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…
==================================
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).
It’s been the wettest May on record across the U.K. We’ve escaped the worst of it up here, but this last week’s been pretty soggy, and cold and windy withal. This has somewhat given the lie to the handful of warm, sunny days we experienced just a few weeks back. Rather than bring the harbingers of spring, it turns out they were just God’s way of saying “Let me show you what you could have won”, and sending us away with only the bus fare and a pocketful of memories for our trouble. Still, if it deters the tourists it’ll be a mercy, our roads are so bad. The other day I passed a council repairman looking into a pothole, shaking his head and muttering, “The dwarves delved too greedily, and too deep…”
The Trinkie
In fact, it’s been so miserable I’ve been reworking some old Christmas carols. For example, there’s “In the bleak mid-spring/ Frosty wind felt numb/ The ducks on the river all took flight/ Saying, Siberia here we come.” Or, “Good King Wenceslas looked out/ On May bank holiday/ When the strong winds blew about/ And the tourists stayed away”. Another favourite would be, “I thought I saw three ships sail by/ On Saturday, on Saturday/ But it was just more rain on the way/ At John O’Groats in the morning”. Or how about, “Oh little town of Latheron/ How still we see thee lie/ For you were devastated/ When the storm front came on by”.
Tern with sand eel
Meanwhile it’s new gansey time, which is always exciting. This one’s another Flamborough pattern, one of many tucked away in the pages of Gladys Thompson, and it’s for a friend-of-a-friend. The yarn they chose is Frangipani Helford Blue and my first thought is, where has this colour been all my life? I’ll say more about the pattern next week, but so far I’ve just reached the top of the welt. (I would have been further on, except I’d knitted about an inch of ribbing, knit two-purl two-ing away merrily, when I realised I’d cast on the wrong number of stitches. With mickle care and Margaret’s assistance it was all ripped out, and I grimly started again—only to realise that I’d been right the first time. D’oh!)
The North Baths
And of course a blustery spring is nothing new: Shakespeare’s sonnet 18 tells us that rough winds were shaking the darling buds of May as far back as the sixteenth century. By a happy coincidence, scholars have recently unearthed an early draft of that poem. Perhaps it’s not surprising he revised it: here’s the opening—
Shall I compare thee to a summers day? Thou probably thinkst thou art more temperate and fair, But like the summer, wind troubleth thee always, And so disheveled art thou, birds nest in thy hair…
Spring has come to Caithness; at least I assume it’s spring because it’s not snowing. The sky is already bluer, the grass is grassier, and the air is filled with the cries of (*checks ornithological encyclopaedia*) birds, and the meadows abound with what I can only assume must be flowers. It certainly feels like spring, and in token of this I’ve started taking my daily walks up the river. Away from the harbour, where the current gets as lively as it’s going to get, i.e., not very, Wick River is a quiet, meandering waterway, the main channel spreading into broad, shallow wetlands. There are reed beds teeming with ducks and, this being the breeding season, duckettes; and also, if you’re lucky, geese, swans and even otters.
Multiple exposure of the Fairy Hillock
There are also, if legend is to be believed, fairies. A ways up the path there’s a knobbly mound called the Fairy Hillock. The story goes that two local men spent a day picnicking on the mound, when towards evening some fairies appeared and invited them inside for a feast. They accepted and stayed to party for a hundred years. When they finally emerged they expected the world to be transformed, only to discover they’d only been away from the real world for a day. (I must admit, when I was at university I went to one or two of those sorts of parties too.)
Trees reflected in the river
Meanwhile, here it is: the completed Wick gansey knit in Frangipani Cordova yarn. You can only really appreciate many of these Caithness ganseys when they’ve been blocked and opened out, like this one. And it’s a spanker; hats off to the anonymous knitter who crafted the original with finer yarn and needles than mine. I’ve knit a few of these for other people, or for the local museum, but this one I wanted to keep and wear for myself, for now at least. (That’s why it has the shaped neckline, because I don’t like the feeling of being clutched round the throat that traditional ganseys give me. I do regret the truncated central trees, though; it feels like hacking the head off a Rembrandt portrait so it will fit under the mantelpiece.) The Cordova yarn is a great shade too; sometimes blue-green, sometimes grey-blue, depending on your mood.
I like the Caithness fairy story because it’s a twist on the archetype: it ends happily, and proves that sometimes there really is such a thing as a free lunch. Usually in the old tales when people spend a night with the fair folk they discover that ages have passed in our world, like Rip van Winkle in the Catskills or Osian in Tír na nÓg (who found that 300 years had elapsed, and who instantly aged and died like an extra in an Indiana Jones movie). Although, having lived a number of years in Caithness, I wonder if there isn’t a simpler explanation: that many years did really elapse while they were in the Fairy Hillock, but when they emerged into present-day Wick they found that nothing had actually changed…
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.)
y 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.
