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 Last Monday I had the pleasure of being filmed by BBC Scotland talking about ganseys—though pleasure may be stretching it, my feelings beforehand being much like those of a medieval astronomer who’s noticed the Earth going round the Sun, and who’s just been told a couple of chaps from the Inquisition are downstairs and would like a word. But actually it was a lot of fun. The whole crew were professional and charming—I got the impression they’d done this sort of thing before—and I became relaxed enough to hear my mouth spouting the most godawful nonsense while my brain searched frantically for the chloroform. (This is perfectly normal for me, of course; but then I’m not usually being filmed for broadcast television.)
 Blooming grasses The programme is called In Our Town, and the presenter, Ian Hamilton, a quite lovely man, is blind. Any nerves I felt going in vanished immediately when I met Ian, who put me at ease at once, and his patient guide dog, Major (I shall in future insist that every tv interview I give must include a friendly dog). The filming took place at Wick Museum, upstairs in the gallery with the Johnston photographs and all my ganseys. I’ve been filmed for tv before, and the experience is a bit like finding yourself being interrupted by a SWAT team in the middle of making breakfast. So I was prepared to move my chair an inch to the left, hmm, how about to the right—your right—tell you what, just stand up a minute, I’ll move it—and doing different takes of the same answers. Ian, who is a good sport, had a go at some knitting, and if we’d had longer I think he’d have cracked it. Though given the fact that I’m effectively down to one working eye, the phrase “the blind leading the blind” has never felt more apt.
 Taking in the view Out of the limelight, my latest gansey has exploded into life this week: the front finished, the shoulders joined, the collar done and the left sleeve started. The original features Betty Martin as the sleeve pattern, but while I’m a huge fan of Betty I do prefer the look of having the body pattern mirrored at the top of the sleeve. So I’ve abandoned tradition for a change. The pattern on the sleeve is exactly the same as on the body.
 Hawthorn blooming in the hedgerows Back in the museum there was one camera, so I was the sole focus of the actual interview. They then filmed the reverse shots of Ian repeating the questions, so they could splice those shots into the footage of my answers (oh, I thought naively, so that’s how they do it). Then I was free to go. They were up here filming all week for a 30-minute programme, so who knows if I’ll even make the cut. Not that I plan to watch it; I don’t think I could bear it. The producer told me the programme was likely to go out maybe in October. Perfect, I said: that gives me just enough time to change my name and start a new life in another country…
 The UK’s been celebrating Queen Elizabeth’s Platinum Jubilee this weekend and the weather—unusually for a bank holiday—has been glorious, even here in Caithness. The clouds vanished and suddenly the sky got bigger, as though God had lifted the lid off the pot to see if we’re done yet. Even the sun seems to have had its dial turned up to eleven, there’s light everywhere, reflecting off the sea and turning the world into a giant kaleidoscope. We’re almost at the solstice, too: the days are already long enough that, when the sun shines, it’s actually brighter when you turn the lights off to go to bed.
 Ruin by the sea, Crosskirk (not the chapel) We took advantage of the sunshine and headed for two separate cliffs, north and east: St Mary’s Chapel at Crosskirk on the north coast, on the road to Dounreay, and Sarclet harbour, just south of Wick. St Mary’s Chapel itself dates from the 1100s, when Caithness was a Norse province. It overlooks a bay that mostly consists of shelves of rock vanishing under the sea at an angle, which always makes me want to get in touch with my inner Charlton Heston, fall to my knees, bang my fist on the grass and shout, “You maniacs! You blew it up!” Later, when we reached Sarclet the haar was just rolling in from the sea, a wave of low cloud drifting in over the cliffs, then pouring down to envelop the harbour in a slow-motion waterfall of vapour. The sun was shining hazily through the mist, as though in a sign that the Holy Grail was buried somewhere near, but though we searched we couldn’t find it anywhere.
 Oystercatcher and thrift on a sea stack One advantage of the holiday has been the chance to draw the curtains, ignore any street parties, and crack on with the gansey: I’ve finished the back, and am well on the way to getting the front done too. As usual, I have to pay extra attention when knitting front and back, as I’ve never quite got the hang of the knitting on the back rows being, in effect, inverted; and as I lost the ability to concentrate somewhere around 1979, a certain amount of unpicking and re-doing is, alas, involved.
