It’s been a tiring week. Again, I’ve gone down to Northants to attend to affairs. There’s not much to say – two days of long drives leavened by stopping overnight with a friend in Edinburgh and finding that audiobooks really do help with the tedium. We’ve listened to audiobooks in the car for years, but it was always when Gordon was at the wheel. Thus it was a very pleasant discovery, and something I will do more of in future.
A Walk on the Beach, Reiss
I am sure Gordon wrote about the ‘War of the Orange’, but some recent posts on Facebook by the Caithness Archive have reminded me of it. Over the past week, they have been posting the day-by-day entries from the Harbour Master’s logbook.
Remains of a Past Tide
On 27 August , what started as a minor scuffle over an orange between a local lad and a Highland lad became a full-scale disturbance with 300 people involved. The Riot Act was read, and constables sworn in, which only served to fan the flames. Tension eased slightly on 1 September, when some of the Highland crews left, but serious fighting broke out again on the evening on the 2nd when it was reported that four men had been stabbed. This time, the military was deployed, supplementing the 270 special constables. By 5 September, it was over, when the bulk of the Highland crews cut their fishing season short and headed for home.
I wonder what they were wearing …
Apples
As I’ve been knitting the gansey, I’ve been thinking and re-thinking about the design. The longer it gets, the more positive I am that the original was likely a yoked design, with a plain or wide-rib body. As you can see in the photo posted last week, most of the garment is hidden underneath a waistcoat, so it is impossible to know for certain. This presumption is based on the sleeve, which is patterned to the elbow only. I’m considering knitting the sleeves plain from the elbow down, but think it would look odd with the full body patterning.
Canalside Sunset
There was not much progress last week, but I have come to the point where I Have To Decide what the shoulder treatment will be. I haven’t definitely decided yet, but the favourite possibility is to work half a fishbone on each shoulder, leaving a gap for the neck. The other half of the fishbone will be on the front, and a two-needle bind-off will form the ‘spine’.
Alas, the conversion to a digital landline was not without a few glitches. First, I had to figure out how to connect the analogue phone to the router. An adapter came in the same box as the router, the instructions informed me. But where was the box? Ah yes, under the bed. Where else? With the phone duly plugged in to the router, nothing happened.
The next step was to have peer at the router software, to see if there were any settings I could change, but I couldn’t see any I was confident to tinker with. I haven’t had success changing settings on the router in the past, even with instructions and videos. Perhaps the settings would take a while to percolate through the system, I thought, and left it until the next day.
Grasses in the wind
The phone was still not working the following day, and I tried other solutions using the provider’s set-up and troubleshooting instructions. I determined that the phone could connect to the router because there were a few steps that needed to be confirmed with a dial-in code. But still nothing. A phone call to support was necessary.
After a short wait, relatively speaking, the tech on the other end quickly found that a crucial setting on the router hadn’t been transferred. He could do it from his end, and a few minutes later, job done. I now have a working digital phone line.
Space Stations
As an aside, the development of the telephone is rather interesting. It wasn’t just Alexander Graham Bell. Other inventors were involved, including Phillipp Reis in Germany (who devised the name), Elisha Gray, Antonio Meucci of Italy, Thomas Edison, and others whose names have been lost to history. I won’t go into detail but encourage you to research it.
Valerian
With the gansey, a total of ten rows were unravelled. I’m never very good with numbers and it’s even worse trying to count rows in knitting. To completely eradicate the miscreant rows, another row needed to come out. It took about one and a half sessions of knitting to regain the lost ground, and a few rows after that, it was time to divide for front and back. I’ve started the back, and it’s full speed ahead and damn the torpedoes. In a few inches, I’ll decide about the shoulders – three needle bind-off, or a shoulder strap? The photo on which this pattern is based appears to have a narrow shoulder strap of double moss stitch. I’ve been thinking about repeating the fishbone motif in a ‘grown-on’ strap – an extension to the front or back, instead of a strap knit from the neck down which joins front and back. Partly it will depend on where the patterning ends when the back is at the correct length.
copyright Johnston Collection. Used with permission.
This coming week, I’ll be heading south again. I hope to do the blog next week, but if I don’t, see you on the other side.
I’ve noticed that the seasons have started to turn while I was away. The frothy white heads of the umbellifers lining the paths have been replaced by the miniature space stations of their seedheads. The green fields are now golden. Alas, they’re not amber waves nowadays; ‘improvements’ in agriculture have shortened the stems. So why does wheat currently have shorter stems? During the mid 20th century, wheat was selectively bred to produce shorter stems. Shorter stems meant the grain was less likely to topple over in the field, and lead to higher yields. (Thank you, internet.)
There are also the thistles – there are so many varieties I don’t even try to identify them. The bright purples and pinks have turned to white fluff, soon to drift off in the autumn winds.
Black headed gull
There are changes in the wildlife too. Most notably, the black-headed gulls are starting to lose their black heads, changing to the winter plumage of a white head with black ‘ears’ – a dark spot behind the eye.
To drift off to another subject, a word I started to wonder about this week was ‘butter’. It just popped into my head during a walk. I thought that perhaps it was called ‘butter’ because cream is beaten, or by extension, butted, to make it. But another surprise awaited in the ever-useful Oxford English Dictionary: it’s a borrowing from Latin! And the Romans borrowed it from the Greeks! To quote the OED: “from classical Latinbūtȳrum (also būtūrum) butter from ancient Greek βούτυρον butter from βοῦς ox, cow (see Bucephalus n.) + τυρός cheese (see tyroma n.).” The first known use in English is before 1150 AD.
