I mentioned last week that I’d spent part of my time during lockdown researching the nuclear industry, in which I now work. (I sometimes wryly imagine travelling back in time to meet my younger self, who spent all those Tuesdays back in 1982 selling anti-nuclear literature from the Ecology Party stall on Northampton market, and watching the hope in his face collapse like an arctic glacier; though to be fair that would probably be at my lack of hair even before we got onto ethics.) One subject that hadn’t occurred to me was the question of how you transmit knowledge about nuclear contamination to future generations.
The pilot boat gets a clean
Language, like nuclear waste, changes over time. It takes about 300 years for radioactive waste produced by fission to decay to the point where it is relatively harmless—until it becomes as radioactive as, say, Cornwall. But high level waste can last up to a thousand years, and if you think that a thousand years ago Old English was slowly evolving into the language of Chaucer you can see the problem: how can you warn generations yet unborn that “here be dragons” if they can’t read the signs? Pictures are no good. A cartoon strip showing a man approaching an electric fence, touching it and falling down dead works fine for us who read left to right; but someone from a culture that reads right to left will think it’s a defibrillator or some kind of revivifying device.
There are many suggestions for dealing with this, and I’m indebted to me dear friend Song for bringing the absolute batshit-craziest of them to my notice: the concept of Raycats. These are cats that would be genetically bred to change colour in the presence of dangerous levels of radiation, the idea being that even if all records are lost humanity will retain a folk memory of a cat that changes colour. (Though having observed humanity up close for many years, I suspect that people of the future would deliberately expose the cats and themselves to radiation just to watch the cool colour-change effect, and then post the pictures on Youtube.) And I feel that this is an idea with far-reaching applications: a cat that changed colour when I’m running low on coffee, or it’s time for my pills, would genuinely enhance my life; it would be worth it just for the expression on the cat’s face.
Oystercatcher on the rocks
In gansey news, the end is in sight. I’m almost to the cuff, and then there’s just a question of six inches of ribbing and a bit of end-darning and we’re there, so I expect it to be finished by next weekend. By the way, the pattern is not just a classic in itself, but it also has the advantage of numerous columns of purl stitches running up the body—this gives you a certain amount of flexibility in the fit widthwise, always a bonus in a gansey knit for somebody else.
Trawl doors from a fishing net
Finally, I was honoured to be invited last week to talk to the Cordova Gansey Project from Alaska, but really from all over. It was a great pleasure to meet so many enthusiasts in one virtual space and talk ganseys for an hour. Knitting is an habitually solitary activity for me, something I do on my own, like brushing my teeth or trying to remember where I put my car keys. It was rather nice to find it suddenly turned into a group activity, and to feel I had something to contribute. Maybe my younger self would be able to take comfort from that, at least, after all. (What’s that? He wouldn’t? Oh, right, I was forgetting: the hair…)
It’s back to work this week, something I’m looking forward to with the same kind of foredoomed anticipation with which Ishmael viewed his final confrontation with the white whale Moby-Dick. Not only will this involve working in an office, but, which is worse, I’ll actually have to interact with other people. Having to work as such, though, won’t be a shock: I’ve been working all through lockdown, most recently on a sort of definitive handbook of the records of the nuclear industry, and have filled no less than 150 pages of an A5 notebook accordingly, using my natty new fountain pen. And it’s led me to think of names.
You can tell everything you need to know about Britain and America from the respective codenames they gave to their secret atomic projects during the War. The British project was called “Tube Alloys”, a brilliantly dull title which sounds like a type of zinc cream for haemorrhoids. It’s boring even to type the words; anyone coming across the dossier would probably have fallen asleep before they opened the cover. But the Americans of course named their atomic research “The Manhattan Project”: a title so cool and mysterious it immediately suggests men in sunglasses with blank faces denying you access, possibly to an alien autopsy. Of course you want find out more. (Equally brilliantly the British committee overseeing atomic research was known as the “MAUD Committee”. But the letters “MAUD” didn’t stand for anything; it was just the name of Danish physicist Niels Bohr’s housekeeper, Maud Ray.)
Overgrown bench by the riverside path
I’ve taken great strides towards the completion of the gansey this week by finishing the first sleeve and starting the second. The one part of knitting a gansey that I don’t particularly enjoy—apart from all the maths involved in planning them, casting on, picking up stitches round the neck and darning in all the loose ends at the conclusion—come to think of it, why do I knit them again?—is picking up 140-odd stitches round the armhole. But the joy of knowing that there are no more stitches to be picked up by this stage is equally great; and as the rest of the gansey is just a gentle freewheel down to the cuff, it feels like a holiday. Another fortnight might even see it done.
