On Saturday I paid another visit to Raigmore Hospital in Inverness—a journey our poor old car has made so often that now when I get in, all I have to do is say “Raigmore” and, like some elderly hackney cab horse out of Dickens, the engine starts automatically and it practically drives there itself. This time it was a trip to Dermatology to look at the variety of lumps and bumps that have sprouted upon my face over the last few years like the less hallucinogenic sort of mushrooms.
I’d been referred by my doctor about 14 months back—funnily enough it was about these that I’d gone to see her, and it was only in passing when she questioned me about my cough that I became a “person of interest” (as the FBI charmingly put it) to throat cancer specialists. Just before Christmas I got a text from the NHS inviting me to fill an online form about the referral, which went something like: (a) has the problem gone away on its own in the meantime? (b) have you resolved it yourself, say by means of a YouTube video and a pair of gardening shears? Or, (c) do you really still wish to see a doctor? Nothing daunted, I ticked (c), hence Saturday’s trip to Inverness, and very grateful I was for the opportunity.
Along the path
And while I’m sitting in the waiting room, trying to concentrate on the opening paragraphs of Sir Thomas Brown’s 1658 masterwork, Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial, or, a Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns lately found in Norfolk (what do you mean, you haven’t read it?) let us turn our attention back to knitwear. For Judit has come up with another triumph, this gansey which uses a variety of patterns (diamonds, double moss stitch and others) in bands to very striking effect, and which shows again just how effective combining patterns like this can be. Many congratulations again to Judit, and many thanks to her for sharing it with us.
But now my name is called at the hospital. This was another 5-hour round trip for 10 minutes’ worth of doctoring, but it was totally worth it: basically, all my lesions are age-related, and—two of my favourite words just now—non-cancerous. One of them was, the consultant said, inflamed, so he opted to freeze it with a liquid nitrogen spray (strange how freezing results in such an intense burning sensation: “This may sting a little” he said, which I’ve discovered is the medical term for “This will feel like I’m burning your face off with a blowtorch”). For the rest, well, they’re not pretty, but I can live with that. Suddenly I don’t have anything particular medically to worry about. Suddenly to have a stash of over 20 ganseys’ worth of yarn no longer seems like an indulgence…
Knitted herring at the museum
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TECHNICAL STUFF
This will be a replica of another elaborate Wick gansey found in the Johnston Collection of old photographs. I’ve knit it before, in the same colour (Frangipani Sea Spray) and the finished article has pride of place in Wick Museum’s gansey display. But this is a commission for a friend and the sizing is different, so I’ll need to be a bit creative when I get to the yoke pattern. But sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof, so meanwhile I’ve cast on 384 stitches for the K2-P2 welt, increased to 396 for the body (for a chest size of 49 inches in the round at 8 stitches to the inch), and am about to start the K3—P-K-P-K-P—K3 ribbing for the body. (And if that doesn’t teach me that life is stern and earnest, and we are not put here for pleasure alone, I don’t know what will…)
Well, it’s a brand new year fresh out of the box with its batteries fully charged, so here’s a very warm welcome to 2023. Let’s hope it’s better than the last few years which have felt uncomfortably like the End Times, visited as they were by the rebranded Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: War, Pestilence, Cost of Living Crisis, and Brexit.
I’m now officially too old to stay up and see in the new year: it disrupts my sleep pattern and I always wake up with a splitting headache, which rather takes the gloss off things. Besides, I’m a New Zealander, so I can celebrate an antipodean new year at the more civilised time of noon and get it over early. But life always finds a way, as the man said, and this year my plans sadly ganged aft a-gley.
Snow on the skylight
Usually by 11.00pm on New Year’s Eve I’m nestled all snug in my bed/ While visions of Hawaiian dancing girls sugar-plums dance in my head. This worked fine during the pandemic, but of course the world has now reopened and I was rudely awakened before midnight by the sound of the Wick Hogmanay Street Party—possibly the four saddest words in the English language—blasting out live music and someone shouting “Woo-hoo” over loudspeakers till 1.00am. It took me hours to get back to sleep; and so, yes, I welcomed in the new year with a headache. The best way to describe what it feels like is to quote the great Ford Prefect in Douglas Adams’s Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy: “It’s unpleasantly like being drunk.” “What’s so unpleasant about being drunk?” “You ask a glass of water…”
Dusting of Snow
But do I begrudge the revellers their revels? Never in life: for it’s a poor heart that never rejoices, and once a year I’m happy to take one for the team. So, in the spirit of one lighting a candle instead of cursing the darkness, let us raise a glass of orange juice and a couple of aspirin and wish a very happy New Year to all our readers: happy knitting, and may our stitches and our spirits never drop!
