happens more often than my biographers let on). But here’s the strange thing: I only found out in the second pattern row. Somehow I’d made two separate mistakes on the first row, each of which made it seem as though I’d the requisite number of stitches by the half-row end, so I never noticed.
Margaret’s been busy too, finishing another of her lacy-shawly things, the kind of garment I imagine an elf superhero would wear for a cape while keeping the branches of Lothlorien safe for decent people to walk (“down these mean twigs an elf must go…”).
 Grey!! Julie’s been in touch to ask what I do with my leftover gansey yarn stash (mittens, scarves, etc.). I’ve mentioned before that I’m saving mine up till I have enough to knit a multi-coloured gansey, the kind of thing a clown fisherman might wear. I know Judit’s knitted some dashing cellphone covers; but what do you use yours for? Any examples, ideas, please let us know.
Finally this week, Jan and Russ of Frangipani have sent me samples of two new colours in their already impressive range, both shades of grey, viz. pewter and cinder. Grey is my favourite colour (it matches my hair), and I’m particularly taken with the lighter shade, pewter: it has the same sort of sheen I associate with some of the old Scots ganseys, and I think I know just the pattern for it…
 Like most people I remember very few of my dreams, waking with little more than a vague sense of disquiet and unable to put my finger on exactly why. But sometimes the dream is so vivid I’m jerked out of sleep breathless and shocked and sweating, like the time I decided to change a light fitting without turning off the electricity first. It’s so realistic that for a time I think it actually happened.
Well, I had a dream like that a couple of months ago, and the impression it made on me hasn’t faded yet, it was so bizarre and disturbing; and as there’s nothing so tedious as someone recounting their dreams to you, er, I thought I’d share it with you.
I’m running through a forest, somewhere in Indonesia or Malaysia, and there are two or three of us, chased by small vicious creatures that move like ferrets or weasels, but larger, about the size of small dogs, with ferocious teeth. We can’t permanently kill them, because every time we do a sort of flickering light plays over them, and they flop about like landed fish and then come back to life—but smaller, shrunk to the size of mice or rats. They jump up and immediately start chasing us again, steadily growing in size as they run.
 Looking towards Norway One of them, still just rat-sized, is closing in on us. I turn and prepare to sacrifice myself to buy the others time, knowing I won’t be able to stop it. I’m terrified, knowing I’m about to die. The others keep running and I hear the sound of them grow fainter. The creature is a small, black shape in the undergrowth, closing impossibly fast for its size. I stoop and pick up a sharp piece of rock.
As I straighten the rat-sized thing springs, it’s a just a black blur launching itself at me. I turn away instinctively and feel it hit my upper right arm. But its teeth are caught in the folds of my shirt; it missed the skin and I can feel it thrashing on my arm as it tries to free itself. There is a shallow puddle nearby, filled with muddy brown water perhaps an inch deep. I throw myself down and roll over so that the creature is pinned beneath my arm, and I try to drown it in the puddle: even if the creature won’t stay dead, it will buy me valuable seconds to escape while it comes back to life.
It struggles frantically, and I can feel it getting larger. I can’t see it, it’s out of my line of vision. I realise there isn’t enough water in the puddle to drown it. A few yards away there is another, deeper puddle. I’m going to have to get up and make a dash to the other puddle if I want to drown the creature—it’s my only chance. But I know that as soon as I get up it will be freed and will go for my throat, and I don’t think I’ll be quick enough.
 Coghill Bridge and St Fergus’ I’m screwing my courage up to go for it, and the creature is flailing beneath me—and I wake up.
Back in the real world, the gansey continues to grow on my needles. It’s just under a foot in length, and it’s going to be about 26 inches from cast-on to shoulder, so in another inch or so I’m going to start the pattern.
Two pieces of parish news to end with. First of all, Judit has been busy, knitting another of her splendid “ganslings”, a banded blue gansey that shows once again that you don’t need cables to create a stunning effect. Warmest congratulations, as ever, to her.
