Scarborough / Wick (Donald Murray): Week 4 – 15 April

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.