I’m very sorry to say that my mother passed away last week. Ruth lived to see her 90th birthday, had a good life and was cared for lovingly until the end, and there’s nothing to regret except the fact that she’s no longer with us; which, of course, is everything.
A few years back I was staying at the family home, and there had been a small, sharp disagreement, the kind of trivial thing that happens when people share a house and a life over several decades. There was just my mother, my father and me. My mother got up and went out and my father watched her go. Unexpectedly he smiled and said, “You know, when I first met your mother she was the kindest person I’d ever met.” He looked at me. “She still is.” Which pretty much sums up how I feel about her too, a feeling shared by just about everyone who knew her.
‘Spirit of Wick’
Well, it’s time to unmask my batteries and reveal—let’s be honest, no one’s surprised—that I’ve been working secretly on another gansey these last few weeks, when I felt like taking a break from the Wick pattern. (Sometimes it’s nice to unclamp the fingers after so much fine work and just relax with some plain knitting.) This is another revisit of a favourite old pattern, the celebrated Skipper Donald Thomson of Thurso, from Rae Compton’s book. I’ll say more about it next week.
Summer Grasses
I’m knitting it in Wendy’s navy yarn—part of my now-dwindling stash. As many of you will know, Wendy’s has discontinued its range of guernsey 5-ply, and when existing stocks have gone that will be that. Frangipani, blessings be upon their name, now stand alone as the last major supplier. (So long as no one reports them to the monopolies commission we’re probably OK…)
Laid out to dry – net by the harbour
And when I look at the old, black and white photographs of my parents I’m struck by how much fun they seem to be having; they’re always laughing. It’s salutary to remember that many of our parents’ best years didn’t involve us at all. (As Paul Simon said: “Well, that was your mother/ And that was your father/ Before you was born, dude/ When life was great…”)
In my memory it’s always the height of summer, the house is filled with soft, golden light and she’s just laid aside her magazine to share a funny story with us. Whenever I think of her, my mother is laughing still.
[We’ve turned off the comments for obvious reasons. Normal service will hopefully be resumed next week.]
So that’s the Wick gansey finished, cast off, washed and blocked—and very splendid it looks, too, pinned out to dry like this. The body ribbing may be a pain to knit, but it looks fine; it features in quite a few of these old Caithness ganseys, and I’m sure it was designed to keep the jumper tight close to the body. (Those of us with ballooning midriffs, such as could lead to us being placed on our sides and rolled downhill like a barrel, have of course little need of such assistance.) This is the first time I’ve seen the pattern properly, and it’s a really impressive combination. I’ve said before that these Caithness ganseys represent for me the missing link between the patterns of, say, Yorkshire and the Hebrides, and this one is no exception. It’s promised to Wick Museum, to complement the original photo that inspired it. (Next week… something else.)
It was the County Show this weekend. In the field across the road from us great white marquees sprang up, so that glimpsed through the trees they looked like giant spiders’ webs, as though Miller Avenue had turned into Mirkwood overnight. At least this year was dry: the last time they held it here it had poured for several days, turning the show into what felt like great recreation of the Battle of the Somme. I’m not really much of a lad for agricultural shows, as a rule—in the event of a bovine mugging I’d struggle to identify individual cows from a lineup—and it doesn’t help to find barricades erected across the end of one’s street, in what I assumed at first was preparation for a no-deal Brexit. And now, as I write, it’s all coming down; only without the comical whoopee cushion noises my imagination is supplying as the giant tents softly deflate. Still, I’m glad the sun shone, and the wind dropped for a change.
Sheep at the Show
Ah, yes, the wind. I keep forgetting that it’s all that protects us up here from the midges and flies, in much the same way that the Earth’s magnetic field shields us from solar radiation. On the rare occasions the wind drops when we’re out walking the conversation usually goes like this:
Self: “Ah, what a stunning view. Shame about the wind, though.”
(Wind drops. Every orifice and inch of exposed skin is suddenly assailed by clouds of midges and flies, so that one resembles a victim of tarring and feathering, only they’d run out of feathers and decided to use currants instead; all the while jerking convulsively, as though someone had slipped a fairly frisky octopus down one’s trousers.)
Self: “Arg arg arg arg arg, gettemoff gettemoff gettemoff!”
(A fresh breeze springs up.)Self (pausing to expectorate several times): “Ah, what a stunning view. Thank God for the wind!”
