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 We’re recruiting for a couple of posts just now, and I’m getting flashbacks to some of the skeletons in my own personal Closet of Interview Horrors. The most unpleasant was at an archive in the City of London back in the early 90s. It’s usual to show candidates round an archive before interview, and then ask them for their impressions as a lead-off question. Not this time. I was shown straight into the boardroom. Across the table was a panel of grave, besuited middle-aged men in cufflinks. Cufflink No.1 blithely began by saying that they expected anyone who wanted to work there to have already paid a visit in their own time, and, presuming that to be the case, what were my impressions? “Actually I’ve never been here before,” I replied. “Oh dear!”, he exclaimed. After a ghastly silence, during which they all bent over their assessment forms to write, as far as I could tell, “Oh dear”, it was Cufflink No.2’s turn: “In that case, can you tell us why you’ve applied for this job?” He asked, before adding nastily, “Apart from the money, that is.”
 The Launch of the Isabella Fortuna Another gem was the time I was interviewed by the entire Library Committee of a certain council in Wales, about twelve people in all. This time they gave the candidates the questions beforehand, so we had time to prepare. When I was called in, the Chairman read out the first question. I said I’d like to take the first two questions together—not trying to be clever, but because it genuinely seemed to make sense to merge them in one answer. The committee heard me out in silence. After a lethal pause the Chairman picked up his list of questions again. “Thank you, Mr Reid,” he said. “Now then, question two…”, which he then proceeded to read out in full, leaving me feeling like I’d just trodden on a rake.
I’ll pause it there, to build up suspense before revealing the interview that still haunts my dreams, and turn instead to the current gansey project. The pattern is starting to reveal itself nicely: panels of open diamonds and ladders interspersed with cables. The “rungs” of the ladders and the cables come every seventh row (this is the only change I’ve made from the original as recorded by Michael Pearson, where both happen every eighth row; I just like seven-row cables). It’s an easy pattern to knit, but a spectacular one nevertheless—the only downside is having to make eighteen cables every seven rows.
 Coming up Daisies And now we come to my worst interview experience. No, it’s not the one where my presentation wouldn’t load, and I ended up giving the talk using finger puppets, grim though that was. This one was in Liverpool, in an old council building. As I was shown into the room I saw the panel waiting inside, sitting in chairs in a row (there wasn’t a table this time). As I was looking at them, and assembling a friendly, non-threatening smile to greet them with, I neglected to notice a fatal step up to the room. This I duly caught with my trailing foot. My entrance was therefore rather more exciting than I’d intended, as I stumbled several paces before losing my balance completely… and ended lying face-up in the lap of the lady who was head of libraries, looking right up her nose.
But let us avert our collective gaze with a shudder from the tragic scene. Like Agent Kay in Men in Black, these are all several of a hundred memories I don’t want; in fact, if anyone out there has a standard-issue neuralyzer and would like to come over and flashy-thing me to erase them all, just let me know…
 Gorse at Helmsdale
 It’s May Day as I write this—though saying it out loud makes it sound like a cry of distress—and nothing gets your Sunday off to a good start like realising that you’re snugly tucked up in bed while a bunch other fellows have already been up for hours, dancing the sun up. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a huge fan of honouring ancient customs; and while I’ve no reason to believe the sun won’t rise if no one is there to greet it, it’s not something I feel we should leave to chance. It’s just that, in my case, as Hamlet said, it’s a custom more honour’d in the breach than the observance. In fact, in modern parlance, I like to think that nowadays I’ve “outsourced” it.
 Plum tree in bloom Back when I used to Morris dance (in England; the last Morris dancer in Scotland was hunted to extinction around the time of Bonnie Prince Charlie) I rather enjoyed getting up at 4 a.m. on May Day. We’d gather at the Market Square for sunrise, which came a little after 5.30 a.m. There’s something special about being up at that time, when the day is so fresh and new you feel you’re getting first use of all the oxygen. I especially used to treasure the last few seconds before the first dance, happy in the knowledge that everyone sleeping within a radius of about a quarter of a mile was about to get the rude awakening of a lifetime. And afterwards it was in to the pub for an early breakfast, sausages and coffee hot-and-hot.
 Snoozing in the sun Now I’ve made myself hungry: to distract myself till lunchtime, I’ve just started a new gansey project. This one’s for the partner of a colleague at work. It’s Mrs Hunter of Filey’s pattern, taken from page 43 of Michael Pearson’s first edition. It’s knit in Frangipani olive yarn; this is the first time I’ve used it, and I like it a lot already. Though ever since I learned that the local fishermen didn’t wear green because it was considered unlucky, I’ve rather avoided the colour, stupidly. After seeing this, I might reconsider.