 Haar rolling in at Sarclet And as for the monarchy, well, it’s one of any number of things that I find I don’t have to have an opinion on, along with such weighty matters as the offside rule, why modern music doesn’t have any decent tunes, and the heat death of the universe. It’s really very liberating. If anyone asks me what I believe, I simply refer them to the poet Stipe, who stated that he believed in “coyotes and time as an abstract“, and also that his shirt was wearing thin—a philosophy I think we can all get behind. Though as I get older I also find myself increasingly coming round to Groucho Marx’s famous credo: “Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them…well I have others…”
 There are some words you don’t want to hear in an optometrist’s, and near the top of my personal blacklist is: “Oh well, at least the other one’s in pretty good shape”. (At the very top would probably be, “Hold still, I saw where it went and I’m sure I can pop it back in in a jiffy”.) Regular readers will be aware that I suffer from myopic macular degeneration in my right eye. This means that I have a blank spot right in in the centre of my vision in that eye, not unlike the cheesy special effect for an energy being in the original Star Trek. (If I’m reading, it’s a space about the size of the word “the”.) My peripheral vision’s still partly there, so when I’m having an eye test I have to sway my head around like the snake Kaa in The Jungle Book trying to hypnotise its prey just to read one of the big letters.
 Swirl of Daisies It’s all because I was born so short-sighted. My eye sockets are deeper than usual (30+mm deep, as opposed to the average of 20+mm), which stretches the blood vessels servicing the retina, particularly those to the macular, which is the bit that does all the work. Some of those have just become stretched to breaking point. (Or the way I look at it, some of the LED lights in the tv of my brain have blown, and they don’t make replacements any more.) It’s very weird. Straight lines bend around the blank spot, so if I look at grid pattern it resembles an illustration of a black hole distorting the fabric of space-time (look up “Amsler Grid” to see what this looks like; like I say, it’s weird). And it’s deteriorated quite a lot since my last checkup.
 Photobombed by a Swallow Still, it’s been this way for a few years now. It is what it is, and, as Gandalf so wisely observed, “All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us”. (In his case this meant overthrowing the Dark Lord of Mordor, whereas I prefer to spend my time on the couch knitting; each to their own.) So I continue to make progress on my olive gansey. I’ve finished the half-gussets, and divided front and back. This is always the payoff moment, when everything goes twice as fast and you can see the pattern really come together. I may never knit another cable pattern ever again, mind.
 Budding Hawthorn And anyway, even if one eye’s a crock I’ve still got another which is, I’m reliably informed, in pretty good shape. The consultant who first diagnosed my condition told me that it might never develop in this eye too, or “it could happen tomorrow” (I’m sure he meant to be reassuring). So as far as I’m concerned every day’s a bonus, and every piece of knitting is literally a stitch in time. And if the absolute worst should happen? Well, so long as they can find it and pop it back in I should be all right…
 If anyone asks me why I study history, I tend to stare thoughtfully off into the distance and try to look as much like Gandalf as possible—the Gandalf who stroked his beard a lot and gave wise counsel, I mean, not the one who went skydiving on terrors from the ancient deeps in his dressing gown. I then, rather pompously, go on to say that I want to understand where we came from, and what we can learn from those who went before us. It’s not remotely true, of course. Mostly I study history to learn weird stuff, like the fact that the Ancient Romans allegedly used mouse brains as toothpaste.
 Summer Flowers I like to think that a Roman patriarch would keep a cage of tame mice by the bathroom sink. At bedtime he’d reach in and select one, hold it up to his toothbrush, and give it a firm but gentle squeeze. All over Rome the citizens must have known it was time for bed by the chorus of short, high-pitched squeaks that rang out across the city, thus doing away with the need for clocks to be invented for several hundred years. (Though as advertising slogans go, “breath as a fresh as the inside of a dormouse” feels like it maybe needs work.)
