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 “I desired dragons with a profound desire. Of course, I in my timid body did not wish to have them in the neighbourhood. But the world that contained even the imagination of Fáfnir was richer and more beautiful, at whatever the cost of peril.” The words of JRR Tolkien, of course, and in The Hobbit he created arguably the greatest dragon in all literature, Smaug the Tremendous, Chiefest and Greatest of Calamities (though The Hobbit is set in a time before Brexit, otherwise Smaug would only be the second Chiefest).
 I find people can be divided into two camps: those who yearn in their secret hearts for dragons to be real, and those who see them primarily as allegories. In the former camp are most writers and readers of fantasy fiction, people who had their imaginative horizons enlarged by reading Tolkien and Beowulf and the Viking Sagas and who want more. In the other camp—well, I can’t tell you how disappointed I was to discover that Wagner had written a fantasy opera cycle with dwarves and dragons and magic rings, but that when it’s staged these days, they replace the dragon with something Freudian to symbolise the hero’s repressed Oedipus-complex or something (personally I think I’d be more afraid of a dragon). We live in a disappointingly prosaic age.
 Cliff-clinging wildflowers Dragons of course are majestic, mighty, and cunning. They can unbalance any work of fiction like nuclear weapons in a cold war thriller, which is why they have to be kept offstage for most of the action. In the tales of old they were too powerful to defeat in single combat—I still treasure an old cartoon where two dragons are talking and one describes his fondness for “tinned food”, i.e., a knight roasted in his armour—and even Beowulf is mortally wounded fighting his. So heroes had to be sneaky. In the Sagas Fáfnir was killed when Sigurd hid in a trench and stabbed him in the belly as he walked over him (this is the origin of Tolkien giving Smaug a weak spot in his chest). I read of one Welsh dragon that was killed when it was perched on top of a church and its tail was nailed to the spire so that it couldn’t fly away.
 Nappin’ in the sunshine Like Tolkien, I too desired dragons with a profound desire. And I’ve not altogether given up hope: legend has it that there’s still a dragon sleeping in Radnor Forest, surrounded by five churches named after St Michael the Archangel, who fought the Dragon of Revelation. If any of the churches that surround it are ever destroyed the dragon will wake up. Legend doesn’t say what the dragon will do then; if it’s anything like me it’ll just reset its alarm and go back to sleep. But if anything happens to any of those churches, I’ll be there. On the chance, you know, just on the chance…
 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
 Scottish Water have been digging up our road again. It’s part of a £4 million project to overhaul the town’s water supply, which means replacing some 15 km of water mains. (They started last year, but had to stop when the war in Ukraine caused a worldwide bitumen shortage.) So far they’ve mostly dug a lot of holes, some of which go down a surprisingly long way. At least I assume they’re specially-dug holes: given the state of the roads up here they could just be potholes the water board has coned off and pretended were deliberate.
 The Trinkie gets its annual overhaul It reminds me of the Lord of the Rings movies, when Saruman warns Gandalf: “You fear to go into that street. Scottish Water delved too greedily and too deep. You know what they awoke in the darkness of Miller Avenue… shadow and flame. Well, I say flame; it’s mostly water, of course, or possibly gas. But there’s definitely shadows, especially at night.” It’s all a little disconcerting. The other day I was passing one of the holes and I could’ve sworn I heard a voice from below exclaim “Ai! Ai! A Balrog!”
 Reiss Beach I wouldn’t mind, but I had to ask one of the workmen to move his digger so I could get to work, only for him to cry “You cannot pass! I am a servant of the Secret Fire, wielder of the flame of Anor. You cannot pass!” (“Drama wizard”, I thought.) They’re going to turn our water off for a couple of days this week, but since the internet tells me that’s one day less than a person can survive without water I reckon we should be fine.
 Finally this week, thanks for all the good wishes when I was taken ill the other day. I’m delighted to say that the swelling in my elbow’s mostly gone, in fact it might be wholly gone and what’s left is just how my elbow looks anyway – elbows being one of those things I’ve never really paid much attention to, like cosines or the name of the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. Even more excitingly, the assorted drugs seem to be clearing up my chesty cough, and for the first time in months my breathing no longer resembles Darth Vader sucking up the last drops of his milkshake through a straw. The treatment still has another month to run, but already I feel like a new man (I wonder where I can get one at this time of night, ahaha). Meanwhile I shall keep taking the tablets, assuming the water supply holds out, and keep knitting, about which I’ll say more next week. But thank you once again for all the good wishes.
 “Oh! on Coronation Day, on Coronation Day/ We’ll have a spree, a jubilee/ And shout Hip Hip Hooray…” No, that’s not from the book of Ecclesiastes, as you might expect, but instead it’s a music hall song from 1901. And we’ve been singing it on repeat here at Reid Towers to celebrate the coronation of His Majesty King Charles III. I was something of a republican in my youth, but as I’ve grown older, I’ve come to understand the real purpose of an event like this: it’s a chance for the country to just feel good about itself for a day, regardless of politics, colour, or creed. It’s a sort of national birthday party.
