I turned on the television the other day, to catch the latest news about the coronavirus. Imagine my shock to find a stern-faced leader addressing his people from a podium: “Some of you may die,” he said, “but that is a sacrifice I’m willing to make”. Blimey, I thought: that’s a bit stark for Boris. Then I realised I’d put on Shrek by mistake.
Handrail at the North Baths pool
So here we are, watching the needle on the anxiety-o-meter creeping all the way up to critical. Football and other sports are cancelled, travel suspended, and the media apparently have no other news. I blew my nose at work on Friday. When I looked up, everyone in the room was staring at the tissue in my hands. I felt like a strange gunslinger walking into the Malemute saloon: the piano player stopped playing, the dealer paused as he dealt the cards. Patiently I explained that this is the same condition I’ve had for a year now, you’ve all seen it, it’s nothing new. Gradually everyone relaxed; but just for a minute there…
Seaweed & Driftwood
The Simpsons captured this mood perfectly many years ago, when a reporter asks a pundit, “Professor, without knowing precisely what the danger is, would you say it’s time for our viewers to crack each other’s heads open and feast on the goo inside?” And the pundit earnestly replies, “Yes I would.”
Well, we all know knitting is one way to alleviate stress and anxiety, so let’s have at it. I’ve almost finished the back of the gansey so it’s possible now to get an idea of the overall look of the thing. It’s always something of a risk, knitting a yoke with a specified number of rows, as every cone of yarn knits up a little differently. But, touch wood, this time it seems to have worked out. The coppery tones of the Frangipani Breton yarn really suit the pattern, too.
As for the virus, we know that things will get worse before they get better. But get better they will. So let’s all wash our hands, be safe, and look out for each other. At times like this I fall back on a phrase from James Joyce’s Ulysses, on the importance of remembering that bad things are only temporary, and will pass: “Life is many days. This will end.”
Hamlet once said that he could be “bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams”. And I feel much the same. Not that I could necessarily be bounded in a nutshell—I think there’d be quite a lot left over, not to mention something of a mess to clean up—but about the dreams. Why is it that when I remember my dreams, they’re always disturbing?
Stacks of Duncansby
Anxiety has been a constant companion throughout my life. A few days before I took my driving test, aged 18, I dreamt I’d taken it and failed. So powerful was the dream that it took most of the following morning before I realised that the actual test was still in the future, the failure as yet only hypothetical. (I passed first time, by the way: as Linus from Peanuts would say, “I wasted a good worry”.) Just last night I dreamt that I was lying on the floor, helpless and dying after some unspecified disaster, possibly a heart attack. This was actually an improvement on another dream a few months ago, when I dreamt I had just died, and my spirit was detached from my body, occupying the space in the room, wondering what came next. Another time I dreamt that half my face was missing. Every time I read that one of the most commonly reported dreams is turning up to work naked, I think, hey, that sounds interesting; as if even in my subconscious I’m missing all the fun.
Friendly Fenceposts
I don’t dream about ganseys, and given how the rest of my dreams work out that’s probably a good thing. Excitingly, I’ve just reached the point where front and back divides: the semi-gussets are ready to go on their holders, and the foundations of the yoke pattern have been laid. There’s just a narrow diamond border to separate the body from the yoke; I had to condense the band because the body is slightly shorter than the ganseys I knit for myself. It’s fun to be knitting a Hebridean pattern again—they’re such a riot of patterns the whole fabric seems to come alive, like a knitted Book of Kells.
Swan on the Grand Union Canal
And in other news, spring seems to have finally, tentatively, arrived even in Caithness. (As King Solomon once observed, the flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land; though after watching Finding Nemo I presume the voice of the turtle mostly says, “Woaaah, dude”.) So here’s one of my favourite Japanese poems to celebrate. It’s by Ome Shushiki (1668-1725), on the hope that spring brings, even to dry dreamers such as I:
Dead my old fine hopes And dry my dreaming, but still… Iris, blue each spring.
It’s the first day of March, St David’s Day, a date which has always felt like spring to me ever since we lived in Wales; a harbinger of hope with the snowdrops and daffodils coming out, and—in a particularly good year—Wales absolutely stuffing England at rugby. Alas for our times, I duly went for a walk along the river today; and yes, the snowdrops are out, though they look rather as if they wished they’d waited; but as for spring—well, not so much. In the space of thirty minutes I encountered drizzle, rain, sleet and hail, with the sorts of winds that make you look like you’re pulling an invisible sled; indeed, all I needed was some snowshoes and a sense of British pluck and I could have fitted into Captain Scott’s expedition, no questions asked.
