I was awoken the other day by a seagull, calling from somewhere outside the bedroom window. It sounded, I thought, like the wail of a lost soul in torment. And then the idea slid into my mind that perhaps seagulls really were reincarnated lost souls, and the reason they went after your chips so aggressively was because they still retained some human memories, such as how good chips actually taste. Come to think of it, maybe they’re reincarnated football fans. Then I woke up properly and resolved to not eat cheese for supper again.
The collective noun for a shedload of seagulls is of course a flock, as fans of 80s synth pop will be only too aware. But you can also call them a squabble, which sounds a bit made-up to me. But then I suppose collective nouns, like all words, have to be made up sometime, or we’d still be communicating by means of facial expressions, as in prehistoric times when mime artists roamed the earth.
Galaxy of Gorse
Take a parliament of owls. This appeared first in Chaucer as a parliament of fowls. But CS Lewis in his Narnia books changed it to a parliament of owls only, and such was the popularity of the books it caught on. I know it’s supposed to designate wisdom, but come on, have you watched the debates in the House of Commons lately? It’s not exactly the Jedi Council. (I’m pretty sure I once heard the Chancellor of the Exchequer refute the arguments of the Leader of the Opposition in these terms: “The honourable gentlemen’s fiscal arguments lack all credibility and will lead to rampant inflation. Plus, no one likes him cos he smells of wee.”)
I love collective nouns. A dazzle of zebras, a shrewdness of apes, a skulk of foxes, an incredulity of cuckoos, an exaltation of larks, a superfluity of nuns (but can you ever really have too many?), a murder of crows, a whoop of gorillas and an international flight path of gazelles. (Well, okay, not the last two, which I’ve nicked from an old Alas Smith and Jones sketch.) I don’t think there’s a collective noun for lost souls, though apparently the term for a bunch of ghosts is a fright, which seems like a missed opportunity. Apart from squabble and flock, you can also have a screech of seagulls and a scavenging, which suggests that seagulls need a better press agent. I’d also like to humbly offer a menace of seagulls or, just possibly, “a chipgrabbing…”
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Straw bales
TECHNICAL STUFF
A word on sleeves. I’ve found there are two ways of dealing with the rate of decrease as you work your way down the sleeve: one is to just pick a rate (two stitches every five rows, for example) and see where it leads you; the other is maths. If I’m feeling reckless, I opt for the former. But more often than not I, as it were, grit my teeth and do the math.
The first thing is to check your stitch gauge, which can vary a little when you switch to double-pointed needles. Say it’s 10 rows to the inch (to keep this example simple). How long is your sleeve going to be? Say it’s 17 inches from shoulder to start of cuff. The first thing you do is deduct from the overall total the number of inches it will take to complete your underarm gusset. In my case a half-gusset is always more or less 3 inches, so (because I won’t be decreasing any stitches from the sleeve itself until I’ve finished the gusset), that equals 17 – 3 = 14 inches from end of gusset to start of cuff. If I knit 10 rows per inch, that equals 14 x 10 = 140 rows to play with.
So, how wide do you want your sleeve to be at the cuff? If it’s going to be, say, 5.25 inches laid flat, or 10.5 inches in the round, and you’re knitting 8 stitches to the inch, then 10.5 x 8 = 84 stitches at the cuff.
How wide is your armhole? Say it’s 9 inches from gusset to top of shoulder laid flat, or 18 inches in the round, 18 x 8 = 144 stitches to cast on at the armhole. This means you have to decrease from 144 to 88 down the sleeve, so 144 – 88 = 56. This means you have to decrease by 56 stitches from end of gusset to start of cuff.
Waves reaching shore
Now, every time you decrease, you decrease by 2 stitches (one stitch either side of the fake seam). So 56 / 2 = 28 decrease moments down the sleeve after the gusset.
So there we are. We have 14 inches or 140 rows to make 28 decreases. The calculation now is a simple one: 140 / 28 = 5. Therefore if we decrease 2 stitches every 5 rows from the end of the gusset, we should have the exact number of stitches we need for the cuff (84 stitches equals 7 x 4-stitch ribs of k2/p2).
Of course, you can play around with this to suit your own gauge and preferred lengths. A shorter sleeve will mean a narrower (less deep) armhole with fewer stitches. A longer one will require a slower rate of decrease: sometimes I decrease at a rate of 4 stitches every 11 rows, or one decrease on the 5th row alternating with another decrease on the 6th row. You may prefer to have a few more stitches at the end of the sleeve than in my example, so that the first row of the cuff involves several decreases, making for a snugger fit at the wrist and a more pronounced change from sleeve to cuff, It’s entirely up to you.