Winter on the marsh
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TECHNICAL STUFF
I wanted to finish the gansey in time for New Year, just to keep things neat, which meant quite a lot of knitting over the festive season (luckily I was helped by some wretched weather, which discouraged much venturing out of doors). So I’m delighted to draw a line under 2022 with this completed gansey, washed, blocked and with the ends darned in. It’s another stunner from the Johnston Collection of old photographs, simple but detailed, and I look forward to taking it out for a spin once it’s properly dried. Next up I’m starting 2023 by revisiting another Wick pattern, one of the really fancy ones, and I hope you’ll join us as we embark on another exciting adventure next week.
Well, we hope you all had a very happy Christmas. And now it’s time to ask the landlord to fill the flowing bowl until it doth run over, for tonight we’ll merry merry be, tomorrow we’ll be hungover: yes, it’s time for the traditional Gansey Nation Christmas Singalong—
Good King Wenceslas was sad, In fact he felt quite miffed – He hadn’t any Christmas cards, Outside the snow did drift. Brightly shone the moon that night Upon a shadowy form, A Royal Mail postie was on strike, Sheltering from the storm.
“Come hither page, and stand by me And tell me, if thou know’st, What that poor man his grievance be, And first class stamps, the cost?” He waited there impatiently But answer came there none, His courtiers all looked vacantly For that good page was gone.
Rain-heavy clouds approaching the Castle of Old Wick
“Go search for him in pool and mere I fear he may have drowned.” “No, sire, we’ve looked everywhere – 404, page not found.” The postie then approached the king, “Improve our pay thou sluggard, Unless more money thou canst bring, The public sector’s buggered.
“I can’t afford to heat my home, The barometer is falling, While it’s colder than a catacomb, No posties will come calling.” King Wenceslas was sore dismayed And said he’d make things better, Resolved to see him better paid, And knit the man a sweater.
Signs of Spring – daffodil shoots
“Bring me yarn and bring me light, And bring this man a heater, Bring me needles sized just right: 2.25 millimetre.” And now the moral’s plain to say As they trudged through the blizzard: Give your posties decent pay If you want your mail delivered…
Signs of Spring – willow buds
And we wish all our readers a very Happy New Year!
It’s shameless self-promotion time, for I have just self-published a collection of my poems on Amazon. (Or rather, my dear friend Song has formatted and published it for me.) It’s print-on-demand only at the moment, but a Kindle version should be available soon. And why am I launching them on an unsuspecting world? To quote the Old English proverb: Ciggendra gehwelc wile þœt hine man gehere, “Everyone who cries out wants to be heard.”
Snow falling at sunset
Though if you are thinking of buying a copy (and all receipts will go towards running the blog) I should offer a word of caution. You remember The Picture of Dorian Gray? The one where the hero lives a life of carefree debauchery and stays eternally young and debonair, while his portrait ages in his stead and becomes bloated and diseased? Well, if this gansey’s blog is my Dorian Gray, the poems are the equivalent of his portrait. They’re the other side of me, the side that exists so the me who writes this blog can function. They’re just not necessarily what you might call cheerful, so caveat emptor and all that.
Still, just think what a perfect last-minute Christmas present they will make. Imagine the delight on the faces of your children as they go to unwrap that Lego Hogwarts castle they asked for—a little anxious as to the small size of the present, but still hopeful—only to find instead a collection of poetry filled with bleak, existential despair. If that doesn’t set them up nicely for the crushing disappointments of adulthood I don’t know what will. Are the poems any good? The flickers of pain that cross the faces of my poetical friends when they read them suggest not. But they’re out there now, and must take their chance. As the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams said, when asked about his fourth symphony, “I don’t know whether I like it, but it’s what I meant”. Me too, Ralph, me too.
