In his final case Sherlock Holmes muses on the coming threat posed by an expansionist Germany and says ominously, “There’s an east wind coming, Watson”; to which dear old obtuse Watson replies, “I think not, Holmes. It is very warm.” This forces Holmes, not to break a whisky bottle over Watson’s head, as you might expect, but to spell out his metaphor more clearly. (Incidentally, there are few scenes in literature that can’t be improved by inserting Watson into them. Take The Lord of the Rings: “Though I don’t know what the likes of me can do against, against –” the innkeeper faltered. “Against the Shadow in the East,” said Strider quietly. “I think not, Aragorn,” said Watson, taking out his pocket watch. “The sun will have set and it’s too cloudy a night for there to be any shadows, even in Mordor.“)
Well, even Watson couldn’t deny the east wind just now, a bitter, biting wind blowing in rain, sleet and snow fresh from Siberia. It’s been cold so long that when I look up frost in my dictionary it just says, “see perma“. But I can’t stay mad at snow. It always takes me back to my childhood, and the sense of wonder I had, as a child of the more temperate parts of the North Island of New Zealand, at coming to Britain and experiencing snow for the first time. (The child is father to the man, of course; a saying that, taken literally, set me back about six months in biology class.) Even the lightest dusting, the merest pither of snow blown in on a wind as easterly as this, is enough to gladden my heart; however pessimistic it might make Sherlock Homes.
Wind & Waves
New month, new gansey: this is a special commission, requested by Graeme Bethune, whose Caithness yarns I featured back in December. It’s made from his own yarn, and the pattern will be based on that of his great-grandfather, a fisherman from Dunbeath, a little fishing village on the east coast of Caithness. All we have to go on is the slightly blurry photograph that appears in the Moray Firth Gansey Project book, but the pattern appears to be a variant of the classic Staithes/Henry Freeman of Whitby pattern. More on this next week.
Snow in Dunnet Forest
Also in parish notices, Judit has knit another splendid gansey, a very fetching combination of zigzags and moss stitch in a very lovely colour. It’s a Valentine’s Day present, and I was interested to learn that in Finland the 14th of February is celebrated as Friends’ Day, Ystävänpäivä, not just a day for lovers. What a wonderful idea! Many congratulations to Judit and a very happy, chocolate-enhanced Valentine’s Day to all.
Winter Fishing
Meanwhile I’ve been listening to the audiobook of The Godfather while I knit, quite possibly the sleaziest book ever written. But it’s got me wondering what would happen if the Mafia ever moved into my own line of work, that of libraries and archives…
The room is in shadow, the blinds drawn. Joyful Sicilian music filters through the window from the wedding party taking place on the lawn outside. The Don is seated behind a large desk. Behind him stands his counsellor, who leans towards him attentively. The Don sighs. “Is that the last of them?” “There’s just one more. Shall I call him in?” The Don gestures weary assent. The counsellor brings in a nervous middle aged man carrying a book. “What favour do you ask of me, my friend?” the Don asks. “I’d like to borrow this book, please.” He holds it out. “It’s Mary Berry’s latest cookbook.” The Don is offended. “You come to me, on this the day of my daughter’s wedding, and you ask me for this favour. But you show me no respect. Why have you never visited me till now?” “It’s only just been published. I thought I might give her bubble and squeak a try.” The Don considers. “All right. I’ll make you an offer you cannot refuse. Bring it back in three weeks and phone the consiglieri here if you want to renew. Fail to return the book and you will sleep with the fishes.” “Look, I only want to cook them, not— Oh, I see what you mean. Thank you, Godfather.” He kisses the Don’s ring and departs. The Don sighs. “When I said we should take over the books on the East Side, I must admit this is not exactly what I had in mind…”
Finally this week, it was a great pleasure to be invited to chat with Dotty Widman and her lovely gansey knitting group of Cordova Alaska. Gansey knitting can be a solitary occupation, and, even in these grim lockdown times, it’s nice to be reminded that a whole community exists out there of like-minded people: You’re not alone, as David Bowie observes (though it’s possible he wasn’t thinking of knitters at the time). Many thanks to Dotty for the invitation!
