After last week’s media triumph I’ve alerted my agent, and the offers are pouring in. I’m already signed up for the sequel to 1917 (“1918”), where I play a gansey-knitting soldier in the trenches; a hired goon in the new Martin Scorsese project, knitting a gansey in the background while Robert de Niro pops a mafia stool-pigeon; and a wookie knitting a gansey comforter in the new Star Wars project. I almost got a part playing a knitting superhero in the new Marvel blockbuster (“it’s not the jumper we need right now, but it’s the one we deserve”) but they decided they could do me better with CGI, something I feel myself every time I look in the mirror. I asked my agent if I could get away with knitting the same gansey in each movie, but he thought not: he didn’t want me to become typecast.
So while I wait for my three o’clock makeup call—nothing to do with movies, I just believe in good grooming—here’s a fun bit of word trivia I came across this week. We’ve been listening to an audiobook by Anthony Trollope as we knit, one of his Barsetshire novels, the definition of comfort listening, and in which the expression “tuft-hunter” occurs. Of course we all know what it means: a toady, a hanger-on to the nobility. But I didn’t know its origin. Apparently for hundreds of years ordinary students at university wore a black ribbon on their mortarboards, while members of the aristocracy had a gold one. These gold tassels were called tufts, and so those who sucked up to their wearers were called… Well; you’re ahead of me, I find. But now we come to the real point of the story. Tufts had fallen out of use by the 1870s, but by then the word had shifted into slang that we still use today for a swell, well-to-do person: a toff. Isn’t that great? Word archaeology in action.
Shadows on the Bridge
Meanwhile I’ve finished the Wick gansey (as TS Eliot said on finally finishing a troublesome gansey of his own, “Well now that’s done: and I’m glad it’s over”). It’s such a simple pattern, but when you see it washed and blocked in all its glory it’s really rather splendid. It knit up a wee bit bigger than I’d expected: maybe the chunky Wendy yarn blew me off course, maybe my cold clouded my wits, but it will serve as a spare tent for a small family when the zombie apocalypse comes so it’s not all loss. Next week we focus our minds and up our game, as we revisit a pattern from the Western Isles.
Impending Spring
Speaking of which, we just want to wish everyone well as Storm Ciara batters the UK. Hurricane-strength winds and pouring rain are forecast, turning to sleet and snow through the week as it gets colder. I joke a lot about the weather in Caithness, and we are getting gusts around 55 mph just now. But the south and west of Britain are really bearing the brunt this time, winds over 80 mph and flooding, and that’s no laughing matter. So if you can, stay home, stay safe, download an audiobook about toffs, and crank up the knitting. As for me, I’m rehearsing for a new Disney animation, in which I play a reindeer who knits a gansey for an irritating singing snowman; it’s a lot of work, though: maybe I should just, ahem, ‘let it go…’?
When it comes to immortality, I’m firmly in the Woody Allen camp. He once said, you may remember, that he wished to achieve it not through his works, but through not dying (“I don’t want to live on in the hearts of my countrymen; I want to live on in my apartment”). However, as this year marks my sixtieth under Heaven, I think it’s time to compromise. So when Wick Voices, the Caithness oral history project, finally tracked me down, instead of setting off the fire alarm and escaping through the window, the natural reaction of every right-thinking Britisher when faced with a microphone, I decided instead to submit to my fate.
‘Perfect’ Reflections
I don’t know if you’ve ever given an interview where you knew you were being recorded for posterity? Take it from me, it’s a tough gig. Even if you start off well, there comes a point when your brain starts listening to what your mouth is saying and the whole thing falls apart. You become self-conscious, and try to correct what you’re saying as you say it. (Imagine riding a unicycle backwards on a tightrope over Niagara Falls while juggling half a dozen oranges; you’re halfway across when your cellphone rings—like Wile E. Coyote, you have a second or so to contemplate your ruin, and then you plummet to your ruin. It’s rather like that, only with fewer oranges.) Anyway, the subject of the interview was ganseys, with particular reference to those of Caithness. You can find it on the Wick Voices website and don’t say you haven’t been warned; and yes, I’m afraid I really do sound like that.
Fairy Glen, Latheronwheel
Turning with some relief to an actual gansey, I’m delighted to say that we’re almost there. I’m past the pattern band on the second sleeve, and can take my feet off the pedals and freewheel all the way down to the cuff. I might finish it this week, or I might not: we’ll see. One curiosity about this gansey, it’s used up more yarn than I’d expected, nine balls already—there’ll be enough to finish it, but only just. We think the chunky Wendy yarn means that there is less yardage by weight than there used to be, so it doesn’t go as far.
