Gansey Nation

Let’s start with the good news, and really it’s as good as good can be: the hospital consultant confirmed that I don’t have oesophageal cancer after all (or cancer of the lymph nodes, or thyroid, or any other place known to medical science they’d thought I might have it) and she doesn’t want to see me again. Of course, the world is full of people who never want to see me again so on its own this isn’t as impressive as it could be, but given that the growth on my vocal cords has gotten smaller now I’m not coughing all the time, I seem to be – cautiously, hopefully – out of the medical woods.

Path in the Forest

To establish this I had to get up close and personal one more time with the dreaded endoscope, the cold steel tube that slides up the nose and down the throat. It’s rather like being attacked by an amorous robot octopus. (I can usually keep it together right up to the moment when they ask you to say “Eeeee” with the tube in place, which is a bit like trying to whistle while gargling.) By way of a bonus, the consultant said my various infections had gone as well, and described the inside of my nose as “pristine”, which means I’ll never be short of a chat-up line again.

Scarfskerry Harbour

Alas, nature abhors a vacuum, or as Job puts it, the Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away. And so I’ve got a new medical condition to stop me getting bored: the top knuckle of my left little finger has swollen up and the tip is starting to grow crooked, like a branch sprouting out of a polled tree. Hurts like the dickens, too. It’s probably arthritis. So it’s as they say, what we lose on the swings we gain on the roundabouts (though I’ve never been sure exactly what I’m likely to lose on the swings, unless it’s my lunch). We all have to dree our weird, or submit to our fate, so I’m really not complaining; all the same, I can’t help wondering if it had to be quite this weird…?

Sitting on the Fence

In parish notices we’ve received pictures of a rather splendid gansey knit by Belinda for her son. It’s knit using Frangipani dark navy yarn, and is a combination of cables, diamonds and chevrons, and other things too. Many congratulations to Belinda, not just for completing the gansey, no mean feat in itself, but also for what looks like a perfect fit, and thanks for sharing it with us.

TECHNICAL STUFF

Mrs Laidlaw’s Pattern

My own current gansey project is of course Mrs Laidlaw’s belter of a pattern from Seahouses, taken from Gladys Thompson’s book. It’s knit in Frangipani Breton yarn, a lovely autumnal russet shade, and is a combination of moss stitch panels at the edges, and trees and flags interspersed with crinkly bits. (What do you call those wriggling line patterns in between the trees? They remind me of the French “epi” bread, cut to resemble ears of wheat.) It’s a classic pattern and I’m looking forward to recreating it over the coming weeks and months.

Now, I’m not usually one to complain (Editor, quoting Bender the robot from Futurama: “Ahahaha. Oh wait, you’re serious. Let me laugh even harder”) but I’m starting to think that tourism up here is getting a bit out of hand. A lot of this is down to the North Coast 500, a clever marketing exercise that’s seen the broad loop of road that runs 120 miles north from Inverness to John o’ Groats, then west to Durness, and south down the west coast, taking in Skye, before heading east back to Inverness, rebranded as a tourist trail. And yes, it’s a lovely drive, even travelling at 30mph in a winding queue of traffic. But it’s turned the north Highlands from somewhere to go into something to do.

Muckle Skerry from John o’Groats

In the west country tourists are known as “grockles”, nobody knows why, but it’s a great name. In Cornwall I’ve heard them referred to as emmets, derived from an Old English word for ants (aemete), and you can see the metaphor. The other day we went up to Duncansby, to go for a walk along the cliffs and look and the sea stacks. But when we got there the car park was full, cars and vans were double- and triple-parked, and a solid line of people like emmets at a picnic trudged across the headland to see the view, take a few photos, and trudge back. (Reader, we chickened out, and went to John o’ Groats for an ice cream in the sun instead.)

In gansey news, it’s always exciting to start a new project. This time it’s another stone-cold classic, Mrs Laidlaw of Seahouses’ pattern, from Gladys Thompson. It’s a pattern I’ve loved ever since I first opened the book nearly 40 years ago, but have scarcely ever knit—well, it’s overdue a revisit. The yarn is Frangipani Breton, a lovely soft russet shade that should capture the pattern definition well. So it begins.

Stack at Sarclet

And do I begrudge other people the chance to experience the beauties of the Scottish landscape? Of course not: I’m a tourist myself every time I get in my car. So I guess I can see it from both sides. After all, what’s the point of scenery if no one looks at it? Here in Caithness there are plenty of quiet places that haven’t (yet) made the guidebooks, which you can visit with nary a camper van in sight. Though I do rather hanker back to wartime, when the north Highlands was a protected area, and you needed a special pass to go north past Inverness. You could limit the number of vehicles coming in, to avoid overcrowding: hmm, about five a day seems about right…

It’s been a week bookended by explosions and drifting clouds of smoke. To start at the end, last night was the finish of gala week, which always culminates in a very pretty firework display down by the river. For once the weather was kind and sunset elided into a clear night of soft blue skies, against which the dark shapes of birds flitted to their nests, the perfect stillness of the night broken only by the pounding thump-thump-thump of the funfair. We watched the fireworks from our upstairs window, breathing in the drifting smoke from the huge bonfire, watching coloured flashes fill the sky and jumping at the bangs. The only problem is, it’s practically August, and here in the far north of Scotland summer tends to leave with the fair. Autumn is just around the corner: the wind has a subtle edge and even the warmest days have a feeling of impermanence.

Getting ready for the bonfire

The week opened with the demise of our microwave oven, which yielded up its spirit accompanied by a loud buzzing noise, like a bluebottle trapped in Metallica’s sound system, together with a cloud of acrid smoke. It occurred to me that this might be a special feature by the manufacturers, if they were Scandinavian, and that each oven departs this world by providing its own Viking funeral; I suppose I should be grateful that it didn’t ritually disembowel and incinerate me as well.

I’ve been amusing myself by imagining how various writers might have described it. So far I’ve got Dickens (“It was the best of ovens, it was the worst of ovens”), Tolstoy (“All working microwaves are alike; each broken microwave is broken in its own way”), Jane Austen (“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that an archivist in possession of a broken microwave, must be in want of a replacement”) and Tolkien (“In a hole in a recycling bin lived a broken microwave”). Then there’s Camus: “Our microwave oven died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don’t know.” Or possibly even Kafka—”As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a broken microwave oven”.

So now it’s off to the home for abandoned microwaves to find a new one, always a depressing experience as you walk up and down rows of cages, with hopeful ovens wagging their little tails and barking optimistically, hoping you’ll take it home. I just hope the new one’s been housetrained. Meanwhile I can only make this appeal, in the immortal words of Shakespeare’s Mark Antony: “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ovens…”