Setting oral hygiene aside for the moment, Judit has come up trumps again, with a very stylish sleeveless slipover in blue. It’s mostly plain, with decoration around the armholes, collar, and a band running all the way down to the welt. And very nice it looks too, bathed in some fine spring sunshine.
 Daisy amid the Horsetail My own gansey project is also making good progress. I’ve just started the underarm gussets, and may even divide for front and back later this week. My only concern is the way the sheer number of cables are pulling it in width-wise. Some pulling-in is to be expected, of course and I tried to compensate from the start by making it half an inch wider per side. It may not be enough, though. If I were Gandalf I’d be stroking my beard thoughtfully.
 The Old Lifeboat Shed And did the Ancient Romans really use mouse brains as toothpaste, even dried into a powder? I rather doubt it. I mean, why use mice anyway, which are not to my knowledge especially renowned for their cranial capacity, even if they do have white teeth? (Bit of a faff getting the tops off them, too, I’d imagine.) I suspect it’s like the urban myth that they used urine as a mouthwash—the Romans, I mean, not the mice. The evidence for that is pretty slim, and it mostly consists of Romans claiming it’s something the barbarians do, to show how uncivilised they are. No, I think the Romans were too smart to use mice in toothpaste, and instead turned to [*checks internet*] ground up bones, ox hooves, pumice, eggshells, bark and, er, charcoal. Oh. On second thoughts, it’s nearly bedtime—just pass me that mouse, will you…?
 There are few things more tedious than people relating their dreams: so bad luck everyone, because here’s a rather unsettling dream I had a few days ago. I still haven’t shaken it off.
In my dream I am walking down one side of a vast, uneven crater, like an enormous open cast mine. Many miles across. A dry, desolate, empty landscape, no buildings. Mounds of spoil. Stones and gravel underfoot.
It is dark: grey, twilight, gloomy. When I look up, I can’t see the sky. When I look down, the bottom of the crater disappears in deep pools of darkness.
I’m part of a group of maybe a dozen or so; it’s hard to be sure in this murk. We are the only people. We’ve been walking for ages, following a path zig-zagging down the side of the depression, and don’t seem to be making any progress. Maybe this is because of the sheer distances involved, or maybe it’s just dream logic.
I believe that we are underground, and that for some reason we all have to live underground. I believe that somewhere high above me, hidden in darkness, is a ceiling of solid rock, like we’re in an enormous cave deep below the surface.
At some point I turn to the person walking beside me and say, “Why do we have to live underground now?”
And he says, “This isn’t underground. We are all dead.”
And I wake up.
 Along the riverside path Weird, huh? And, it has to be said, just the tiniest bit creepy. “Where do you go to, my lovely,” Peter Sarstedt asked back in 1969, “when you’re alone in your bed?” It’s a good question, Peter, thanks for asking: turns out I go to the land of the dead, which, somewhat surprisingly, appears not to be Caithness after all.
 Cliffs near Sarclet It’s not often that I compare myself to Hamlet—except we’ve both been called fat and scant of breath—but when he says, “O God I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space; were it not that I have bad dreams”, I reckon I know exactly what he means…
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TECHNICAL STUFF
Here’s the pattern chart. As I said the other week, the only change I’ve made is to have the cables and ladders every seventh row, instead of every eighth as in the original. It’s a great combination, and the narrow bands and the number of cables really make for a highly distinctive effect without being too “busy”. (Though all those cables every seventh row does sometimes feel like getting detention.) Anyway, we’re getting there, and maybe later this week I may even be in a position to start the underarm gussets.
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Last Monday I had the pleasure of being filmed by BBC Scotland talking about ganseys—though pleasure may be stretching it, my feelings beforehand being much like those of a medieval astronomer who’s noticed the Earth going round the Sun, and who’s just been told a couple of chaps from the Inquisition are downstairs and would like a word. But actually it was a lot of fun. The whole crew were professional and charming—I got the impression they’d done this sort of thing before—and I became relaxed enough to hear my mouth spouting the most godawful nonsense while my brain searched frantically for the chloroform. (This is perfectly normal for me, of course; but then I’m not usually being filmed for broadcast television.)