I’ve been thinking a lot about borders recently: frontiers, marches, edges and liminal spaces. Partly this was inspired by a visit to Ousdale broch, which lies on the coast near the Caithness-Sutherland border. You park in a lay-by off the main road, and then follow a path which winds lazily down towards the sea for about a mile and a quarter. This gentle slope lulls you into a false sense of security, as the only hazards you have to face are the numerous fewmets left by the sheep that graze there, and you enjoy the solitude and the scenery, relishing the unspoiled landscape. Coming back, however, is another matter: before you’re halfway up the return slope you’re damning the unspoiled scenery to blazes and wondering why no one has installed a funicular railway.
The path to the broch
The location of the broch is pretty special, on tree-shrouded cliffs just above the point where the Allt a’ Bhurg burn joins the the Ousdale burn as it flows into the sea. Ousdale is Old Norse for Oystein’s Valley, suggesting that it was originally settled by a Yiddish-speaking Viking, while Allt a’ Bhurg is Gaelic for “stream of the fort”. Archaeologists used to think that brochs were Iron Age forts (they date from more or less Roman times), though no one really knows. Maybe they just liked the view. Archaeologists get around the problem by calling them “complex Atlantic roundhouses”, and then wonder why they never get invited to parties. Originally they were imposing stone towers a couple of stories high, bulging at the base like a clay pot on the potter’s wheel; nowadays they’re mostly just 16-metre wide stone-lined holes in the ground, like at Ousdale.
The main entry to the broch
But the location! Like so many brochs it seems to mark a border—of a valley, a loch, an inlet, a river, of the land and the sea, even of time. And just now feels like one of those transition points in history, with the passing of the old Queen and accession of a new King, a new, untried prime minister, a war in Europe, energy no longer something to be taken for granted, and winter coming. The old certainties suddenly don’t seem so certain any more. There’s a great song by Al Stewart called “On The Border” which captures this feeling perfectly:
Late last night the rain was knocking on my window, I moved across the darkened room and in the lamp glow I thought I saw down in the street The spirit of the century Telling us that we’re all standing On the border…
Panorama of the interior
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TECHNICAL STUFF
I’ve completed the first sleeve, six inches of cuff and all (sigh), and am now well embarked on the second. By the time I reached the cuff I had 84 stitches on my needles, i.e., just enough for 21 ribs of k2/p2. Now the end’s in sight, even if may not quite finish it this week: the nights are drawing in fast now, so my narrow window of summer light to knit using navy yarn is closing; time to start planning a gansey in pastel shades…
“For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground/ And tell sad stories of the death of kings,” as Shakespeare’s Richard II poignantly observed. Of queens, too: for, as you may perhaps have heard, Britain is now officially in mourning for the death of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.
When I was younger I was something of a republican, feeling that a monarchy had no place in a serious, mature, modern democracy. But then I remembered that I lived in a country which had voted to name a scientific research ship “Boaty Mcboatface”; which has an unelected second chamber of Parliament, the House of Lords; and which now has noted climate change sceptic Jacob Rees-Mogg as its *checks notes* minister for climate change. At which point it dawned on me that adjectives like mature, modern and serious are, perhaps, a touch optimistic. (A propos of nothing, someone once labelled Rees-Mogg “The Haunted Pencil”; I don’t know why, but it cheers me up no end whenever I hear his name.)
My only brush with royalty came just over a decade ago, when one of Charles’s brothers, Edward, earl of Wessex, officially opened a new Scottish archive centre. I’d been invited to host the event, and it was something of a revelation. He was amusing, self-deprecating, made time for everyone, spoke to everyone, listened, and made each person feel a little special. And suddenly I got it: it wouldn’t have been the same with a politician (half the room would have voted for the other side) or a celebrity, when it would have been all about them. He made it about us. I was, a little to my own surprise, genuinely impressed.
Stopping for a cuppa
I was also a little surprised to find how touched I was by the passing of Her Majesty: touched by some of the tributes (especially the ones involving Paddington), touched by the grief of the family, and also by the memories it brought back of some of the losses in my own life, especially of my mother and (just recently) her sister. The Queen, God bless her, is dead: long live the King. And if another’s grief ever seems excessive or misplaced, well, maybe we should remember Benedick’s words in Much Ado About Nothing: everyone can master a grief but he that has it.