Secondly, I hear from Michael Pearson that his book Traditional Knitting is expected to be republished by Dover books in March, in a revised and expanded edition. It’s been a long wait, but hopefully we’re near the end. Such a great book should never be out of print, I think.
So there we are. All that remains is for me to wish you all happy knitting—and, of course, sweet dreams…
 Have you ever heard of Operation Outward? I’ve just come across it, and it’s so bizarre I thought I’d share it with you.
It dates from the Second World War, and was one of those cunning, strange, left-field ideas the British came up with to disrupt the Nazi war effort. The inspiration came out of the Blitz: one night during the German bombing of London a number of barrage balloons got loose in a gale and drifted away, and next day reports came in of chaos over Sweden.
 Barrage Balloon
Imperial War Museum Inspired by this, the military had the bright idea of sending small-airship-sized hydrogen balloons to float over occupied Europe, trailing long cables in the hopes of snagging power lines and causing outages, or with incendiary devices attached to the wires to start forest fires.
Well, you might think, fair enough: but how many did the British send – a few hundred? A thousand? Well, by August 1942 over a thousand of these balloons were being launched each day. All in all almost a hundred thousand were despatched, stopping only with the D-day landings; trains were disrupted and forests set ablaze, and finally the Luftwaffe had to divert their planes to shoot the damn things down.
 Operation Outward balloon launch, Felixstowe
National Archive It’s strange to think that you could be standing on the south coast of England, and look up and see an armada of airborne jellyfish floating on the breeze, trailing long stings, disappearing towards the Continent, bringing destruction and chaos in their wake. (Actually, this is probably a policy commitment in UKIP’s manifesto, now I come to think of it.)
 Happy Burns Night – 25 January I am now eight inches into the body of the gansey, and I notice my knitting is tightening up as I go, now that the pernicious influence of all that Lopi knitting is wearing off. Another week or so and I’ll have to think seriously about the pattern: I’ve factored in the width, but I need to count rows to make sure I start at the right point so the pattern fits vertically.
In parish notices, Tina has sent us a photo of her new gansey.
Meanwhile the weather is continuing in much the same way as usual for this winter—one day the birds are cheerfully building their nests and dreaming of spring, the next they’re bitterly shovelling out several inches of hail and snow—but as none of it is very dramatic just now I thought I’d end this week by sending our best wishes to all of you living along the east coast of North America for the coming snowstorms. Wrap up warm and stay safe, and we’ll see you on the other side…
 So, this must be that winter thingy, which I’ve heard so much about—sub-zero temperatures, snow, sleet, hail, gales, ice and hordes of emaciated Frenchmen stumbling through the drifts, harried by wolves and Cossacks as they make their desperate retreat from Moscow.
This week the winds reached 70 miles per hour, and it says a lot about the year so far that this came as something of a relief after the 90-mile winds of last Friday. It’s rather disconcerting to look up and see a seagull drifting sedately backwards past the window, as though God had just pressed “rewind” on his remote control because he wanted to watch the last few seconds over again.
It was not without its compensations, though. I walked to work last Friday down by the river, just as a mini-blizzard struck. The sun rises around 8.45am this time of year, but the clouds came over so thickly that everything was still dark, in a sort of eerie grey twilight: the wind got up, coming from behind me, and then it  began to snow. Soon the wind was whipping the snow past me horizontally. Then I caught a sudden movement on the river and when I turned my head I saw a black bird like a heron flying past, beating into the wind and snow like a Chinese print come to life, before it disappeared again into the darkness. My daily commute, I thought.
When I got to work I found that although my front was perfectly dry, my back was white with a crust of snow which broke off in chunks, melting in pools on the floor. (Luckily the cleaner comes in after I’ve gone home…)
In gansey news, my fingers seem to have rediscovered how to knit with 2.25mm needles and yarn that requires an electron microscope to see, and as a result I’m past the ribbing and on to the body, which will be knit plain up to the yoke. As I said before, I plan to donate the gansey to Wick Museum, as the pattern  will be another Wick pattern. It’s taken from the same photograph in Michael Pearson’s book, Fisher-Gansey Patterns of Scotland and the Scottish Fleet as the previous Wick pattern, the one on page 29. I’ll chart it out when I actually start the yoke.