Harbour Reflections
I read somewhere that there is a lovely Jewish conceit that you’re never truly dead until the last person who remembers you is no longer alive. In my case it seems I am destined to live on in a boatload of ganseys, and as a disembodied voice with a floating accent and an unhealthy obsession with gussets. (We met a dog walker down by Latheronwheel Harbour last weekend. He asked where I was from. When I told him New Zealand he expressed surprise: “Oh really? I had you down as posh southern”, before adding “Well, I was sort of right.”) These days, I’ll take my immortality where I can.
Wait—you mean it’s still only January? Boy, this year’s off to a slow start, huh?
TS Eliot famously summed up the burden of human consciousness and the yearning for a simpler kind of existence in two of the most perfect lines in English poetry: “I should have been a pair of ragged claws/ Scuttling across the floors of silent seas”. And never have I felt more like a quick scuttle than this week, upon reading two science stories in the news—each of which have gone a fair way to boggling what sometimes passes in a dim light for my mind.
Leaf of Grass – double exposure of a hillside
The first of them concerns our old friend, low-level nuclear waste. Apparently scientists are experimenting with extracting carbon-14, a radioactive isotope, from the waste being cleaned from Britain’s nuclear power stations. If you combine this isotope with a special type of diamond that generates an electrical field in the presence of radioactive material, you create a “nuclear powered battery” offering “near infinite power”. And if you encase radioactive material in a diamond there’s no risk of it escaping. It’s early days, so who knows: but wouldn’t it be great if we could turn a problem like nuclear waste into a solution?
To be frank, I don’t really understand this, any more than I understand how a biro works or why ocean liners float—some things man is just not meant to know—so as we now turn to particle physics you should probably have some big pinches of salt ready. Anyway, there’s this big question in physics, namely: why does the universe seem to be expanding faster over time instead of slowing down? The concept of “dark energy” has been suggested to explain this, a mysterious force we haven’t discovered yet. But there is another theory, which is that gravity itself might be driving the expansion of the universe. (No, me neither.) But the bit that stopped me cold was this throwaway comment: The physicist developing the theory “is interested in the speed of gravity, which has never been directly measured and which the theory predicts could in some circumstances be faster than light…” At which point all I can do is take a deep breath, get up, go outside and look at the stars, assuming it’s night, and not cloudy, which is actually pretty rare up here, and wonder how I dare have any opinions at all given how vanishingly small my experience and comprehension of the universe really is.
First snowdrop of Spring
Well, let us avert our gaze from the heavens to something closer to home: a gansey, to keep us warm when stargazing. I’m pushing to get it done now and am making good progress down the first sleeve, helped by my cold finally beginning to shift properly. (No longer do my handkerchiefs resemble what I like to think of as primordial soup and my cough is no more that of an asthmatic sheep being goosed on a frosty morning.) This next week should see the second sleeve begun, and then we really are on the home straight.
Finally this week, just because we can, here are some more British gritter names to cheer us all up. Ready? Gritty Gritty Bang Bang, Gritsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Anti-Slip Machiney, Sir Salter Scott, Spready Mercury and – wait for it – David Plowie. Makes me prouder than a blue passport, honestly…
Back in the Middle Ages people believed that their destiny was watched over and affected by guardian angels or malicious demons. I’m starting to see what they meant. For example, on Saturday I decided to walk up the road to Tesco’s for a loaf of bread and some grapes. I checked the skies for clouds before I set off: nope, nothing. Light breeze, blue skies, crisp snap in the air. Traces of frost on the lawn like the skin on a rice pudding. Perfect. Off I went, possibly even with a merry song on my lips.
Moon Tide
Within four hundred yards the sky was black from horizon to horizon, I was battling a howling gale like Scott of the Antarctic, supposing he had nipped to the supermarket to stock up on some snacks en route, or possibly even en croute, and my face was being shredded by a blizzard of hailstone spicules. In seconds I was soaked to the skin, so I decided I might as well carry on as go back. When I reached Tesco’s, carrying more than my own body weight in melting hailstones, the skies cleared and the sun came out. I trudged wetly around the aisles, a team of shop assistants following me discreetly with a mop and bucket. And when, with a bulging knapsack, I turned to leave, the clouds rolled back in and it pelted down with hail again. At least this time I had a tail wind, though the hail accumulated on my back until I looked as if I was giving one of Frosty the Snowman’s nephews a piggy back. When I got home—well, you’re ahead of me, I see: sunshine and blue skies. And all I can say is, I wish I’d kept the receipt for my guardian angel so I could trade them in for one who doesn’t take quite so many cigarette breaks.
