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 Ye Back It’s that time of year again when we celebrate one of the highlights of the cultural calendar. No, not the Oscars—I speak, of course, of the Oddest Book Title of the Year Award.
If you’re new to this, it all started back in 1978 when the immortal classic Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice was spotted at a Frankfurt book fair. Since then it has included such gems as How to Avoid Huge Ships, How to Poo on a Date, Greek Rural Postmen and Their Cancellation Numbers, and Bombproof Your Horse.
 Snowy boardwalk at Camster Cairns But if I had to choose my all-time favourite I’d have to stick with 2003’s winner, The Big Book Of Lesbian Horse Stories, which alas turns out, disappointingly, not to be concerned with the question of equine sexuality. (In fact, I strongly advise you to look it up on both the US and UK Amazon stores—it’s inspired some of the funniest reviews I’ve come across, some of them from horses.)
I’m a little disappointed in this year’s entries—I think to be eligible the titles should be unintentionally funny, so Transvestite Vampire Biker Nuns From Outer Space, which is all about cult films, shouldn’t really count—but Soviet Bus Stops and Paper Folding with Children are at least worthy contenders.
Pilot House, Wick  Snowdrops in Snow Meanwhile, I was off work for most of last week with a nasty cold, the kind that leaves you gasping for breath if you do anything as strenuous as brushing your teeth. I went round wheezing like Keir Dullea playing an astronaut in 2001: A Space Odyssey (at one stage it got so bad that Margaret took to following me round the house, singing “Daisy, Daisy” at me slowly in a deep bass voice).
Standing up was problematical, sitting less so: and so I got a lot of knitting done. I finished the back of the body and the shoulder strap and am now over halfway up the front, and will soon be dividing for the neckline. There often comes a time on a gansey when you feel like you’re slogging on forever and hardly making progress, and then suddenly it all starts to come together in a rush: that’s what happened last week. It is, in a manner of speaking, all downhill from here.
And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to find a book to read. But which one? At the moment I’m torn between The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America and Reusing Old Graves. Decisions, decisions…
 It’s not hard to find the used car district of Inverness, even without a map: you can tell you’re close by the clusters of garlic hanging in the windows and the way the locals cross themselves at the sight of strangers. Indeed, we stopped in at a Starbucks on the way, and when she learned why we’d come the anxious barista hung a rosary around my neck, saying, “For your mother’s sake.”
 The used car salesman awaits The curious thing was that I’d expected to have to resist the smooth blandishments of the sales staff and was bracing myself for a fight, like someone refusing to be taken in by the illusions of a street magician. But not a bit of it: they seemed completely unprepared (“You mean you want to buy a car?” they said doubtfully, as if they’d been secretly hoping we wanted an aardvark, or a holistic massage.)
None of the cars in the lot had any petrol, so each of our test drives were first to the nearby garage. At one point while we waited we could see mechanics frantically trying to jump-start one car whose battery was dead: I even thought I saw one blowing hopefully into the radiator, as if administering the kiss of life.
The salesman discovers I have a credit card Another car had such a tiny engine that it was like driving a four-wheeled sewing machine. Part of the test route involved going up a long incline south of Inverness; this car gradually got slower and slower as it struggled up the slope, until elderly dog walkers we’d passed shortly before were waving cheerily as they overtook us and we were in danger of rolling back downhill. (Since between us and Inverness lie the notorious Berriedale Braes, a series of switchbacks that seem as if the road layout was designed by whoever invented the coat hanger, on an incline that begs for a funicular railway, we politely declined.)
 Soon be spring In the end we settled on a three year-old Kia Cee’d, a nice little car that ticked all the right boxes. Before deciding we looked up online reviews: the consensus was that it was reliable and good value for money, but boring. (That’s us! we thought: it’s a perfect match!)
 Meanwhile, I’m enjoying knitting back-and-forth up the back of the gansey. If my calculations are correct (there’s a first time for everything) I have one more diamond to complete; and then it’s just the shoulder straps to do, after which it’s on to the front. I’m almost at the end of my first cone of 500g Frangipani yarn, too, so am just about halfway—always a good sign.