I did see an otter, though, and that made up for much. The recent heavy rains have swollen the river to the fullest level I can remember, and maybe that’s made them bold. I was aware of a sleek, dark, whiskery head with a bright black eye bobbing in the swell, looking alertly round. Then it was gone with a *glop! *, only a few silently expanding ripples to show where it’d been. A few minutes later it was up again, twenty metres further off, and seemed to be munching something. It’s always a privilege, seeing an otter; even the ones that don’t look like Matt Damon (honestly, look it up: it’s a thing). They’re another creature who seem to have the meaning of life sorted out—sheep always look anxious, but you never see an otter having an existential crisis—as if the moment your back is turned they’ll be round the back of the bike sheds with the other cool kids, smoking something illegal.
Meanwhile, I’ve almost finished the lower body of the gansey. When I’ve finished the current round of trees and starfish, it’ll be time to start the gussets and the diamond strip separating the body pattern from the yoke. This is the business end of the gansey, so I have to commit to a row and stitch gauge in order to work out how to fit the patterns in the horizontal and vertical planes—and then hope for the best. I’ll say more about patterns as I come to them; for now, let’s just say I wish I’d paid more attention in maths class.
And speaking of St David’s Day, I came across this bizarre fact in my extensive researches (viz., Wikipedia): “by the 18th century the custom had arisen of confectioners producing “taffies”—gingerbread figures baked in the shape of a Welshman riding a goat—on Saint David’s Day”. I mean—what? From the context it’s obviously not supposed to be complimentary; though part of me wonders if we’d dealt with the EU in the same way—a particularly pointed pastry of Michel Barnier, say—would Brexit ever have come to pass? Alas, we’ll never know. Still , we can at least console ourselves with the thought that spring will soon be here—one way or, ahem, anotter…
[N.B., Margaret is off on her travels this week, which is why the photos are below our usual standard; smartphones are wonderful things, but they can’t capture the true shade of a gansey. The other photos are recycled from my phone’s library; I was going to add captions, but I think they’re pretty self-explanatory…]
“… and storms beat these rocky cliffs,
falling frost fetters the earth,
the harbinger of winter; then dark comes,
night-shadows deepen, from the north there comes
a rough hailstorm in malice against men.”
These lines have been in my mind recently—not because they’re the latest weather report for Caithness, though they might as well be, given how generally grim and end-of-the-world-ish things have been up here lately; no, these lines are from the Old English poem The Wanderer (and yes, that’s about as cheerful as it gets). The poem is splendid in its own right, of course, but it’s also fascinating to me how Tolkien incorporated elements of it into The Lord of the Rings.
Down to Earth
For example, there’s a line in the poem about the eald enta geweorc, which translates as “the old work of giants”, i.e., the prehistoric remains in the English landscape. But Tolkien took the word enta, giants, as his inspiration for the Ents, the wise old sentient tree creatures that are the moral heart of his ecology. Or take these lines: Hwær cwom mearg? Hwær cwom mago?/ Hwær cwom maþþumgyfa? (which translates as, “Where is the horse gone? Where the rider?/ Where the giver of treasure?”). He adapted these for the moving poem of the Riders of Rohan: “Where now the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing?” Of course, it’s this level of detail that gives Tolkien’s universe such a feeling of authenticity, and makes it so hard to imitate: the roots of his fiction go deeper than his imitators can hope to follow.
Spring Snowdrops
This, of course, is a familiar feeling to anyone who’s attempted to recreate the more complex ganseys of the past, which brings us to my latest project, the Hebridean gansey. One advantage of horrible weather is that you don’t feel the need to get up and do something more energetic instead. So I’ve been cranking up the heating and beavering away, making good progress up the body: alternating starfish and tree panels, divided by narrow two-stitch cables. I’m using cables rather than seed stitch (which I used last time I knit this) to delineate the pattern panels for a couple of reasons: firstly, because they fit the number of stitches better; secondly because I like them; and thirdly because this is a new batch of yarn, and I won’t know my exact stitch gauge until I’ve knit a bigger sample. (This is important, because it’s intended as a gift, and I don’t want it to be too big or too small. A small variation in stitch gauge can make a big difference over 300+ stitches: but the purl stitches either side of the cables act rather like pleats, and give a degree of flexibility to the ultimate width of the garment.)
Rare Creature
In parish news, while we’ve all been talking Judit has quietly finished another gansey: this one in blue (darker than the photos suggest, but not navy; which is not a colour ideally suited to fine knitting over long winter evenings). The pattern, a fetching diamond and ladder combination, is based on one from Rae Compton’s book, Mrs Mainprize’s pattern on page 56. Many congratulations once again to Judit! (And when is someone going to reprint Rae’s excellent book?)
