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 We’ve had a taste of summer this last week, with blue skies, high fluffy clouds, sunshine, and the kind of heat that makes a Highlander strip to a T-shirt and shorts—as if there wasn’t enough sadness in life—yes, we’re talking a sweltering 15ºC. Even someone as sun-averse as I have been lured outdoors, so that my head and neck are now bright pink, while the rest of my body remains the colour of semi-skimmed milk—when I take my shirt off I look like a partly-eaten coconut ice.
I read this week that the White House made the classic mistake of hitting “reply all” to an email, and so revealing the name of the CIA’s top man in Kabul to everyone on the mailing list. I’ve never done anything quite this crass on email—I prefer to be dumb and gauche up close and personal, face to face.
 A Sunny Day in Caithness . . . Once upon a time we were Morris dancing at a festival in York, when the city was full of tourists. The various sides were supposed to take turns dancing in a public square, once dance each. We were up next, but frustratingly the side before us decided to do several dances, hogging the limelight and keeping everyone waiting. I was pretty keyed up, we all were, because if you’re a Morris dancer your usual audience is a couple of resigned people and a dog outside the pub, so to perform in front of hundreds of tourists with cameras is quite a big deal.
 One of the dancers in this side wasn’t very good. As time passed, the tension in our party grew; so by way of relieving it I began to be extraordinarily witty at this guy’s expense: I criticised his posture, his coordination, his balance and his dancing, everything from his galleys to his capers. I didn’t really mean any of it, of course. But the Devil took possession of my mouth and I flew…
…right up to the point when a woman standing in front of me turned round furiously and snapped, “That’s my son you’re talking about,” and stalked off.
The echoes of that moment will resonate across the universe until the light of the last star has perished in icy darkness. Sometimes when I read of scientists detecting what they think is a faint trace of the Big Bang, it’s really just the ripple of that moment, travelling through interstellar space at the speed of shame.
 Turning hastily to ganseys, I’ve finished the neck and started on the first sleeve. The armhole measured 8.75 inches from gusset to shoulder join, and I’m knitting at about 8.75 stitches to the inch, so I cast on 151 stitches in the round, using the famous “suck it and see” approach. I’ve just decreased the hell out of the gusset, and am on the sleeve proper, which will eventually be about 18 inches long plus a 3 inch cuff; I’m decreasing at a rate of 2 stitches every 7th row, so I should have in the region of 90-something stitches by the time I start the cuff.
 . . . and a stormy one Finally, I’m indebted to my friend Dav for the news that Glasgow University is looking for a knitter-in-residence this October, if you’re feeling adventurous. “Knit is”, they say, “the pin-up craft for sustainability, creativity and authenticity”. I shan’t be applying as my days as a pin-up are, sadly, long behind me—that, and when I knit I look like someone impersonating a chicken laying an egg—but if you’re feeling creative and authentic, why not give it a go? (http://knithistory.academicblogs.co.uk/knitter-in-residence/ )
 Spring has come to Caithness, and possibly summer too, with blue skies, light winds, and temperatures in the mid to high teens. (Or at least I presume they are—I have a special Caithness-adjusted thermometer which only goes up to 13ºC, on the grounds that any further numbers are redundant.)
 The air is full of birds, too. The trees are as noisy as school playgrounds, and our car’s been used as an avian lavatory so often it looks like a painting by Jackson Pollock. Swallows are zipping about all over the place, with that weird dipping flight that makes them look as though they’re being jerked along on strings for a joke.
On Saturday we went for a stroll along Dunnet beach, which lies on the north coast somewhere between Thurso and John O’Groats. There we encountered a new breed of dog, a cross between a dachshund and a friendly piranha. If you held out your hand for a neighbourly sniff, the next thing you knew your arm had disappeared up to the elbow in slavering jaws and drool, and you looked like a novice vet trying to conduct a rectal examination orally.
 Not a bouncy castle, or why we were at a standstill for 20 minutes. The road was closed to move this huge piece of equipment. Significant progress on the gansey this week: the front is finished, the shoulders are joined and I’ve started the collar. The jumper is 209 stitches across; so each shoulder is 70 stitches and the neck is 69 (70+70+69 = 209).
I decided to make the neck quite deep this time, some 28 rows, and so—since I decrease on the neck at a rate of 1 stitch every 2 rows—that meant 14 decreases per side. I therefore started each shoulder with 84 stitches on the needle and decreased down to 70 to give a nice, rounded (yet daringly plunging) neckline; and the stitches that were left for the neck at the front were correspondingly reduced to 41 (i.e., 69-14-14 = 41). The shoulders were cast off using the conventional three-needle bind-off.
