Gansey Nation

The good news is, I’m on my feet again, the worst of my cold being over; the bad news is, I feel like I’ve been assembled from a variety of badly fitting parts, none of which seems to work properly—a sort of Frankenstein’s Archivist, lumbering across the countryside, scaring villagers and randomly cataloguing old documents.

I’m tired most of the time, and sleep like the dead—except for the weird, vivid dreams. The other night I dreamed that Batman was being psychoanalysed: the analyst kept explaining what aspects of his psyche his enemies represented—the Joker, and the Penguin—while a frustrated Batman was explaining that no, they were real people, real criminals he had to fight. (I woke up before the end; hope it worked out okay—Batman really looks like a guy who needs help.)

Meanwhile, spring has come to Caithness; or, if she hasn’t actually arrived, is peeking through a crack in the door, checking out if it’s safe. The snowdrops are out, the gorse is just coming into bloom, and the birds outside the window sound like a handful of pennies in the tumble drier (or at least they do at 4.00am, blast them).

It’s still windy and cold—about 5-7ºC—but on Sunday the sun shone bright and clear. Soon I’ll ask Margaret to fetch the secateurs and cut me out of the greased bearskin I’ve worn all winter, and then—who knows?—maybe it’ll even be time for my yearly bath.

Lybster Harbour

I’ve been knitting assiduously, partly because I’ve been doing the plain knitting down the sleeve (much easier under artificial light than knitting the intricate pattern on this gansey) and partly because I’ve knitted myself back into the zone. I’ve finished the first sleeve and cast off, and am now well underway on the second.

It’s starting to look like a gansey at last. Most of the time it’s hard to make out the actual pattern definition, it looks like a jumble of boiled spaghetti, or Yorkshire seen from space; but then the light catches it just so and it all falls into place. But I won’t really know until it’s blocked.

I should finished it sometime in the next fortnight. (I’m already thinking of the next one, so I’m at the stage where I’m keen to move on.) Maybe then too, like an invalid who finally trusts himself to take his first few faltering steps without the aid of crutches, I’ll be able to leave the Lemsip in the box…

The Back

Welcome back to another trip, not so much down memory lane as paragliding off the cliffs of senility; memory off-roading, if you will.

Riffling through the rolodex of memory we find Lowestoft, where I had my first job as an archivist. Lowestoft is an east coast fishing port fallen on hard times, and even when we lived there it was broadly shabby-genteel, only without the genteel part. But I loved it, much as I love Wick, for the gansey-wearing ghosts; and for the days when I would walk to work along the beach and see the sunrise far beyond the horizon and the boats dwarfed to insignificance by the flat perspective.

Well, one day we learned that a collection of rate books dating back to c.1900 had been stored in a disused gaol in the town, and so we went to have a look.

The Front

The cells had been abandoned for over a decade and the dirty old volumes were piled up any old how—huge great things, the sort of books Bilbo Baggins wrote his laundry lists in. We only had enough room in the archive to take a sample, one book for every five years, so we had to open each one to find out the date.

Now, this was back in the 1980s, before health and safety had been invented, so we wore no gloves, no overalls and no facemasks. I picked up a volume that had been resting on the toilet, and made the mistake of glancing in the bowl—and you know those nature documentaries that take you down a mole-rat’s burrow? This was worse, and apparently hadn’t been cleaned since Gladstone learned to shave.

Diamond detail

Supporting the book with one hand, I opened it with the other. And as I did so I realised too late that edges were covered with a furry sort of mustard-coloured mould; and that strands of the mould were extending even as I pulled the covers open, stretching like elastic until they suddenly snapped and I was enveloped in a cloud of spores, like a sneeze in a talcum powder factory.

The dust settled in my hair, on my glasses, on my jumper. I tried to hold my breath but my timing was wrong and all at once I had to take a great gulp of air, sucking in millions of spores like a vacuum cleaner. I could taste it in my mouth, a sharp, bitter taste, like rancid sourdough yeast.

I had an urge to go and shave my tongue, but I can’t remember suffering any ill effects afterwards—though, come to think of it, I suspect the reason I get so many colds these days is because I used up all my antibodies in one go…

Camster Cairns

The front of the gansey is now complete, and I’ve started on the back. I won’t quite get the body finished next week, but almost; and I’m finally settling into the pattern so that I don’t have to look at the chart every row. I must admit, I’m getting curious to see how it turns out.

And finally this week, in parish notices Judit of the Busy Needles has completed a v-necked sleeveless jumper, or slipover, with the traditional tree motif up the centre and the rest of the body plain—a very elegant pattern. (I have to admit that, living in the far north of Scotland, a jumper without sleeves seems to me reckless to the point of madness and an invitation to hypothermia; but apparently they organise these things better in Finland…)

Some archivists have all the luck: I see a hitherto-unknown copy of Magna Carta dating from 1300 has been found in Kent archives and the media have gone wild. Meanwhile, by way of contrast, I’ve been cataloguing planning applications from the 1930s; and you can bet the BBC isn’t going to turn up to film that anytime soon—unless the king decided to build a garage at Runymede or add an en-suite bathroom to a bijou dungeonette.

Noss Head Light from Keiss beach

Still, now that we’ve outsourced our winter to America we had a first, tentative glimpse of spring last week—blue skies, temperatures above freezing, and England being humiliated at cricket; but now it’s back to business as usual, with arctic winds gusting up to 60mph.

We went to look at the ocean, and the wind was so strong at one point it was like being in the Dead Sea; I could lean back and let the force of the wind hold me up (unless a troupe of kindly sheep acrobats had snuck up behind me and formed an ovine pyramid without me noticing—always a risk up here). The wind blew spray from the waves inland, coating us with salt, so that our faces crackled when we smiled. I think if we’d stood there another ten minutes it would have moulded a perfect saline mask of our faces.

As promised, here are the pattern charts for the Wick gansey, which I found in Michael Pearson’s Fisher Gansey Patterns of Scotland and the Scottish Fishing Fleet.

It’s a very busy pattern, heavily textured, and I think it’s one of those that won’t become entirely clear until the gansey is finished and washed and blocked; till then it looks disconcertingly like I’m knitting a navy blue species of pearl coral. Mind you, because I’m knitting this as an example, I don’t have to worry about shaping a neckline and will make this one the traditional way, front and back exactly the same.

Thanks to everyone last week for your suggestions for using leftover yarn. Once again, Judit has come up trumps with her suggestions and we’ve posted some of her photos which can be seen on her gallery page (which also includes a new image of her last gansey).

Finally, a word of warning: Margaret’s worked out how to remove her electronic tag and is escaping to London and Edinburgh for a week, so next time I’ll be flying solo and formatting the blog myself. The only problem is, WordPress has been upgraded—and I haven’t…