Every now and then I like to punish my brain by reading a book on modern physics. (Not that you should picture me next to a blackboard covered with equations while I check that Einstein got his sums right; we’re talking The Big Boys’ Bumper Book of Quantum Mechanics, or My First Little Nuclear Reactor level stuff here.) So I’ve been reading a book on the nature of time, with about as much success as Bertie Wooster struggling to come to grips with modern philosophy. The author defines time as “the order in which things happen”, which I feel is either a blinding insight, or else staggeringly obvious; possibly both. (This reminds me irresistibly of the splendid bon mot from Alan Bennett’s play The History Boys: “History is just one ****ing thing after another”.)
That Otter again
At one point the author toys with the idea that time is just a concept invented by human beings, which tells me that this is a quantum physicist who’s never had to try to explain to his cat that, since the clocks have gone back, they’ll have to wait an extra hour for their dinner. (“Time,” as Ford Prefect wisely observed in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, “is an illusion. Lunchtime, doubly so.”) In the end I read all this stuff, get a glimpse at the illusory nature of reality and then, like a Hindu who accepts that the material world is naught but Maya, a deceit of the senses, but who still buys himself a 50-inch plasma tv, I go and write up my diary.
Hawthorn by the riverside
Meanwhile, as I continue to splash about in the shallow end of the swimming pool of time, I’m pleased to report that the Filey ganseyette is finished. It was so pleated by the time I’d finished that blocking it felt like stretching a heretic on the rack: every time Margaret inserted another pin I found myself leaning over and whispering, “Confess, my son, and all your suffering will be over”. Will it fit? Lord alone knows. I’ll find out next week when it’s delivered. And now it’s on to my next project, and here I must apologise: I had planned next to make a gansey using the stunning Cordova Frangipani yarn I got from Deb Gillanders. But I’ve had a special request from Graeme Bethune, whose yarn I featured back in December, to knit a gansey based on his great-grandfather’s Dunbeath pattern, and I’m going to try to squeeze this in before Easter. So, sorry about the delay. Hopefully the Cordova yarn gansey will be worth the wait.
Walking in the Snow
Speaking of which, I’ve been provisionally invited to attend another online session with the Cordova Gansey Project on Thursday (the words “punishment”, “gluttons” and “for” spring to mind). These sessions save me a fortune in psychotherapy, as I exorcise the traumas of my youth. (“Kidnapped as a child by Barbary corsairs while punting on Billing Aquadrome, I was sent as a barge-slave to work on the Grand Union Canal, until one day I escaped in thick fog caused by the fumes from the Carlsberg brewery. I soon fell in with a travelling freak show, where I scraped a living as The Amazing Bearded Archivist; people gasped in wonderment while I arranged medieval Latin title deeds into chronological order before their very eyes…”) If it goes ahead, and you’re interested—it seems morbid to me, but you never know—I’ll post details when I get them. I believe it starts at 9.00pm GMT; assuming, of course, that such a thing as time even exists…
It snowed the other night, almost the first proper snow of winter, so that we awoke to a frozen world. We’ve escaped the worst of the weather so far here in Wick, sheltered as we are by the mountains; it’s as if the really bad storms just give up before they reach us. It helps too that we’re right beside the ocean, and while no one would pretend the North Sea is exactly famous for its sunbathing opportunities, it does exercise a moderating influence. So we’ve had ice and hail and gales and rain and sleet this winter, but not much snow. It’s bitterly cold, though: the wind’s knifing down from the arctic, the scavenging seagulls have a feral, hungry look like extras in a Mad Max movie, and you can see the ducks on the river huddling together miserably, thinking: You mean we migrated all the way from Siberia for this?