 Colourful creel As for my dancing days, well, that was then and this is now. Time has done what time does—for instance, my younger self had knees; these days I need three strong men to help me up after loading the washing machine, like Henry VIII in his armour being winched onto his horse. And so has geography. The sun rises early here in the far north of Scotland (and every day it rises earlier, until in a few weeks it will hardly set at all). I achieved a sort of Buddhist enlightenment when I realised that I could still dance the sun up: it’s just that the sun whose rise I’m celebrating is the one over Boston, Massachusetts (sunrise, 10.39 a.m. UK time); and by “dancing up” I mean “getting slowly and painfully out of bed”. Thus I play my own small part in welcoming in the summertime and the May-oh, and ensuring that the crops will grow for another year. No, honestly, I don’t want any thanks—sometimes virtue is its own reward…
 We’ve been on holiday this week, and for a change pretended we’d come to Caithness on vacation, and resolved to get out and do touristy things. So we’ve spent the week dropping litter, complaining about the weather, asking passers-by where the nearest Starbucks is (Inverness, i.e., 100 miles away), and wondering why we’d come.
 RSPB Forsinard On Thursday we went over to the Forsinard nature reserve, out west on the Caithness-Sutherland border. There’s no direct road from Wick, so you have to go about 30-40 miles north or south to hit the 40-mile long single-track road (the A897) that runs all the way from the north coast near Reay to Helmsdale on the east coast. If you look up “the middle of nowhere” in the dictionary you’ll see a picture of Forsinard. It’s a stunning drive, though, following the river all the way down Strath Halladale, starting among the bleak northern hills, down through Europe’s largest peat bog (rebranded the “Flow Country” by marketing professionals, which always feels as if should be prefixed with the word “Sani”). Head south from Forsinard and you enter a broad, fertile river valley, with lochs, sheep, and fishermen in waders optimistically casting for salmon.
 Stack at Sandside, near Dounreay Of course I got plenty of knitting done this week too. I duly finished the navy Wick gansey, and here it is, all washed and blocked. It still looks kinda weird, as though someone had had the bright idea of combining a pullover with an accordion; but it would make for a nicely snug fit, and, given the prevailing Caithness winds, seems eminently practical.
It’s a double-header of finished ganseys this week, as Judit has sent us pictures of a golden gansey in the classic Staithes pattern, a splendid present to a young lady on passing her Finnish language exam. Staithes is a classic for a reason, and can be scaled up or down to suit and still look great, as this proves. Many congratulations to Judit, and the lucky recipient also, of course, and many thanks as ever for sharing.
 Cliffs near Sarclet The name Forsinard is an interesting combination of Norse and Gaelic, Fors-an-airde (fors being Norse for torrent or waterfall, while airde is Gaelic for upper, higher). Though, given how flat it all is, you wonder where the lower waterfall might be—the whole area resembling the impact crater of a meteorite, possibly the one that wiped out all the haggis. It’s squarely in squishy peat bog territory, a vast wetland ringed in the far distance by the mountains of Sutherland. There’s a futuristic viewing tower about a mile from the road, which you reach by a causeway, and numerous lochans dotted among the peat—if I managed the reserve, the temptation to hide dummies in them with the faces of elves and orcs, like the fallen warriors in the Dead Marshes in Lord of the Rings, would prove irresistible. Other than that, there’s basically a whole lot of nothing. It’s so empty it brings to mind Philip Larkin’s bon mot about growing up in Coventry: “Nothing, like something, happens anywhere…”
 Just a short blog this week, as spring is here at last, I’m on holiday all week and the great outdoors is calling. What it’s calling is harder to say; rude names, possibly.
I was a little perturbed to receive an email this last week headed, “Included in your membership: backstabbing, betrayal and long-buried secrets”—I thought my Guardian Angel had mistakenly sent me his briefing note for how my life should turn out. Then I realised that I’m a subscriber to the talking book service Audible.com, and this was merely an advert for their latest releases.
 Daffodils by the old library They’ve been digging up the roads around Wick the last few weeks, apparently to check the water mains. Though it’s more like an archaeological dig than what you’d normally expect from main drainage works. In brief, they sink a series of exploratory trenches, each one a few yards long by a couple of yards wide, thirty or forty yards or so apart, then put barricades around them and go away, presumably to dig up somewhere else. I can only assume one of them dropped his car keys down there a while back and now they’re all looking for them. Every now and again they come and dig another hole, or else just stare thoughtfully into the deeps, as though listening for a distant voice shouting “You shall not pass!” or “Fool of a Took!”.
Incidentally, The Lord of the Rings has a genuine echo in Wick, as there’s a point on the north side of the bay across from the harbour called Proudfoot, and a modern road that’s been named after it. Every time we see the sign, the pavlovian response proves impossible to resist and we call out in unison, “ProudFEET!” after the elderly hobbit at Bilbo’s birthday party.
As for spring, I’m firmly in Virginia “Big Bad” Woolf’s camp when she said, “Yes, I deserve a Spring—I owe nobody nothing.” You and me both, Ginny, you and me both…
 The ‘Soldiers’ Tower’ =================================
TECHNICAL STUFF
This is another pick-up-and-set-down project I’ve been working on for several months (and no, it’s not really “week 1”; not even I knit that fast!). I said the other day that my plan is to knit up a number of Caithness ganseys, taken from the Johnston Collection of historical photographs, many of them of Victorian and Edwardian fishermen. The originals are glass plate negatives, and are often so sharp and clear that you can see every stitch. There are 50,000 photographs in the collection, though only a tiny fraction feature ganseys.
