Last week, I spent a few days in Edinburgh, taking the bus there and back. It was a relatively uneventful trip, apart from the bus being two hours late getting there. The first bus ran out of coolant an hour’s drive from Inverness, where it connects to the next bus. There we sat for nearly two hours. The driver was almost frantic, having made several phone calls but not getting any updates. Eventually an engineer arrived to fix the bus, but it had been without coolant too long and could not be driven. We were shifted to the next scheduled bus when it arrived and caught later connections in Inverness.
Snowdrops in the back yard
The UK government is transitioning to digital eVisas, and the trip south was to complete the last step in the application process. It is necessary to present oneself in person, passport in hand, to have photo and fingerprints taken. I’d left plenty of time for the bus and to find the office, but traffic halted at a bottleneck for 20 minutes, and I was late. Fortunately, others were ahead of me, as I found when escorted into the waiting area. When my turn came, they scanned my passport, and directed me to the other half the room to another bank of chairs. Thinking to pass the time by reading e-mails on my phone, I took it out but was informed ‘no phones’. But it was only a short wait, and I was soon called behind a screen for the photo and fingerprints. This last was not like a police show, where your fingers are rolled on an ink pad. Of course not. It was digital. You press your fingers on a small scanner which has four lights that turn green when the scan is read. If your fingers are too dry, there’s a blue pad where you oil them up and try again. The whole process, from arriving to leaving, took about 15 minutes. In the fulness of time, I’ll have a digital visa, which should speed going through UK borders.
Snow on the Cairngorms
For the rest of my stay in Edinburgh, I had a good rest. The weather was cold, windy, and rainy, so not conducive to long walks or window shopping. I was staying with a friend, and when we weren’t chatting at the kitchen table, I was knitting in the guestroom.
The back of the National Gallery, Edinburgh
I made good use of the long bus rides by knitting nearly the entire way there and back. The 3” of K1P1 ribbing are done, and about 4” of the body. The bottom of the ribbing ripples somewhat, but that should lessen upon blocking. The body ribbing – 5 K, P1, K1, P1, K1, P1 – is almost mindless, and I reckon it’s better than plain stockinette. The ‘new’ yarn was on the mat when I got home. It’s a different dyelot, but I’d be hard-pressed to tell the difference.
For some forgotten reason, I recently researched ‘what is celebrated today’ on the internet. There are some interesting ‘awareness days’. We all know that 14 February is St Valentine’s Day. But what about St Trifon Zarezan? In Bulgaria, he’s the patron saint of viniculture. It’s the day that marks the first vine pruning of the year. In the country of Georgia, it’s the festival of Lamproba, where birchwood fires are lit after dark to celebrate the end of winter. There are many heart health and emotion-related awareness days on 14 February, but some of the others are: National Cream-Filled Chocolates Day, League of Women Voters Day, National Ferris Wheel Day, and National Library Lover’s Day. Some groups need a bigger slice of the year, so there are awareness weeks and months: Random Acts of Kindness Week, Real Bread Week, National Hero Week, International Week of Black Women in the Arts, Pickle Time Week, Love Data Week, National Jello Week. The list is lengthy. February is National Goat Yoga Month. I did not make that up.
Rushes
But it is fair to say that all of these, apart from Valentine’s Day, have gone unnoticed here in the far north. It’s been a week much like the last, with the notable events being a haircut, and attending the Net Loft Thursday evening Zoom, where gansey knitters get together to show their progress, ask advice, and chat. My regular weekly visit to the museum to work on charts from gansey photos was aborted early when the power went out. It flickered on and off for ten minutes, teasing us into thinking it was on permanently, and then went off. At least I hadn’t even started so didn’t lose anything. I set aside that afternoon to do some charting at home and have been doing a bit more during the week. The weather has been conducive for that – cloudy, cold, windy.
First Crocus
I’ve been working steadily on the gansey, aided by some springy bamboo needles. I am occasionally concerned that an end will snap, but given that the grain of bamboo runs lengthways, it would probably take more force than mere knitting. The dual dilemmas of the chart and ‘yarn chicken’ have been resolved. The chart only needed to be widened slightly, so there will be two open diamond panels instead of one. For the yarn, I searched a well-known auction site and found 5+ balls for sale, and I await its arrival.