None shall pass: before the freeze
There’s something magical, in-the-bleak-midwinter-ish about snow, which always takes me back to my childhood before the original sin really kicked in. There are some beautiful lines by the Scottish singer-songwriter Al Stewart: Do you remember the time we were young?/ Lowly, lowly, low/ Outside the window the frosty moonlight hung/ On the midnight snow. And when I hear those lines, yes, I do remember. (Mind you, it was Al Stewart who also sang, Now winter moans/ in old men’s bones/ as the day falls into dark—when I first heard that in my teens I thought it was just, well, poetry; forty years later I realise it was, regrettably, something of a prophecy…)
Snow-covered nets
In gansey news, as you can see this one’s nearly finished—just the lower sleeve and cuff to go. (I’ve learned however not to underestimate the demoralising effect of a five- or six-inch cuff, which always takes longer than you’d like.) I’ve mentioned before what a pleasure this pattern has been to knit; it just clicks, all the pattern elements complementing each other, cables always fallen on the same pattern repeat. If things go to plan I should finish it later this week, and then it can be blocked into revealing its true pattern.
Snow at South Head
Outside, the snow, frozen overnight and softly thawing through the day, is beginning to freeze again with the coming of night. You can see the frozen footsteps of everyone who’s come to our front door since Saturday morning, which explains why we’re always so excited to see the postman (who wears shorts; welcome to Scotland). So to celebrate the snow’s survival, here’s a superb wee poem by the Chinese poet Bai Juyi, who lived 772-846 (remarkable to think he was broadly contemporary with Charlemagne), called “Night Snow”:
Already surprised to find my quilt and pillow cold I again see pale light shining through the window; The night lies deep and I know the snow is heavy, Sometimes I hear the bamboo crack beneath its weight.
A very happy Burns Night on Monday to all our readers! (Remember, plunge your haggis straight into boiling water so it doesn’t suffer…)
A long time ago—1981—in a galaxy far, far away—Manchester—I was a student at the university. I took my degree in medieval studies, with hilarious consequences for my career prospects: I was unemployed for over a year afterwards. In those days, to qualify for the dole one had to present oneself for a certain number of job interviews every month. I still remember, usually around four in the morning, an excruciating interview with Eagle Star Insurance in Northampton, that began, “So, Mr Reid, perhaps you could begin by explaining how a degree in, what was it, let me see, ah yes, medieval history, qualifies you for a career in the field of modern, ahaha, insurance?”.
But a career isn’t everything, and some experiences are beyond price. One late winter afternoon we medieval studiesists were taken down to the basement of the John Rylands Library, where they housed the rare books collection. It was a horrible, bleak midwinter day, rain and sleet and blustery wind. We entered the reading room—it was closed to readers just then—a cavernous, echoing space in semi-darkness. The overhead lights were turned off, but the curators had lit—I want to say candles, but it must have been spot lights—to shine on the central tables, which gleamed like the treasure in Aladdin’s cave. When we got closer, we saw that arranged on the tables, and weighted to lie open, was a collection of books of medieval illuminated manuscripts.
Sign of Spring: Burgeoning snowdrops
To qualify as “illuminated”, the decoration must be real gold or silver. The lights reflected off the gold leaf, filling the room with a shimmering golden glow. I’d only ever seen reproductions before, I had no idea they were contoured like that (the gold leaf sits on a slightly raised foundation of plaster, called gesso, to better catch the light). I’d never seen anything so beautiful, possibly still haven’t: these were books that existed in four dimensions (length, width and depth, plus time); but for me they also had a fifth dimension, that of wonder. I was utterly captivated, hypnotised. In the end, it took three porters and a policeman to finally drag me away. Back outside, the streets felt a lot darker and colder.
Patterns in Ice
There’s an obvious connection with ganseys here: the rich, fine detail, the sheer three-dimensional tactile texture that pictures can’t ever quite capture. Sooner or later I’m going to get delusions of grandeur and decorate one with gold leaf, as if Goldfinger had swapped international villainy for the quieter life of a herring fisherman. Meanwhile, I’m nearing the end of my current project, and have reached the cuff on the first sleeve. You’ll observe that I’m patterning the sleeve all the way down, not just on the upper arm. I don’t usually do this because (a) traditionally it wasn’t the norm, and (b) typically by this stage I’m all patterned out, and a splash of plain knitting feels like a treat. But this is a much smaller gansey than I usually knit, and I’m not confident about the sleeve measurements: by extending the pattern all the way to the cuff, with the pulling-in effect created by the cables etc., we should have an element of flexibility when we block it, expanding or contracting the sleeve to get a better fit (I hope!).
