“The bright day is done, and we are for the dark.” With these words Cleopatra is informed by Iras, her lady in waiting, that daylight saving time has just ended in the Nile Delta, and as a result she gets to stay in bed an hour longer tomorrow. Yes, it’s time to put the clocks back (personally I’d like to put them back about ten months, but sadly that doesn’t seem to be an option). Autumn is my favourite time of year, and that’s obviously for the colours and the sunsets and the halloween candy you can stock up on, in the hope no children knock on your door. But I think it’s also because winter is coming, the days of the real long dark, and time is precious.
In his poem Tam o’Shanter Robert Burns described a typical Caithness day in late October: “The wind blew as ‘twad blawn its last/ The rattling showers rose on the blast/ The speedy gleams the darkness swallow’d.” (Mind you, Burns also famously declared that his heart was in the Highlands—mine is too; it’s just a shame I seem to’ve left most of my hair in the Midlands.) And while this Saturday, which began in rain and violent gales, has eased into an afternoon of sharp, bright sunlight, the sun’s spinning further away with each revolution, the warmth is fleeting, the trees are stripped bare and thermal underwear once more stalks the land.
St Fergus’
Chinese and Japanese poets writing about autumn usually focus on frost on spindly branches, the full moon reflected in a still pond, or the fragrance of chrysanthemums—you know the sort of thing. But the great poet Bashō, master of the haiku form, as ever, gets to the heart of what really matters in life. Here’s one of his sequence of autumn haiku, and the humour is part of what makes him one of my heroes:
It’s great— Having an autumn lie-in, As the host.
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Reflections in the harbour
TECHNICAL STUFF
It’s new gansey time. But here’s the thing. I love ganseys with simple patterns and no cables (just as I love ganseys with intricate patterns and lots of cables). But when I knit them they always end up too big. The plain knitting on the body is fine; but the yokes, knit back-and-forth instead of in the round, develop a sort of “mission creep” and end up an inch or more wider than the body. If I’m ever to knit a gansey for, say, the Incredible Hulk or Popeye, then I’m all set; otherwise, not so much. (Patterns with cables don’t do this, or at least not noticeably: I assume the fact that the cables twist the yarn serves to counterbalance the lateral spreading effect.)
Network
I’ve never seen this mentioned anywhere, so I assume the problem is mine alone—that the fault is in me, not in my stars. It’s probably a minuscule effect which gets magnified over 180-odd stitches, creating havoc (see also: butterflies, wings, flapping and chaos theory).
Anyway, I’ve been mulling this over, and so this latest project is my first attempt at a solution. Like the Scarborough gansey, I’m going to add a cable at either edge of the yoke, leaving the central part of the yoke for whatever non-cabley pattern I choose. (In this case it’s the classic seed stitch of Henry Freeman of Whitby, also found in just about every village where fine ganseys were knit.) I’m hoping that the two cables will correct my “stitch gauge creep”, while allowing enough room in between not to lose the overall effect of the pattern. Will it work? We’ll find out sometime in November, if we’re lucky. Meantime, the yarn is Wendy’s guernsey five-ply, some of the last they produced I imagine, very uneven, but hopefully just right for a simple seed-panel gansey like this. More on the pattern next week.
And here we are: the Scottish Fleet cardigan is finished, at least as far as the knitting is concerned. All that remains is for it to be anaesthetised, strapped to the operating table and to undergo open steek surgery, a procedure only slightly less fraught than removing an alien face hugger from poor John Hurt’s fizzog. The tree and cable pattern combination has worked out really well, two of the very best designs complementing each other nicely. And next, after four ganseys in a row for friends and family, I think there’s just time to end the year with one for me. More on this next time.
Harbourside
Mind you, I don’t know how much knitting I’ll get done for a while. You see, I’m expecting to take up boxing for a living. It’s not my idea—the government, in a way that is not in the least bit crass or insensitive, is suggesting that people in the arts and cultural sector retrain to learn a more “useful” profession (surprisingly, MP or government adviser doesn’t seem to be an option). So I duly completed the online questionnaire, and hey diddle-de-dee, it’s a boxing life for me. I must admit I was expecting my age, spectacular lack of fitness, and a well-known reluctance to be repeatedly punched in the face to steer me in a different direction, but evidently boxers can’t be choosers.
Gordon’s actual new career suggestions
Until now, the most spectacularly inept careers advice I’d received came from my old alma mater Manchester University, from which I graduated with a semi-respectable 2:1 honours degree in 1982. Automated careers advice back then was nowhere near the sharp, sophisticated levels obviously available to today’s government, and the three options I was given were teacher, social worker or priest. I remember I went back to see my tutor after graduation to discuss the matter. He said, “Well, to be honest we didn’t give your career options a lot of thought as we had you down as a fail,” before going on to add that he had rather a lot of other students to see. My academic career in a nutshell.