In parish notices, a big shout out to Linda for bringing her gansey safe to fruition. You can see the pictures here—it’s the splendid Filey ladder and cables pattern, and from the pictures looks like a perfect fit. Many congratulations to Linda!
Textures of the marsh
And speaking of names, did you know that no one actually knows what the “moby” part of the white whale’s name means, or how Melville came up with it? Though there was apparently a famous whale called “Mocha Dick, the white whale of the Pacific”. The best that anyone can come up with is that it’s a blending of “mocha” and “Toby” (though no one can explain what Toby has to do with anything). Ah well; a mystery it is, and a mystery it shall probably remain, and I find that curiously satisfying. It’s not good for us to know everything. Ishmael, as in so many things, got it about right: “Think not, is my eleventh commandment; and sleep when you can, is my twelfth”.
To celebrate our new-found freedom out of lockdown we’ve been revisiting some of our favourite haunts, going round each place to make sure they’re still there, like a cat just back from the vet’s checking out the neighbourhood; though, unlike the cat, so far we’ve drawn the line at scent marking. And everything is just the same, exactly where we left it: the cliffs and the boulders and rivers and geos and trees. Also the seagulls and skuas, the ravens and crows; even, alas, the flies.
Caithness usually has enough of a wind—the equivalent on an average day of, say, the slipstream of a fighter jet—to keep the flies away. But even the wind needs a breather now and then, and when it drops the little buggers pounce. Walking the cliffs by Sarclet last weekend I brushed my sleeve across my forehead which had become bedewed with honest perspiration, only for it to come away black with the crushed bodies of a disconcerting number of ex-flies which I’d just inadvertently sent into the Great Beyond. (Not for nothing is the Scottish currant and raisin cake known colloquially as “fly cemetery”.)
Grass in the wind
Worse was to follow. Next day we went to Camster Cairns, the semi-reconstructed 4,000 year-old monuments a few miles south of Wick. It was a still, muggy day and within a few minutes of leaving the car I was beset with my own personal entourage of blowflies, possibly sent by Beelzebub in vengeance for my midge-assassinations of the previous day. In my jerking, spasming efforts to shake them off I waved my arms like someone taking a speed-reading course in semaphore. I tried to reason with them—pointing out the fragrant sheep droppings liberally dappling the field in which we stood—but they would have none of it: only my ears, nostrils and eyes would do. (Margaret, incidentally, was scarcely affected, leading me to suppose that Caithness has now evolved a new strain of blowfly that feeds exclusively on archivists.) I duly fled to the car, trailing a cloud of flies, where I amused myself for the next ten minutes or so repeatedly winding down the window, waiting till a cluster of the black devils had got my scent, then quickly winding it back up again and watching them thud into the glass, giving themselves concussion and making tiny boi-yoi-yoi-yoing noises.
Cliffs at Sarclet
Meanwhile, in gansey news, I have real progress to report. I’ve finished the front, joined the shoulders, done the collar and started the first sleeve. As I said last week, there are good reasons why this has gone so quickly; but it also helps that it’s a pattern I could probably knit in my sleep; and although I worked out a pattern chart, I’ve never needed to refer to it. It’s always a sign of a good pattern that it practically knits itself. All things being equal, I should finish it by the end of the month: the last gansey of (sob) summer.
Beset by flies at Camster
Finally, we all know that Beelzebub is styled the Lord of the Flies—of the flying insects, that is to say, not trouser fastenings, though there was that one time I caught my… but the less said about that the better. There are however also times when I feel there’s another minor demon out there, one who persecutes archivists and record-keepers in general, and all owing to a tragic misprint in some ancient text: the lesser imp Dampmould, the Lord of the Files…
By way of distracting myself from my toenails—which, if allowed to grow, end up more like a selection of Swiss army knife blades made out of keratin than anything human—and the cutting of which, as I get older, increasingly resembles someone trying to defuse an explosive device using robotic arms while trying not to sneeze—we took a trip over the border to the lovely coastal village of Helmsdale in Sutherland. It was a fine day, so we parked in the middle of the village and went for a walk a mile or so up the strath, along the banks of the broad, shallow River Helmsdale. We’d hoped to see some wildlife, and in a way we did, for every hundred yards or so there was a fisherman up to his knees in the water, casting his line.