Sinclair’s Bay is part of a broad crescent sweeping 20 miles or so from Noss Head near Wick all the way up to Duncansby in the far northeast. Some 2,000 years of coastal defences can be traced in the monuments scattered along the bay. There are the remains of Iron Age brochs, those great round stone edifices that once towered above the cliffs. Debate still rages as to why they were built—whether defensive structures, manor houses or (my personal theory) the ventilation towers of a vast Iron Age underground railway—but Caithness has more ruined brochs than any other part of Britain, many of them strategically placed overlooking the sea.
A foggy day in Wick
Then there are the castles. Sinclair’s Bay has three: Girnigoe in the south, Ackergill Tower in the middle and Keiss (pronounced to rhyme with fleece) to the north. Seen from the sea, Keiss towers dramatically on the cliffs—as impressive in its way as, say, Harlech or Edinburgh castles. It’s only when you view it from the landward side that you realise it’s all a front, that it has breadth and height but hardly any depth, like the mockup Western town in Blazing Saddles. (As I get older I tend to look at medieval castles with a different perspective; I can’t help wondering how they managed all those steeply winding turret staircases in an age without knee replacements or stairlifts.)
Old Keiss Castle and a pillbox
We were over by Girnigoe Castle on Sunday, and I was surprised (and quietly delighted) to find a lone piper playing there. It was a blustery day, though, and the wind whipped the skirl o’ the pipes around so that it sounded from where we were as though someone had trapped an an angry wasp in a jam jar. Perhaps it’s a new initiative by the Scottish Tourist Board, and when you rent a camper van in Inverness you’re also issued with a free piper to enhance the experience as you travel round?
Well. In gansey news I’m getting on for halfway down the second sleeve (in terms of knitting, if not distance) and the end is in sight. If I can keep up this rate I might even finish it next weekend. Of course, we won’t be able to see it at its best until its been washed and blocked, but already it feels like a classic.
Another foggy day in Wick
The third age represented along the Caithness coast is of course the Second World War. After the German invasion of Norway in 1940 Caithness was very much on the front line and Keiss, with its long flat beach, was heavily fortified. Most of the defences have been cleared since, but you can still see numerous pillboxes (machine-gun emplacements) as well as examples of “dragons’ teeth” (concrete anti-tank defences shaped like huge toblerones) above Keiss beach. The beach was mined, reportedly Britain’s longest minefield, and there was even a “flame barrage” (in the event of an invasion, the beach could have been flooded with a petrol-oil mixture and set alight). Impossible to imagine on a peaceful July day in 2019, when there was nothing out to sea save a couple of fishing boats bobbing placidly on the swell, nothing in the air but predatory herring gulls. It probably says something about us that these are the monuments that endure; Philip Larkin once memorably wrote that “what will survive of us is love”—he didn’t go on to add, “and castles and pillboxes”, but maybe he should have.
[Apologies for the late posting – internet gremlins. Margaret]
It’s officially summer: schools across the Highlands have broken up for the holidays, and suddenly the town is full of children doing what children do best, viz., hanging about on street corners looking vaguely menacing, as though they’d managed to catch the first three seasons of the Sopranos before their parents added a parental lock to the satellite box. It’s not been a great summer so far, to be frank. Last week it was 11-12ºC, the rain lashed in by 30mph winds, and you could see the tourists staring grimly through the water-streaked windows of their camper vans at a saturated, grey, lifeless world, as though realising that, after visiting Caithness, death was no longer something to be feared.
And yet, and yet. Every now and then the sun remembers what it’s for, and hastily stubs out its cigarette and puts down its cinnamon latte and actually shines through rare breaks in the clouds. And it’s rather wonderful, like Dorothy waking up in Oz—suddenly the world is transformed, full of colour and life and sound. From about 3.00am the handful of birds who haven’t woken up to find themselves in Denmark start singing their little hearts out—presumably seeking new mates, their old ones having drowned last week—in what is arguably the world’s most annoying dawn chorus. The fields are full of lambs, squelching excitedly through the boggy ground while their mothers, heavy with unshorn fleeces and existential dread, sink slowly into the mud with a general air of pained resignation.
North Baths in the Rain
Meanwhile, we continue to knit. The first sleeve of the Wick gansey is finished: note the cuff, a fancy little number involving cables. Several of the ganseys in the Johnston Collection of old photographs feature variants of this, a very fetching pattern. (It wouldn’t work for my preferred style of knitting long cuffs you can double back and adjust to suit; but it does look very neat as part of a “Sunday best” gansey like this.) I’m on the second sleeve now, and the end is in sight.