But here’s the thing. The world’s just gone through an unprecedented lockdown. And what helped us all get through it, and is helping us all still? It’s the writers, artists, actors, dancers, tv programme makers, filmmakers, novelists, poets, musicians, and what they create and do. But art and culture aren’t just something to help us cope with life, they are life, reflected back at us. So my advice to Fatima, the ballerina in the advert, and all the other creative people out there, isn’t to retrain as a cyber security expert (unless you really want to); it’s to hang in there as long as you can, for what you do touches and enriches all our lives. And I’ll be with you in spirit: for as Jack Handy famously observed, there’s a parallel with my new career: “To me, boxing is like a ballet—except there’s no music, no choreography, and the dancers hit each other…”
As I was still on holiday last week, and the rain actually rainethed every day, I spent rather a lot of time knitting; so much so that I’ve finished the first sleeve and made a good start on the second. It’s back to work now, so normal (i.e., slower) service will be resumed; even so, the knitting part of the cardigan should be completed sometime this week.
The old mill
There was a morning when it didn’t rain—yes, we were surprised too—so we went in search of the legendary waterfalls of Forss. Well, I say legendary… In fact they’re so well known there’s a hotel right next to them, the Forss House Hotel, and the word “forss” in Old Norse means a waterfall; but as I hadn’t actually visited them they were legendary to me. There are two ways to reach the falls: park on the main road and walk about a hundred yards; or drive up to Crosskirk on the north coast and follow the Forss Water inland for about a mile and a half. Well, as the poet Waters says, we were young and life was long and there was time to kill today: and so we took the scenic route.
Looking downriver
Forss Water has its source about 13 miles south of Crosskirk, at Loch Shurrery (rhymes with “jury”). For the first mile or so from the sea the river meanders through a broad strath, wide and open. It was very wet and very muddy underfoot: the recent rains had swollen the river and saturated the adjacent fields, so that at times the path was completely submerged and the question of whether my boots were waterproof was conclusively, if disappointingly, resolved. It’s a salmon river, and every now and then the silence was broken by the splash of a leaping fish; scientists think they do this to shake off sea lice, but I think they were just checking to see if we were packing rods. After a mile the sides of the valley closed in, becoming steeper and narrower and covered in trees. We were conscious of a steadily growing roar, like a pride of lions watching a football match. The water became streaked with foam.
Raindrops on sodden grass
We crossed the footbridge, and it was immediately clear that we were almost at destination’s end: the muddy path was here overlaid by a wooden walkway (helpfully labelled “unsafe”). We rounded a couple of bends and there were the falls; and very lovely they are too. It’s not a high drop: the rain-boosted river cascades over a series of steps in an exuberance of foam and spray; and if I wouldn’t choose them for a showdown with Professor Moriarty, I wouldn’t exactly want to go over them in a barrel either. We didn’t linger, as it quickly became apparent that there was more than spray in the air. So we squelched our way back to Crosskirk, where the Forss Water spills into the sea; and made for home, and a hot drink, and the long-awaited benison of dry socks.
It’s raining again—and this time it’s not just in my heart, whatever Buddy Holly says. No, Feste has it about right: the rain it raineth every day; and even if it doesn’t really, there are times when it certainly feels like it. This is one of those times. The rain is drumming on the roof, spilling out of the gutters and collecting in forlorn little puddles on the gravel. Downpours always turn the drains on our road into pools; one of these is now so deep and wide that a many-tentacled horror of the ancient world has taken up residence and has already dragged an abandoned shopping trolley down to a watery doom. It’s a good, hard, Calvinist rain, the kind of rain that would have had John Knox stroking his beard in moody satisfaction—a beard long enough to tuck into his socks, if tucking wasn’t an abomination unto the Lord—before dashing off a 15,000-word sermon on why breathing is sinful, but only if women do it.
The world is becoming saturated, sodden. The fields are one giant sponge and the distinction between sea and sky is blurred, as though the clouds have had enough of floating on high o’er vales and hills and decided to experience life at ground level. On days like this you find yourself drawing the curtains around five o’clock and checking the calendar to see if it’s March yet. Time, one feels, to open the dictionary and dust off such little-used words as squoosh, squelch and squirrelsquish.
Marshland grasses
I’m holidaying at home just now. Abraham Lincoln once described a Union general who’d been defeated as “confused and stunned, like a duck hit on the head”. This is a perfect description of me on the first few days of any holiday: I usually come down with a mild cold, as I have this time; but that’s just my body’s way of making me get a proper rest. So I’ve been having a great time reading, listening to Wagner and knitting. Knitting a lot, actually: I’ve finished the back, stormed up the front, joined the shoulders and knit the collar. I’m now on the first sleeve. That’s the detox/ r-‘n’-r taken care of; now it’s time for the holiday; perhaps even for more Wagner.