By the way, when I was researching this I got curious about why vampires are afraid of garlic. Turns out it’s such an old belief, dating back to Roman times, and so widespread (even to China), that no one really knows the origins of the myth. Insect repellent? Air freshener for unburied corpses? Your guess is as good as mine. And is it just raw garlic that affects them—what about in tomato sauce or good chilli? Can they be driven away by, say, garlic bread? All I can say is that I had garlic the night before and I wasn’t bitten by a used-car salesman. Draw your own conclusions…
 You may recall that our poor old car developed a fault over Christmas. The car’s an automatic, and basically the problem is this: you’re bowling along at a jaunty 40 or 50 miles per hour, with nothing on your mind but your hair oil when suddenly, with no warning, the whole car slams to a near stop and drops into second gear, while the instrument panel lights up as though announcing a nuclear meltdown.
 Hail shower over Sinclair Bay I was once a passenger in a car that ran into a deer, and the sensation is almost identical—except in our case we don’t have to get out and pick antlers out of the radiator—but perhaps it most closely resembles the rapid deceleration you see when a jet plane lands on an aircraft carrier and is snagged by that giant rubber band. (The sensation a pilot has that his morning coffee and scrambled eggs are about to precede the rest of him into the windscreen is also, I imagine, rather similar.)
Well, we took it to the garage in Inverness last week and the diagnosis is more or less terminal—the cost of getting it fixed is over twice the value of the car. So now there’s nothing for it but to load the shotgun while the poor thing’s back is turned, take it for a last run in the fields and put it out of its misery. And then, brushing away a manly tear, go and find a replacement.
Snow on the mountains: Cromarty Firth When I close my eyes and try to picture a used car dealer, the image that presents itself is of the weasels from Who Framed Roger Rabbit; and if you want a preview of what’s about to happen when I enter the showroom, imagine the scene from a nature documentary where slavering hyenas separate an elderly wildebeest from the rest of the herd.
 Meanwhile, I knit. I have finally reached the point where I’ve divided front and back, having completed the underarm gussets. It feels like it’s taken forever, but it’s only been a couple of months and, now I think of it, I’m almost at the halfway stage—the end may not be in sight, but neither is the beginning. (As Stephen Dedalus observes in Ulysses: Life is many days. This will end.)
Finally this week, congratulations to Victoria in finishing this splendid gansey based on that of Richard Searle of Polperro on pages 124-129 of Rae Compton’s book. (Her picture is, as she admits, a little blurred—no doubt the camera shook with the emotion of finishing, as opposed to my usual excuse of cooking sherry mixed with paracetamol—but it’s still clear enough to see the pattern.) So well done to Victoria—and it’s good to know that gansey knitting is alive and well in the Azores.
I’m now off to pack a spare shirt for my car-buying expedition, as I’m sure I’ll emerge without the one on my back. (Now I come to think of it, I’m pretty sure it’s not a good sign when you get buyer’s remorse before you even purchase something…)
 Whenever he was feeling low in spirits, Ishmael—the narrator of Moby-Dick, I mean, not the son of Abraham and his maidservant Hagar—took to the sea. Of course, as things turned out this proved something of a schoolboy error, and Ishmael ended up shipping with a monomaniac one-legged captain determined to take revenge on God in the form of the white whale that had removed his leg.
Perhaps, he must have felt, as he bobbed in the empty ocean with only his friend’s empty coffin to keep him afloat, next time he was feeling low it’d be simpler all round to settle down in front of the tv with a bumper tin of Quality Streets, a tub of Ben and Jerry’s cookie dough ice cream and a box set of Roadrunner cartoons.
 Droplets on Hawthorn My solution is usually less drastic: I treat myself to a new fountain pen.
I love fountain pens—partly for their old-world elegance, reminiscent of a time when a man had to enter a room sideways to avoid bruising his handlebar moustache on the doorframe—but mostly because, if you do a lot of writing by hand, they’re just so much nicer to use. (Mind you, there are downsides: the ensuing ink stains on your fingers make you look like you’ve been handling stolen bank notes, and you have to explain to people under 30 that the device you are holding is something Sherlock Holmes would have used to write with, not administer a 7% solution; but these are trivial matters.)