Ribbon of Trees
In gansey news, it’s that moment when it all comes together and it starts to look like a pullover. I’ve finished front and back, joined the shoulders, knit the collar and picked up the stitches around the first armhole. Knitting this one has been a bit of a slog, to be honest. Partly because the yarn—Wendy’s—is so uneven; but mostly because of my cold, which has left me with precious little energy, even for knitting. Thankfully it’s finally starting to wear off, and and as the days get lighter everyone’s mood improves; as though spring might actually one day be a possibility.
Finally this week, an update on our robot vacuum cleaner. So far it’s been a huge success, for all it keeps getting stuck in blind corners, eating the curtains and has to be changed as often as a diarrhetic infant. It’s a truism that British homes are always far more spic and span once we employ cleaners, on the grounds that we’re so appalled at the thought that a stranger might see our homes in a dirty state that we clean them thoroughly before the cleaner arrives. I haven’t quite reached that state with the robovac, though I have caught it regarding a particularly dusty corner with a disapproving tilt of its carapace, and making “tut tut” noises under its breath. I have a sneaking feeling that in a year I’ll be doing the vacuuming while the robot swings lazily in a hammock drinking cocktails…
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Here as promised the much-delayed pattern chart. It’s a very simple pattern, and not the kind of pattern I usually knit, but as so often the simplicity makes for a very effective combination when it’s done.
Right, deep breath: it’s confession time. Here we go. Ready? All right: we treated ourselves to a robot vacuum cleaner in the New Year sales, one of those black discs that randomly trundles across your carpets, hoovering. There, I feel better already. And let’s be honest, anything that can turn vacuuming into a spectator sport has to be a good thing.
It takes a bit of getting used to: it’s quite big, with brushes that behave disconcertingly like feelers, so it’s not unlike having a robot trilobite patrolling your carpets searching for prey. It has sensors that stop it banging into chairs or tumbling down stairs. It seems to have a grudge against net curtains and trailing wires, though, and tries to hoover them up, leaving it gorged and choked and paralysed, like the last time I tried to eat a whole naan bread at an Indian restaurant. It beeps when in distress, and it’s rather touching to watch it limp brokenly back to its charging base when low on power, like a student crawling home to bed after a particularly rough night.
Rising Moon
It’s surprisingly quiet, though I’m starting to worry that not only is it smarter than I am—I don’t have sensors that stop me walking into table legs or falling down stairs—but that all the vacuuming is a blind while it secretly cases the house for hidden jewels, or failing that, loose change. (On the plus side, our house has never been cleaner; on the downside, we just received an unexpected Amazon delivery of bags with “swag” embroidered on the sides; honestly, this could go either way.) Now we just need one with a built in jetpack so it can take care of all the dusting and change the duvet cover. Hmm. Every day I learn a little more about myself. A few years ago, faced with a robot enslavement of humanity I’d definitely have joined the resistance; now I think, vacuuming you say? Dusting you say? Let’s talk.
Sunset on the river
In gansey news I still have my cold, so I still haven’t really made the progress I’d have liked to. I’m definitely miles better, unrecognisable from the horizontal me of New Year’s Eve, but it’s still been a bit of a slog. It’s easy to make mistakes when most of your energy is devoted to closing your mouth instead of letting it hang open like the exit ramp of a landing craft; so unpicking and redoing has been rather a thing lately. All the same, I’m halfway up the front and expect to join the shoulders sometime this week. I will post the charts soon, I promise: it’s just that my vacuum cleaner says it now wants weekends off plus sick pay, and I’ve got a meeting with its union rep at three.
Finally, it’s very easy these days to take a gloomy view of my country for reasons that hardly need to be stated. However, Manchester Council recently held a competition to name the council’s new fleet of winter road salt spreaders. The best names (as reported on national news)? Gritty Gritty Bang Bang, Snowbi-Gone Kenobi, and the fantastic—are you ready?—Gritter Thunberg. You know, I think there may be hope for us yet…
So while I wait for my three o’clock makeup call—nothing to do with movies, I just believe in good grooming—here’s a fun bit of word trivia I came across this week. We’ve been listening to an audiobook by Anthony Trollope as we knit, one of his Barsetshire novels, the definition of comfort listening, and in which the expression “tuft-hunter” occurs. Of course we all know what it means: a toady, a hanger-on to the nobility. But I didn’t know its origin. Apparently for hundreds of years ordinary students at university wore a black ribbon on their mortarboards, while members of the aristocracy had a gold one. These gold tassels were called tufts, and so those who sucked up to their wearers were called… Well; you’re ahead of me, I find. But now we come to the real point of the story. Tufts had fallen out of use by the 1870s, but by then the word had shifted into slang that we still use today for a swell, well-to-do person: a toff. Isn’t that great? Word archaeology in action.