Frog Orchid, Dunnet Coronation Meadow
In parish news, Judit has sent me pictures of her latest gansey, which you can see on her (crowded) gallery page. I was struck by the picture of the whole gansey, and thought it wouldn’t be out of place as an illustration from Gladys Thompson’s book, as an example of a classic vintage gansey. It’s another very effective combination of patterns, and many congratulations once again to Judit.
Finally this week, we’ve been watching Brian Cox’s jaw-dropping new series on the solar system and the planets, which I’d urge you to catch if you can. In which spirit, here are two of my favourite quotes on the general wonderfulness of our existence. The first is by theoretical physicist Michio Kaku, who like Professor Cox does an outstanding job explaining science to archivists like me: “Physicists are made of atoms. A physicist is an attempt by an atom to understand itself”. Isn’t that great? The other is by Brian Swimme: “Four and a half billion years ago, the Earth was a flaming molten ball of rock, and now it can sing opera”. Also great! Although … replace the words “sing opera” with “knit ganseys”, Brian, and I think you may be onto something…
You know the apocryphal so-called Chinese curse, may you live in interesting times? Well, I’ve found a new and rather unsettling variant: may you become interesting to the medical profession. Indeed, so many and so various have my ailments become that medical students have started following me around, taking notes; I’m familiar with predatory lawyers acting as “ambulance chasers”, but when the ambulances themselves start getting in on the act you know you’re in trouble.
Orchids and buttercups at Coronation Meadow, Dunnet
About a year ago I had a chest infection, unpleasant enough at the time but easily identified and cured. Ever since then I’ve suffered from the world’s least attractively-named illness, post-nasal drip. It’s not very serious—no heroine of an opera ever died from it, though La bohème might have turned out very differently if Mimi had developed packed sinuses instead of full-blown consumption. The symptoms are a general sensation of breathing mucus instead of air, and the hacking cough of a three-packs-a-day man. Blowing one’s nose produces a sucking, slurping, squelching noise like someone trying to lift a pig, stuck in mud, against its will. One doctor recommended a steroid spray, which resulted in nosebleeds so spectacular that my handkerchief was declared a war zone by the Red Cross, so I decided to just live with it in future. (In bygone days, certain people in rural communities took on the role of “sin eater”, someone who turned up at funerals to literally take on the sins of the deceased person; without getting “needlessly messianic”, in the immortal words of Douglas Adams, I’m starting to think I may be a less creepy but still useful “minor ailments eater”…)
Dunnet Head from Castletown
In gansey news, I’m making good progress down the first sleeve. The original gansey has a diamond trellis border between the body and the yoke patterns, which is replicated on the sleeves. This is the kind of unity in patterns that make these ganseys so satisfying to knit. Because my row gauge is rather less than the original knitter’s, I had to forgo the trellis on the body—I just didn’t have enough rows, and it would have looked wrong ending the body pattern several inches earlier. So I’m aware my gansey isn’t going to be as aesthetically pleasing as the original. (Meh—whatcha gonna do?) I’ve enjoyed knitting these recreations of Caithness ganseys, and this one, like the previous one, is intended for the local museum to complement the photographs. But increasingly I’m thinking the next step is experiment with a blend of Caithness and Hebridean patterns, to create something both spectacular and unique. Watch this space.
Sun on the Sand – Dunnet Beach from Castletown
And it’s been a week of record temperatures across Europe: 45ºC in France, 35º in England, while Wick reached… well, pushing 20º actually. But do you hear me complaining? Never a bit! I do possess t-shirts and shorts, but the whole point of living in the frozen north is that I should never have to wear them. (And let’s face it, there’s enough sadness in life without my knees being displayed in public. One I might get away with, but both of them? I think not.) The weather has been beautiful—blue skies, gentle breezes and sunlight glittering on the wide, blue ocean—but as Wordsworth put it so eloquently, “Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive, but to be just cold enough to wear a gansey was very heaven…”
I’m very sorry to say that my mother passed away last week. Ruth lived to see her 90th birthday, had a good life and was cared for lovingly until the end, and there’s nothing to regret except the fact that she’s no longer with us; which, of course, is everything.
‘Spirit of Wick’
Summer Grasses
Laid out to dry – net by the harbour
