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 I’ve been immersing myself in the world of Charles Dickens—not only his novels, but Peter Ackroyd’s biography. And the more I read, the more I feel he inhabited language the way Mozart did music. Here’s just one example: in a letter home from his trip to America in 1842 he described the constant flashes of spittle from the railway carriage windows expectorated by his fellow-travellers, “as though they were ripping open feather-beds inside, and letting the wind dispose of the feathers”. Isn’t that great (if gross)?
 Dickens has a wonderful sense of the absurd, too, and in Martin Chuzzlewit this reaches something of a high point. The landlady of a boarding house for single gentlemen describes how wearing the life can be: “The gravy alone is enough to add twenty years to one’s age, I do assure you.” Elsewhere two women have a loud quarrel and the landlord, who owns the pet shop downstairs, complains: “You were pelting away, hammer and tongs! It’ll be the death of the little bullfinch in the shop, that draws his own water. In his fright, he’s been a-straining himself all to bits, drawing more water than he could drink in a twelvemonth. He must have thought it was Fire!” (From this to Monty Python isn’t really so very far.)
 The Soldiers’ Tower, with Wick in the distance There’s not much to relate in gansey news this week, except progress. I’ve finished the back of the Scarborough gansey and am something over halfway up the front. And the Wick gansey continues to grow as just over an inch a week: it’ll soon be time to think of the yoke pattern. Meanwhile, for someone who makes as many little mistakes as I do, and has to go back and have them corrected (sometimes two or three inches), it’s a relief to be knitting patterns that (a) are simple and repetitive, and (b) instantly show up any mistakes.
Ackergill Tower Oh, and shall I tell you another reason I love Dickens? In Oliver Twist he created Fagin, the evil, almost supernatural villain, who was Jewish. To Dickens, Fagin’s race and religion was incidental—as he pointed out, all the other villains in the book were English Christians. But Fagin is such a powerful creation, and the evil and the Jewishness of his character were so indelibly presented, that a lasting connection was made. Well, years later Dickens became friends with a Jewish couple and the wife, Mrs Eliza Davis, pointed out to him that to her Fagin represented “a great wrong”.
Dickens came to see her point of view, and was mortified. So in his next book, Our Mutual Friend, he created a wholly beneficent Jew, Mr Riah, who is used by another character—a wholly repellant Englishman—as the public face of a moneylenders’ business. The Englishman squeezes the customers ruthlessly and lets the Jew take the blame, trading on the stereotype of Jews and finance, until the wrong is righted and justice prevails. In this and in other ways, Dickens tried to make amends. Of course, everyone knows Fagin and hardly anyone remembers Mr Riah, but perhaps this says more about us and the superficial glamour of evil than it does about Dickens.
And so, as Tiny Tim observed in A Christmas Carol, “Mother always taught me: never eat singing food”—no, wait, that’s the Muppets. Here we are: “God bless us, every one!”
 I turned 59 last week, which was a bit of a shock. Not the fact of the birthday as such, which I’ve rather got the hang of by now; but the total. I seem to have lost a decade along the way somewhere, as though my memory has done the equivalent of plastic surgery on my life, to tidy it up—a nip here, say, or a tuck there. And yet, if I add up the years they’re all accounted for; at least they are if I involve a couple of friends, and we all take our shoes and socks off.
 Of course, the symptoms of ageing are universal, and every generation has to go through them. (One of Jefferson’s early drafts of the Declaration of Independence began: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that modern music sucks and no one writes proper tunes any more, and the edgy new sitcoms of today just aren’t funny, fact.”) I just can’t help feeling I made a crucial mistake in my pact with Mephistopheles all those years ago: and somewhere there’s a youthful painting of me in an attic that isn’t ageing at all, while here I am in real life…
Primroses at Nybster In gansey news, I am almost to the shoulders of the back of the Scarborough gansey. I think one of the reasons I’ve always liked this pattern is because it’s essentially one block of one pattern. So many gansey patterns rely on detail for their effect—and very effective it is too, of course. But there’s still a lot to be said for simplicity. Meanwhile I’m still inching (centimetring?) my way up the body of the Wick gansey. The yoke pattern will be the polar opposite of the Scarborough one, and we should reach it in another month or so.