Sandy Goe
I remember when I was little reading something about the art of fly fishing, how the fisherman “pitted his wits against the wily salmon”; and even at the tender age of twelve that struck me as odd. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I have the highest respect for the pastime and those who practice it—it’s the closest humanity has come to turning meditation into a sport. But I can’t help feeling that, generally speaking, a random specimen of genus homo and species sapiens ought to be able to defeat salmo salar in a battle of wits, surely? It’d be like me boasting that I beat a labrador in a game of Monopoly; or scoring higher than, say, an ocelot in a cognitive test that might be considered hard even by an American president.
Fly Fishing at Helmsdale
You never see a salmon knitting, either; I suppose the yarn would get too wet. Anyway, I continue to make good progress on the Flamborough gansey. I’ve finished the back, and am well embarked on the front. The speed at which I’m knitting can be explained by two things: this gansey is rather narrower than the ones I usually knit, so the recipient will have to swear off junk food for the foreseeable; and as I’m working from home I can use my commuting time and coffee breaks to knit a row here and there, which results in half an inch extra a day by this stage.
Heading Out
Now, about that duel of wits with a salmon. Try asking it to count to twenty and I bet it’d struggle, even if it took its socks off—that’s one nil to humanity. But ask me to navigate my way back to the breeding grounds where I was hatched without GPS and I’d be hard put to it—that makes it one all. Let’s see what another US President, George W Bush, had to say in 2000 on the subject: “I know the human being and fish can coexist peacefully.” Hmm. Tell you what, let’s call it a draw…
I’ve been thinking recently about famous last words—not, I hasten to add, because I plan to utter any in the near future, but rather because there are more of them around than I’d imagined. Of course, we all know Oscar Wilde’s witty last words: “My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has to go.” (Although knowing Oscar’s habit of preparing his witticisms carefully in advance, I have a vision of him being carried in extremis from hotel to hotel until he found a room sufficiently ghastly for his quip.) In terms of dying as you lived, the French grammarian Dominique Bouhours is one of my heroes. As he expired he said, “I am about to—or I am going to—die: either expression is correct”.
On the deck
Imagine going down in history as a black joke, your last words revealing how badly you’d misjudged things. This happened to the American Civil War general John Sedgwick, who berated his men for taking cover under fire with the immortal words, “They couldn’t hit an elephant at this dist—”. Running him close in the misplaced optimism stakes we have William Pitt the Younger, British Prime Minister, whose last words were, “I think I could eat one of Bellamy’s veal pies.” (Spoiler: he couldn’t.) It’s also a good time to settle old scores. Told that his time was short, the Spanish playwright Lope Félix de Vega Carpio memorably exclaimed, “All right, then, I’ll say it: Dante makes me sick!”
Hogweed at Sarclet
Leaving last things for a moment, it’s time to ring in a new gansey. It’s another old favourite, Flamborough III in Frangipani pistachio yarn. I’ve amended the pattern slightly by narrowing the diamonds from the previous time I knit it, because the intended recipient is somewhat less broad across the beam than yours truly. It’s a truly classic pattern, one of the best, and the pastel shade really suits it. (Of course this isn’t really week one: I’ve been beavering away quietly on it for the last few weeks.)
Duncansby Stacks
Staying green for a moment, Judit has been busy in Finland, turning corona-lockdown to advantage. She’s sent pictures of this green gansey, a future Christmas present. The pattern is taken from Beth Brown-Reinsel‘s book, and is a really effective combination of bands of different patterns which set each other off to a “T”. Congratulations once again to Judit! And a reminder that if anyone has a completed gansey they’d like to share, please send us pictures (completed ganseys only, I’m afraid).
Turning back to last words, the French, as ever, do it with the most style. Take the philosopher Bernard de Fontenelle. His last words were the marvellous, “I feel nothing, apart from a certain difficulty in continuing to exist.” (To be fair, this is how I feel most Monday mornings.) But pride of place surely goes to the celebrated atheist and writer Voltaire—or it would do if it were true, which it probably isn’t; but, as another man once said, unless it turns out he didn’t either, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend”. Where was I? Oh, yes: Voltaire. On his death bed, and urged by a priest to renounce Satan, he is alleged to have told him, “Now, now, my good man; this no time to be making enemies…”
I mentioned last week that I’d spent part of my time during lockdown researching the nuclear industry, in which I now work. (I sometimes wryly imagine travelling back in time to meet my younger self, who spent all those Tuesdays back in 1982 selling anti-nuclear literature from the Ecology Party stall on Northampton market, and watching the hope in his face collapse like an arctic glacier; though to be fair that would probably be at my lack of hair even before we got onto ethics.) One subject that hadn’t occurred to me was the question of how you transmit knowledge about nuclear contamination to future generations.