Pancake ice heading out to sea
And now we wish all our readers a very merry, safe and warm Christmas. Next week, join us if you can for the traditional Gansey Nation Christmas singalong.
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TECHNICAL STUFF
Pattern for top of sleeve
It’s amazing how quickly things come together at this stage after such a long haul. So in the last week I’ve finished the front, joined the shoulders, knit the collar, and picked up stitches round the armhole and started the first sleeve. Suddenly it looks like a gansey-to-be.
I picked up 136 stitches around the armhole, or 68 stitches per side. I’ve noticed that my stitch gauge is a little bigger knitting sleeves on double-pointed needles than knitting the body on circular needles. I don’t know why this should be, but it’s not much and it doesn’t bother me enough to experiment with smaller needles. In a pattern with cables, you’d never notice. But in a sleeve like this with plain knitting there’s a risk the top of the sleeve balloons out widely like the puffy sleeves of Hamlet’s shirt. So I cast on slightly fewer stitches—136 instead of 144—and it seems to work out.
I was away last week at a workshop on nuclear records. This took place in Lancashire, or what I like to call “the south” to annoy Lancastrians, and Margaret came with me to share the driving (public transport in the UK just now not being what you’d call dependable). With perfect timing, this coincided with a sudden and dramatic plunge in temperature to several degrees below freezing. (Despite what the Met Office says, from my detailed knowledge of Disney movies I presume this is because the Queen has lost control of her powers and accidentally created an eternal winter, which only strengthens the argument for Britain being a republic.) It was pretty to look at, all frosted fields and trees covered in snow and ice, but not so much fun to drive in, especially as the cold seemed to push our hire car—a little sensitive at the best of times—into panic attacks.
10 AM on the Moray Firth
Windscreen wiper fluid nozzles can ice over and get jammed, for sure—but after every use? Driving back up the M6 was challenging, as we only had one shot at cleaning the windscreen between motorway service areas. One time I just held the button down in the hopes that something might happen. It did: eventually the passenger-side nozzle freed itself, sending the equivalent of an ice bullet into the windscreen where it exploded rather terrifyingly; meanwhile the other remained jammed, so that the driver-side wiper just smeared the crud across the screen in a hopeless sort of way, like Santa waving goodbye to his reindeer on Boxing Day morning. A lot of the electronics in the car operate by bluetooth, apparently, which works about as well as I do in cold weather. Occasionally we’d get random error messages or the sat-nav would freeze up, so we had to turn the engine off and on again to reboot it. And this was in Lancashire; if I were Captain Kirk I’d be asking some pretty searching questions about the bluetooth capabilities of the Starship Enterprise, travelling as it does through the freezing vacuum of space.
Waiting for the train
Well, we made it back safely, though the last twenty miles were in pitch darkness and heavy snow. Driving up the A99 into a snowstorm and watching the flakes streak towards you is not unlike being in the Enterprise travelling at warp speed while trying to navigate an obstacle course at the same time (hmm: how exactly did Mr Sulu steer that ship?). And so we’re home in Caithness, where the sun barely has the energy to rise above the treetops, and where at this time of year we get just over six hours of what they laughingly call daylight. But there’s only a couple of weeks to go to Christmas, the most wonderful time of the year, and we’re past the solstice when everything will start to change, even if we don’t notice it right away. And if that fails? I’ll just have to go find the Queen in her ice palace; after all, it shouldn’t be too hard: I’ll just have to follow the singing…
Only 7 1/2 hours to go . . .
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TECHNICAL STUFF
I didn’t get a huge amount of knitting done this week, what with being away and all. But I tried not to lose momentum by setting myself a target each day. Each mini-chevron is four rows, or about an hour in all. So I tried to make sure I did four rows a night, even if I didn’t really feel like it, with the result that over seven nights I got nearly three inches done. I’m almost to the point where I can divide for the indented neckline and shoulders, when everything starts to move rather fast, so let’s see what happens this week.
On Saturday I paid another visit to Raigmore Hospital in Inverness—a journey our poor old car has made so often that now when I get in, all I have to do is say “Raigmore” and, like some elderly hackney cab horse out of Dickens, the engine starts automatically and it practically drives there itself. This time it was a trip to Dermatology to look at the variety of lumps and bumps that have sprouted upon my face over the last few years like the less hallucinogenic sort of mushrooms.
