Support Gansey Nation -
Buy Gordon a cuppa!
Many, many thanks to those of you who have already contributed!
|
 It’s Sunday lunchtime as I write this, and the servers on which this website is hosted have been down for four long days now. I imagine that for a website this must be the equivalent of a general anaesthetic: one minute you’re awake and alert, and the doctor is asking you to count down from ten, then there’s a cold sensation running up your arm and suddenly you’re in a state of non-being. The hosts promised that things would be back to normal in three days, and yet, as the saying goes, here we are. Or rather, here we aren’t. Even now someone is probably reaching for a defibrillator, while a voice asks helpfully, “Have you tried turning it off and on again?”
 Raindrops on Grass Because of this, the blog this week is in the nature of a message in a bottle: I have no idea how long till anyone will be able to read it. So I’ll keep it short. Our thoughts and prayers are with all our readers caught up in the current heatwave sweeping up from North Africa, set to push temperatures in England and Wales up to an unprecedented 40ºC. It’s not forecast to make it this far north (we might get as high as a balmy 18-20º, something to remember in January when the sleet is piling in horizontally on bitter, 70-mph gales).
To keep your spirits up, I recommend following the election of a new leader of the Conservative and Unionist Party, and de facto Prime Minister, a process so drawn out it makes the ending of the last Lord of the Rings movie seem abrupt. The first televised debate had the contestants playing tug of war over an abyss, with the losers plunging to their deaths—no, wait, sorry that’s Squid Game. Though now I think of it, it would certainly liven up political debate considerably…
 Thistle trying to hide ==========================
TECHNICAL STUFF
This gansey is being knit for charity. The idea came from Deb Gillanders of Propagansey fame, and I’ll be giving Deb a guest spot to say more about this is future weeks. First, though, I have to knit it.
It’s in Frangipani navy yarn, and the pattern is taken from the Johnston Collection of old glass plate held by Wick Heritage Society. It’s the gansey of one George Bremner and I’ll say more about the pattern when I reach the yoke. There are lots of these caithness patterns still to try, so I’m grateful to Deb for the opportunity to knit it up. (In my affably muddle-headed way, I agreed to knit a Caithness pattern and then promptly forgot and started a completely different pattern, from Filey. So if you see that the title of this project has changed since you saw it last, don’t worry!)
 The Funfair is in town I’ve been contacted by a few people in recent months interested in knitting a gansey for the first time. So I thought I’d use this gansey as an opportunity to talk through the process in some detail, from start to finish (assuming we have a functioning website to share this on). For now I’ll just say that it’s for a finished gansey chest size of about 22.5 inches across when blocked, so I’ve started by casting on 328 stitches for the welt. At the body this is increased by 34 to 362 stitches (so, if you deduct 2 stitches for the fake seams, this gives 180 stitches per side.)
 Summer has come to Britain, with most of us sweltering in temperatures into the low 30s centigrade. (I am, of course, using “most of us” here in the same sense that weather forecasters do, i.e., meaning everyone but those of us—sorry, “you”—in the far north of Scotland.) But don’t get me wrong: I wouldn’t have it any other way. Caithness is currently basking in a cool 15-19ºC, with a cool sea breeze, and it’s delightful. After all, you can always add an extra layer if you’re cold; but there are limits to how far you can go if you’re too hot. And while I do possess a pair of shorts, I’m so unused to seeing my legs in the flesh, as it were, that I keep mistaking them for a pair of pink hairy caterpillars that have mutated after a nuclear disaster, and the shock is too much for my weak heart. I still remember the time I opened the door to the postman in my shorts and he shied like a startled mustang, flinging his letters to at least three of the four winds.
 I don’t wear bathing trunks for much the same reason, the overall effect resembling a rubber band stretched round the middle of an over-inflated pink balloon. This is where I always feel the Victorians got the tone just right, refusing to enter any assemblage of water more copious than a bathtub in anything less than a full suit of evening dress, preferably with a top hat and monocle. No, all in all I’ve found my spiritual home in Caithness, where summer means transitioning from a heavy sweater to a light one (though keep the heavy one handy).
 Flowers by the path Speaking of sweaters… here’s the finished picture of the Mrs Hunter’s gansey. As ever, washing and blocking has done its magic and opened it out so you can see the gansey in its true proportions. I don’t have any superlatives left to say how wonderful this pattern knits up, except to say the textures really catch the light: it’s a stunner. And it’s a deceptively simple pattern that pays you back tenfold for the effort you put in. You do have to like cables, though.
