It’s Twelfth Night, so I guess Christmas is officially over for another year. Christmas traditionally ends with the feast of Epiphany, celebrating the visit of “we three kings of orient are” to the Nativity; my own personal moment of epiphany comes from the realisation that the sun will rise here at 8.59am on Monday, the first time in over a fortnight that it’s risen before 9.00am. (Time to nip to the chemist’s for some sun cream, then.)
Riverside at Dusk
But alas, within a day of returning home after our travels I came down with a cold which has afflicted me all week: it’s just a cold, not flu, but a bad one all the same. It’s knocked me sideways, and there are times when even holding a knitting needle feels like too much effort. I read once that we all produce about a pint and a half of mucus every day, which we just swallow without noticing. Well, I seem to be producing about a gallon and, trust me, I notice. The best way to visualise my handkerchiefs after use would be to round up about twenty garden slugs and pop them in a blender, and—OK, OK, you get the idea, I’ll stop there. My only consolation is that I’m probably immune to vampires while it lasts, as mucus is so much part of my constitution I bet it’s gradually displacing my blood.
All this means I haven’t done as much knitting as I’d hoped this week, though the back is almost complete. But I have, ahahaha, somewhat miscalculated the number of rows I’ll need to get an even distribution of patterns. My initial plan of three bands (two zigzags and a herringbone) has left me about an inch short of the shoulder. I’d like to be able to blame this on the cold, but no: it’s just a combination of stupidity, poor maths and a sort of breezy insouciance that everything would work out in the end. (Which it will, of course: it’s really very hard to irretrievably screw up a gansey.) I should be able to fix it by adding another herringbone and turning it into the shoulder straps: viz., half a herringbone on the back and half on the front with the cast-off row and a bit of rig’ and fur’ as the centre of the pattern. If it works I can pretend it was a deliberate strategy all along and no one will ever be able to tell. (So long as no one ever reads this. What? Oh.)
Five of the ganseys on display in the Wick Heritage Museum’s Fishing Hall
By the way, I donated eight of my completed ganseys to Wick Museum before Christmas, including the ones replicating those in old photographs from the Johnston Collection. The Museum had an open day on 2 January (a public holiday in Scotland, on the sensible principle that everyone will be too hungover from celebrating Hogmanay to be expected to work) and they were kind enough to make a feature of the ganseys. You can read more about the day here, including the ganseys, along with all the other fun things they organised to welcome in the New Year.
Meanwhile we wish all our readers a very happy 2020, and remember: there’s only 354 sleeps to Christmas…
Apologies for the delay in posting; there were technical problems over which we had no control.
And so that’s Christmas over for another year; all that remains is to put the wrapping paper in the recycling, plan next year’s vendettas on the basis of who didn’t send us a Christmas card, and wonder where another year has gone. As I get older I’m coming to the realisation that Christmas is a pretty good metaphor for my life, in that every morning is like waking up to discover the batteries weren’t included and all the shops are closed.
We spent Christmas in Northamptonshire, where the weather was unseasonably warm and wet. The land had clearly absorbed as much rain as it could hold: the fields were saturated, and a number of rivers overflowed, turning low-lying roads into impassable, muddy pools. Country walks became grim slogs through mud, and the evenings were spent looking up synonyms for “clag” in the dictionary. On the plus side, there was an hour and half’s extra daylight compared with Caithness; a fire blazing in the hearth on demand; and Christmas seeing family and friends. What’s not to like?
I didn’t spend as much time knitting as I’d expected, largely because I seemed to lapse into a sort of coma in my downtime, but I’ve still made progress and am about to divide for front and back. The original of this gansey was evidently knit on narrower needles than mine, and with yarn of a finer gauge than this particular lot of Wendy’s, which resembles the sort of rope used to rig a man o’ war in Nelson’s navy. We’ll see how it works out, but the plan is for the yoke to consist of three pattern bands (two zigzags either side of a herringbone), of which the first band is almost complete. (I’ll hopefully post pattern charts next week, once the jet lag wears off.)
Christmas by the Canal
Fire in the Inglenook
One memorable evening last week my brother took us for a drive to look at the Christmas lights in some nearby towns (Daventry, Towcester and Brackley). The civic illuminations were really rather lovely, but it was also fun to drive through some of the backstreets and estates. Most people hadn’t gone overboard on their houses, but suddenly one would flash vividly out of the darkness, as tasteful as a Las Vegas casino offering Santa stripteases. We felt like deep-sea divers encountering new and exotic forms of life, dancing with bioluminescence, and it was all rather wonderful.
Next stop: New Year, or possibly Hogmanay. However you choose to welcome in 2020, may your year be joyful and full of good things, always remembering to be, in the words of the Ghost of Christmas Present, most excellent to each other.