It usually takes me 6-8 weeks to do the sleeves, so I might actually finish this one by the end of July—in other words, just in time for the Caithness winter…
 Dunbeath is another small harbour down the coast from Wick, built around 1800 and once the home of upwards of a hundred fishing boats all crammed tightly into the shelter of the bay, now open to the sea and the sky and the kittiwakes nesting in the cliffs—and to the occasional busload of shivering New Mexican tourists stopping off on their way north to Orkney.
We were there on Saturday, and it was cold and grey, with a bitter east wind (early summer, in other words). I have a friend who tricks her dog into going out in the pouring rain by standing in the doorway and throwing a tennis ball; the poor New Mexicans had much the same look of betrayal as her dog as the wind hit them like a hail of machine gun bullets and they realised the tour guides had shut the bus doors behind them.
It’s another beautiful Caithness coastal location, not hemmed in by cliffs like so many of the little coves used for fishing, but spaciously wide and open. Visibility was exceptional, offering a fine view of the North Sea oil platforms, plus another large, square building like an offshore multi-storey car park I haven’t noticed before. (It’s either another oil installation, a James Bond supervillain headquarters, or a secret military base; if this blog mysteriously vanishes in the next few days you can draw your own conclusions.)
 The Icehouse Dunbeath is still a working harbour, but only for the odd creel fishing boat. There’s a large fishing store, a salmon bothy and an ice house back from the days when they used to collect ice from the river to store the salmon. It’s another great place to visit, perfect for wandering along the pier and thinking of the good old days—unless perhaps you’re from New Mexico, in which case you add another pullover and plan a messy and painful revenge on your tour guides.
 On the gansey I have now finished the back, and started on the front. As I mentioned in the comments last week, I decided at the last minute to opt for the traditional rig ‘n’ fur shoulders, as opposed to a Scottish patterned shoulder strap. I was concerned that the jumper was already quite intricate, especially with the double diamond lattice patterns; I think a shoulder strap would be too much, and detract from the overall effect. The simpler knit and purl ridges will hopefully offset the body and sleeves and allow them to shine.
Finally, I see we’ve been getting a number of visitors referred this way from the Knitting Paradise website, and the excellent gansey group. I’d just like to say welcome to new readers, and I hope you find the website useful. If you ever want to get in touch directly, or want to query anything in the ‘Knitting techniques’ section, just drop us a line via the contact form.
 This week I’d like to share with you two bits of Caithness gansey lore, courtesy of George Bethune of Dunbeath and Harry Gray of Wick, each of whom had fathers who fished the herring and wore ganseys—and what these two gentlemen don’t know about the history of Caithness and the fishing industry could probably fill the space on a postage stamp, but only if you wrote in big, capital letters.
George contributed to the Moray Firth Gansey Project, and his story is recounted in their book, along with a picture of his father in his gansey, on page 37. But it’s so interesting I think it’s worth repeating here. We were talking about ganseys, and the way the Scottish ones had buttons on the neck to keep them tight; and he said that the buttons would always be on the other shoulder to your main hand—in other words, if you were right-handed, the buttons would be on the left side, and vice-versa.
 Harry Gray and Gordon The reason was that when loading the boats the men would heave the nets up onto their shoulder, like men pulling a cart. And if the buttons were on the same shoulder as the nets, they’d run the risk of snagging on them—as indeed George says happened once to one poor fisherman in Dunbeath: when the nets were being loaded, they caught in his buttons and he was pulled violently down and broke his neck against the harbour quay.
Harry is the Chairman of the Wick Society, which runs the Aladdin’s cave-cum-museum in town, and he came in to collect the Caithness-patterned gansey I knitted recently, and which I was donating to the museum.
He said that in the old days the fishermen used to wear their ganseys next to the skin—except for old newspapers, which they’d wrap round their chests as a sort of under-layer to keep the wind out. “It made you crackle when you moved,” Harry said, “but it didn’t half keep you warm.”
 Meanwhile, my own project moves on apace, though slower now I’m back at work. I’m seven-eighths of the way up the back, and it’s almost time to get the slide rule out to start calculating how much space to allow for the shoulder strap (which will be 22 stitches wide). Sometime in the next week I’ll hopefully start the front.
In parish notices, many congratulations to Sue Rees for a splendid Staithes gansey, which can be seen here being stylishly modelled by husband Paul. As I’ve always said, this is in many ways still one of the most effective patterns.