Interference on the Line
Life’s a funny old game, isn’t it? After a year or so of unemployment, I applied for a cataloguing temp job with the local Record Office. At my job interview the head archivist said, “Were you aware that your degree in medieval studies—all that medieval Latin, palaeography, and land law—gives you half the qualifications you need to be an archivist…?” Reader, I was not. The rest is—literally—history. I’ve not encountered any more medieval illuminations in my work, though there’ve been plenty of other manuscripts, some of them indeed medieval—but it’s not been altogether without illumination, for all that…
I was reading Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire this week—call me a pessimist, but I’m beginning to suspect it doesn’t have a happy ending—and I was interested to learn in chapter nine that women’s fidelity is frequently undermined by “licentious spectacles”. That sounds fun, I thought; I wonder if I can persuade the optician to prescribe me a pair at my next appointment? (*Ba-dum, tish!*) Yes, it’s another lockdown, remarkably similar to all the other lockdowns only this time with added ice, and we’re just going to have to get through it the best we can.
Cable on the quay
Last year there was a meme doing the rounds, a quote from the movie Men in Black. Will Smith (Agent J) has declared that people are smart and Tommy Lee Jones (Agent K) corrects him: “A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals.” But, you know what? Persons can be pretty dumb too. Let me offer myself as Exhibit—or Agent—A. Before Christmas I went to fill up at the gas station. I carefully put on disposable gloves before I went, to ensure I didn’t directly touch any surface that might be contaminated. I drove up to the pump, got out and inserted my bank card into the slot. But I couldn’t type my PIN with the glove on. So—and I want you to follow me closely here—I removed my glove, entered my PIN, licked my finger to better replace my card in my wallet, filled up with petrol, and only then realised I still had my glove in my other hand, and the tip of my index finger looking suspiciously clean and pink. Sigh. I expect the CCTV footage of that incident is on Facebook by now, along with that tragic guy at the convenience store who takes his glove off and holds it in his mouth while fishing for his wallet…
Stranded pancakes
In gansey news, the rapid progress continues. I’ve finished the front and back, joined the shoulders, completed the collar and picked up stitches around the armhole of the first sleeve. I know it’s a smaller gansey than I usually knit, but the pictures are deceptive: the cables and all the purl stitches actually make it some four inches narrower than it will be once it’s been washed and blocked. (I’m sure it’ll be fine, so long as the recipient doesn’t want to, as it were, breathe.) I’ll say more about the sleeves next time, but it’s the exact same pattern as the body, just inverted.
Turnstones on the harbour wall
Finally this week, I’d like to share with you a quote, which is sort of a riposte to Agent K above. It’s from the movie Harvey, the one where the amiable Elwood P Dowd, marvellously played by James Stewart, is accompanied everywhere by a giant invisible rabbit. At one point Dowd explains his philosophy: “Years ago my mother used to say to me, she’d say, ‘In this world, Elwood, you must be’—she always called me Elwood—’In this world, Elwood, you must be oh so smart or oh so pleasant.’ Well, for years I was smart. I recommend pleasant.” And to be honest, especially after my gas station experience, so do I…
In his final case Sherlock Holmes muses on the coming threat posed by an expansionist Germany and says ominously, “There’s an east wind coming, Watson”; to which dear old obtuse Watson replies, “I think not, Holmes. It is very warm.” This forces Holmes, not to break a whisky bottle over Watson’s head, as you might expect, but to spell out his metaphor more clearly. (Incidentally, there are few scenes in literature that can’t be improved by inserting Watson into them. Take The Lord of the Rings: “Though I don’t know what the likes of me can do against, against –” the innkeeper faltered. “Against the Shadow in the East,” said Strider quietly. “I think not, Aragorn,” said Watson, taking out his pocket watch. “The sun will have set and it’s too cloudy a night for there to be any shadows, even in Mordor.“)
Wind & Waves
Snow in Dunnet Forest
Winter Fishing
