“Well, now that we have seen each other,” said the Unicorn, “If you’ll believe in me, I’ll believe in you. Is that a bargain?” (Lewis Carroll, Alice Through the Looking-Glass)
We watched the classic 1951 Disney version of Alice in Wonderland the other day. It was a bit disappointing, to be honest, and so (as often happens) it sent me back again to the books. And the main thing I noticed was how gratuitously rude all the creatures are, especially to Alice. It’s utterly delightful. Among the choicest insults are: “You don’t know much, and that’s a fact” (the Duchess); “Really, you are very dull” (the Mock Turtle); “I never saw anybody that looked stupider” (the Violet); “It’s my opinion that you never think at all” (the Rose); and, the best of all, “You’re so exactly like other people” (Humpty Dumpty – ouch).
Retro Snowdrops
Of course, plenty of other children’s books feature rude characters. Gandalf is splendidly tetchy (“Fool of a Took!”) in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, leading to this eulogy from Faramir: “Many are my names in many countries, he said. Mithrandir among the Elves, Tharkûn to the Dwarves; Olórin I was in my youth in the West that is forgotten, and in the South, Mister Grumpy-pants…”
St Fergus’ Church
Of course, the main thing about the Alice books is the sheer strangeness of it all, and the dream logic that obtains throughout (you can’t answer a door unless it says something first, for example). It’s an endlessly quotable book, even occasionally drifting into eastern mysticism and the illusion of the self: “I can’t go back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.” Anyway, I’ll leave you with my favourite passage of all. Alice is talking with the Cheshire Cat, who’s telling her about the Mad Hatter and the equally mad March Hare:
“But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.
“Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”
“How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice.
“You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.”
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TECHNICAL STUFF
I’m taking my time with the sleeves, now that the hard yards of the yoke are behind me. The Caithness style was to have a run of plain knitting at the top of the sleeve, followed by a moss stitchy-type band, and then it’s plain knitting again down to the cuff (which was usually a little fancier than just knit 2/ purl 2). The sleeves will only be 16 inches from the top of the shoulder to the bottom of the cuff, I.e., not very long, so I’m decreasing by two stitches every fourth and fifth rows alternately.
It’s been a funny old week, weather-wise. Arctic air came sweeping down last Sunday, dropping a couple of inches of snow on us and then freezing it solid. Each day would dawn in blue skies and sunshine, just warm enough to melt the top layer of snow ready for it to freeze overnight, when it would also snow again, and so on all week. Come morning it was so treacherous underfoot I could’ve slid gently all the way to work with just a single push at my doorstep. The layers of compacted snow and ice were like varnishing done by Jack Frost. Scenic, yes, I grant you, but when every step you take resembles someone wearing roller skates for the first time it’s a little more hazardous than I could wish.
I know as you get older everything seems to happen faster—time passes more quickly, and seasons can flash by before you’ve had time to get used to them—but I seem to remember spring lasting more than a week. And even then it was usually followed by summer, or what we laughingly call summer here in the far north of Scotland, and then autumn; not by winter. But tempora mutantur and all that, and winter is what we’ve got, after a teasing glimpse of spring the other day: sleet, snow, ice and temperatures hovering around zero. As I leave for work in the morning sparrows glare reproachfully at me as I pass, as if this is somehow my fault, coughing piteously and swearing darkly in birdish under their breath.
I sometimes think that birdsong would probably be a lot less appealing if we could understand it. Mostly I think of it as just a pleasant string of meaningless sounds, the avian equivalent of Italian, but of course to other birds it’s how they communicate, unless they’ve developed a form of semaphore yet to cracked by ornithologists. I suppose the ethereal, delicate beauty of a nightingale singing in the garden at evening would be diminished rather if you knew it meant, “Oi! Turn that bloody light off, some of us are trying to sleep out here, you know!”
To match the weather, here’s a chilly little poem by the Japanese master, Bashō: These cold winter days On horseback— Even my shadow is frozen.
