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 In Twelfth Night, Feste, an experienced weather forecaster, declares that “The rain it raineth every day”. But while this is usually a pretty fair description of Caithness in early summer, right now the ground’s parched. It hasn’t rained for weeks, not that proper, solid, god-fearing presbyterian rain where it just falls all day dripping from the eaves and cascading from the trees in miniature waterfalls. I mean, the ground up here’s supposed to be soft: I’m used to walking across grassy fields in Caithness in squidgy squelches, the water sometimes rising to my ankles. These days I just bounce. It’s as if we’d moved to California and I hadn’t noticed
 We went up to Duncansby Stacks, those great triangular sea stacks rising up beside the cliffs like God’s Toblerone. The walk over the headland is usually pretty squishy, as though the grass isn’t anchored to earth but just floats on the water table like plankton. I keep expecting to see people roped together in case someone is sucked under in a Grimpen Mire sort of way. Not this time. The soil was dusty, watercourses you normally have to jump over were all dried up, and the sheep followed us around in hopes of catching stray drops of sweat.
 Sea thrift carpeting the shore TS Eliot probably had us in mind when he wrote, “Here is no water but only rock/ Rock and no water and the sandy road/ The road winding above among the mountains/ Which are mountains of rock without water”. Except for the rock, the sand, and the mountains, and the roads having potholes you could lose a battleship in, it’s an almost exact portrait of Caithness. But surely the dry spell can’t last for ever—this is Scotland, after all—and I see some rain is in the forecast. Till then, as Feste would say, the sun it shineth every day…
 A glimmer of light in the shadow TECHNICAL STUFF
As you will see, I’ve almost finished the front of the body. One shoulder is complete and has been joined to its counterpart at the back. (I find it easier to join the first shoulder as it is completed, rather than put it on a holder until both are ready to be joined.) The other has almost reached the shoulder strap.
The indented neckline is achieved by decreasing every other row on the inside, or neck edge. This indent is over 28 rows, so a decrease every second row means 14 decreases: so, each shoulder needle starts with an extra 14 stitches on it taken from the centre. These 14 stitches are decreased away over 28 rows, so that by the shoulder straps there will be the same number of stitches as the back (if that makes sense) And the centre needles lose 14 + 14 stitches, of course, to compensate. I find this makes a nice, rounded neckline. I usually also knit the first stitch of the decrease row, and then do the decrease on the next two: because that first stitch “disappears” when it is picked up during the foundation row of the collar, you’re left with the nicely delineated angled decrease stitches making a V to either side.
 Enjoying the view from the Trinkie
 If you travel north from Wick as far as Castletown, about 14 miles, then turn east towards John o’Groats, you come to a little turning on the left just before the Castle of Mey, signposted to Harrow. The single-track road points due north again for maybe a mile, taking you through flat fields dotted with farms and houses, before forking again: left for the hamlet of Skarfskerry (Old Norse for “cormorants’ rock”; the Vikings evidently running out of names at this stage) and right to the harbour. The harbour road cuts through some cliffs (Harrow Braes), over a boneshaker of a cattle grid, and then it’s just you and the open ocean.
 Despite being renovated back in 1979 and officially reopened by Jimmy Page, lead guitarist with Led Zeppelin (whose Caithness-inspired hits include “Whole Lotta Fish”, “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You Some Herring”, and of course, “Stairway to Harrow”) a solitary lobster boat, looking rather sorry for itself marooned at low tide, is all the industry that remains. But when we visited the other day, it was home to a colony of seals, lumpen and awkward by land and so graceful in the water, who crossed the bay to check us out before retiring in disgust when they discovered we hadn’t brought any fish. Everything goes better with seals.
 Sprucing up the sheds by Wick Harbour And yes, like so many Caithness harbours, this one has seen better days. But you’d be wrong if you thought it was the decline of the fishing that was behind it, despite the vaulted ice house cut into the cliffs: no, Harrow harbour was built by the earl of Caithness back in the day to take advantage of the local flagstone industry. The stones were cut by hand originally, which sounds like fun, later by a steam-powered saw in one of the tumbledown sheds on the high ground overlooking the sea, and then loaded onto ships which sailed out into the wild grey yonder. It’s impossible not to stand on the harbour flagstones and think of all the people who have come and gone, come and gone, leaving just broken monuments behind, and wonder where that leaves us; and how much it matters, if at all.
