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 “So,” the doctor said, reading from her computer screen, “it says here you’re allergic to penicillin.” She looked at me thoughtfully. “Now, when it says allergic…?” “Red spots from the nave to the chaps,” I said, “human sacrifice! Dogs and cats living together! Mass hysteria!” “Ah.” The doctor consulted her screen again. “Well, luckily there’s another medication that will deal with the problem, so let’s just see… Ah. This one’s also got a red flag next to your name, and a note.” “What’s it say?” I asked, though I had a pretty good idea. She smiled encouragingly: “Extreme nausea.”
 Fog drifts at the harbour Which goes some way to explaining why I’m writing this on my phone, flat on my back, with a small bucket discreetly positioned under my bed. For some weeks now I’ve been aware that my left elbow was sore when I leaned on it – is ‘Zoom elbow’ a recognised medical condition yet? – but on Thursday last week matters escalated. It swelled up and became puffy and inflamed, so that it now looks like the elbow is encased in a large, distinctly overripe plum, and rather sore. The infection, for infection it is, seems to have spread several inches down my forearm, and up towards what I optimistically call my bicep, even if it more closely resembles a lump of soft cheese being strained through a muslin cloth.
 Croaking Raven The doctor very considerately prescribed a side dish of anti-nausea pills to go with the main course – the name of which escapes me, but it’s something like dioxyacetylene – and so far the bucket under the bed has thankfully remained dry. Though I’ve had some mauvais quarts d’heure lying on my back breathing slowly, or hunched over the sink trying to think happy thoughts. It’s too early for the swelling to’ve gone down yet, but despite all the surface wooziness I think I actually feel better underneath than I have in a while; as if the antibiotics are killing off more than just an elbow infection. Of course, I could be imagining it; but I can’t help thinking this is what a pint of milk must feel like when it gets pasteurised.
 The Gorse at Helmsdale I’ve not done a lot of knitting this last week, for obvious reasons, but it was still enough to finish another project. These days I tend to have two ganseys on the go at any one time, a main one which I blog about, and another, usually of a contrasting pattern, for light relief. Both this one and its predecessor are for two of the ladies who volunteer with me at Wick Museum, and they chose them from the selection of my ganseys on display there: I hope to hand them over this coming Saturday. It’s the classic Matt Cammish pattern from Gladys Thompson’s book in Frangipani pewter, one of the all-time great patterns, just a perfect combination, and the Frangipani yarn really shows it up nicely. And now it’s on to the next project, or it will be once I get through the next few days. (You think all this is bad? It’s actually worse: you see, I’ve realised that you can sing, “I’m dreaming of a dry bucket” to the tune of White Christmas, and now I can’t get the damn thing out of my head…)
 The coast of Caithness is dotted with little harbours, many of them ruined and abandoned now, or else on life support, home to maybe a solitary boat or two fishing for lobster. Yet once they were a base for whole fleets of fishing boats, and great three-masted schooners, that in photographs look like something the Flying Dutchman would choose for a round-the-world cruise, would be tied up at the quays, unloading timber and salt and filling their holds with barrels of packed salted herring for the markets in Germany and Russia.
 Staxigoe, a mile or so north of Wick, is one such. The name derives from the Old Norse world for an inlet, geo, plus stakkr, or stack for the great lump of rock jutting up like the last tooth in a gum that’s seen better days; so, “inlet of the stack”. The Caithness fishing industry began here, when in 1767 three local men fitted out a couple of boats to fish for herring. Within a few decades there were 50 boats fishing out of Staxigoe, and it was the largest curing station in the area.
