I learned a useful pointer the other day that I thought I’d share with you. When making a cup of tea from a teabag, especially if it has one of those paper tags on a cord, make sure that you put the teabag in the hot water with the tag dangling outside the cup, and not, ahaha, the other way round. (Follow me, as the saying goes, for more helpful cooking tips.)
Chatham Light, Cape Cod
I went back to the hospital at Inverness last week, for the consultant to take another gander at the growth on my vocal cords. I’m starting to dread the moment she gets out the lubricating gel and starts sliming up the laryngoscope, the metal device that goes up one nostril and then down the back of the throat. It’s along, slender fibre optic tentacle with a glowing tip, and it’s hard not to feel as though ET’s decided to pick your nose for you and didn’t know when to stop. I keep expecting to feel a tickling sensation in the brain, and it’s always a surprise when instead it emerges somewhere down by the uvula. The worst part is when they ask you say “Eee” with it in position, which is a bit like trying to drink a glass of water and whistle at the same time.
More Adirondack Colour
The good news is that, a year on, the growth on my vocal cords is much the same and the consultant is now pretty confident that it’s “nothing more serious” (which is, I’ve come to learn, the medical term for cancer). It’s hard to believe it’s only been a year since I was first referred, and in that time the medical profession has been concerned about possible cancer on my vocal cords, my lymph nodes, and my thyroid. It was only a matter of time, I felt, before they became concerned about my navel, my knees and possibly my big toe. So even though I’m living my life in six-month slices (like the man in the old joke falling from a tower block, who as he passed each floor they heard him say, “So far so good… so far so good”), and the doctors use “probably” more than I could wish, this feels, literally, like a whole new lease on life.
Reflected colour on the river, Sutherland, MA
The growth is still there—there’s no point in removing it as the consultant says it’ll just grow back in a few months—so I’ll probably have a croaky voice till the end of my days. I’m also being referred for a CAT scan on my sinuses, which may be infected (words you’d rather not hear when a doctor is inside your face: “Ooh, there’s a quite surprising amount of pus”). But these are mere details. Now I have another year’s worth of ganseys to plan for. But first, a cup of tea…
[Editor’s note: Margaret’s away in the States just now, but is able to upload images to the blog remotely. This will explain the rather startling variation in quality between the main image of the gansey, taken by me on my phone, and the rest. As Hamlet observed, when comparing the poor quality of his uncle’s holiday snaps with his late father’s much better ones, “Oh, what a falling off was there…”]
So, how can you tell if you’re not having a good week? Well—voice of experience here—one way is if you find yourself confusing lip balm with shoe polish. Let me explain. Having certain weighty matters on my mind (i.e., whither I should direct my steps for a walk), and feeling that my lips were dry, I decided to go put on lip balm. On the way, I took a detour into my bedroom to don my shoes, which I also remembered needed a clean. On entering my bedroom, the first thing I noticed was my liquid shoeshine applicator. Somehow all these impulses combined to short-circuit what I laughingly call my brain, and I found myself picking up the shoeshine bottle, popping the top, and starting to apply it to my lips. Luckily it was only the briefest dab before all my senses screamed the alarm, and the application of some washing-up detergent removed the stain, but for a while there I risked looking like I’d been in a transporter accident with an over-ripe banana.
It’s been that sort of autumn. The other week I was in the museum, and some thistledown drifted in the open door. One of the charming ladies I volunteer with reached out and grabbed it, and said that when she was a child she was told that these were fairies and if you caught one you made a wish. She was thrilled, as she’d never caught one before. But as she opened her fist to reveal the mangled wisps of thistledown on her palm I heard myself saying, “Well, that’s one fairy that’s never going to grow up and have kids.” Honestly, if I could have recalled those words I would. But it was too late. They are now part of the eternal, irrecoverable unfolding history of the universe, and somewhere in heaven the Recording Angel got a ping on his phone, woke up from a doze with a jerk, and scrolled through his messages before dipping his quill in the ink bottle and making another entry in the book of my life. In red ink.
All the same, it could, I suppose, have been worse. I was talking with a retired teacher. She told me of a school trip she’d been on once, visiting some old ruins. It was a foggy day, and some of the children wandered off and started clambering on the walls. At last the head teacher noticed these two figures on the walls and shouted at them to come down. They ignored him. So he roared out, “Right! You two come down right now and stand still until I come and deal with you!” Only when he got closer he discovered that they weren’t any of his party at all but a couple of German hikers, who were now standing petrified to attention at the foot of the walls…
Autumn colour in the Adirondacks
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TECHNICAL STUFF
I’m now about 3.5 inches into the plain knitting of the body, which is, I’m delighted to say, too floppy to stand up properly. There will be about 12 inches of plain knitting before I start the pattern, so feel free to start a longish book—Moby-Dick, say, or A Brief History of Time—and catch up with me sometime in November.