More rushes
I neglected to mention last week that as well as thinner yarn, I’ve also gone down a needle size to 2mm. It isn’t much of a difference in size, but the swatch felt a bit ‘boardy’ and I didn’t want to go any smaller. The k1 p1 ribbing is about 2.5” now and should be finished in a day or two. Then the body, which will also be ribbed up to the yoke – k5, p1, k1, p1, k1, p1. This style of body is not uncommon in the old photos. I wonder if the knitters then dreaded it. It will be both mindless and very mindful.
Before I opened the curtains this morning, there were sounds outside. Assuming it was pitch dark and that nothing should be stirring, I listened carefully. It was birds in the plum tree, and then I realised that in reality dawn was soon to break, and the sparrows were just going about their business. It’s a harbinger of spring, hearing birds in the morning.
Hawthorn budding
There are other signs of spring, too. The snowdrops around town are blooming, although not yet in the back garden. Daffodils are sending up flower buds. On trees and bushes, shoot tips are starting to swell, and soon there will be pussywillow catkins along the riverside path. Plus it is not dark at 5 p.m.
Last year’s flowers
A few weeks ago, with Spring is in the offing, I made an appointment with the dentist. I haven’t been in over a year. The appointment came round this week, and it was both good and bad. The good: I didn’t need to visit the hygienist. “I can see you have very good dental hygiene,” the dentist said. The bad? A cavity under a decades-old metal filling. It is always disconcerting when the dentist, after poking your gums with the pointy end of the probe, then inserts it into a hole in your tooth and waggles it around. She asked me to turn my head so the trainee assistant could see. “See that white? It’s not tooth, it’s calcification. That bit there (poke poke waggle) is the cavity. We need to fill it or there’s danger of the tooth breaking.” At least there was only one filling, but I have a feeling it will be a big one. I made an appointment for the earliest available date – 1 April – and vowed to cut back on sugar.
Yet I might need that sugar to fuel the next gansey. I’ve cast on with a Channel Island cast on and will start with 1×1 ribbing. Most of the week I’ve been measuring and re-measuring the gauge swatch, restretching and measuring again, and attempting to chart a version of the pattern that would fit the stitches required. The first set of measurements didn’t seem believable, but the second set required complete re-jigging of the chart. I tried for several days to capture the essence of the pattern in a smaller chart. The problem was to reduce the number of rows, but not the number of stitches, and to keep the central panel at about one third of the width. Although the diamonds in the yoke don’t look square, in terms of numbers they are square: a diamond that is 39 st wide will be 39 rows high. To reduce the rows, the width of the motif would also need to change. This might work on side panels, but not the central panel, which needed to retain its width to keep the character of the original. After struggling with this, charting and re-charting, I remembered the first set of measurements, which would give me something much closer to the Johnston photo. It only needed to be slightly wider. It’s a bit of a leap in the dark, particularly with different yarn that may not behave like our old friend, gansey 5-ply.
Being ‘retired’, nothing much seems to happen from day to day, and then you realise it’s next week. Things are happening, but it’s mostly background noise – buying stuff I don’t need online; cancelling landline accounts; sending long e-mails relating to my brother in law’s income; deciding to co-organise a course in the autumn and thinking about that; a day out with a friend who was having a scan at the small hospital in Dingwall.
Distant rain
The landline is for the family home in Northamptonshire. After 7 months, even though not expensive, I decided it was time to cancel. When I’m there, all the calls are the cold-call variety, trying to sell insulation or double glazing. You rush to answer the phone, only to find it’s an automated call or someone you can’t understand. So I phoned BT to cancel. The agent on the other end was surprised that the account had been open for nearly 49 years! The Reids bought the house in January 1976 and the phone was installed two months later. I thought of keeping the line on until 50 years, but it’s an unnecessary spend just to reach a milestone.
Snowdrops
The course in the autumn is not for knitting, but for making, playing and decorating bamboo pipes. The group try to run one every year, but our membership is decreasing, and it might be one of the last we’re able to hold. This year, all other possible organisers declining the privilege, I was firmly in the headlights. I’ve agreed to do it with another experienced organiser. Unless I have some brainwaves over the next few months, it’ll be much the same as the last one, which I was unable to attend due to illness.
