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 The biopsy results are in, and, in truth, it was always going to be serious. I mean, your body doesn’t just stop producing blood cells because the mind is elsewhere (temporarily distracted, say, by wondering if God can create a stone that’s too heavy for even Him to lift, or what was the best thing before sliced bread?). Plus, two blood transfusions in a fortnight was kind of a clue that something was up.
 Webs of Autumn Reader, I have leukaemia. It’s a comparatively rare form, charmingly named “hairy cell leukaemia”. I’m not going to pretend I understand all this, since I majored in medieval history and foolishly didn’t take the module “ways in which your body will try to kill you in your sixties”, but basically you produce too many of the wrong kind of blood cells. These bad cells then crowd out the ones you need [Think of it like fifth century Anglo-Saxon invaders driving out the native Celts – Ed.], leaving you tired, anaemic and liable to infection, much as I’ve been these last few weeks.
 Haybales at Sunset Well, it can be treated by chemotherapy, and I’m just waiting to find out when my course will start. The doctor says I should return to a full quality of life afterwards, and that it shouldn’t impact how long I live; so while I don’t suppose it’s ever fun to be told you have cancer, all in all I suppose it could be much, much worse.
 Rainbow over the harbour When the call comes I’ll go into hospital for a couple of weeks, then self-isolate at home until sometime in the new year; my body needing time to start filling me up again with my own blood, instead of other people’s. Till then, all I can do is keep on keeping on, see how far I get with the current project… and ponder important questions like, how much deeper the ocean would be if sponges didn’t grow in it…?
 Birds on a Wire
Update – Monday evening: Gordon is now receiving chemotherapy at Raigmore Hospital in Inverness. And yes, he took his knitting.
 What’s the most unnerving thing you can hear when you’re lying in your back, with a cannula in your arm, waiting for a CT scan? I suppose “Oops” would be right up there, or possibly, “Can someone fetch a bucket?”. In my case it was being told that the dye they were about to inject me with might give me a warm sensation, I might feel my face flush – “Oh, and you might also get a feeling around your middle that you’ve just peed your pants.” Wait, what?
 This was the last of the scans I’m having (for now) to help the doctors determine the cause of my severe anaemia. Luckily they have a CT scanner here in Wick. The machine is a large, white ring, like a miniature Stargate, and the bed you lie on is propelled, none too gently, two or three times in and out, like someone poking a hole in the middle of a bagel, while a recorded voice booms at you “Breathe in!”, “Hold your breath!”, and “Breathe normally!”. It’s a bit intense, as though they’d got a US Army drill sergeant to do the recording, and I kept expecting it to add, “You horrible little worm”.
 Looking upriver It’s loud, too. The scanner makes a noise like a 747 revving its engines, and it’s just as well I was reminded to breathe: my atavistic instincts kicked in, and I found myself holding my breath and trying to lie perfectly still, like my caveman ancestors playing dead when cornered by, say, a particularly grumpy woolly mammoth. At least the scanning part was over quickly, in less than five minutes, and the only bit that really hurt was when they removed the tape holding the cannula in place, together with what felt like most of my arm hair.
 Storm damage at the Trinkie The nurse said it would take seven to ten days for the results to come through, so I don’t expect them to be ready for when I go back to see the consultant in Inverness this week. Meanwhile all I can do is wait. It’s a curious time, an in-between time, as though I’m in a casino at the roulette table, and I’ve bet everything on 37 red: the wheel is spinning, the ball is in play, bouncing between numbers, and who knows where it will land? Still, I do have one piece of good news: as I could confirm after some surreptitious fumbling, once the dye entered my bloodstream, despite a warm sensation, reader, I did not pee my pants. Right now, that feels like a victory…
 There’s a poem by Ted Hughes, “Foxhunt”, in which he describes hearing a distant pack of hounds who’ve picked up a fox’s scent. For such a gloomy subject, I’ve always liked it for its optimistic final lines in which Hughes wonders if the fox will make it, if it will manage to outrun the hounds and reach safety:
Or will he
Make a mistake, jump the wrong way, jump right
Into the hound’s mouth? As I write this down
He runs still fresh, with all his chances before him.
 It’s been in my mind this week, after I went to Raigmore hospital in Inverness to see a doctor about my anaemia and get some tests done. I think I’d had seven needles in me by the time they let me go: two for taking blood, one to anaesthetise my hip for a bone marrow biopsy, one for the biopsy itself, two for a blood transfusion, and one final indignity when the nurse asked me to turn round and face the wall, bend over, and drop my trousers for a vitamin B12 injection (at least, I thought, my view was better than hers).
Ripe Haws In brief, and for whatever reason, my body seems to’ve just stopped producing blood cells, hence the anaemia. There was a moment in the transfusion when they hooked up the bag of blood (each bag holds about a pint, and I had two) to my arm, when I stupidly thought, I can see the new stuff going in, but where’s the outflow pipe, as it were? And then I realised, this was a one-way street, and that’s how far my levels had dropped.
 Meanwhile, and until we know more, I’m self-isolating at home, because apparently you also need blood cells for a functioning immune system (who knew?). It’ll be a frustrating couple of weeks till they get the test results back, but at least then we’ll know what we’re up against.