I was reminded the other day of that song—I think it’s from Hamlet—the chorus of which goes, “Back in Nagasaki/ Where the fellers chew tobaccy/ And the women wicky-wacky woo”. It was one of those lyrics that I didn’t understand as a child, a sort of secret handshake for grownups, who, when you asked them what it meant, just used to waggle their eyebrows mysteriously. If you were very unlucky, they might even sing it at you too. I just assumed it was something Japanese women learned as part of geisha training (“Lotus Blossom, full marks on your wicky and your woo, but I’m afraid you just weren’t wacky enough. Try the tea ceremony again, only this time with the clown shoes and the revolving bow tie”).
Narrow boats on the Grand Union Canal
Of course, the lyrics of most songs were a mystery to me as a child. Folk songs in particular were a minefield. I couldn’t understand why the young man who was helping the farm girl look for her spotted cow first laid her down upon her back; it’s the job that’s never started that takes longest to finish, I thought disapprovingly. Nor could I understand why the young maid and the sportsman decided to hunt the bonny black hare under her apron; a most improbable place to find specimen of the genus Lepus, surely. As for the foggy, foggy dew, well, that presented few difficulties: if you wish to avoid dampness and cramps and get a good night’s sleep, obviously it’s best to lie indoors in the warm.
King of the hill
Of course, even I got the meaning behind some songs: anyone wanting their lemon squeezed probably didn’t have pancakes on their mind, and as for playing with their ding-a-ling, well, let’s just say it rang a bell. Even the classic folk and Morris tune The Cuckoo’s Nest didn’t leave a lot to imagination for the budding ornithologist. But then, in most cases, as the saying goes, sometimes a double entendre really only has one meaning…
Northampton Market
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TECHNICAL STUFF
This new gansey project is another pattern charted from an old photograph in the Johnston Collection of Caithness fishermen—in this case, three young boys. The pattern is hard to make out, as the original is a little blurred, but we think it’s a relatively simple combination of chevrons and a variation of moss stitch. But I’ll say more about that in a few weeks when I reach the yoke; meantime, there’s the body to do. This one’s for me, in Graeme Bethune’s Caithness Yarn (natural colour “gansey gold”). I cast on 328 stitches for the welt, knit 4.75 inches of ribbing, and have just increased to 360 stitches for the body, which will be 12 inches of plain knitting.
Finally this week, Judit has shared with us another stunning gansey: she’s taken the George Bremner pattern I recently knit in navy, and has run with it, this time in a light shade which really shows the pattern. It’s going to be a Christmas gift for her grandson, and very splendid it looks. (And can I just say, how great it is to see these old patterns get a whole new lease of life?) Many congratulations again to Judit, and many thanks for sharing this with us, as ever.
“My lord Aragorn!”
“Ah, Gandalf, my trusted counsellor.”
“Remember that mini budget the other week? The one announced by your chancellor?”
“Oh yes, Wormtongue.”
“You know he asked you to stop calling him that.”
“Well, what about it?”
“The market’s crashed.”
“What market? We’re a pseudo-medieval economy: we haven’t invented capitalism yet.”
“The flea market above the Queen Beruthiel Home for Superannuated Cats. The floor gave way.”
“Anyone hurt?”
“Well, my lord, you’ve heard of a ‘dead cat bounce’..?”
Hardy fuchsia
“Miaowch. All right, what are our options?”
“My lord, we can either put up taxes or cut public services.”
“But we can’t touch any more taxes! I mean, we had to u-turn about removing the 45-groat top rate of tax on dragons’ hordes.”
“You mean the gilt intervention? It was a dumb idea anyway.”
“Well it’s better than your ‘Let’s send hobbits up chimneys to clean them to get around the child labour laws’ plan. All right. How about cutting the public sector?”
“The only thing left still in state ownership is the orc resettlement programme.”
“The who of the what now?”
“Orcs, my lord, the ones who survived the war.”
(Frowning) “But I thought they all fell into that big pit thingy.”
“Not all of them, my lord. I mean, there must have been many thousands of them.”
“But Mordor’s just fire and ashes and stuff.”
“Only some of it. After all, on the map it’s about the size of Australia.”