Staghorns
The day out with a friend wasn’t really a day out, but it’s better to think of it that way than as another trip down the road for a hospital appointment. Dingwall is north of Inverness by about 15 miles and although better than going to Inverness, it’s still a two-hour drive one way. Inevitably, it brought back memories of all the trips we’d made to Inverness for hospital appointments, mostly Gordon’s but a few mine.
Donald Gillies, August 1911. (c) Wick Heritage Society Used with permission
The next gansey will soon be on the needles. When the swatch is dry, I’ll take measurements and do the maths. This one will be for me. About five years ago, I decided to knit a gansey for myself, using finer yarn to get a gauge more akin to what I was seeing in the Johnston photos. It took a while to find a yarn that was slightly finer and still in my price bracket – Drops BabyAlpaca Silk. Unfortunately, it has been discontinued, and I fervently hope there is enough to finish the gansey. The pattern will be based on one of the Johnston photos, with a ribbed body, and a yoke with small double cables and a bold ‘lightning’ motif in the centre. Part of the pattern is hidden by the braces, but from what is visible, there would appear to be two identical tree and diamond panels next to each other.
Shall I start with the weather again? After a brief respite of calm weather, storm Éowyn stampeded in with the riders of Rohan at her back. While it was definitely breezy in the far north, we weren’t affected as badly as the central belt of Scotland. As far as I know, there were no power cuts, no flooding, no road blockages. But then, I heeded the warnings and stayed in that day.
And what does one do on a cold, windy, rainy day in mid winter? Hurkle-durkle, of course. This term appeared on my Facebook feed one morning, and my first reaction was, ‘This is my life!’ It’s an obsolete word from southern Scotland, popularised by the internet, meaning to cozy up in bed long after you should get up.
Calm Sea
When I’m not hurkle-durkling of a Monday morning, I go to the Wick Heritage Museum to peer at scans of photos from the Johnston Collection that contain ganseys. It’s an ongoing project I’ve been working on for the past five or six years. Initially, I edited the photos, cleaning up noise from the background or repairing ‘holes’. These ‘holes’ are plate damage, where emulsion has worn away or suffered water damage. Some of the plates are so damaged at the edges that repair of those areas is impossible.
Colour on the quayside
Because Wick was a centre for the herring industry, there are many photos of fishermen. By and large, the ganseys tend to be plain, and many, to my surprise, were machine knit. Prior to this, everything I’d read indicated that ‘ganseys were hand knit’. But this is simply not the case when looking at the photos. There are, of course, many photos of hand-knit, patterned ganseys. Some of these are ‘Sunday best’, and just as many, if not more, are simpler. In some photos, the ganseys are worn under a waistcoat, jacket, or both, with only a tiny glimpse of a gansey at the neck. Most photos have a decipherable pattern.
Flaking slate
The interpretation of these patterns into chart form is what I’ve been doing for the past year or so. Because the photos are portraits of a person and not a gansey, the quality varies. Some are so clear you can nearly count every stitch. In others, it is possible to interpret the pattern even if you can’t see the stitches. In others, the pattern is out of focus, or perhaps the sitter moved. It will take a while to get them all charted, but there have already been some interesting finds – for instance the cabled cuffs and cuffs with lace panels.
Speaking of lace, the lacy jacket is complete and stretched on the blocking boards. I had hoped to stretch it slightly more lengthways, but the i-cord edging on one of the fronts was knit too tightly. Bell sleeves are not my favourite, as the trailing edges get into everything; as a solution, an i-cord laced through the loops could be used to gather the edge and keep it out of the way.
Last week, I spent a few days in Edinburgh, taking the bus there and back. It was a relatively uneventful trip, apart from the bus being two hours late getting there. The first bus ran out of coolant an hour’s drive from Inverness, where it connects to the next bus. There we sat for nearly two hours. The driver was almost frantic, having made several phone calls but not getting any updates. Eventually an engineer arrived to fix the bus, but it had been without coolant too long and could not be driven. We were shifted to the next scheduled bus when it arrived and caught later connections in Inverness. 