Waves on the harbour wall
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TECHNICAL STUFF
So, the sleeve. In the original photo, George’s gansey has repeats of the pattern bands all the way down to the cuff. I’m not doing that for a couple of reasons. Firstly, and obviously, because I’m lazy. And secondly, because I don’t particularly like the look of a fully-patterned sleeve on a half-patterned body. It just looks a bit top-heavy to me, like a gansey designed for orcs (I like to think that Aragorn encouraged the surviving orcs to take up fishing for herring after the fall of the Dark Lord). But it’s just a question of personal taste. I cast on 137 stitches round the armhole, and after the gusset am decreasing at a rate of 2 stitches every 5 rows.The sleeve will be about 15.5 inches shoulder to cuff; the cuff will be 6 inches standard k2/p2 ribbing, folded back on itself.
Loch Watten
Now, I don’t know if this is useful or not. When I’m knitting purl rows on straight, double-pointed needles, try as I might I can’t get the stitches an even size across the join from one needle to the next: either they’re too loose, and they sag; or I overcompensate, and they end up tight and tiny. So I’ve got into the habit of just slipping the last 3 or 4 stitches from those on the needle I’ve just done onto my new needle. This means that I start my new needle with 3 or 4 purl stitches already completed, sitting there—i.e., the join/ transition point between needles is now 3 or 4 stitches back, it’s already happened—and I can carry on with my purl row, and the tension is automatically the same in every stitch. It only takes a couple of seconds per needle, and the effect is, well, seamless.
I was musing the other day on the the Bible story of the Prophet Elisha and the bears, as told in 2 Kings 2:23-24. As you will doubtless recall, the prophet was on his way to minister to Bethel when he was mocked for his baldness by some children of the city: “And he turned back, and looked on them, and cursed them in the name of the Lord. And there came forth two she bears out of the wood, and tare forty and two children of them”. (What, I wonder, is the procedure, if no bears are available, and you have to find a substitute? I mean, the only animals I usually see from my window are sheep, but I’m pretty sure the local children could take them in a fight.)
Gone to seed
This is the sort of smiting that seems, regrettably, to have gone out of fashion, leaving children free to mock the follically challenged without fear of ursine dismemberment. But if you had that sort of power, what other sorts of high crimes and misdemeanours would you punish with it? As an archivist, the worst crime my profession faces is the loss of original documents, something which has happened all too frequently in the past, and even in the present too.
Take Edward I who captured Edinburgh in 1296 and removed the nation’s archives, shipping them south to London, where they somehow (*cough*) disappeared. Then Cromwell came along in 1650 and did it all again. This time they weren’t misplaced: instead, after the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, they were actually being returned to Scotland, when the ship carrying the records sank in a storm off Northumberland. Or here’s another example: when Napoleon’s army invaded Russia in 1812 it was so badly prepared that, after the battle of Smolensk, French doctors had to use documents raided from the city’s archives as bandages. (I like to think that when the bandages were eventually removed the ink was transferred to the skin like a tattoo, so that Smolensk historians followed the French army around asking the soldiers if they’d remove their trousers so they could read their legs.)
The old gate
And as for anyone improperly withholding US government files from the National Archives, all I can say is, if I were the guilty party I’d be pretty nervous if I learned the FBI had requested the loan of a couple of she-bears from the Smithsonian National Zoo…
[Update to last week’s post: regrettably Margaret and I won’t now be attending Thursday’s craft event at Drumnadrochit owing to logistical challenges. We wish everyone involved a very successful event.]
Thistledown
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TECHNICAL STUFF
As you can see, I’ve now finished front and back, joined the shoulders, knit the collar and started on the first sleeve. I’ll say something about the sleeves next time.
The neckline isn’t shaped or indented at all, but is the traditional straight rectangle, and is the same front and back. I don’t usually worry too much about the exact number of stitches for the collar—so long as they can be divided by four for the k2-p2 ribbing, it doesn’t really matter. So for the first row of the collar I knit the stitches on the holders (i.e., the ones left over from front and back), and pick up stitches along the sides (the inside edges of the shoulder straps), aiming for roughly 8 stitches to the inch. I keep count as I go, so that I can finish with an exact multiple of 4 for the ribbing. Sometimes my counting goes awry, but it doesn’t matter: if I have one or two stitches too many, I can decrease them out of existence on the first pattern row of the collar (usually on a purl stitch, since the purl stitches are pushed to the background by the k2 ribs, and thus become invisible).