 Dunnet Beach from Castletown Now don’t get me wrong: you might think, given my saturnine disposition, that the walls of my room would by now be lined with cases like the shop where Harry Potter bought his magic wand. Not so—I have a relatively modest collection of just half a dozen, vintage and contemporary. But each one writes in its own style and, like Harry’s wand, carries the memories of all the spells it’s cast.
 Meanwhile I have reached the underarm gussets on the gansey. I am increasing at my standard rate, 2 stitches every fourth row, but this time I did something a little different: I increased another purl stitch into the side seam four rows before starting the gusset proper, so that the first increases don’t touch the sides of the body, something I’ve never really liked. This way it all happens inside the seam (a marginally more elegant solution to a problem nobody has but me).
Now, you may remember I was interviewed by a journalist last autumn who was writing an article on ganseys for the Scotsman newspaper online. Well, I never heard any more about it, and eventually assumed it had been spiked, or whatever the digital equivalent would be (depixellated, perhaps). But by chance I looked again this weekend and discovered that it had been published last November after all.
I haven’t actually read it. (I never do: I’ve had some bad experiences with journalists.) But if you’re curious, here’s the link. Just don’t tell me if it’s bad; besides, I don’t want to be interrupted—I’ve got all these Roadrunner cartoons to watch…
 Well, we survived Storm Gertrude last week, which brought gusts of 60-70 mph to Wick (others had it worse; Shetland recorded gusts of over 100 mph); now we’re battening down the hatches for Storm Henry, expected Monday night into Tuesday, and the forecast is for much the same, or stronger. (The rate these gales are whistling through I expect to have received a visit from Storm Zachariah a week next Tuesday.)
The sea has torn a chunk out of Wick harbour wall, as though a very hungry whale had taken a large bite, for added roughage perhaps. There were trees down on the road to Inverness (Caithness has hardly any trees to speak of, just a few straggly bits of forest that make it feel as though the land was attempting a rather unconvincing combover). The fields are waterlogged, cattle and sheep standing bedraggled and miserable, ankle-deep in water (Caithness now twinned with the Grimpen Mire).
 Near the end of the river path We went to Inverness last week for my final trip to hospital (touch wood), to see the consultant about my mouth sores. After no less than four blood tests (the arm they took the blood from was so emaciated afterwards that I looked like a hermit crab) and a month of fasting and meditation, I finally had my answer: they don’t know what the cause is. (This is actually good news: it means it’s probably nothing serious, or at least nothing with the word “disease” in the title.)
The most likely cause is an allergy, possibly to spice, with cinnamates and benzoates strong candidates. So I’ve got another three months of trial abnegation to look forward to: no spicy food (so Indian, Mexican and Chinese cuisine is out), no tea, no strawberries, and—I can hardly type this for the tears running down my face, blurring my vision and short-circuiting my keyboard—no Easter eggs, no hot cross buns.
 Trees by the river Oh, well, he says bravely; there are always ganseys. I continue my long creep up the body which is now about 15 inches long. Next week, expect some exciting gusset-related news.
Speaking of knitting, many thanks to Judit for sending me this link to a piece on the health benefits of knitting from the New York Times. Unfortunately many of them seem to accrue from socialising with other people in knitting groups, whereas for me, knitting is the equivalent of a 30-year sentence in solitary confinement. Never mind! I’m sure it’s still therapeutic; as I said to Judit, it’s the equivalent of assembling your own cat over a period of weeks, and stroking it as you go.
 Snow on the window Oh, and if anyone was thinking of advising me to look on the bright side during my time of trial, I refer you to this superb piece of dialogue from PG Wodehouse’s The Mating Season. Bertie Wooster is up against it and Jeeves offers him some philosophical comfort:
Jeeves: “‘I wonder if I might draw your attention to an observation of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius? He said “Does anything befall you? It is good. It is part of the destiny of the universe ordained for you from the beginning. All that befalls you is part of the great web.'”
I breathed a bit stertorously. ‘He said that, did he?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Well, you can tell him from me he’s an ass.'”
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