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 You may perhaps have noticed that I have something of a problem with the Mel Gibson movie Braveheart. Or, to be more accurate, I don’t so much have a problem with the film, I have dozens; it being, like Tim Vine’s joke about crime in a multi-storey car park, wrong on so many different levels. Let’s face it, Monty Python and the Holy Grail is a more accurate depiction of the Middle Ages, and that’s got a cartoon Edward VII as God. Braveheart strays from the path of righteousness right from the opening titles—King Alexander III died in 1286, not 1280—and alas it’s all downhill from there.
 Old Lifeboat shed and harbor lighthouse But of all the untruths and distortions in that film, the one that bugs me the most is that it presents “droit de seigneur” (or jus prime noctis)—the so-called custom whereby a feudal lord took the maidenhead of a village beauty on her wedding night—as if it were true. It’s not. There’s no contemporary evidence it ever happened. It’s a myth, like the Vikings wearing horned helmets (not much evidence they wore helmets at all), people thinking the Earth was flat (it’s literally a globe on medieval maps) and the Supreme Being looking like Edward VII (absurd; He looks like Ralph Richardson). Aubrey Beardsley did a similar hatchet job on the Victorians when he mischievously made up the story about them covering piano legs because it was immodest, when really they did it to protect the varnish.
 Abstract Waves II Not that Medieval justice wasn’t sometimes bizarre. After all, these were the guys who formally tried animals for crimes. In 1474 a Swiss court ordered a rooster to be burned at the stake for laying an egg, which feels not so much like a miscarriage of justice as a cheap excuse for a barbecue. Other courts sentenced criminals to wear animal masks as a punishment (“Prisoner at the bar, you have been found guilty of murder; which is it to be: hanging by the neck until dead, or the dreaded duck mask?” “Er…duck mask, my lord.” “Really? Are you sure? I mean, we’ve got a nice new rope and everything.” “Still going with the duck mask, my lord.” “Damn!”). In 897 Pope Stephen VI actually had the eight-month-old corpse of his predecessor dug up, dressed in his papal vestments and put on trial (when he was unable to answer the charges he was, with undeniable logic, found guilty). The past, it is said, is another country; if so, the Middle Ages sometimes seem like another part of the galaxy. I suppose I shouldn’t complain. For, as the man in the movie famously observed, “When truth becomes legend, just feel free to make up a bunch of stuff”.
 Seals at Sarclet =================================
TECHNICAL STUFF
 As promised, here is the pattern chart for this gansey. It combines two of my favourite patterns: the trees from Mrs Laidlaw of Seahouses, and the cables of Mrs Laidler of Whitby. There are actually variations on the tree pattern in Rae Compton and Michael Pearson (the number of branches differs), so in the end I went with Rae’s version (five branches, as opposed to six). In order to make the panels fit the number of stitches at my disposal I had to make then each two stitches narrower, so the pointy bits either side of the trees are six stitches wide, not seven. But, to use the current management jargon, the recorded patterns are signposts, not railway tracks; and I feel that altering them at need is part of what keeps the tradition alive. Tune in for next week’s exciting episode, when I divide for front and back…
 In many ways, Caithness seems perfectly suited to this impatient modern age of instant gratification. Take autumn, for example. In other places it announces itself with a suggestion of coolness in the air, a hint of russet in the trees and hedgerows, and about as many fallen leaves as, if they were hair clippings, would maybe oblige a lazy hairdresser to get out the broom. It’s a gradual process of weeks and months, a gentle transition between states. Not so in Caithness: here we get it over pretty much in a weekend, and then it’s straight on to winter, no messing. Such few trees as we have—which skulk about the landscape with a hangdog air, as though they’re runaways from Fangorn Forest and expect the Ents to come along any moment and round them up—seem to have evolved quick-release mechanisms, and at the first suggestion of an autumn breeze drop all their leaves with the unseemly haste of robbers dumping a bag of swag down an open manhole to escape the law.
 Autumn has arrived in Caithness wet and cold and very, very windy (as I write this the wind is gusting to 65mph). Looking from my window—for I am not so foolish as to venture outdoors—the trees by the riverside are reduced to bare skeletons, their branches shivering with cold, their leaves already somewhere over the North Sea. The fields are waterlogged quagmires, the roads treacherous with standing water. And the sun, when it shines through the kaleidoscope of clouds that streak across the sky, already seems more distant, dimmer and cooler. No wonder our pagan ancestors indulged in human sacrifice this time of year, especially when there’s so little on tv worth watching.
 Flying to the evening’s roost But enough of darkness! Let us turn to the light instead, where Judit continues to be an inspiration with another splendid gansey. This one is a Filey pattern in lavender, alternating filled and moss stitch diamonds with double moss stitch patterns. The lavender yarn shows the pattern really well and as ever when I see one of Judit’s ganseys I add another pattern to my mental to-do list. Judit tells me it’s going to be a Christmas present, so someone is going to be very lucky this Yule. As ever, many congratulations to Judit, and many thanks for sharing it with us.