Back when I was little, I can’t remember how I imagined I’d be spending my time in my sixties: watching attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion, perhaps, or travelling the American Midwest teaching bullying cowboys the error of their ways by preaching non-violence, and, when that didn’t work, breaking their arms with kung fu. Not making urgent trips to the bathroom at inconvenient moments and trying to remember if I’ve already taken today’s medication. And yet here we are.
I wonder this about vampires, sometimes; does their biology stop when they get bitten? I mean, if Dracula’s hundreds of years old, think of the state of his prostate. (And his opinions: “The children of the night, what music they make. Not like modern so-called ‘popular music’, ha, I mean, call that music, there’s not even a bloody tune.”) I can barely crawl out of bed in the morning, never mind go creeping down castle walls face-down. I don’t suppose they have to worry about blood pressure, but do vampires’ teeth ever fall out? And what happens if someone knocks out a canine? Are there vampire dentists? Or do very elderly vampires go searching for prey armed with a very sharp straw?
Wildflowers by the path
Meanwhile, back in the real world I have a couple of parish notices. First of all, Judit’s been busy again, this time with a gansey in lovely grey-green Finnish yarn (Novita 7 Veljestä, or 7 Brothers), not unlike the Frangipani Cordova shade. The pattern is the classic double-line zigzag, also known as marriage lines, as described in Rae Compton’s book, pp.82-83 (with associations all along the east coast, though here I’m claiming it for Scotland!). Congratulations again to Judit, and many thanks as ever to her for sharing it with us.
In other news, Margaret and I will be making a rare public appearance at the Highland Meet the Makers event on the morning of Thursday 8 September at Blairbeg Hall in Drumnadrochit, south of Inverness near the shores of Loch Ness. The event is organised by Loch Ness Knitting, and is primarily a showcase for Highland yarn suppliers and craftspeople. We’re delighted to be invited, and will be taking along a selection of ganseys for people to look at and hopefully chat about. If it’s quiet we may even slip out for a spot of Nessie-watching.
Abstract hawthorn
And if growing old hasn’t turned out quite the way I’d expected, to be fair few things have. Take joy. I used to imagine the summit of human pleasure came through falling in love, the passion of physical embrace, the symphonies of Bruckner, or religious ecstasy. But no: turns out bliss really lies in finally scratching that itch in the small of your back that’s been driving you mad, or finding a space in a hospital car park, or discovering you can still reach your little toe with the toenail clippers. If only I’d known this earlier, how much simpler life would have been…
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TECHNICAL STUFF
I’ve finished Side A and am well embarked on Side B. (Because this gansey doesn’t have a shaped neckline there technically isn’t a front and a back, as such.)
Now, either this batch of yarn is knitting up a bit thicker than some others, or (more likely) I just got the maths slightly wrong, because I ran out of room at the top of the yoke (i.e., I still had some rows to go when the armhole reached 8 inches from the gusset). I only had 3 rows still to knit, but 3 rows per side equals 6 rows in total, or half an inch, and that would make the armhole just a wee bit deeper than I wanted.
Flower of Scotland
So what I did was simply divide the row into three, a third each for the two shoulders and another third for the neck. (As my row has 180 stitches, each third has 60 stitches.) I put the neck stitches in the middle on a holder—and yes, the chevron ends 3 rows early here, but I’m hoping no one will really notice once it’s finished. And after all, the original (which is knit on finer needles and so has more rows than mine) has a truncated chevron band at the top, so obviously the knitter was fine with being pragmatic too.
I then knit the 3 extra rows to complete the chevron on each shoulder. Now, my shoulder straps are usually 12 rows, so I knit another plain row after the chevron and then made up the remaining 8 rows with 2 ridge and furrows (of 4 rows of p-p-k-k each). More on this next week.
I should finish Side B this week, then it’s on to the collar and—sigh—picking up stitches for the sleeve.
I was awoken the other day by a seagull, calling from somewhere outside the bedroom window. It sounded, I thought, like the wail of a lost soul in torment. And then the idea slid into my mind that perhaps seagulls really were reincarnated lost souls, and the reason they went after your chips so aggressively was because they still retained some human memories, such as how good chips actually taste. Come to think of it, maybe they’re reincarnated football fans. Then I woke up properly and resolved to not eat cheese for supper again.