But boom leads to bust as chocolate Easter eggs lead to the dentist, and the fitting out of Wick as a purpose-built herring port (especially as the boats grew larger, with a deeper draft) killed off Staxigoe as a going concern. If you’re sensitive to atmosphere it’s laden with meaning, and everywhere you turn you brush up against the ghosts of ghosts. If not, – and while we were there a car pulled up, obviously tourists, who stayed for as long as it takes to say “is this it?” and drove off again – not…
 The fountain, Wick PARISH NOTICES
First of all, the great reveal as my gansey project is finally finished. Washing and blocking is essential with these garments, and especially ones with such extended ribbing: so now it expands, like a wilted flower after spring rain, and we can see it whole and entire. Will it fit? I’ll find out in a week or two.
And finally this week, we have another cracking gansey in chocolate brown from Sigrid in Germany. I’ll let her describe it in her own words:
 Sun & Shadow near Wick Harbour “I got the pattern ideas from the German edition of “Ganseys” (original: The Gansey Knitting Sourcebook) by Di Gilpin and Sheila Greenwell: Eriskay Lifetree and Diamond, combined with Scottish flags with mock braids (Fraserburgh, Aberdeenshire) and tiny heapies at the ends of the sleeves. I have to admit that I already had the body from a cardigan I had ribbed up – it had to become a gansey ;)). That’s why the yoke and gussets are a bit shorter, but I still like the final product.”
Many congratulations to Sigrid, and many thanks to her, and to all who have been so generous by sending us pictures of their finished ganseys, for sharing.
 It being Easter, and spring having finally arrived, a little rusted after all the rain, we took a trip up to John O’Groats. John O’Groats is famously the most northerly settlement on the mainland of Britain. (Dunnet Head, a few miles up the coast, is actually a little further north; but as it basically consists of a lighthouse on a headland, a scattering of fulmars and the odd puffin, and is a bit of a fag to reach, it doesn’t count.)
 The Harbour, John o’Groats Back in the day, visiting John O’Groats used to be a pretty bleak experience, especially in bad weather: after the first half hour or so of standing next to a sign telling you that it’s 3,230 miles to New York whilst a scouring wind drives the rain through your inadequate coat like radioactive particles, the novelty starts to wear off. But since they rebranded the coastal road that runs for 516 miles in a broad loop from Inverness and back round “The North Coast 500”, tourism is now very much A Thing. John O’Groats has been gentrified accordingly: there’s an ice cream shop, gift shops, cafes and even a “distillery experience”, whatever that may be.
 The Mill near John o’Groats What’s in a name? The story goes that John O’Groats is named after a Dutchman (Jan de Groot) who was awarded a contract by King James IV in 1496 to operate a ferry across the Pentland Firth to Orkney. Well, maybe: for something so specific there seems to be a shortage of documentary evidence. Did he really charge passengers a groat each, and is that really where the place’s name comes from? I hae ma doots. De Groot means “the large” (incidentally, the same root meaning as groat), so if he existed it seems more likely that the place was just named for him; though I must say, John O’Groats has a better ring to it than “Big John’s place…”
PARISH NOTICES
In parish notices this week we have another splendid gansey from Judit. It’s knit in a lighter shade which shows off the pattern perfectly. The pattern itself is taken from Rae Compton’s book, that of John Northcott from Cornwall. It’s a cousin to certain other Cornish gansey designs like The Lizard and the Vicar of Morwenstow, which are some of my all-time favourites, and it’s great to see these patterns being brough to life by Judit. So many thanks to her, and as ever many thanks for sharing them with the rest of us.
 The mill stream Finally, my own gansey project is almost finished, just the last bit of cuff to go. As usual when I’m knitting a gansey for someone else, I tend to double the length of the cuffs so that, when doubled back, the recipient has a bit of flexibility as to how long they want their sleeves to be. And if they don’t like them doubled back it’s easy enough to rip them back to their preferred length. The only downside is knitting five or six inches of ribbing when you’re already thinking of your next project…
 I was reading this week about Wick’s patron saint, an Irish bishop and missionary called Fergus the Pict (died c.730 AD). St Fergus didn’t confine himself to Caithness but founded a number of churches in north-east Scotland (the Aberdeen Breviary says he “occupied himself in converting the barbarous people”, still a fair description of Aberdonians to this day).