Heading in
Of course, I know Wagner’s music isn’t for everyone. The American humorist Bill Nye said, “I’m told Wagner’s music is better than it sounds”. (Ouch.) Baudelaire wasn’t exactly a fan either: “I love Wagner, but the music I prefer is that of a cat hung up by its tail outside a window and trying to stick to the panes of glass with its claws.” But Gustav Mahler, on the other hand, felt that “There is Beethoven and Richard [Wagner], and after them, nobody. Oh yeah, and Bob Dylan. But that’s definitely it.” It was Dylan of course who, in his early career as a weatherman, forecast that a hard rain was a-gonna fall—well, it’s a-falling now, Bob, and pretty a-hard at that…
“I ‘gin to be aweary of the sun,” Macbeth declares. (This has always struck me as a curious observation from someone who has his castle in Inverness, endless sunshine not exactly being the USP of the north Highlands; but then, Shakespeare put a coastline on Bohemia, the equivalent of giving Iowa a navy, so who knows?) Where was I? Oh yes, the sun: we’ve passed the solstice, and so the world begins its slow descent into darkness, madness and despair, also known as the party conference season.
Other than the solstice, this last week has also marked two of the more bizarre national days: Ghost Hunting Day and Fish Amnesty Day. I’m a supporter of amnesties for fish: even recidivist herring deserve a second chance. Ghost hunting, though, is a little more problematic. The question of bait is easy: if Halloween teaches us anything, it’s that the best thing to attract the undead is chocolate (actually, now think of it, it works on the living too; damn, now I’m hungry). But then, what do you do with all the ghosts once you’ve caught them—release them back into the wild? What happens if they follow you home and decide to move in, haunting your sock drawer? John Donne, a poet with a one-track mind which, as the saying goes, was a dirt track, threatens, “Then shall my ghost come to your bed”; not an appealing thought, unless maybe as a spectral hot water bottle. No, both are safe from me, and every day is fish and ghost amnesty day as far as I’m concerned.
In gansey news, I’m three-quarters up the back with the shoulders in sight. I would have made more progress but I made a schoolboy error with the flags one row a few inches back and Margaret offered to correct the mistake, rather than just rip it out. Well, as the Buddha observed, no good deed goes unpunished: like Brexit it turned out to be rather more complicated than it had first appeared, and by the time the scaffolding eventually came down and the welder put away two full days had passed. Still, I’m on holiday for the next couple of weeks and will hopefully soon make up the time lost.
Sarclet Harbour
I always find autumn is a good season to take stock and evaluate where you are with things. As Gandalf says to Frodo in The Lord of the Rings, “All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us”. Though I was interested to read that Tolkien’s first draft of that scene is a little different to the version that was published:
“All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us. What have you done with yours, for instance?”
Frodo considered. “Well, last year I beat Fredegar Bolger to first prize at the county fair to see how many Doritos you could shove up your nose.”
“That wasn’t exactly what I meant—”
“I got a dozen up there,” Frodo added smugly. “Fatty only got nine. They got wedged in so tight in one nostril he had to go to the hospital.”
“Look, I’m talking about the return of the Dark Lord here!”
“Don’t you want know how they got them out?”
“No, of course I don’t—” Gandalf hesitated. “How did they?”
“Well, apparently you stick a straw up the other nostril and blow really hard, and—”
“Right, that’s it! Never work with children and hobbits my agent said, but would I bloody listen?”
“Still more’n you’d manage,” Frodo muttered.
“What?”
“It’s more than you would manage,” Frodo repeated rebelliously.
“Did I hear that correctly? As you seriously challenging me, Gandalf the Grey, servant of the Secret Fire, wielder of the Flame of Anor, Maia of Valinor, to a competition to see who can cram the most potato chips up their nose?”
“Er, well, when you put it like that—”
“You’re on. Pass that bag!”
“The bright day is done, and we are for the dark.” With these words Cleopatra is informed by Iras, her lady in waiting, that daylight saving time has just ended in the Nile Delta, and as a result she gets to stay in bed an hour longer tomorrow. Yes, it’s time to put the clocks back (personally I’d like to put them back about ten months, but sadly that doesn’t seem to be an option). Autumn is my favourite time of year, and that’s obviously for the colours and the sunsets and the halloween candy you can stock up on, in the hope no children knock on your door. But I think it’s also because winter is coming, the days of the real long dark, and time is precious.