 Stormy waves My own gansey project creeps in this petty pace from day to day, as that famous gansey knitter Macbeth once observed. Without trying particularly hard, I’m almost halfway up the body (it helps enormously knitting for people who aren’t very tall). In another inch or so I’ll start the yoke pattern, the charts of which I’ll post next time.
Meanwhile the wind rampages unchecked, and we cower indoors like the Geats in Beowulf huddled in the mead-hall while Grendel prowls malevolently without. Ted Hughes wrote a great poem called Wind which captures the mood perfectly; it has one of the best first lines in English poetry, “This house has been far out at sea all night”, and after last night I know just what he means. And as the wind passes, so does autumn; I fear we might be in for a long winter…
 I was listening to the news in the bath the other day, and was just heaving myself out of the billowing foam when I was arrested by a startling report. I’d missed the beginning of the story—in my younger days I leapt from the tub more like a graceful gazelle than anything human, whereas my method now more closely resembles a mad scientist heaving his latest corpse onto a slab, requiring considerable concentration—and I tuned back in just as the announcer was saying, “The animal waste is dried and processed into pellets which can then be placed directly into the bouillon.” For a moment it stopped me in my (wet, soggy) tracks: a sudden desire to rush to the kitchen and check the ingredients on the packet of stock cubes seized me. Then my brain caught up with reality as the report continued, and I realised that the operative word was “boiler”, and that the pellets were, ahaha, intended as fuel, and not in fact as flavouring for soup.
 Raven on the cliffs And now it’s Hallowe’en, All Hallows’ Eve, or in its Celtic form Samhain, that ancient pagan festival celebrated by our ancestors when they all put their clocks back on the same night. Apparently some modern scholars argue that the tradition of bonfires and dressing up at Halloween derives from a belief that this will prevent the souls of the recently departed returning to earth and generally making nuisances of themselves. I must admit, if I were a recently departed soul—and living in Caithness is as good a preparation for this as any I can think of—I’d probably have other things on my mind. Stephen King probably has an unpublished novel tucked away in which a small town in Maine is besieged by an army of the undead, only for them to be driven away after 800 pages by a bonfire and some children wearing Trump masks.
 Winter light near the Trinkie This year I’m marking the occasion by unveiling a new gansey project. It’s for my friend Elizabeth, in Frangipani Denim. When I get to the yoke it will combine elements of two of my favourite patterns: the cables from Mrs Laidler of Whitby and the trees from Mrs Laidlaw of Seahouses. I hope this works out, otherwise it will be the knitting equivalent of the apocryphal riposte of George Bernard Shaw to Isadora Duncan when she allegedly suggested they have a child that would inherit her looks and his brain; to which Shaw crushingly replied, “But what if it inherited my looks and your brain?”
 Rush in the rain I love tales of folklore and ritual. Not because of what we are told the people who practised the rituals believed, which is mostly patronising and fictitious; but because it’s a glimpse into a lost world before iPhones and GPS and televangelists. A world when people did the thing that was right in the place that was right, because that was what was done, and had always been done, time beyond remembering. And so tonight I shall do my best to honour the tradition, mutatis mutandis—in place of a bonfire I shall light a gas ring on my cooker, ritually slaughter a veggie burger, and keep a watchful eye out for any recently-departed spirits; and if any drop by I shall offer them a hospitable bowl of nourishing, hot—but no; on second thoughts, maybe I’d better not offer them soup…
 Well, here we are: another gansey rolls off the production line and into the showroom, spick and span and with that special “new gansey” smell that will last right up to being exposed to its first takeaway curry. And what a cracking pattern it is—which, seeing as it comes from Flamborough, almost goes without saying—and, as ever, I’m impressed at how clearly the Frangipani Moonlight yarn shows up every stitch, for good or ill; there’s really nowhere to hide. My next project will be a blend (or “mashup” for our younger readers) of two famous and familiar patterns; more on this next week.
 Wrapped in Plastic I referred last time to the notorious prankster Horace de Vere Cole in relation to the Dreadnought scandal of 1910. But Horace deserves to be more than a footnote in someone else’s story, so I thought I’d mention a couple of my favourite practical jokes of his. Some perhaps haven’t aged so well. For example, he and his pals once dressed up as workmen and dug a trench across Piccadilly in central London, easier a hundred years ago when all you needed was a shovel and an assortment of decent biceps. And once he bought up front-row seats for the premiere of an avant-garde play, which were taken by several bald men, each with a letter painted on their pates which, when seen together from the circle, spelled out a rather rude word.
 Abstract Waves But there is genius in persuading someone at a street corner to hold one end of a piece of string, then walking round the corner and getting someone else to hold the other end, and strolling off, leaving them both to it. The one I like the best, though, not least because it was aimed at his friends—it’s a little surprising to discover he had any, but still—is as follows. In the course of an evening, he would slip his watch into the coat pocket of one of his chums. Later that night, he would offer to walk them home. When he spotted a policeman on the beat coming towards them he’d challenge the friend to a race, and then, as the friend innocently hared off down the road, shout, “Stop thief!”
