“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…
“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.
Hardy fuchsia
Wick riverside
