I’ve been considering an important question this week, namely, how did people in the Stone Age cut their toenails? True, you can bite your fingernails, but as you get older and your joints start to set like concrete you’d have to be a black belt in yoga to get your toes within comfortable reach of your snappers, even assuming you fancied a wee nibble. (And if you ever want proof that the universe is far stranger than we can imagine, I wrote the above as a joke but it turns out Google’s top follow-up nail-based question is actually, “Is it OK to eat your toenails?”; the answer to which is, of course, yes, but only if you’ve run out of Parmesan.)
Newly renovated North Baths
I don’t really associate personal hygiene and good grooming with prehistory, perhaps unfairly—after all, the British climate being what it is, you only have to stand outside on a typical summer’s morn and that’s your daily shower right there. Mind you, I’ve often felt that the aliens in 2001: A Space Odyssey have a lot to answer for. If you remember, they present our simian ancestors with a giant monolith which implants in them the concept of killing other creatures for their meat. If only it’d shown them how to make bubble bath-foam and aloe vera shampoo instead, the course of human history would have been a lot less bloody; or at least smelled a lot better. And as a vegetarian, this always troubled me. How hard can it be for creatures sophisticated enough to cross galaxies to knock up a quick mushroom quiche or aloo gobi when they get here?
Wildflowers on the cliff edge
In gansey news, I’ve finished the half-gussets and divided front and back. This is always the moment where all the hard work pays off and you feel like you’re knitting twice as fast. (It’s also the moment where you hope the pattern works out as you near the shoulder. One reason why I chose this pattern is because the diamonds are small, so the chances of ending up with incomplete ones when I reach the top are hopefully pretty small.)
Waves at North Head
As for my toenail “cavemanicure” conundrum, well, as you’d expect, there isn’t a definitive answer. Most anthropologists seem to feel the keratin would’ve worn away naturally, or else our ancestors filed them down with a stone (so that I shall in future think of this period as the Pumice Stone Age, ahaha). My own personal theory—that they grew them long so as to have something to toast their marshmallows with—is still in the ring. Meanwhile I have another question. If, as my researches suggest, people only started wearing clothes 170,000 years ago, you have to wonder: where did they keep their loose change before then…?
It’s the summer solstice, a time when I honour the pagan rituals of my Neolithic ancestors by standing as I brush my teeth to face in the exact same direction as the sun rises; although this inevitably involves a certain amount of guesswork, since the sun will have risen a good three hours before I do and I lack the necessary equipment (viz. a circle of standing stones). And now the nights will start drawing in, and we in the northern hemisphere begin the gradual slide towards darkness, despair and the horrors of the Christmas panto season. (Dante imagined nine circles of Hell, from Limbo to Treachery, but personally I have a tenth: Pantomime. I imagine Conrad’s Marlow would have found a lot more horror at the end of his journey into the heart of darkness in the human soul if he’d found Kurtz, not sick and megalomaniacal, but instead laying out whoopee cushions and pouring whitewash down his trousers.)
Sea Thrift near the cliffs
Solstice or not, it certainly feels as though summer might be a possibility. Some days it’s so warm I don’t even knot my scarf. The banks of the river on my daily walk are thick with cow parsley—another name for which is, apparently, the rather unnerving mother-die, arising from a folk belief that your mother would die if you brought it in the house. There were certainly times in my youth when I felt my mother might die because of things I’d brought in the house—prog rock albums, flared jeans and certain girlfriends spring to mind—but that was of shame, not literally. The name probably came about because cow parsley resembles hemlock, which is of course poisonous; and if anyone offers you cow parsley herbal tea, I’d be cautious if I were you. (“A drowsy numbness pains/ My sense, as though of cow parsley I had drunk”, as Keats might have said, but didn’t.)
More sea thrift
In gansey news I’ve started the underarm gussets, which is about as exciting as my life gets these days (this is a good thing). This gansey is going to be 28 inches long, so to keep it simple I’ve made the welt four inches, leaving 24 inches to the top of the shoulder. This is my standard body length: so that’s 12 inches from the welt to the start of the gussets, 3 inches for the gussets, 8 inches for the rest of the yoke (after I’ve divided front and back) and 1 inch for the shoulder strap.
