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 What’s your favourite scientific theory? At the moment I’m torn between two. One is that black holes are stars that have collapsed in on themselves and are now exploding back into stars but, owing to relativity, too slowly for us to be able to detect it yet. The other is that time is just a way of measuring the exchange of heat from hotter to colder objects (e.g., from a hot water bottle to my feet); and that where there is no friction, no heat exchange—the orbit of the planets round the sun, for example—the whole notion of time becomes irrelevant.
 Sarclet harbour I don’t remotely pretend to understand this, of course—I just like the sheer mind-boggling wonderment of it all. Modern physics seems to be mostly equations on a blackboard, where forgetting to carry the 1 can profoundly alter our understanding of the universe; and equations and I have never really been friends. I remember being quite energised by medieval philosophy at university, right up to the point when the professor said, “If we represent the goodness of God with the symbol a, and the nature of evil with b, then we have a – b equal to…” And my tentative understanding collapsed in a heap of jumbled logic, never to recover.
When I did my archive training there was a nun on the course. Her attitude to medieval philosophy was rather refreshing, dismissing it as an argument over “how many pins you could stick in the head of an angel”. (Mind you, her attitude to most things was refreshing: one day she came into the common room carrying a bunch of flowers. One of the students asked her, “Do you want something to put them in?” She eyed him appraisingly for a moment, then said, “All right, then. Bend over!”)
Dredging in Wick harbour In gansey news I have divided for front and back, half-finished the gussets, put them on holders, and am now embarked on the back. My respect for the pattern grows apace—it’s as easy to knit backwards as forwards. (Apologies for the quality of the photos this week; as you’ll have guessed, Margaret is away just now. Normal service should be resumed next week, but it’s tricky to get the colour right on an iPhone.)
Gorse at Helmsdale Finally this week, I’d like to share with you one of my favourite poems by Matsuo Bashō, the great Japanese poet who could say more in three brief lines than most of us manage in a lifetime. We’ve had a taste of summer in Caithness, an explosion of light and colour and, of course, birdsong. This summer poem always lifts my spirits—physicists and poets, each bringing us closer to a kind of truth:
Skylark
sings all day,
and day not long enough.
 Summer has come even to Caithness, with blue skies, sunshine and temperatures in the high teens. It’s so gorgeous that a walrus decided to check us out, turning up on the shingle by the old lifeboat station on the south shore of the bay. (This even made the news on BBC Scotland; which either says a lot about them, I feel, or about us.)
The next day it was gone, off on another walrus adventure. Of course this didn’t stop us, and a lot of other people, going to stare at the place where it had been, like so many cats who stare fixedly at a spot on the kitchen floor where a saucer of tuna had once stood; and continue to stare at it today, because, you never know, it might reappear…
 Wally has a kip So we went inland to Forsinard, the great bird reserve on the border with Sutherland. It’s a vast area of peat bog, a flat bowl ringed by hills, which always reminds me of photographs of the grassy uplands of Montana where Custer led his men of the Seventh Cavalry to disaster; though if Custer had ever tried riding through Forsinard he’d have found himself up to his knees in watery peat in about three squelchy strides. There was a Highland breeze to keep the midges off, and it so was so quiet we could hear a cuckoo calling from the woodland a mile or so away, as though someone was tuning the reeds in an old-fashioned pipe organ.
 Distant mountains and lochan, RSPB Forsinard There’s a visitor centre, where the helpful young lady behind the desk tried to engage me in conversation. I could see the light dying in her eyes as I explained that I could just about distinguish a robin from a duck, but that was as far as my ornithology went; and while I conceded that golden plovers existed, I wouldn’t recognise one if it wandered over and pecked me on the ankle. Gamely she rallied and tried to interest me in bogbean, a flowering plant in the family Menyanthaceae, but beyond regretting I hadn’t had a firstborn child to name after it, it held no charms for me. Instead we walked the path over the bog to the viewing tower, the kind of thing Sauron might have constructed if he’d been into birdwatching, and basked like lizards in the stillness and the heat and watched the dragonflies skimming erratically over the ponds.
 Bogbean In gansey news I’ve started the gussets, am about halfway up them in fact, and should get them finished this week; and then it’s onto the back. The pattern and the colour continues to please (I like the idea that I’ll finish this one in time for autumn, which seems like the ideal season to wear it). It’s a very intuitive pattern to knit, essentially alternating pattern rows, so you always know exactly where you are.
