Gansey Nation

Thursday was the day of the referendum on whether Scotland should be independent of the United Kingdom, so on my way to work I stopped at the polling station in the old parish church of St Fergus and placed my cross in the box.

Shoulder detail

I’d woken up to television pictures of people queuing outside polling stations, reporters and cameras, campaigners, balloons, everything but elephants and a chorus line. So it was rather a surprise to get there at 8.30am and find the place deserted, not a soul inside or out apart from the two ladies handing out forms. Had it been busy at all, I asked? They looked at each other uncertainly. ‘Er… no, not really,’ one of them said. ‘Not as such, no,’ the other confirmed. (This counts as voting frenzy in Wick, I suspect.)

As it turned out, I needn’t have bothered—no one from the Highlands need have. There was a tragic accident that night at Berriedale, about 25 miles south of Wick, a lethal series of hairpin bends on cliffs overlooking the sea. As a result the main road was closed, so the ballot boxes had to be sent on a 90-mile detour before they could be counted. The Highland result was announced around 8.00am, but by then the No campaign had already achieved a majority, the Yes campaign had conceded and the Prime Minister was  already finagling over the promises he’d made.

I don’t know if you followed the referendum at all, but all the national parties committed themselves at the last minute to guaranteeing Scotland more devolution and levels of funding, in hopes of shoring up the No vote. The BBC invited listeners to send in poems after the referendum and my favourite went something like:

Only in Britain could such things be done/ There were two options to chose from, and the third option won

—which seemed to sum it all up, rather.

Wick river bridge in fog

In gansey news, I’ve finished the front and the two shoulders, and joined them both. The next step will be the collar, and then—sigh—it’ll be time to pick up the stitches round the armhole of the first sleeve. I decreased a few stitches when I got to the rig ’n’ fur shoulder strap this time, as I’ve noticed that they can stretch a bit, especially on already large pullovers; so I reduced it by 5 stitches, which will hopefully keep things in better shape.

Spiderwebs in the railings

There’s an autumnal feel to the air just now, and the mornings are misty and moisty, just like in the old folk song. Spiders are everywhere. They’ve even been colonising the spaces between the railings outside the library where I work; one day I came out to find the webs all glistening with dewdrops and billowing in the breeze, as if the spiders had fashioned an armada of ghostly pirate ships with webs for sails. (Quite cool and more than a little creepy.)

There won’t be a blog next week, as we’re heading down south to visit my parents in Northamptonshire—no passports required, which is lucky as mine has expired. (If Scotland had voted for independence, sooner or later I’d have had to choose a nationality.)

The next post will be on Monday 6 October—see you then.

So that was summer, then. Only last weekend we were sunning ourselves down by Lybster harbour, inhaling ice creams and watching the sunlight shimmer on the ocean like a sprinkling of fool’s gold; today, Sunday, we huddle indoors as the rain lashes the windows and the wind shakes the branches of the tree in the garden so vigorously it looks like Treebeard with his finger stuck in the light socket.

I had another migraine today. Sometimes they come like the end of the world, bright lights and dysfunctionality, like watching the last quarter of an hour of 2001: A Space Odyssey with a hangover; sometimes, as today, they just sneak up on you and mess with your head.

On Saturday we had hail . . .

It’s hard to describe a migraine to someone who’s never had one, like trying to persuade a lover of classical music (or, well, any music, come to that) that Bob Dylan is a great singer. (Someone once said to me that Bob Dylan is what a migraine would sound like if it had a recording contract, but I tell myself he was just being mean.)

. . . and sunshine

So today I had a headache, sure, but that wasn’t the worst part—everything became fragmented, disjointed. To take just one example, after taking a bath I became convinced that my shirt had been folded inside out—but every time I corrected this and put it on it was still, bafflingly, inside out again. I did this three times. I even tried reversing just one sleeve to see if I could figure out what was wrong (I couldn’t). The only way I could make sense of it was to take another shirt from the rack and compare the two, by aligning the labels. (Honestly, sometimes the flashing lights are preferable.)

Anyway, ganseys. I have finished the gussets as far as the body is concerned, and put them on loops of yarn ready for when I start the sleeves. I increased 2 stitches every 4 rows along the gussets until they were 17 stitches across.

Now I’ve divided front and back, and am embarked on the back. With a pattern as fiddly as this it’s a challenge to do the reverse rows, especially in such a dark yarn, so I have to concentrate (hmm, a migraine you say?). But it’s shaping up nicely, and I do like the effect of the vertical ribs separating the seed stitch panels. Many years ago we lived in East Anglia, the flattest land I’d yet seen (I hadn’t been to Caithness then, of course): this pattern reminds me rather of the drainage dykes running straight as Roman roads across the sunken fields.

Oh, and speaking of flatlands, the Caithness community website has posted some aerial photographs of the county, which you can view here: well worth a peek if you want to see what God’s early handiwork looked like before He moved into the third dimension with the rest of His creation…

It’s not yet September and autumn is already knocking at the door, with chilly nights and a dusting of frost on the fields. And on a clear, bright morning like today there’s a sharpness to everything, as though God’s adjusted his binoculars and brought the world into focus. (And then it rains.)

A few weeks ago, when I realised I had to go back and re-knit the sleeves on the denim gansey, I decided to make a start on my next project, just for a change. I’ve kept it going since then, on and off, whenever the urge to put the denim one into the woodchipper grew too strong. As a result, now I come to unmask my batteries, I have eleven inches of welt and body under my needles, and suddenly it doesn’t seem so daunting.

It’s for my old friend Derek, whom I’ve known for over forty years (and if that thought doesn’t send me back to the bottle of Old Pulteney tonight, nothing will) – and will hopefully be a Christmas present for him (unless I get side-tracked again, in which case he’s likely to get it for Easter).

The pattern is John Knaggs’ from Flamborough Head, and is taken from Rae Compton, page 54. It consists of alternating bands of “birds e’en and a narrow rib with stocking stitch edge and one repeat of a basket stitch pattern in the centre”. (And if that sounds a bit too much like modern jazz you can do what I did and look at the pattern chart instead!)

This is something of a departure for me (there are no cables, for one thing), but I’ve always liked the look of it. Rae Compton suggests that the pattern “recalls a time when patterns were simpler”, but the interesting thing is just how busy, by which I mean fiddly, it is to knit—simpler doesn’t mean easier! The maximum number of plain stitches side by side you ever get is four: the rest of the time almost every stitch alternates between knit and purl. You have to pay attention.

The texture is different too, with so much seed stitch; there are times when it feels like I’m knitting a tote bag. (The ribs give it a pleated effect, as though I’m knitting a concertina; I can’t help thinking I should be able to play “Over the Hills And Far Away” while I knit.)

Gordon and the Rainbow

As for the denim gansey, I’m delighted to say that it’s finally finished—re-knit, washed and blocked. We went up to John O’Groats on Saturday for the photo shoot (yeah, give it to me, oh yeah, that’s the way, baby), dodging the squally showers. A strong wind was blowing in off the sea, and watching the tourists trying to photograph each other in the gale I realised that the famous signpost was most useful as an anchor, if not a windbreak.

The Isabella heads out to sea

What else? Oh yes, my collection of fantasy short stories, The Dragon of Stroma and Other Tales, will be free until this Friday from the Amazon kindle store.

Finally, many congratulations once again to Judit for another spiffing gansey, this time in violet, with a very effective pattern, and once again measured entirely by eye. (It was knit for another of her doctors, thus reinforcing my view that Finland is a country where the doctors are all as rugged as the landscape…)