Till then, as I write this down, I run – well, I say run, it’s more of a slow shuffle, with a pause every few steps to catch my breath – still fresh – for a given value of freshness – with all my chances before me…
 It was a cold, wet, dreary autumn afternoon, and the three Fates, rulers of men’s destinies – let’s call them Snap, Crackle and Pop – were bored. Earlier, they’d tricked some angels into trying to dance on the head of a pin, it being one of the modern rounded ones so they kept flying off, but it was some hours now since the angels had left in disgust.
“Hey, I’ve got an idea,” Snap said suddenly. “Why don’t we tribulate that Reid chap some more?”
Pop frowned. “Reid, Reid… Didn’t we give him boils and kill all his goats?”
“No, that was Job.”
“Oh yes, the one James Bond electrocuted in Fort Knox.”
 Waves breaking over the lighthouse Crackle sighed. “No, that was Oddjob. This one’s the knitting feller. Why, the last few years alone we’ve given him macular degeneration, a sinus infection, a chest infection and an elbow infection.”
“And don’t,” Snap added, “forget the three cancer scares.”
“Three?” Pop asked.
“Yeah, you remember: vocal cords, lymph nodes and thyroid. Remember when they tried to do that biopsy via the throat and we nudged the doctor’s elbow and triggered that epileptic fit?”
“Oh yeah. Man, that was funny. I was eating breakfast, I laughed so hard I had cornflakes coming out my nose. The last time I saw projectile vomiting like that was an anniversary screening of The Exorcist.”
“Here, hand me that medical dictionary,” Snap said. “There must be something fun we haven’t given him yet. Let’s see, A, A… anthrax, hmm, maybe not.” He looked up. “What about amnesia?”
Pop shook his head. “No point. The guy already can’t remember what day of the week it is, give him amnesia he’s not even gonna notice.”
High seas at South Head “Got it!” Snap cried. “Anaemia! He hasn’t had that yet.”
Crackle leaned forward and, in a burst of nominative determinism, loudly cracked his knuckles. “Well, he has now…”
All of which rather explains why I shall be visiting Inverness hospital this week for a battery of tests. For it turns out that yes, I do indeed have anaemia, so much so that the doctor who gave me the news advised me to avoid unnecessary exercise like walking or driving until I can see the consultant on Tuesday. On the plus side, at least it explains why I’ve been so tired and run down lately. Hopefully it’s an easy fix, but first they have to try to pin down what’s causing it, and why it’s come on so suddenly. In the meantime, I’m counting my blessings. After all, I suppose, at least it’s not anthrax…
 Happy Halloween!
 For a time there, I thought we might get away with it. Storm Babet had barrelled in on Wednesday night, winds up around the 50-70 mph mark, shaking the windows and rattling the walls like someone taking Bob Dylan way too literally, and three days later it was still at it, but by that point there had been surprisingly little rain. Then Saturday afternoon the rain arrived, and boy did it make up for lost time. As I discovered to my cost, standing outside got you soaked to the skin in a matter of seconds. For a brief moment I thought of copying Gene Kelly and start singin’ and dancin’ in the rain, but Gene didn’t have to contend with winds like the exhaust of a jumbo jet; besides, there weren’t any policemen around to see me, so what would be the point?
The day before the storm Of course, it’s always windy in Caithness, if not usually this windy. That’s the main reason we don’t get midges: the little beggars can never get a foothold because as soon as they poke their tiny noses out the front door, whoosh, next thing they know they’re in Scandinavia. (I never quite recovered from reading that midges make their bites with minuscule teeth. I’d always assumed they operated like mosquitos using the jab-and-suck principle, but no: having lacerated the skin, they then roll up their mouthparts into a tube and use that to suck up your blood. Hmm. By coincidence I’ve got a blood test coming tomorrow at the doctors’, and all I can say is, if the nurse makes a sudden dart at my arm with her teeth, I’ll be ready.)
 Wick Outer Harbour on a calm day In parish notices, Penelope has sent in a picture of another cracking gansey. This one is based around patterns from Filey, double moss stitch diamonds flanked with Betty Martin and cables. It’s a classic combination of patterns, and more proof in any were needed that Yorkshire patterns rock. It’s knit in Frangipani Greystone, possibly my favourite Frangipani shade, which really shows the pattern off nicely. Many congratulations to Penelope, and many thanks to her for sharing.
 Masts reflecting in the harbour And now it’s Sunday, the storm has finally passed, and we look out on a drowned world, shining in the weak autumn sun. The fields, those of them that aren’t actually underwater, are waterlogged. Everywhere looks bedraggled. The roads are littered with broken branches, twigs, and leaves, and a new peril has arisen: the flooded roads hide the potholes like camouflage to trap the unwary. Still, water tends to stream off the promontory of Caithness like breakers off the prow of a ship, so I expect it will subside soon. Though I wonder if this what Noah must have felt when he finally made it back to land—relief that it’s over, coupled with dismay at all the tidying up to be done…
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The biopsy results are in, and, in truth, it was always going to be serious. I mean, your body doesn’t just stop producing blood cells because the mind is elsewhere (temporarily distracted, say, by wondering if God can create a stone that’s too heavy for even Him to lift, or what was the best thing before sliced bread?). Plus, two blood transfusions in a fortnight was kind of a clue that something was up.