Yellow Flag Iris
As well as flora, the riverside walk offers plenty of fauna (though I’ve only ever seen one faun up there): lambs in the meadows, ducks on the river and, in Tolstoy’s marvellous phrase, “over the fields the larks rise trilling, one after another, like bubbles rising in water”. There are skittish butterflies too, which always flit about as though being jerked on invisible wires by angels with too much time on their hands. The kinds I see most often are Fritillaries (actually I have no idea if this is what they are, I just like the name; it sounds like an army regiment, The Queen’s Light Fritillaries) and Large Whites. Though with these latter I feel the entomologists rather phoned it in, it’s such an obvious name; it’s like calling bananas “yellows”, or grapes “purples”, or oranges—oh wait…
In an idle moment this week—and as I get older I find these moments rarer and to be savoured—while Keats may have opined that a thing of beauty is a joy forever, I find my joy these days in the chance to put my feet up, let my jaw go slack and my mind go wander—”idle” being my favourite answer as a child to the perennial question of adults, “what do you want to be when you grow up?” Where was I? Oh yes, idling—I found myself wondering about the origins of the word skinflint. It means, as you’d expect, someone who’s so mean they’d skin a flint, though exactly what that would achieve rather escapes me. (The websites that tell one this also refer to the French expression “to shave an egg”; but honestly that just raises more questions.)
Silene flos-cuculi
Apparently Americans, who do these things so much better, used to describe a mean person as someone who’d skin a louse, or skin a flea for its tallow, which at least feels like a sort of benchmark of miserliness. My favourite, though, is the 1785 word “nipcheese”. Originally used for ships’ pursers, who would trim the viands for profit, it conjures up visions of someone with an illicit passion for cheese that had, like Conrad’s “Mistah Kurtz”, beguiled his unlawful soul beyond the bounds of permitted aspirations somewhere in the dairy aisle of Tesco’s. (Sadly my idea for a book based on a tour of cheese-producing regions of Spain, Fromage to Catalonia, never caught on.)
Sea Thrift on the cliffs
Meanwhile, one knits. It still surprises me how each day I seem to be making next to no progress, only to find at the end of the week that the gansey has grown by another three-and-a-bit inches. It’s the kind of pattern where I have to pay attention, and it’s fatal for my mind to wander—as it might, on the origin of words—or else I find myself in Queer Street, unpicking stitches with all the relish of a Victorian convict picking oakum. Still, so far so good, and it feels like a perfect match of pattern and colour.
Finally this week, it was a great pleasure to be invited back to speak with Dotty Widman’s Cordova Gansey Project web kitting group on Thursday. When I first started knitting ganseys back in the 1980s it seemed as though the tradition was, if not actually at an end, at least close to it; and that the handful of reference books had captured the last embers of a vanished world. But over time it’s become clear that the tradition hasn’t died—it’s just evolved, and many knitters have not only kept it alive, but enabled it to grow and change into something rich and strange. So it’s great to engage with so many enthusiastic knitters from all over the world, and here’s to Dotty, and Deb Gillanders, Liz Lovick, Penelope Hemingway, Beth Brown-Reinsel, the good people at the Scottish Fisheries Museum and Sheringham Museum, and so many others, not just preserving the sacred fire, but kindling torches to pass onto a new generation.
Each May we make a point of driving the 36 miles south to Helmsdale, a picturesque village just over the border in Sutherland, to see the gorse in bloom. We couldn’t go last year, with the pandemic roaming unchecked like the Big Bad Wolf, so this year we were determined to make up for lost time (or temps perdu, for French literary readers). We tried visiting the other week but were defeated by the haar. The coast road wound merrily along the clifftops, bathed in sunshine, and periodically dropping to ground zero every time it reached the point where a river joined the sea, and these infernal places were uniformly obliterated by fog. It was as if God had taken all the harbours along the east coast offline for essential maintenance, a sort of Existentialist Vista upgrade. Sure enough, when we reached the descent to the village we were met with a blank wall of mist, and an angel with a flaming sword advising us to come back when Helmsdale had finished rebooting.
Creels at Helmsdale Harbour
Helmsdale was originally a Viking settlement called Hjalmundal, meaning Dale of the Helmet, presumably because they only had one helmet between them and had to take turns wearing it. It was a herring fishing harbour, but only after 1814 when, like Wick, the modern village was built to give employment to families displaced by the infamous Highland Clearances. In 1760 Bishop Richard Pockocke passed through: “We soon after got to Hemsdale, where there is a salmon fishery. Here the tyde being in, we crossed in a coble in the shape of a boat cut in two”—though whether the cut was lengthways or amidships he doesn’t say. Hopefully an enterprising experimental archaeologist with a wetsuit will find out.
Helmsdale
In parish notices, we have another splendid gansey from Judit to celebrate. It’s a fern pattern taken from Rae Compton’s book (page 68) in a very festive—it’s going to be a Christmas present for one lucky person—red. As ever, many congratulations to Judit for continuing to bring these excellent old patterns to life.