“The greatest luxury I know,” Eleanor Roosevelt said once, “is sitting up reading in bed.” I couldn’t agree more, though I’d add that it’s even more luxurious to sit there snugly, warm as toast, while outside the blizzard rages. With that in mind, and because this blog is being written ahead of time as we head south for an extended Christmas break, I’d like to change the format this week and share with you ten of my favourite books set in the bleak midwinter. Every year I take down one or more from the shelves, and I’m transported back to a Christmas some 40-odd years ago, when I was nobbut a bairn: when the fields were white, the skies were dark and heavy with snow, rooks nested in the bare branches and I was safe indoors, a log fire blazing in the inglenook; and I read on oblivious while the wind rattled the doors, darkness fell and fractals of ice frosted over the windows, and somewhere in the distance a wolf began to howl…
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight*. A classic medieval poem that’s very readable in a modern translation. It’s Christmas at King Arthur’s court, and the decadent knights in white satin sit around carousing instead of knightly knighting. Suddenly a green giant (why do I immediately think of sweetcorn?) rides into the hall and challenges any one of the knights to cut off his head with his great axe, on condition they will take a return blow at his castle in a year and a day. Only one dares accept, and he finds he’s let himself in for more than he bargained for. An inspiration for Tolkien and Alan Garner and one of the wellsprings of English fantasy.
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. The original and best Christmas story. It’s hard not to think of it in terms of the Muppets, so wonderful is their version, but when the book contains such lines as this you know it will endure: “They were a gloomy suite of rooms, in a lowering pile of building up a yard, where it had so little business to be, that one could scarcely help fancying it must have run there when it was a young house, playing at hide-and-seek with other houses, and have forgotten the way out again. ”
Frosty Morning
The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame. Not altogether a Christmas book, but included for Mole getting out of his depth in the Wild Wood in the snow, and the chapter where Mole comes upon his abandoned burrow at Christmas, is overcome with homesickness and remorse, and Ratty gives him the best gifts of all, friendship and understanding.
Moominland Midwinter by Tove Jansson. The world of the Moomins is utterly original, full of warmth and love but, like the best children’s books, strange and not altogether safe. The Moomins usually hibernate, but one winter Moomintroll unexpectedly wakes up. He finds himself in a frozen, otherworldly landscape, and meets creatures he had no idea coexisted with his kind. Haunting, funny and unsettling by turns.
The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper. The archetypal midwinter children’s fantasy book. “It will be a bad night,” said Mr Dawson. “The Walker is abroad, and this night will be bad, and tomorrow will be beyond imagining.” Wow. It’s a classic for a reason.
Fairy Dust and Fenceposts
The Giant Under the Snow by John Gordon. A neglected children’s fantasy. It’s Christmas in Norfolk, and some teens on a school trip find an ancient buckle. But they’re pursued into their everyday lives by a terrifying black hound and its blank-faced master, and the sinister Leathermen, and under the snow the Giant is waking up… (Seriously, British young adult fiction in the 1970s was weird.)
The Sword in the Stone by TH White. I can’t read the rest of the series, it’s just too sad altogether, but the first book in White’s Arthurian sequence is simply wonderful. He makes few concessions to a younger readership, and the adventures of the young Wart as he learns how to be a good king from birds and beastly beasts are a delight. (White’s good-hearted but irascible Merlin was surely second cousin to Gandalf, too.) Not really a Christmas book, but it spans a year and you learn what it was like to live through a medieval winter, with a boar hunt that shows the author had read his Sir Gawain.
I Heard the Owl Call My Name by Margaret Craven. Not strictly speaking a winter book either, as it covers all the seasons, but it reaches its climax in winter so I’m claiming it. A young Canadian vicar is diagnosed with a terminal illness. His bishop sends him to a remote First Nations village so he can learn enough of life to be ready to die. A beautiful and wise book, and the end, when it comes, is right (sorry, I seem to have something in my eye). If God ever felt like destroying the world again because humanity wasn’t worth the trouble—and let’s face it, He’d have a point—this is the book I would offer as Exhibit A in the case for the defence.
Dunes at Reiss
The Stone Book Quartet by Alan Garner. Four short stories, each one a different moment in the history the author’s family living on Alderley Edge in Cheshire, culminating in the building of a sledge in which all the skills of the generations combine and the author is just the latest in a line of craftsmen stretching back down the generations. Garner is a masterful writer of dark fantasy but for me this is his masterpiece. If I was Minister of Education I’d stop schools teaching Lord of the Flies tomorrow and replace it with this, a much more rewarding experience.