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TECHNICAL STUFF
This is always the point where the magic happens and everything comes together. It’s also the time when I put a bit of a shunt in to get things finished. So this week I’ve finished the front, joined the shoulders, knit the collar (13 rows of k2/P2, or just about an inch), and picked up stitches round the armhole (124 stitches in total, excluding the gusset, for roughly 16 inches in total). The sleeves won’t be very long—only 16 inches in total—but now I can settle down to the next few weeks of mostly plain knitting, quite a relief after concentrating on such a detailed yoke pattern.
I came across a great Winston Churchill story this week. Churchill was famously informal, and frequently turned up to meetings in a silk dressing gown embroidered with dragons or his famous boiler suit “onesie”. He used to dictate letters in the bath and once speculated that President Roosevelt was the only head of state who’d seen him naked (at which I expect the President, a literate, naval man, exclaimed, like the Sea Captain in The Simpsons, “Yar! That’s going to replace the whale in my nightmares!”) Well, one day after breakfast he was sitting in bed having a lengthy telephone conversation with Field Marshal Alan Brooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, concerning weighty matters of strategy. To one side was his secretary, Grace Hamblin, listening in and making notes. And on the bed was his cat, Smokey. Grace herself tells the story:
Backyard snowdrops
“The prime Minister’s telephone conversation with the C.I.G.S. was long and anxious; his thoughts were far away; his toes wiggled under the blankets. I saw Smokey’s tail switch as he watched, and wondered what was going to happen. Suddenly he pounced on the toes and bit hard. It must have hurt, for Mr. Churchill, startled, kicked him right into the corner of the room shouting “Get off, you fool” into the telephone. Then he remembered. “Oh,” he said, “I didn’t mean you,” and then seeing Smokey looking somewhat dazed in the corner, “Poor little thing.” Confusion was complete, the C.I.G.S. hung up hastily and telephoned the Private Secretary to know what was happening…”
Wick Harbourside
In parish notices, we’ve got two splendid ganseys to share with you this week. The first comes courtesy of Sigrid, who has used the Wick Fergus Ferguson pattern to create a very fetching blue cardigan with a stand-up collar. She’s amended the pattern creatively with narrower plain stripes between the zigzag lines, small braids of 2 in the yoke and another small zigzag at the end of the sleeves. As Sigrid points out, you can only see the big tree of life at the back because of the V-neck, but that’s par for the course with modern shaped collars, you lose the top of the centre panel (it’s a price worth paying for me as I don’t prefer loose necklines).
Choppy sea
The other gansey comes from Rose, who’s also been creative with a very impressive blend of Grimsby, Humber and east coast patterns. It’s for her husband (who stylishly models it in the photos; note the initials above the welt), and is also knit in blue, in 4-ply yarn. Many congratulations to Sigrid and Rose, and many thanks to both for sharing.
As for Churchill, he had another cat which he named Nelson. One day during an air raid the cat, frightened by the siren, fled under the bed. Churchill knelt down to remonstrate with it: “Think of your namesake,” he told it. “No one named Nelson slinks under a bed in a time of crisis!” Though in my experience, most cats are so unheroic you might as well name them Brave Sir Robin and be done with it…
I said last week that spring was in the air, and there are three more infallible signs to show that it must be true. First, and most obvious, in a few days we see the back of February, which has felt less like a month and more like the sorts of tests they put a car through to see how much punishment it can take. Secondly, this is the week I stop using my sunrise wake-up lamp, as it’s finally light enough at seven in the morning to navigate one’s way to the bathroom by sight instead of blindly ricocheting off objects in the hallway like an elderly pinball with arthritis. And thirdly, it’s warm enough that I no longer scream from the shock of applying freezing cold moisturiser to my face. Spring is, I think it’s fair to say, coiled to spring.
Noss Head from Nybster
Take Sunday. It was a simply glorious day: cold—between 3 and 6ºC—but the wind had dropped, the sun was out, and you could see for miles. We went up to Nybster broch, one of our favourite jaunts, just a few miles north of Wick. Nybster, by the way, like Lybster, is one of those Highland place names designed to catch out tourists. The y is long, like the y in “why”, so it’s pronounced Nye-bster. Other notorious places are Guidebest and Leodebest, which I’ve heard pronounced Gidder-best and Lee-odder-best, but I’ve never dared attempt them myself. “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”, as Wittgenstein famously said when someone asked him how to pronounce Loch a’ Mhadaidh Beag.