Finally, few things have given me as much pleasure recently as the story, possibly apocryphal, that the Flat Earth Society is arranging a round-the-world cruise for its members. And leaving aside the mindset—surely as inconceivable as refusing to believe in gravity, or the greatness of Bob Dylan—I recently came across the best argument yet to refute it: if the world really was flat, cats would already have pushed everything off the edge…
 We’re back in Caithness, after a gentle 600-mile drive. We did it all in a day—it was either that or watch the royal wedding—8.00am to 8.00pm. And it was like travelling back in time. We left Northamptonshire in early summer and arrived back to find Caithness in early spring. (This is probably something to do with relativity, e=mc²: where “e” equals the number of roadworks on the M6 motorway; “m” is the number of bikers who overtook us; and “c” is equal to the curse words we used when other drivers cut us up, squared because this happened rather a lot.)
The Lake, Delapré It’s 11ºC in Wick today, grey skies and a cool breeze, and that fine drizzly rain the Scots call smirr. (This always makes me imagine the baby Jesus being born in the Highlands by some cosmological error, and three wise men turning up in Celtic football shirts, saying, “We bring you gifts of gold, frankincense and smirr. And an umbrella”.) It’s only a couple of days since we were strolling round the lake at Delapre Abbey in our shirtsleeves, dodging the goslings and illegal campers, everyone basking in the sun like lizards on a rock. Now the world outside is blurred as the smirr coats my glasses in fine droplets of Scotch mist and I wonder if I packed away my winter clothes too soon.
 Non-whomping willows at Delapré I took the gansey with me and managed a bit of knitting around work commitments, which mostly consisted of sitting stationery in traffic jams wondering how people could live like this. The pattern’s starting to develop nicely: I’ve always liked the Flamborough patterns, and one of the things I particularly like about this one is the way the narrow columns flank the cables and moss stitch, like the slender pillars in a Gothic cathedral, great weight supported on delicate flutes of stone.
 Gorse at Helmsdale One sight to gladden the heart on returning to the Highlands is all the gorse, just coming into full flower. It covers the hillsides in a glorious display of yellow, as though the Martians had decided to try to conquer the earth again, only this time with yellow, instead of red weed. In places where it appears in patches I was reminded of blooms of lichen dappling an ancient church wall. The village of Helmsdale, just over the border in Sutherland, sits beneath a great dome of a hill which is wall-to-wall in gorse, so much that it’s probably visible from space. It’s just gorgeous, and it really is worth paying the price of losing a few degrees in temperature and gaining a raincoat just to be here to witness it.
 Work has taken me south this week, to Oxfordshire, but within commuting distance of the ancestral home in bosky Northants. And what a change six hundred miles makes.
There are trees – no really, actual trees – growing all over the place. And everything’s green, everything’s blooming. The trees and hedges are out, there’s hawthorn blossom, lilac, horse chestnuts, cow parsley and nettles, and so many dandelion spores floating in the air you can’t help wondering if it isn’t time God changed his dandruff shampoo. Spring is literally in the air, displaying the kind of fecund profusion that would’ve had DH Lawrence lying down in a dark room until the shivering stopped.
Delapré Abbey Park, Northampton The air is very still, too. I’m used to the uncompromising winds of Caithness, but here smoke from a distant fire rises almost vertically, eventually becoming lost in a smudge of haze and cloud. Back home, the wind acts like a sort of celestial leaf blower; when you stop to think about it, it’s not hard to imagine why smoke signals never really took off in Caithness.
Rain, Caithness In the fields, lambs are – to use my favourite old Scots word – friskling. We learned a new ovine term this week: “hefting”. It’s a northern word for sheep that’ve been bred and trained to graze within a defined pasture, so they don’t go wandering off. One day a Sockeye salmon from Idaho will encounter a north British sheep – in a bar, say – and the salmon will do the piscine equivalent of a facepalm when it realises the whole arduous business of travelling 900 miles and climbing 7,000 feet just to spawn can be avoided by simply staying at home and watching tv – and a continent’s ecology will change overnight…
TECHNICAL STUFF
This pattern is taken from Michael Pearson [2015 edition, p.71, Misses Major’s Pattern]. Basically, it’s just as Michael describes, with a couple of minor tweaks. (And why would I want to change it anyway? It’s such a perfect combination.) I’ve always liked double moss stitch diamonds, just because of the way they seem to recede into the fabric, rather than sitting on the surface. All I’ve really done is adjust a couple of widths.
But first of all, my standard 46-inch-in-the-round ganseys have 368 stitches (at a gauge of 8 stitches per inch). These days I usually add an extra stitch for each cable, to compensate for the way cables pull the garment in. So, this gansey needs to be 368 + 8 stitches (i.e., one stitch for each cable) = 376. So that’s roughly how many stitches in the round I need.