 Wind in the Willows Of course, the problem with practical jokes is that someone usually has to be the butt, and it’s hard not to resent being made the fall guy for other people’s humour. But Ishmael in Moby Dick has this to say on the subject: “However, a good laugh is a mighty good thing, and rather too scarce a good thing; the more’s the pity. So, if any one man, in his own proper person, afford stuff for a good joke to anybody, let him not be backward, but let him cheerfully allow himself to spend and to be spent in that way.” Wise words, I hope you agree; and so, in that spirit, would you mind just holding this piece of string for me? I promise I’ll be back in a minute…
 Have you ever heard of the celebrated “Dreadnought Hoax” of 1910? It sounds like the plot of a Marx Brothers movie, one that the brothers rejected as too implausible, only it really happened. Back in the early 20th century Britannia ruled the waves (as opposed to just waiving the rules, as I’m afraid we do now, ahaha: sorry, Europe), and the battleship HMS Dreadnought was the flagship and pride of the Navy, the most powerful ship afloat. There was a friendly rivalry between ships’ crews, especially between those of Dreadnought and HMS Hawke, and some officers from Hawke approached celebrated prankster Horace de Vere Cole to see if he could hoax the Dreadnought. What followed became a national scandal, and some aspects are still pretty shocking today—or would be if it wasn’t so utterly ridiculous.
 Fisherman’s hut by the harbour Cole and several of his friends—among them the young Virginia Woolf—dressed up in Arab costume, donned false beards and (*cough*) “fake tan”, and sent a telegram to the Commander in Chief of the Fleet Lord Fisher to say that Prince Makalen of Abyssinia and his retinue were coming to see the Dreadnought. When their train reached the fleet at Weymouth (having blagged a special VIP carriage at Paddington) they were met with an honour guard and given a full ceremonial tour of the battleship. One of their number posed as an interpreter, while the others spoke garbled Greek and Latin or exclaimed “Bunga Bunga!”
And the really shocking part? They got away with it. The hoax was only exposed several days later. I mean, fair enough, it was a simpler time, but Virginia Woolf in blackface and a fake beard? Seriously? (Look it up: there’s a photograph.) Ah, well. All I can say is, in retrospect maybe Brexit shouldn’t have been quite such a surprise after all.
 Image from the Johnston Collection displayed at a local street corner Meanwhile in parish notices, Judit has sent us pictures of another triumph, a rather fetching Wick leaf pattern gansey in navy (the image colour has been tweaked to show the pattern more clearly). What a great pattern this is. This one has a narrow welt and the collar is quite short, as requested by the lucky recipient. As ever, many congratulations to Judit.
My own gansey project is drawing to a close, as I’m almost halfway down the second sleeve. This is always the point where I start to panic over the fit (more so in this case as the first measurement I was offered suggested an improbable body width of 14 inches, subsequently revised upwards to about 20 inches after some hasty work with a tape measure). I may not quite get it finished this week, but I’ll be disappointed if I’m not at least within hailing distance of the cuff.
 St Fergus’ Church through the hawthorns Unsurprisingly, the poor old British Navy became something of a laughing stock following the hoax. Apparently visitors who were subsequently shown over the Dreadnought used to exclaim “Bunga Bunga!”, and Admiral Fisher—who was actually a cousin of the two of the group but had failed to recognise them—suffered the indignity of small boys shouting it at him the street. In 1915 HMS Dreadnought heroically rammed and sank a German submarine, and among the telegrams of congratulation was one that read… well, you get the idea. There was even a popular song about the hoax, to the tune of “The Girl I Left Behind Me”: When I went on board a Dreadnought ship/ I looked like a costermonger/ They said I was an Abyssinian prince/ ‘Cos I shouted “Bunga Bunga!”…
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You may perhaps have noticed that I have something of a problem with the Mel Gibson movie Braveheart. Or, to be more accurate, I don’t so much have a problem with the film, I have dozens; it being, like Tim Vine’s joke about crime in a multi-storey car park, wrong on so many different levels. Let’s face it, Monty Python and the Holy Grail is a more accurate depiction of the Middle Ages, and that’s got a cartoon Edward VII as God. Braveheart strays from the path of righteousness right from the opening titles—King Alexander III died in 1286, not 1280—and alas it’s all downhill from there.
As promised, here is the pattern chart for this gansey. It combines two of my favourite patterns: the trees from Mrs Laidlaw of Seahouses, and the cables of Mrs Laidler of Whitby. There are actually variations on the tree pattern in Rae Compton and Michael Pearson (the number of branches differs), so in the end I went with Rae’s version (five branches, as opposed to six). In order to make the panels fit the number of stitches at my disposal I had to make then each two stitches narrower, so the pointy bits either side of the trees are six stitches wide, not seven. But, to use the current management jargon, the recorded patterns are signposts, not railway tracks; and I feel that altering them at need is part of what keeps the tradition alive. Tune in for next week’s exciting episode, when I divide for front and back…