 Scurvy Grass The coronation to beat was, of course, that of William the Conqueror, which took place on Christmas Day, 1066. William had posted Norman guards outside Westminster Abbey in case of trouble from the natives. When these guards heard the shouts of Vivat! (“long life!”) coming from inside they assumed they were being attacked and responded, in a custom that is still honoured in France to this day, by setting fire to nearby houses. It’s in moments like this that the true English character comes to the fore. As the Norman chronicler Orderic Vitalis recorded, “Nearly everyone else ran towards the raging fire, some to fight bravely against the force of the flames, but more hoping to grab loot for themselves”. So proud.
 Rhythm in Foam As for King Charles’s coronation, these are the sorts of things Britain still does rather well: a ritual that feels like it dates from medieval times (and not the 1950s, when most of it was invented), a sort of comfortable, faded, down-at-heel, yet curiously moving touch of mystery and grandeur, a splash of fancy dress, and some frankly outstanding hair-on-the-back-of-the-neck-raising music. At least this time it was raining, which fortunately stopped Charles’s Norman guards setting fire to anything.
Fulmar in flight The Coronation Day song would probably be forgotten now, but James Joyce has Buck Mulligan sing it mockingly—“out of tune with a Cockney accent”—in the first chapter of Ulysses. “O, won’t we have a merry time/ Drinking whisky, beer and wine/ Or in my case ginger tea to help with the nausea from the antibiotics/ On Coronation/ Coronation Day?” The answer is, yes: yes, we will.
 All in all, I suppose, it could have been worse. I survived my week of antibiotics (the bucket unused) and watched the swelling in my elbow diminish from the size of a tennis ball to a crab apple, then a golf ball, and finally to something resembling a rather squishy marble. There’s another swelling beside it on my forearm; but as this one is rock hard and still quite tender, I’m giving it a wary wide berth, like someone faced with a sleepy cat: start poking it and who knows how many fingers you’ll have left?
 Gorse at the path’s end Meanwhile, in other news, the hospital consultant I’ve been seeing for the growth on my vocal cords and my cough is exploring the hypothesis that I’ve got an infected sinus and chest (to go with the elbow infection on the “buy one, get two free” principle). It’s a curious twist on Groundhog Day—if a hospital consultant emerges from her burrow and sees a shadow on a scan, you get six more weeks of antibiotics.
 Marsh marigolds I also have six weeks’ worth of nasal drops to take, which makes me wish I hadn’t given up yoga thirty years ago. You see, the instructions say to stand upright, then bend over so your head is completely upside down, and start squirting, remaining in that position for at least a minute. Alas, as about the furthest I can bend these days is about at the level of a respectful Japanese bow, this is as impractical as most of the illustrations in the Kama Sutra, leaving me to wonder if there hasn’t been a mix-up at the printers’. So instead I recline on the bed with my head dangling over the edge, laboriously counting to 60, and wonder, like Theoden in The Lord of the Rings when he had to take his nose drops, how did it come to this…?
 Two Swans a-swimming TECHNICAL STUFF
This is a classic Flamborough pattern, one of the best, and a favourite of mine, which is probably why I’ve knitted it so many times. The cables and the long lines flanking the moss stich panels always remind me of gothic architecture, those long, slender columns supporting seemingly weightless arches. It’s for a work colleague, and is in Frangipani Claret yarn, a deep, rich shade the colour of, well, claret. This time I’ve decided to break the cable pattern over the fake seam stitches, i.e., with half the cable pattern either side of the fake seams.
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“I desired dragons with a profound desire. Of course, I in my timid body did not wish to have them in the neighbourhood. But the world that contained even the imagination of Fáfnir was richer and more beautiful, at whatever the cost of peril.” The words of JRR Tolkien, of course, and in The Hobbit he created arguably the greatest dragon in all literature, Smaug the Tremendous, Chiefest and Greatest of Calamities (though The Hobbit is set in a time before Brexit, otherwise Smaug would only be the second Chiefest).
I find people can be divided into two camps: those who yearn in their secret hearts for dragons to be real, and those who see them primarily as allegories. In the former camp are most writers and readers of fantasy fiction, people who had their imaginative horizons enlarged by reading Tolkien and Beowulf and the Viking Sagas and who want more. In the other camp—well, I can’t tell you how disappointed I was to discover that Wagner had written a fantasy opera cycle with dwarves and dragons and magic rings, but that when it’s staged these days, they replace the dragon with something Freudian to symbolise the hero’s repressed Oedipus-complex or something (personally I think I’d be more afraid of a dragon). We live in a disappointingly prosaic age.