So remember: next time you’re thinking of throwing away that old newspaper, spare a thought for those fishermen who used them for keeping more than just their fish and chips warm; and the stories that lie behind even simple things like buttons on the neck…
 Many years ago I discovered I was allergic to penicillin when I broke out head to toe in red spots. When I went back to the doctor next day he got me to take off my shirt and trousers then said, “Excuse me a moment” and left the room.
He returned with two nurses and, while I stood there feeling the draft and horribly aware of my bulging midriff spilling over my nether garments like a loaf in the oven overflowing its tin, proceeded to point out interesting features on my person with a felt-tip pen, as if I was a relief map of Germany and he was planning a bombing raid.
Well, this week I discovered I have an adverse reaction to another antibiotic, doxycycline, which sounds like a circus act involving prostitutes on bicycles but which in fact the doctor prescribed for my chest infection. I took the dose in the morning, felt very light-headed and had to lie down; but then, after an hour or so it seemed to pass and I felt well enough to get up and have lunch.
 But, just like John “Chestburster” Hurt in the movie Alien, I had been lulled into a false sense of security. Like John, I ate a hearty meal—then felt ill and collapsed—and, just like John, an alien substance exploded from my chest. (In his case it was a baby alien—in my case my lunch—but the principle is the same.)
 I almost fainted, but didn’t quite. I sweated profusely, and I saw something remarkable: I was lying on the floor, unable to move, and my right arm lay before me, with the wrist only a few inches from my eyes; every single pore had a tiny bead of sweat in the hollow, so that my skin looked like a spider’s web on a dewy morning. (When was finally able to stand up I left a Gordon-shaped damp patch, as if my evil shadow had mysteriously been transferred into the carpet, and I remember wondering in the night if it could escape and come after me.)
Anyway, as I say, it was only an adverse reaction, not an allergic one, thank goodness; but between that and the chest infection I’ve been off work all week, sleeping mostly, and wheezing like an old bellows if I did anything energetic, such as breathing. (Sitting and watching television, on the other hand, I’ve got rather good at.)
 Calm day on the river I did an awful lot of knitting. So much so, in fact, that I have finished the first half of the gussets and divided front and back. (Incidentally, for those who keep count, at the point where I started on the back I had just 40g left from a 500g Frangipani cone.) The gussets are 3 inches long, with an increase of 1 stitch either side of the seam every 4 rows, and are 15 stitches across at the widest point.
I went back to the doctor today, and she took a blood sample to see if it’s a virus or an infection that I’ve got. If the former, I just have to tough it out; if the latter, I get to play Russian roulette with another antibiotic. And now I don’t know which I’m more afraid of: another adverse reaction to the drugs, or more time exposed to daytime tv…
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We’ve had a taste of summer this last week, with blue skies, high fluffy clouds, sunshine, and the kind of heat that makes a Highlander strip to a T-shirt and shorts—as if there wasn’t enough sadness in life—yes, we’re talking a sweltering 15ºC. Even someone as sun-averse as I have been lured outdoors, so that my head and neck are now bright pink, while the rest of my body remains the colour of semi-skimmed milk—when I take my shirt off I look like a partly-eaten coconut ice.
One of the dancers in this side wasn’t very good. As time passed, the tension in our party grew; so by way of relieving it I began to be extraordinarily witty at this guy’s expense: I criticised his posture, his coordination, his balance and his dancing, everything from his galleys to his capers. I didn’t really mean any of it, of course. But the Devil took possession of my mouth and I flew…
Turning hastily to ganseys, I’ve finished the neck and started on the first sleeve. The armhole measured 8.75 inches from gusset to shoulder join, and I’m knitting at about 8.75 stitches to the inch, so I cast on 151 stitches in the round, using the famous “suck it and see” approach. I’ve just decreased the hell out of the gusset, and am on the sleeve proper, which will eventually be about 18 inches long plus a 3 inch cuff; I’m decreasing at a rate of 2 stitches every 7th row, so I should have in the region of 90-something stitches by the time I start the cuff.
This week I’d like to share with you two bits of Caithness gansey lore, courtesy of George Bethune of Dunbeath and Harry Gray of Wick, each of whom had fathers who fished the herring and wore ganseys—and what these two gentlemen don’t know about the history of Caithness and the fishing industry could probably fill the space on a postage stamp, but only if you wrote in big, capital letters.
Meanwhile, my own project moves on apace, though slower now I’m back at work. I’m seven-eighths of the way up the back, and it’s almost time to get the slide rule out to start calculating how much space to allow for the shoulder strap (which will be 22 stitches wide). Sometime in the next week I’ll hopefully start the front.