Goldeneye (Bucephala clangula) in said river There used to be a sculpture of the saint in Wick parish church. During the Reformation, in 1613, Wick got a new archdeacon, one Dr Richard Merchiston of Bower. Merchiston was an iconoclast in the original meaning of the word, someone who believed that images smacked of popery, and one day smashed up the statue of St Fergus. This so annoyed the townspeople they waylaid Merchiston one evening and – perhaps a little extreme – drowned him in the river. When questioned about it later they swore they weren’t to blame, but said the saint himself had appeared and sat astride Merchiston in the river, holding his head under the water. Full marks, you’d have to say, for style.
 Cheerful daffs Meanwhile in gansey news, I am inching my way towards being about halfway down the second sleeve. Another week or so should see it completed, and then there’s just the anxious wait to see if it fits! Like so many gansey patterns, we won’t see what it looks like properly until it’s been washed and blocked; for now I keep on, in Yeats’s phrase, “dreading and hoping all”.
 Fulmar And now it’s Easter week, which means it must finally be spring (by which I mean it seems to’ve stopped snowing). It’s traditionally the season of rebirth and renewal, and also of chocolate rabbits and the eggs they lay from which baby rabbits hatch. In The Lord of the Rings the Lady Galadriel sadly contemplates a future in the Undying Lands without her beloved mallorn trees; I feel much the same way about heaven (assuming I’m lucky enough to get there, which currently feels like a long shot) and Hotel Chocolat easter eggs…
A very happy Easter to all our readers, from Gordon and Margaret!
 The clocks in the UK went forward last night for Daylight Saving Time, and of course I’m wrecked. It’s like having seasonal jet lag. Every year I find myself wondering if even summer is worth all this grief (this being what my old Latin grammar teacher called ‘a question expecting the answer “no”’). Experience teaches me that for the next couple of weeks I shall greet each day like Frankenstein’s monster on the slab, while Margaret stands over me with electrodes, waiting for a lightning storm and shouting “Give my creature life!”
 The Last Snowdrops of Spring The time change isn’t the only reason I’m knackered just now, though. I was down in Cumbria on a business trip last week, a wearying 800-mile round trip. Highlight of the journey was a visit to Sellafield, Europe’s oldest and largest nuclear site, some 650 acres on the beautiful Cumbrian coast. It doesn’t generate power any more and is used primarily for reprocessing and storage, as redundant buildings and plant are gradually being decommissioned. It’s big in three dimensions, some of the silos tall as cathedrals.
 The church from across the river It’s big in the fourth dimension, too. My profession is cultural heritage, and already places like Sellafield seem to belong to Britain’s past, like those ruined abbeys from the Reformation, crumbling monuments to a faith which once dominated the world and which now seem unimaginably out of reach. “History is now, and England” as TS Eliot said, even if it looked like the future just a few short years ago.
 Budding hydrangea But then, lack of sleep always tends to send me into philosopher mode. There’s no real cure but to wait till my body clock adjusts, tempting though it is to set the alarm for about an hour before the dawn chorus, then go out and shout at the trees to see how the birds like being woken up early for a change. Meanwhile, an urgent question: how exactly shall I spend all this daylight time I’ve saved…?
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“So,” the doctor said, reading from her computer screen, “it says here you’re allergic to penicillin.” She looked at me thoughtfully. “Now, when it says allergic…?” “Red spots from the nave to the chaps,” I said, “human sacrifice! Dogs and cats living together! Mass hysteria!” “Ah.” The doctor consulted her screen again. “Well, luckily there’s another medication that will deal with the problem, so let’s just see… Ah. This one’s also got a red flag next to your name, and a note.” “What’s it say?” I asked, though I had a pretty good idea. She smiled encouragingly: “Extreme nausea.”