Meanwhile I continue to make slow but steady progress on my own project. The pattern is starting to emerge more clearly, and it’s the kind of pattern that really shines the more of it you do. As the gansey’s for someone else, I chose the pattern because the diamonds are small enough to give me a lot of flexibility when it comes to height (depending on my row gauge) and width, as the seed stitch draws the gansey in, concertina-ing it with a pleat-like effect, so it can hopefully be contracted or expanded to suit.
Catch of the Day
As for Helmsdale, we tried again on Saturday and this time our perseverance was rewarded: the sun shone, the wind dropped and the gorse (just starting to go over) still had enough blossom to turn the hillsides bright yellow. (Gorse in bloom has a rich, creamy coconut scent, so I’m always reminded in a Proustian rush of shampoo and sunscreen.) So encouraging was this that we scarcely noticed the potholes in the road, which are so bad the Council’s roads maintenance department now has its very own spelunking division. We parked above the river and walked down through the town to the harbour, which was full of tourist camper vans. As we passed one with the door open, we heard a querulous (Yorkshire) voice inside ask, “Where is this again?”; only for another (even more Yorkshire) voice to reply, “It’s ‘elmsdale ‘arbour!”
We had our second doses of the Covid vaccine on Saturday, and while I wouldn’t exactly complain about the side-effects—at least compared with the alternative—I do have a headache and a general fatigue bordering on lassitude, like a late romantic poet who’s been overdoing the laudanum after finishing a really tricky sonnet. I’m experiencing a curious sort of dislocation: my limbs seem heavier than I remember, as though someone turned up the gravity instead of the air conditioning, and my brain feels like it’s been stuffed in (and with) cotton wool. My face grew warmer as the shot took effect, until I blushed as though I’d been injected, not with a vaccine, but with embarrassment. (Of course, by the time you read this all these minor symptoms will be gone.)
Outside, spring is having another try at world domination—its third since March, by my reckoning. I realise that at this point I’m in danger of taking the leading role in my own folk tale, “The Boy Who Cried Spring”, there’ve been so many false alarms. But the temperature in Wick has reached double figures for the third day in a row, and it can now only be a matter of time before a nameless dread stalks our land, viz., Scotsmen promenading in shorts.
Pareidolia
Ah, the weather. I’ve become quite media savvy down the years, and when I see a weatherperson smirking in front of a map of the British Isles saying, “And it’s going to be a beautiful day for pretty much all of us”, I note those weasel words pretty much and us, and direct my gaze to the top-right corner. There, sure enough, “us” becomes “them”, with a strip of cloud just fringing the coast of Caithness from John O’Groats down to the border with Sutherland, signifying the fabled east coast haar, also known as the sea fret, or other words I can think of beginning with f. So it is with us now, a dank, dripping fog drifting in from the sea like cannon smoke at Waterloo. You’d think I’d be complaining, but no: some like it hot, but not me; besides, Wick is one of those rare towns whose beauty is actually enhanced by fog. I’m still puzzled I didn’t land that job with the Caithness Tourist Board, with my prizewinning slogan, Wick: It seemed like a good idea at the time…
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TECHNICAL STUFF
Flamborough III
After finishing the welt, I’ve laid the foundations of the pattern. It’s taken from Gladys Thompson, where it’s recorded as Flamborough III, and, unless I’m reading it wrong, it’s called “net mask and honeycomb”—a much more attractive name than my working title, “open diamonds and fiddly bits”. There’s a real pleasure to be had in taking a simple, short pattern chart and turning it into a real, live full-size gansey, a process that (perhaps fancifully) reminds me of cloning dinosaurs in Jurassic Park.
It’s not a quick pattern: every other row is mostly seed stitch, which really is fiddly; plus it’s a 48-inch chest, so this one won’t finished anytime soon. But it’s a lovely shade of blue, and the kind of pattern that should look very impressive running the whole length of a gansey; and anyway, who’s in a hurry? N.b., I’ve placed the seed-stitch rows so they start on the second row, not the first, so they will fall on the back (or purl) rows when I knit the yoke, leaving the plain knit stitches for the front; this will hopefully make knitting it easier (every little helps).
I’ve been considering an important question this week, namely, how did people in the Stone Age cut their toenails? True, you can bite your fingernails, but as you get older and your joints start to set like concrete you’d have to be a black belt in yoga to get your toes within comfortable reach of your snappers, even assuming you fancied a wee nibble. (And if you ever want proof that the universe is far stranger than we can imagine, I wrote the above as a joke but it turns out Google’s top follow-up nail-based question is actually, “Is it OK to eat your toenails?”; the answer to which is, of course, yes, but only if you’ve run out of Parmesan.)