Being observed by fulmar
Meanwhile, in gansey news I’m making good progress up the back—have nearly finished, in fact, for in about half an inch or so I’ll start the shoulder straps. The overall length of the gansey is to be 24 inches, so I’m making the armhole 8 inches (i.e., 16 inches in the round for the sleeve). In practice this will mean 7 inches plus one inch for the shoulder straps.
Snowdrops by the riverside
Nybster broch is perched on a knobbly outcrop on cliffs overlooking Sinclair’s Bay. Someone’s been busy clearing it over the winter, for it used to be mostly a lumpy, bumpy assortment of hillocks and holes (or “negative features” as archaeologists like to call them), but now the various chambers and passages are open to the sky. It looks like something built, a place where people could actually have lived, and not so much like somewhere colonised in prehistoric times by a now-extinct species of giant mole-rats. We stood there and watched the waves foaming in and the fulmars wheeling below us, and black shaggy-type things skimming over the sun-dappled water in the offing. I expect somewhere time was passing, though not where I was; and it occurred to me, for the first time, that eternity might not perhaps really be so bad, after all…
For a short time there it looked like spring was about to make an entrance, and rather earlier than usual. The days are getting longer, the snowdrops are out and the first green shoots of a crowd (possibly even a host) of golden daffodils are, well, shooting. A few optimistic blackbirds even start the day with a bit of a warble, stubbornly ignoring the fact that this is Caithness and dawn at this time of year usually happens to other people. Spring has definitely been in the air, and in the earth.
The Coast at Sarclet
Then on Friday morning Storm Otto swept in, and all bets were off. I’d had a restless night. Lying awake at 5.30am I heard the wind blowing and thought, pah, call yourself a storm? By 6.15 I thought, okay, that’s definitely windy. By 6.45 it felt like a jumbo jet was revving its engines in our front garden. The whole house was shaking and it seemed the only thing holding it together was the wallpaper. At times like this, all you can do is sit it out and hope. Luckily Otto didn’t hang about. The worst was over by about 8.00am, and an hour later he’d headed off to trash Aberdeenshire. Wick recorded a top wind speed of 78mph—not the worst we’ve had, but bad enough. And then, the aftermath. I always know when a storm’s blown through, the roads are littered with broken branches and twigs; and I suddenly realise why Caithness is so bare of trees.
A Bird in the Bush . . .
As for spring, Shakespeare famously has this jaunty little ditty: “In spring time, the only pretty ring time/ When birds do sing, hey ding a ding, ding/ Sweet lovers love the spring.” Seriously, Bill? Stretching for the rhyme a bit there, mate; I mean, have you ever heard a bird go “ding a ding, ding”? Other than a very confused woodpecker mistaking a church bell for a birch tree, obviously. But then, I suppose, given the alternative (When birds do tweet, tweet tweet tweet tweet tweet/ Sweet lovers love… the sleet? To cheat? A treat? A spreadsheet?) on second thoughts, birds that go “ding ding” are probably fine…
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TECHNICAL STUFF
It’s another landmark week this week, as I place the half-gussets on their holders and divide for front and back. The overall length of the gansey is just 24 inches, so including the two inches of ribbing at the bottom I’ve divided at 16 inches: the plan is to make the armholes seven inches plus one inch for the shoulder strap (16 + 7 + 1 = 24″). Normally this is the point where you really pick up speed, since you’re only knitting half a row at a time, but in this case I’ve got to be careful as the lacy trees in the centre panels with their yarn overs and right- and left-decreases require my full attention.
Here are the pattern charts for the yoke. These charts are for the original gansey in the glass plate negative: please note that in this knitted version I’ve inserted cables to separate the various pattern bands. This is purely to make it wider (to fit the recipient) while leaving the actual pattern elements the same.
In the following charts / = right decrease, \ = left decrease, and 0 = yarn over.
“Well, now that we have seen each other,” said the Unicorn, “If you’ll believe in me, I’ll believe in you. Is that a bargain?” (Lewis Carroll, Alice Through the Looking-Glass)