Thistledown
Coming back to the future with a jolt, tomorrow the landline in the house will be switched to a digital voice service. What does this mean? Instead of the telephone line being routed through the old copper network, it will come via the internet. The UK is switching off the copper network at the end of 2027. Essentially, communication needs have changed drastically since the network was first developed in the 19th century. Broadband is faster, more reliable, more resilient and easier to maintain. The landline doesn’t get much use now, perhaps the switch will future-proof it. The only thing I need to figure out is how to connect the phone handset to the router.
Finally, we reach the sparse paragraph where I detail this week’s progress on the gansey. The photo gives a false impression, because last night I realized that yet again I’d made a blunder, and a rather colossal one at that. If you get out your rulers and measure your screen, you will see that the top repeat of the fishbone pattern is too tall. Annoyingly, I didn’t notice until the end of the repeat. The last 9 rows will need to be ripped out. Due to the nature of the pattern, this can’t be done in sections, amending a stitch here and there. They’ve all got to go.
Back in the cool and gloomy North, after a long, uneventful drive from Edinburgh. It’s not a bad drive – unless you find yourself behind some very slow traffic, as I did – an exceptionally plodding van, whose top speed was 50 mph and which was also large enough to block the view ahead. Patience is a virtue, they say. Sometimes it’s difficult.
The Olympics end this evening, and rather belatedly I found out yesterday what the puzzling mascot is supposed to be. Was it a flame in soft toy form? A pyramid, like that outside the Louvre? Surely it wasn’t a red poo emoji? Then I read that it represents a Phrygian cap. Of course I’d heard of those – but the explanation of ‘the cap worn by French revolutionaries’ doesn’t tell you much. It is most famously seen in Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People, which hangs in the Louvre.
Hardy Fuchsia
This work, painted forty years after the 1789 revolution and one year after the second in 1830, was Delacroix’s response to the turmoil in France during these years. He is quoted as saying, “. . . if I haven’t fought for my country at least I’ll paint for her.” It was exhibited at the Salon of 1831 for the first time, after which it was bought by the French government. The plan to display it in the throne room, as a reminder to the King of who was boss, came to naught, and it was returned to Delacroix in 1832. The subject was considered ‘inflammatory’. Eventually the government acquired it again in 1874, and it has been in the Louvre since, apart from a trip to the US in 1974/5 for the Bicentennial and to Tokyo in 1999.
Marshland textures
But we’ve wandered away from the Phrygian cap itself. Its origins are from eastern Europe and ancient Persia. To quote from Wikipedia,
“The original cap of liberty was the Roman pileus, the felt cap of emancipated slaves of ancient Rome, which was an attribute of Libertas, the Roman goddess of liberty. In the 16th century, the Roman iconography of liberty was revived in emblem books and numismatic handbooks where the figure of Libertas is usually depicted with a pileus.”
Going to Seed
For the following two centuries, it was frequently used in the Netherlands, “where the cap of liberty was adopted in the form of a contemporary hat. In the 18th century, the traditional liberty cap was widely used in English prints, and from 1789 also in French prints; by the early 1790s, it was regularly used in the Phrygian form.”
So there you have it. An ancient garment revived during the Renaissance and taken up throughout Europe as a symbol of liberty.
Busy
With a bit of clumsy footwork, I can say that the knitting on the ancient garment of the current gansey has been revived. An inch or two have been done, and the gussets have been started. It feels like progress, when the gussets are begun – one third down, two thirds to go . . .
This week, I write from Edinburgh, having arrived after three quiet, restful days in Southport. There’s a festival on here , but you’d never know it here in the suburbs. My stay in Northants was longer than originally planned. With the change in location came a change in schedule, which disrupted sleep yet again. I’d hoped to get all sorts of things done – sewing, knitting, cleaning, photo editing – but in the end only got through some necessary paperwork.
A dab of red
I did fit in one walk, however, and ambled up to the nearby village of Gayton. The walk is along an ancient right of way, up the hill and through the fields. One year, golden wheat was waving and rustling in the field. This year, it was the solid green of broad beans, occasionally enlivened by a dab of red poppies. I went through the village to the ancient church. There had been a wedding that morning; confetti was swirling in the breeze, captured by spiderwebs on the church gate. The church didn’t seem to be open, I had to be satisfied examining the exterior more closely. The top mouldings of the windows were terminated by faces:
Window moulding
Did you know that the Olympics also included the arts? I hadn’t a clue. Between 1912 and 1948, 146 medals were awarded in the categories of architecture, literature, music, painting, and sculpture. Two talented individuals won medals in both the arts and athletics Olympics: Walter Winans, a gold for shooting in 1908, and a gold for sculpture in 1912; and Alfréd Hajós, two golds for swimming in 1896, and a silver for architecture in 1924.
Gayton from the path
And ‘clue’. I recently read the origin of the word on another knitter’s blog, and it was both enlightening and surprising. The meaning we use most doesn’t need explanation, but one of its meanings, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is: “A ball of thread, employed to guide a person in ‘threading’ his or her way into or out of a labyrinth or maze; hence, in many more or less figurative applications, a fact, circumstance, or principle which, being taken hold of and followed up, leads through a maze, perplexity, difficulty, intricate investigation, etc.”. Indeed, “clue” is still in use today with its meaning of ‘ball of yarn’, particularly in Scotland and the north of England.
Ships passing
One last item of interest – congratulations to RSPB Forsinard for being granted UNESCO World Heritage status. It’s the first peat bog in the world to be awarded such status. Well done to them.
Gayton church
The clue to the Gansey content of this week’s blog is apparent in the photo. Alas, no progress whatsoever has been made this week. Between lack of sleep and, erm, following up clues in paperwork, there wasn’t much left in the tank for knitting. I promise to do better next week.