“Australia, eh? Though that does rather support my fire and ashes theory.”
“Never mind about Australia. We haven’t even discovered it yet.”
“Yes, I’ve been meaning to ask you about that. We keep sending boatloads of elves over the horizon, but none of the little blighters ever come back. Not even so much as a saucy postcard.”
“I keep telling you, they’ve gone to the land from which no traveller returns.”
“So… not Australia then?”
“Galadriel on a bike! Look, we’ve got a whole country of orcs to find jobs for.”
“But where do they all come from?”
(Sighs patiently) “I’d have thought Arwen might have… I mean, surely by now the two of you must have… Look, it’s like this. When a mummy orc and a daddy orc love each other very much, they—“
“No, hang on, that’s not right. I thought orcs were just corrupted elves.”
“Seriously? I mean, all the elves we know just drape themselves over the furniture and sing sad songs about twilight. If you corrupted them you wouldn’t get orcs, you’d get a sort of fey Black Sabbath.”
(Gloomily) “Oh, well, that’s out then. And we’re getting hammered in the polls.”
“I know, Sauron and his ‘Nazgûl Are People Too’ Party.”
“Yes, I’ve got a MMGA hat.”
“Mummaga?”
“Make Mordor Great Again.”
Wick riverside
“Tell you what, my lord, we could always put a tax on pipeweed.”
“That’s true. Everyone smokes in Middle Earth, even dragons.”
“There we go. Though I sometimes wonder if there’s any connection with our life expectancy of about 25 years and our booming cough sweets industry.”
“Probably just a coincidence. Was there anything else?”
“Just one thing. Someone called Gollum keeps phoning, leaving voice messages asking you to give him a ring…”
It’s officially autumn, which arrived gently, even stealthily, like someone sneaking up behind you only to burst a water balloon two inches above your head. Yes, we had our first storm of the winter on Friday—nothing like the hurricane that hit Florida and the Carolinas, of course, and our thoughts and prayers are with everyone affected—but driving rain nonetheless and winds strong enough to qualify as storm force (55-63 mph). The tree at the bottom of our garden is mostly hanging onto its leaves, but it already has a defeated look, like a boxer whose wobbling knees have just about made it to the end of the first round, and who realises a rubdown with a damp sponge may not be enough.
Twirl of haws
The agricultural Anglo-Saxons called autumn hærfest, or “harvest” (which also appears as hairst in Old Scots). It’s thought that this only fell out of favour once people began to live in towns and cities. “Fall” was another common word in England for autumn, of course, until it stowed away on the Mayflower and started a new life for itself in the New World. Fall mostly refers to leaves, and I was interested to learn that “the fall of the leaf” and “the spring of the leaf” were also used for the seasons. (Winter possibly derives from a word meaning “wet”, which supports my theory that Caithness is the real cradle of civilisation.) Robert Burns wrote a poem called The Fall of the Leaf, which starts promisingly, with lines like “The forests are leafless, the meadows are brown/ And all the gay foppery of summer is flown” before taking a decidedly gloomy turn (“How long I have liv’d—but how much liv’d in vain/ How little of life’s scanty span may remain”), which suggests he wasn’t at home to Mr Cheerful on the day he wrote it.
Remains of flowers
But then, autumn does rather bring out the gloomy side of poets, especially Chinese poets (more than usual, I mean; they are poets, after all); as in Li Yu’s splendidly named How Can a Man Escape Life’s Sorrow and Regret? But sometimes the poems convey stillness and serenity. Here’s one of my favourites, Autumn Twilight, Dwelling Among Mountains by Wang Wei (699-759):
In empty mountains after the new rains, it’s late. Sky-ch’i has brought autumn—
Bright moon incandescent in the pines, crystalline stream slipping across rocks.
Bamboo rustles: homeward washerwomen. Lotuses waver: a boat gone downstream.
Spring blossoms wither away by design, but a distant recluse can stay on and on.
Trees & distant sheep
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TECHNICAL STUFF
Well, here we are: the end of another gansey project. I’m quietly pleased with it. There was a time when I began to fear that the yoke was getting away from me and would end up too big, but I’ve tried it on and it’s a pretty comfortable fit on me (my actual chest size by tape measure is in the 41.5/42 inch bracket, depending on how many crisps I’ve eaten). I’d classify this as an extra large in UK sizing, maybe a large/extra large in US. And the pattern stands out nicely: when the pattern catches the light, it really catches the eye. Next week, a surprise extra before we knuckle down to our next project. Watch this space…