Finally this week, in my Anglo-Saxon reading I came across the concept of a holmgang, which was literally an “island-going”, viz., a way of going to a special place (usually an island, or holm) to settle your differences “though formalised and circumscribed violence”. I don’t know why this should come into my mind as I prepare to settle down to watch another rugby international. My team usually loses, too: but as the poet of The Wanderer philosophically observed after a particularly disappointing England vs France game: Wyrd bið ful aræd! or, “Events always go as they must…”
Another week, another storm system sweeps across the British Isles, depositing a month’s rainfall in a day, gale force winds bringing down everything from power lines to trees: now we know how a ninepin feels when the next bowling ball comes smashing down the lane. At least here in Caithness we’ve been getting off relatively lightly. Partly because we hardly have any trees to begin with, of course; but mostly because we’re sheltered by a chain of mountains to west and south which seem to soak up most of the rain and snow before it can reach us. And though the fields here are now so waterlogged that I expect the farmers to switch to planting rice, the county is in effect a promontory and excess water drains off via the cliffs like waves in a heavy sea breaking over the prow of a ship.
Late afternoon snowdrops
We can’t escape the wind, though. It’s been relentless, gusting up to 60 mph for days on end. We went down to Sarclet Harbour to look at the waves. The whole sea was a churning, heaving cauldron of foam and spray, as though God had dropped a giant bath bomb into the water and then sneezed. We only stayed a few uncomfortable minutes before we groped our way back to the car, feeling like blind men who’d wandered onto the field of Twickenham in the middle of a particularly brutal rugby match. Any seagull who ventured out of shelter was whisked away in an instant: there was only time for it to swear briefly before it vanished out of existence like a spaceship in a Star Wars movie going into hyperspace.
Sea at Sarclet
In such circumstances the only thing to do is brew up some hot, strong coffee, draw the curtains against the draught, and knit a gansey. As heavily trailed last week, this is another Hebridean pattern. It’s one I’ve knit before; but that was in another country, and besides, the yarn is different. This time I’m using Frangipani Breton, a glorious coppery-red, and what a relief it is to be working with such smooth, consistent yarn again. It’s sort of a commission, for a friend-of-a-friend, and it’s going to be interesting seeing how the pattern scales down for a smaller original (42″ in the round, as opposed to my usual 46″) and with my current stitch gauge of 8 stitches to the inch. We’ll talk patterns another time, but so far I have cast on 320 stitches for the welt, increasing to 340 for the body. So far, it’s a joy to knit. (Hang on to that thought: Ed.)
Sheep on a hillside
Finally this week, more random fun with words. The Hobbit is one of my favourite books, and it’s been pointed out that—unlike in Lord of the Rings— almost all the place names in it are just nouns and adjectives (The Shire, The Lonely Mountain, The Misty Mountains, Lake Town, Dale, etc.). One exception to this is a rock called The Carrock, on the border of the skin-changer Beorn’s lands. Bilbo asks Gandalf what it means, and is crushingly put down: “[Beorn] called it the Carrock, because carrock is his word for it. He calls things like that carrocks, and this one is the Carrock because it is the only one near his home.” But this is really an in-joke on Tolkien’s part. Words and their meanings were his passion and his life; and “carrock” is his made-up amalgamation of carr [the Anglo-Saxon word for rock] and rock (as well as an echo of the Welsh word for rock, carreg). So when Bilbo asks the derivation of one of the few names in the book with a meaning, Tolkien deliberately points out the ultimate folly of derivations: names only mean what things are.
Oh, and my favourite fact of the week? In past times, sailors called penguins “arse-feet” because their feet are set so far back on their bodies… Stay dry and stay safe.
I turned on the television the other day, to catch the latest news about the coronavirus. Imagine my shock to find a stern-faced leader addressing his people from a podium: “Some of you may die,” he said, “but that is a sacrifice I’m willing to make”. Blimey, I thought: that’s a bit stark for Boris. Then I realised I’d put on Shrek by mistake.
Well, we all know knitting is one way to alleviate stress and anxiety, so let’s have at it. I’ve almost finished the back of the gansey so it’s possible now to get an idea of the overall look of the thing. It’s always something of a risk, knitting a yoke with a specified number of rows, as every cone of yarn knits up a little differently. But, touch wood, this time it seems to have worked out. The coppery tones of the Frangipani Breton yarn really suit the pattern, too.