 More creels by the harbour Caithness ganseys come in three main types: the really fancy ones, like that worn by Fergus Ferguson, my last project, which rival their Hebridean kin for ornate decorativeness; simpler patterns, such as diamonds and chevrons or double moss stitch; and very simple patterns, effectively just ribbing from welt to shoulder. This gansey is almost an exact replica of one worn by Malcolm Campbell when he had his picture taken in 1912, and features double moss stitch panels alternating with cables, and a plain panel on each side. I’ve tried to make the stitch count exactly the same, though with chunky late-period Wendy yarn it’s inevitably knitting up rather bigger than Malcolm’s original. I didn’t bother with a pattern chart, this being the sort of pattern I can do in my sleep.
The obvious stand-out feature is the ribbing, which reaches from welt to yoke—obviously to create a snug fit around the waist. Quite a few Caithness ganseys do this. Because I’m knitting this gansey for show—if anyone will be interested in showing it, that is—and not to wear, I’ve kept it in. I’m not a big fan of the look, myself; if I wore something tight round the middle like this I’d look like someone bursting out of a cake, and while Debbie Reynolds could pull that off I’m not sure I could. The other feature is of course the saddle shoulder, with the cable running along the shoulder from collar to bicep. These are always fiddly to get right, but they really do catch the eye once the gansey is washed and blocked and draped over a well-shaped shoulder.
 And here it is, the Wick Fergus Ferguson gansey, washed and blocked and unpinned and ready for its time in the sun. It really is a stunning combination of patterns, with something to catch the eye wherever you look. It’s knit in Graeme Bethune’s Caithness gansey yarn, and I wish you could reach into your screen to touch it, and feel how lovely and soft it is. It is, of course, far too nice to wear, and I hope it will one day find a home in Wick Museum alongside the big, blown-up photograph of Fergus that they have on display. There are many more Wick patterns I intend to try, but none finer than this.
Crow in the Snow It’s Easter in a few days, which means it’s time for me to get irrationally annoyed at pagans claiming the festival for the goddess Ēostre. I say irrationally because I keep catching myself out in the sort of logical trap that Captain Kirk used to confuse intelligent robots in Star Trek. The reason, of course, is that there is only one historical reference to Ēostre (or Ostara in German) which comes in the annals of the Venomous Bede written in the early 8th century. Bede said that Easter was originally a Saxon pagan festival in her honour, but that it had died out and been replaced by the Christian one. And it’s it. There’s literally no other reference to her before the folklorists got hold of her in Victorian times, and made up a whole bunch of stuff involving hares and fertility rites, at which point it all gets bit mucky.
 Impassable These same loony Victorians came up with the idea that she was also the Goddess of the Dawn, because—and how I wish I was making this up—east in English, or ost in German, means literally east; the sun rises in the east, and—well, I guess that’s what passes for scholarship in these matters. Mind you, I’m not saying there wasn’t a Saxon goddess of spring called Ēostre—after all, there’s no other explanation for the name Easter in German and English (unlike other languages, which tend to use a version of Passover for the festival)—just that all we have is the name, and even that’s open to question.
 Bunny by the warren But what about my logical paradox? Well, it’s like this: I have to ask myself why I get annoyed when I read about Ēostre and her hares because it’s made up—as if, for example, Thor and Loki and Tiw, let alone Venus and Bacchus and Poseidon, were actually real gods, and only Ēostre out of the whole pantheon is fictitious; as if I’m OK with deities invented fifteen hundred years ago, but not since then. (And it’s not even as if I’m consistent: I mean, I’m so keen not to tempt Fate I even give the word a capital letter.) Well. All I can say is, I have no idea if the goddess is (or was) real (or not), but I do know that chocolate Easter eggs are real, and right now that’s good enough for me. So, happy Ēostre everyone!
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We’re recruiting for a couple of posts just now, and I’m getting flashbacks to some of the skeletons in my own personal Closet of Interview Horrors. The most unpleasant was at an archive in the City of London back in the early 90s. It’s usual to show candidates round an archive before interview, and then ask them for their impressions as a lead-off question. Not this time. I was shown straight into the boardroom. Across the table was a panel of grave, besuited middle-aged men in cufflinks. Cufflink No.1 blithely began by saying that they expected anyone who wanted to work there to have already paid a visit in their own time, and, presuming that to be the case, what were my impressions? “Actually I’ve never been here before,” I replied. “Oh dear!”, he exclaimed. After a ghastly silence, during which they all bent over their assessment forms to write, as far as I could tell, “Oh dear”, it was Cufflink No.2’s turn: “In that case, can you tell us why you’ve applied for this job?” He asked, before adding nastily, “Apart from the money, that is.”