 Waves near South Head, Wick TECHNICAL STUFF
First of all, in parish notices, Sigrid has sent us pictures of another stunning cardigan in ice blue, which she appropriately calls “Hoofprint, or The Sea”. The pattern takes its inspirations from Di Gilpin’s book, and features hoofprints, waves, ropes, starfish and anchors, all associated with the sea (as so many gansey patterns are, of course). Many congratulations to Sigrid, who is setting quite a high bar here, and many thanks to her for sharing.
My own gansey project has seen the back finished, with shoulder straps of 12 rows rig ‘n’ fur on either side. Without wishing to appear cocky, I am quietly smug in a terribly British understated sort of way at getting the diamonds to finish at just the right length.
 Muckle Skerry from Duncansby Head
 I was delighted to learn this week that medieval scribes believed in a demon called Titivillus, whose job it was to introduce errors into their work. So if you made a mistake copying a manuscript, you could simply blame it on him. (“I say, Brother Eczema, you’ve copied antidisestablishmentarianism wrong again!” “It wasn’t me, Brother Hashbrown, honest, it must have been Titivillus, the wee imp”.) Whereas the Jackson Five didn’t blame it on the sunshine, the moonlight, or the good times, but blamed it on the boogie, we know who was really responsible.
And when you think about it, it makes a lot of sense. I used to think my guardian angel was slacking on the job, I make so many silly errors; little did I realise they were Titivillus’s doing. (I’d like to say that Titivillus is the origin of the modern slang phrase for when things go wrong, that they’ve gone “Tit’s up”, but alas that’s not true. The world can be a bit disappointing sometimes.)
Oystercatchers In his spare time Titivillus also collected idle chat during church services, as well as instances of the minister skipping or mispronouncing words. These he put in a sack and took down to hell, ready to be used in evidence at the day of reckoning; they were, he said, when asked about it one day, “stolen from God” – at which point I think back with a twinge of unease to my schooldays and the larks we young scamps got up to when we should’ve been attending to morning service.
Titivillus was regarded as the patron demon of scribes, but he’s pretty much out of a job now that we’ve migrated to computers and keyboards. Still, the devil finds work for idle hands, and I these days I expect he’s gainfully employed messing around with the autocorrect function on my phone and creating paper jams on the work photocopier.
 Blooming grasses TECHNICAL STUFF
Given the number of mistakes I’ve made in my knitting recently, each of which had to be patiently corrected by Tech Support (i.e., Margaret), I think Titivillus must’ve been perched by my elbow, dropping stitches, turning knits into purls, and casting purls before swine. Still, despite his best endeavours I’m about three-quarters up the back. The gussets were increased by two stitches every four rows until they were 17 stitches wide, or two inches, when they were put on holders and I divided for front and back.
I should finish the back this week, and then we’ll do it all again for the front; unless of course it turns out that the devil, as the saying goes, really is in the detail…
The Trinkie on a bonny day
 “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
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In Twelfth Night, Feste, an experienced weather forecaster, declares that “The rain it raineth every day”. But while this is usually a pretty fair description of Caithness in early summer, right now the ground’s parched. It hasn’t rained for weeks, not that proper, solid, god-fearing presbyterian rain where it just falls all day dripping from the eaves and cascading from the trees in miniature waterfalls. I mean, the ground up here’s supposed to be soft: I’m used to walking across grassy fields in Caithness in squidgy squelches, the water sometimes rising to my ankles. These days I just bounce. It’s as if we’d moved to California and I hadn’t noticed
We went up to Duncansby Stacks, those great triangular sea stacks rising up beside the cliffs like God’s Toblerone. The walk over the headland is usually pretty squishy, as though the grass isn’t anchored to earth but just floats on the water table like plankton. I keep expecting to see people roped together in case someone is sucked under in a Grimpen Mire sort of way. Not this time. The soil was dusty, watercourses you normally have to jump over were all dried up, and the sheep followed us around in hopes of catching stray drops of sweat.