. . . and Primroses at Castle Sinclair Girnigoe Finally, as it’s May this week, and even in Caithness Spring has definitely sprung, I thought I’d share with you two of my own poems. This time last year I was possessed by the spirit of a Chinese zen poet, albeit one remarkably fluent in contemporary English, and found myself writing a bunch of poems in the old style. Here are two of my favourites:
Hawthorns heavy with blossom,
Shaggy as sheep—
Waiting for the wind to shear them.
*
Full moon in spring—
Only a dog’s solitary bark
Tells me I’m alive.
 It rained last night: just a few light showers, but still worth celebrating. You see, it’s been such a dry spring so far, barring the odd downpour, that the fields are parched. The word “dustbowl” comes to mind: farmers ploughing on their tractors are surrounded by billowing clouds of topsoil like the drifting smoke from fires; while along the hedgerows huddle groups of discontented crows, coughing and looking murderous. There’ve been moorland wildfires in Caithness too, no mean achievement in a landscape that’s basically a saturated peat bog.
 Rocks at Scarfskerry, with Dunnet Head in the distance It still being fine this Easter weekend we betook ourselves to Scarfskerry, a little hamlet which has the distinction of being the most northerly settlement in mainland Scotland. It lies on a little peninsula between Thurso and John O’Groats. The name comes from Old Norse skarfr (a cormorant) and sker (rocky island); though even on sunny days a scarf is also recommended. (I do like the name. I keep wanting to work it into a limerick.) There were no cormorants when we were there, just a fisherman having a quiet smoke, a pier leading nowhere in particular, and a general air of desuetude. All in all, we felt, it could have been worse.
Waves at the Trinkie, Wick In gansey news, we keep on keeping on. I’ve finished the half-gussets up the body of the Scarborough pattern and have divided for front and back. Usually I situate the stitch markers at the fake seam stitches separating the front and back; on this one I’ve been placing them at the point where the pattern changes from double moss stitch to the cable and ladder sections: I found I was so getting into the rhythm of knit two/ purl two that I kept missing the pattern change and having to unpick stitches. The Wick pattern is still growing slowly too; but I can tell I’m making progress because it’s getting harder to stand it upright, like a house of cards in danger of overbalancing.
Ackergill shore and Tower Finally this week—oh, all right then. A limerick, you said? Well, if you insist:
There once was a young man called Terry,
Who ran for the Scarfskerry ferry—
But he’d drunk so much beer
That he fell off the pier,
So they’ll bury poor Terry in Scarfskerry.
 So there I was, innocently flossing between two of my back teeth, when the floss snagged on something. I wiggled it back and forth to free it and, with a crack resembling part of the Greenland ice sheet giving way, a chunk of tooth broke free, leaving a jagged hole about the size of the cave the dwarves took shelter in in The Hobbit.
I duly betook myself to the dentist, who took a chin-stroking sort of x-ray. Turns out the tooth had an old filling, and decay had taken place underneath the filling, like a sapper tunnelling away invisibly below the enemy’s walls. I didn’t know they could do that! I feel like those characters in Doctor Who, who, evading a Dalek by running upstairs, are just congratulating themselves on a lucky escape when they see the little blighter fire up the rockets and come floating up after them. It hardly seems fair. I shall draw a veil over the next half hour in the dentist’s chair: suffice to say that more than one nerve was removed (“Aha! I see by the way you flinched that that one isn’t dead!”), with the promise—if all goes well—of a root canal to come.
Dunnet Bay from the edge of the forest It’s lucky I have knitting to console me, while I partake of my dinners through a straw. The Wick gansey continues to grow at about the same rate as the average oak tree, but a time-lapse of previous photographs will reveal a geological sort of progress (at 2 rows a night). The Scarborough—playing the hare to the Wick gansey’s tortoise—on the other hand has moved on to the point that I’ve started the pattern, and the gussets.
