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…
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…
Narrow boats on the Grand Union Canal
King of the hill
Northampton Market