The original pattern has just one purl stitch either side of the cables, but I prefer to have two, so I’ve changed that in my gansey. Finally, after some experimentation, I found that if I increased the width of the diamonds from 15 stitches in the original to 17 it gave me 378 stitches in total. Close enough for jazz! (N.B., I’m cabling every seventh row – the cable is the left-hand panel in my diagram.)
The yarn, as I said last week, is Frangipani Breton, a beautiful coppery rusty orangey red. For some reason I’ve always thought of the Flamborough patterns in shades of red – the consequence of the photos in the books all being black and white, I suppose: I supplied my own colours in my head – and this seems like a perfect match between colour and pattern.
 It’s May, which always makes me think of the days when I used to rise early enough to dance the sun up on Brackley Market Square. Sunrise there comes a little after 5.30am this time of year, a fact which the residents of Brackley could appreciate at first hand once we started playing music, banging drums and dancing the Morris outside their windows.
It’s a couple of decades since I last shook a bell in anger, but I’m delighted to say that the custom continues to this day, as it does in towns and villages all over England. Tradition is like a vast relay race with the ages: you’re handed the baton from the distant past and, trying desperately not to drop it, you hand it on. People always get folk wrong, by trying to understand it. You can’t; not really. But if you’re lucky, and if you respect it, sometimes you’re allowed to do it right.
I used to love getting up for May Day. There’s something about being up while the world’s still abed that feels like a privilege—you get first use of the day, while it’s still fresh, full of unbreathed oxygen. The folk-rock group Oysterband do a fantastic version of the May song Hal-an-Tow (“Hal-an-Tow, jolly rumbelow/ We were up, long before the day-oh/ Well, to welcome in the summertime, to welcome in the May-oh/ For summer is a-coming in, and winter’s gone away”). It’s exhilarating, and captures the excitement of Maytime for me: maybe not enough get me out of bed for 5.30am, but enough to make me feel vaguely guilty and play some folk music by way of expiation.
St Fergus’ Church from the riverside path Incidentally, have you ever stopped to consider the role the correct footwear plays in folk songs?
 Gordon (on the right) dancing the morris [The squire in the courtyard giving orders] “You there: go saddle for me the bonny brown steed, the grey was never so speedy-oh.”
“Um, excuse me, Squire?”
“Hello, yes? What?”
“Well, I’m sorry to trouble you, but I write the songs down in the village.”
“Look, I’m rather busy just now. Can’t it wait?”
“Well, you see, I understand you’re going after your lady wife, who’s absconded with Black Jack Davey, right? Well, there’s going be a fine ballad in all of this, I can tell, but I was just wondering about your shoes.”
“My shoes? What about them?”
“Well, they’re more what you’d call rubber boots, don’t you see. Wellingtons.”
“So?”
“Were you by any chance going to be tripping o’er the heather?”
“I might be. Possibly. Damp stuff, heather.”
“In wind and rainy weather?”
“According to the forecast there’s a deep depression moving over the country, bringing an 85% chance of precipitation, so yes, probably.”
“And if you meet up with your good lady, do you think you’ll be pointing out to her the advantages of sleeping on a good soft bed made of goose feather? Instead of, as it might be, the cold, hard ground?”
“I say, that’s a bit personal. Keep it clean.”
“What I’m driving at—the point I’m trying to make—you couldn’t see your way to wearing boots of Spanish leather, by any chance? It’d make my job so much easier. For the rhymes, don’t you know.”
“Sorry, wellies it is.” [The squire mounts his bonny brown steed] “Still, look on the bright side. After all, it could’ve been worse.”
“Oh? How?”
“My other shoes are flip-flops. Hi-yo Brownie, away!”
 Duncansby Stacks And yes, it’s a new gansey, based on a couple of classic Flamborough patterns, knitted in the gorgeous coppery hues of Frangipani Breton. I’ll say more about this next week, and hopefully include a pattern chart and full specs. But for now there’s blossom on the plum tree, and, as my old friend Alf Tennyson once observed, “To-morrow ‘ill be the happiest time of all the glad New-year/ Of all the glad New-year, mother, the maddest merriest day/ For I’m to be Queen o’ the May, mother, I’m to be Queen o’ the May/ It’s a shame about the beard, mother, but at least I’ve the legs for a dress/ Just don’t put that razor away, mother, I want to look my best.” Ah, tradition—makes you proud, doesn’t it?
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What’s your favourite scientific theory? At the moment I’m torn between two. One is that black holes are stars that have collapsed in on themselves and are now exploding back into stars but, owing to relativity, too slowly for us to be able to detect it yet. The other is that time is just a way of measuring the exchange of heat from hotter to colder objects (e.g., from a hot water bottle to my feet); and that where there is no friction, no heat exchange—the orbit of the planets round the sun, for example—the whole notion of time becomes irrelevant.