 Valeriana pyrenaica And one thing about the sunshine, at least we’ve had nice weather for the fall of the government. Britain famously doesn’t have a written constitution, but instead relies on what is called the “good chaps” theory of government, the notion that decent people will govern us decently. (And I can’t help wondering, as I think back on just about every government since Lord North lost the American colonies back in 1783: oh yes? What good chaps exactly would these be?) Still, two quotes occur to me as we witness the long goodbye of our current prime minister. Firstly, the quote ascribed to Oscar Wilde on the tragic death of Little Nell in Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop (but which only appears some 30 years after Wilde died, so is, alas, probably not true): “One would have to have a heart of stone not to laugh”. And secondly, the one about football managers leaving as they arrived, “fired with enthusiasm…”
 It was some time since I had moved out of our old rooms in 221B Baker Street, but happening to find myself in that neighbourhood one July morning in the year 1897 I thought I would stop by to see my old friend, Mr Sherlock Holmes. As was his custom when faced with an extremely difficult puzzle he was lounging on the sofa shooting discontentedly at the wall with an old service revolver. He seemed to be marking out a message in bullet holes. I could just make out the letters F, U, and what may have been the start of an L, or then again it may not.
‘Ah, Watson!’ he exclaimed, laying aside the pistol. ‘You are the stormy booby of crime. You arrive to find me grappling with a singularly difficult problem.’
‘An illustrious client?’ I asked, glancing the gilded monogram adorning the letter on the table.
‘The most illustrious: her Majesty the Queen herself.’
‘Why, I congratulate you, Holmes!’
He shook his head. ‘The problem she has presented to me is of a unique difficulty. It may be insoluble. Something has gone missing from the heart of government.’
‘Surely they haven’t lost another top secret submarine plan?’
‘No, nothing as simple as that.’
‘Then what?’
‘The government has lost its sense of morality. I fear not even I may be able to locate it.’
 Poking around in a tide pool ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Remember the time you found their missing ethics advisor?’
‘Pah! That was a simple matter. All I had to do was follow the sound of sobbing until I discovered him hiding in the broom cupboard.’
Just then there came a tap on the door and Mrs Hudson entered bearing a tray with three more telegrams. Holmes opened the first two, and groaned.
‘What is it this time?’ I asked anxiously. ‘Surely they haven’t lost anything else?’
‘It’s worse than I feared. Now they’ve lost their sense of shame and of decency!’ He tore open the third, then flung it aside with a cry of despair. ‘This one’s from the Prime Minister.’
‘What’s he lost?’
‘His marbles.’
‘But what are you going to do, Holmes?’
‘In a situation like this there’s only one thing to do.’
He made a long arm and opened the desk drawer. Inside I could just see the tip of a hypodermic syringe, and small bottle marked “Seven percent solution. Do not take if operating heavy machinery”. I sadly shook my head, and took my leave. As I made my way downstairs I could faintly hear the strains of Holmes’s violin, playing an unusual set of chords, in a rhythm quite unlike anything I had ever heard (da-da-da-da, da-dum). Then Holmes began to sing.
‘She don’t lie, she don’t lie, she don’t lie… cocaine!’
Outside, a steady drizzle had begun to fall, and I realised I’d lost the sense of purpose with which I’d set out that morning. I thought of going back and asking Holmes to help me find it, but something suggested this may not be the time…
 St Fergus’ on a sunny day ==============================
But let us turn our minds to happier thoughts. Judit has sent us pictures of another splendid gansey, in a very natty shade of blue, and what—if I mistake not, Watson—appears to be a variant of the classic Staithes pattern. It’s a good reminder of how effective these patterns are in pretty much any colour, and that they’re classics for a reason. Many thanks once more to Judit for sharing!
And finally this week, I didn’t quite manage to finish the olive gansey, but nearly. (And there’s nothing like five or six inches of ribbing at the end of a project to teach you that we’re not put here on earth for pleasure alone.) Next week we’ll post pictures of the finished article, hopefully washed and blocked and ready to be taken for a spin. All I need to find is the motivation… but let’s not go through all that again, eh?
 Grasses in the wind
 Last Tuesday was the Longest Day—no, not the solstice, though it was that as well—when we were scheduled to fly to Paris for a couple of days. And (spoiler alert), scheduled is the operative word here. I was due to attend a workshop on archiving records of nuclear waste, was even going to give a presentation; and the powers that be, having a pretty good idea of how I feel about travelling anywhere further away than, say, Thurso, had invited Margaret to accompany me, on condition we paid the cost of her flights. So it was that we approached the trip with a mixture of dread and anticipation: that is to say, I was dreading it and Margaret wasn’t. Reader, we got as far as Inverness.