Rook Meanwhile in parish news, Judit has sent pictures of another gansey she has knit, this time in brown. It’s a variant of the classic Staithes pattern, still one of my favourites. The very first jumper I knit was a Staithes gansey-inspired pattern, my entry drug for a lifetime’s addiction now I come to think of it—and it still has a place next next to my heart. (Well, literally, of course, that being the pattern for the yoke, but you know what I mean.) Congratulations again to Judit! The classics are classics for a reason—and doesn’t brown suit it well?
Primroses at Castletown Meanwhile Easter has arrived. The grass is greener and the sky—on those rare occasions when it isn’t grey—is bluer. As the Song of Solomon says, “The flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land”—though if our land is Caithness, what the turtles are mostly saying is, “Windy, ain’t it?” and, “Got any lettuce?”
So however you like your chocolate eggs (milk or dark, vegan, or, in my case, ground to a fine paste) may your Easter be all your heart and your dentist desires. A very happy time to all.
 I came across a great quote this week. Admittedly, I read it in the comments section below an online article on Brexit—I know, I know, I keep promising myself I can quit any time, and yet here I am. To quote the Biblical Proverb: “As a dog returneth to his vomit, so Gordon returneth to articles about Brexit in the Guardian newspaper”.
Anyway, here’s the quote: “Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.” Apparently the exact origin of the phrase is disputed, but it was said most famously by Eleanor Roosevelt, which is good enough for me. As a warning against mean-spirited gossip it’s excellent. But it also seems to me that most of the trouble in this world is caused by people with small minds being seized with big ideas, which leads inevitably to bad events. (“That whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must remain silent”, as Wittgenstein famously said when someone asked him what he thought about Brexit. If only others felt the same.)
 Old Lifeboat Shed, Wick Harbour Well, knitting ganseys is a great idea, and finishing one is always an event, so we probably qualify for the Eleanor Roosevelt seal of approval. The Scarborough gansey in navy is clearly outstripping the Wick gansey in cornish fudge, a reflection of the respective hours I’m working on each. Plain knitting, as in the Scarborough body, is always a breeze; but I must admit I find the Wick body pattern hard to warm to. Don’t get me wrong, it looks great, especially at the end when it’s been blocked. But the pattern of knit 5, purl-knit-purl-knit-purl-knit-purl is like running with shin splints: just when you’re hitting your stride you have to keep stopping for a few halting steps, then you’re off again. But my routine of a couple of rows a night is already reaping rewards; and as we know, people who knit ganseys shouldn’t be in a hurry anyway.
Driftwood on Keiss Beach Finally this week, I came across a rather delightful mishap from the newsletter of the Dounreay nuclear facility, which is currently being dismantled and decommissioned. Well, the iconic building at Dounreay is the Fast Reactor, which is basically a vast ball or sphere (known, unsurprisingly, as “the Sphere”). Some decades back a worker inside was leaning on the rails, facing towards the walls of the Sphere when “he sneezed energetically and his dentures flew out of his mouth and disappeared down into the bottom Sphere skirt”. Who knew? Nuclear waste with bite…
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I’ve been immersing myself in the world of Charles Dickens—not only his novels, but Peter Ackroyd’s biography. And the more I read, the more I feel he inhabited language the way Mozart did music. Here’s just one example: in a letter home from his trip to America in 1842 he described the constant flashes of spittle from the railway carriage windows expectorated by his fellow-travellers, “as though they were ripping open feather-beds inside, and letting the wind dispose of the feathers”. Isn’t that great (if gross)?
Dickens has a wonderful sense of the absurd, too, and in Martin Chuzzlewit this reaches something of a high point. The landlady of a boarding house for single gentlemen describes how wearing the life can be: “The gravy alone is enough to add twenty years to one’s age, I do assure you.” Elsewhere two women have a loud quarrel and the landlord, who owns the pet shop downstairs, complains: “You were pelting away, hammer and tongs! It’ll be the death of the little bullfinch in the shop, that draws his own water. In his fright, he’s been a-straining himself all to bits, drawing more water than he could drink in a twelvemonth. He must have thought it was Fire!” (From this to Monty Python isn’t really so very far.)