Hogfather by Terry Pratchett. The Discworld equivalent of Father Christmas has disappeared, so Death decides to fill in for him, to keep the tradition alive. Very funny, of course (the scene where Death turns up in a department store and starts actually giving the children whatever they ask for is worth the admission price alone), but, as ever with Pratchett, learned too and with important things to say about traditions and their pagan origins.
Oh, and speaking of Eleanor Roosevelt, here’s my favourite quote of hers: “I once had a rose named after me and I was very flattered. But I was not pleased to read the description in the catalogue: no good in a bed, but fine up against a wall…”
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My old friend Cole Porter once memorably declared that mere alcohol didn’t thrill him at all, and went on to spurn drugs for much the same reason. Me too, actually. I never really got the hang of alcohol: it never made me feel better, but instead made me behave as if I were suffering a mild stroke in zero gravity. And I’ve always found the sensible universe to be so full of wonders that I couldn’t see the point of drugs; reality is usually enough, and more than enough, for me.
Of course, I knew people at university who partook of various substances; and while it all seems rather innocent, looking back from a distance of 40 years—few in my circle flirted with anything much stronger than tobacco, and that but occasionally, though you were advised to bring your own oxygen to a Steve Hillage concert—they didn’t half talk some gibberish while under the influence. Earnest gibberish, too.
Sunset by the riverside
Famously, Oliver Wendell Holmes senior once inhaled a large dose of ether, with the intention of capturing the secrets of the universe which he was convinced the drug revealed to him: “The veil of eternity was lifted. The one great truth which underlies all human experience, and is the key to all the mysteries that philosophy has sought in vain to solve, flashed upon me in a sudden revelation,” he wrote afterwards. “As my natural condition returned, I remembered my resolution; and, staggering to my desk, I wrote, in ill-shaped, straggling characters, the all-embracing truth still glimmering in my consciousness. The words were these (children may smile; the wise will ponder): ‘A strong smell of turpentine prevails throughout.’”
Well, quite. Suddenly “I am the egg man, they are the egg men, I am the walrus, goo goo g’joob” starts to make perfect sense.
Clouds brought down to earth
Moving on. In much the same way that Harry Potter dedicated his life to collecting the scattered fragment of Lord Voldemort’s blackened soul, I have been trying to find the last remnants of Wendy navy guernsey 5-ply yarn across the terraqueous globe. Though it turns out there’s more than I thought, so, unlike Harry, I promptly abandoned my quest after a couple of attempts in favour of watching daytime television and eating doritos on the couch. Deb Gillanders of Propagansey was able to supply me with some vintage Wendy yarn, the prelapsarian good quality stuff of a few years ago; I believe there’s still some left, so if you’re interested I suggest you hurry while stocks last.
Christmas lights
My own Wendy project in aran has set up base camp and is now advancing tentatively up the foothills of Mount Gansey. This is late Wendy yarn, however, so the technique is not so much knitting as stuffing a horsehair sofa. Still, on the plus side, the yarn is light enough to knit with even in the hyperborean darkness of a Caithness winter (sunrise today was at 8.45am; sunset at 3.22pm). Hmm, maybe there’s a Russian proverb to keep us going through these dark times? “In the land of hope there is no winter”. Oh. I guess the navy yarn will have to wait for spring.
But let us not be gloomy. Here are a couple of wintery quotes to warm the heart, from two French writers not widely celebrated for their optimism. One is by Albert Camus: “In the depth of winter I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.” (Isn’t that great?) And this, from Victor Hugo: “Laughter is the sun that drives winter from the human face.” Absolutely no drugs, tobacco or alcohol required.
It’s Twelfth Night, so I guess Christmas is officially over for another year. Christmas traditionally ends with the feast of Epiphany, celebrating the visit of “we three kings of orient are” to the Nativity; my own personal moment of epiphany comes from the realisation that the sun will rise here at 8.59am on Monday, the first time in over a fortnight that it’s risen before 9.00am. (Time to nip to the chemist’s for some sun cream, then.)
All this means I haven’t done as much knitting as I’d hoped this week, though the back is almost complete. But I have, ahahaha, somewhat miscalculated the number of rows I’ll need to get an even distribution of patterns. My initial plan of three bands (two zigzags and a herringbone) has left me about an inch short of the shoulder. I’d like to be able to blame this on the cold, but no: it’s just a combination of stupidity, poor maths and a sort of breezy insouciance that everything would work out in the end. (Which it will, of course: it’s really very hard to irretrievably screw up a gansey.) I should be able to fix it by adding another herringbone and turning it into the shoulder straps: viz., half a herringbone on the back and half on the front with the cast-off row and a bit of rig’ and fur’ as the centre of the pattern. If it works I can pretend it was a deliberate strategy all along and no one will ever be able to tell. (So long as no one ever reads this. What? Oh.)