Meanwhile, I cast on 268 stitches and have now increased to 296. I thought I’d aim for a 40-inch chest size, but since it’s going to be given to the museum I don’t have to be too exact, for once!
Finally, by popular demand, we’ve included a picture of me modelling the Lopi sweater down by the river. As this took place in a piercing wind straight from the Arctic Circle I am now in a position to confirm that a Lopi is about as wind-resistant as a string vest; several passers-by assumed it was a desperate suicide attempt when I took my coat off and rushed to help but I told them I was practicing the new sport of extreme ornithology, in which you combine birdwatching with hypothermia, (which now I come to think of it is something of a tautology in a Caithness winter).
 During the early hours of Friday morning wind speeds of 93 miles per hour were recorded in Wick as the storm front passed through. We’d lain awake most of the night, feeling the house shake under us and listening to sleet rattle against the windows. Every now and again there’d be a deafening “Whumpf!”, as though God had left the gas burner on slightly too long before lighting it, followed by a shudder like an African elephant head-butting the bedroom wall.
 Tesco’s garage just up the road had part of its roof blown off, trees and branches littered the roads and even by Sunday evening there were still hundreds of homes up here without power. I feared the worst, but luckily we survived more or less unscathed (here a slate missing, there a gate blown over); not that we’re entirely out of the woods yet—more lows are heading our way, rolling across the Atlantic like bowling balls, with us as the pins.
In times like this it’s good to have something to keep you occupied, and I finished the Lopi sweater on Thursday night—just over a fortnight since I started. (You can knit a jumper in two weeks—why didn’t anyone tell me? Did I miss a meeting or something?)
 So, what have I learned? First of all, old habits die hard and I struggled to knit as loosely as the pattern called for; as a result, it’s more of a large than an extra large (but that’s fine, as I’m somewhere between the two, depending on how much tablet I got my hands on over Christmas.) Next time I might use a size bigger needles.
I also discovered it really plays havoc with your stitch gauge when you go back to knitting ganseys. First came a certain amount of hilarious confusion when I picked up the ribbing I’d started for my next gansey project (“you mean I used to knit with this? No, seriously, where’s the real yarn?”); followed by stitches so big they looked like I was making a fishing net. Two days on the weirdness is just wearing off.
 But, of course, despite everything, the main lesson was, yes, I can knit with two colours, which I have to say is a pretty big deal for me. (The pattern forced me to occasionally knit with three colours on one row, a dirty trick if ever I saw one—but I’d be lying if I said I mastered that, given the hours I spent disentangling balls of yarn that looked like they’d spent an hour in the tumble drier with a family of playful kittens.)
Flushed with success I plan to alternate ganseys with Icelandic and other types of sweater in future, and see how it goes; if the forecast’s anything to go by, as well as more gales and depressions heading our way—as if things weren’t depressing enough already—we have some days of ice and snow to look forward to. So, the more warm jumpers up our sleeves, as it were, the better…
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There’s an inlet just south of Wick on the old maps with the wonderful name of Dog’s Haven. Legend has it the place got its name when a ship was wrecked there ages back—all the crew were lost, but the dog alone survived.
And just for a moment I wondered… Suppose there had been another vampire on a second vessel, one who was hard of hearing, and who’d misheard Whitby as Wick. I like to imagine this vampire—Eric, I think his name was—stranded, wandering disconsolately round Caithness, doing odd jobs, unable to fly south to rejoin Dracula in bat form because of the winds.
He tried his hand at the fishing but kept getting sacked when they found he could only kill herring one at a time (and then they came back to life, vampire herring escaping the barrels by dead of night to go and bite other fish). In the end he married a local girl and settled down, but perished on the morning after his wedding when she innocently flung open the curtains to let the sun in and he crumbled to dust.