 Valerian You may have noticed that Britain is currently in the grip of a sort of collective travel omnishambles, with rail strikes, airport delays and flight cancellations. Our original return flight had already been cancelled, causing a lot of stress finding an alternative at a week’s notice. Well, we drove down to Inverness airport, checking our phones for any alerts that might indicate trouble. Nada. Then, just as we set foot inside the terminal, we, along with all our fellow travellers, were told that the flight was running about three hours late. This meant that we would miss our connecting flight, resulting in a 24-hour stopover at Bristol, and I’d miss the workshop. (On the plus side, we were given £3 vouchers for refreshments, which, given airport prices, meant we could put down a deposit on a cheese sandwich.) We were encouraged to hang on for as long as possible in hopes our connecting flight would also be delayed, but as this turned out to be the only flight on the entire network that was departing on time, after four hours we admitted defeat and drove all the way back home. Where, adding insult to injury, we had to unpack.
 Yellow Flag Iris If there is a silver lining—which I am not at present prepared to admit—it’s meant I’ve got more knitting done this week than I’d expected. And at least I’ve finished the pattern section of the sleeve, which means that, for the foreseeable, cables are no longer part of my life. (All I have to do now is iron the kinks out of my fingers.) As ever, once the second sleeve is underway it really looks like a jumper, and what a striking pattern this is: the photos in the books don’t do it justice.
 St Fergus’ in the fog I spent part of the time at the airport chatting to a French lady booked on the same flight as we, who also had to be in Paris next day (“But I ‘ave a plumbeur coming tomorreau!”). She was understandably inclined to take the pessimistic view—to be fair, Inverness airport can have this effect at the best of times—and her opinions on the current state of the world would might caused even the prophet Jeremiah to urge her to lighten up a bit. In particular she deplored what was happening in her own country, how people had become selfish and no one cared for their neighbours any more: “France used to be a great country,” she sighed, “but now eet ees just sheet!”
 I’ve started volunteering at the local museum on Saturday afternoons. It’s a lot of fun to spend a few hours welcoming visitors, getting them oriented and sending them off to explore the collections with a guidebook, and sometimes chatting with them when they get back. It’s not so very far removed from my old life as a local government archivist, but now I’ve moved into middle management I spend more time interacting with a computer screen than face-to-face with the public. (You’d think this would be perfect for misanthropic me—I’m a little surprised myself—but it turns out I actually quite like people. Maybe it helps that they’ve usually just given me money.)
 St Fergus’ from across the river The museum’s surprisingly big, and is sort of a cross between the Tardis and Ghormenghast Castle, all winding stairs and corridors, unexpected galleries and annexes, and absolutely crammed with stuff. There’s a working lighthouse light from Noss Head, a smithy and a cooperage, a kippering kiln that could smoke up to 8,000 herring (once Wick had fifty such kilns in operation; not for nothing was it known as “Herringopolis”, though personally I prefer its other soubriquet, “the Sodom of the North”). There’s the old schoolroom from the abandoned island community of Stroma just north of John O’Groats, and a replica of the Johnston photographic studio where all the marvellous glass plate negatives that make up the Johnston Collection were taken. There’s even—*coughs modestly*—a gallery where modern copies of ganseys from Caithness and elsewhere are displayed.
 Yellow Flag Iris Speaking of ganseys, behold! The first sleeve is completed, even unto its entirety, and all that remaineth is to grit my teeth, pick up the stitches around the armhole of the other sleeve and Get It Done. And looking at it in it’s nearly-finished state, all those cables (and their flanking purl stitches) really do act like pleats, drawing the fabric in so that it looks very compact; I keep fighting the urge to water it, in hopes it will expand like a parched flower. But it’s bigger than looks, and washing and blocking should teach it who’s boss.
 Hawthorn bough It’s people and their stories that make volunteering in the museum so interesting. I was talking to one lady who said that her mother remembered when she was a little girl in Wick in the Second World War. One time a German plane came low over Bridge Street. She was too young to do anything but stare, even when it opened fire, until a man knocked her down into a doorway and threw himself over her. She remembered the feel of his tin helmet on her head, when he hastily shoved it on to protect her. Incredible. Another time I was talking to a couple of ladies. One was interested in exploring lighthouses, but the access road to one she wanted to visit was marked Private. “That’s down by the cemetery,” the other said. “You can always say you’re visiting it if anyone asks”. And when the other still demurred, she said: “Tell you what, you can look like you’ve got business there. Take a shovel.”
|
|
It’s Sunday lunchtime as I write this, and the servers on which this website is hosted have been down for four long days now. I imagine that for a website this must be the equivalent of a general anaesthetic: one minute you’re awake and alert, and the doctor is asking you to count down from ten, then there’s a cold sensation running up your arm and suddenly you’re in a state of non-being. The hosts promised that things would be back to normal in three days, and yet, as the saying goes, here we are. Or rather, here we aren’t. Even now someone is probably reaching for a defibrillator, while a voice asks helpfully, “Have you tried turning it off and on again?”
