Gansey Nation

A still from the 1930s classic, “The Maltese Gansey”…

I got into an argument the other day with someone—well, I say it was an argument, but this is Britain so we didn’t actually come to blows and I wasn’t left groping around on the floor for fragments of my teeth; but we definitely raised our eyebrows at each other in a meaningful sort of way—about the literary merits or otherwise of the Harry Potter series. My interlocutor took the position that the books were badly written and would not survive, while I respectfully disagreed.

Clouds over Dunnet Beach

Now, I’m happy to argue the toss with anyone over values; but when people say that a work of art won’t last, what they usually mean is that they can see no value in it and they hope it won’t. Anyway, predicting the tastes of the future is a mug’s game. JS Bach went out of favour for a century after his death, and performances of Mahler’s symphonies were rare as hen’s teeth for 50 years after his; now you can’t turn on the radio without hearing them. Walter Scott was the Stephen King of his day—Waverley Station in Edinburgh still remains the only railway station named after a novel—but who now reads his books?

If I’m ever tempted to get out my crystal and try my hand at a spot of ball-gazing, I remember the British music critic James William Davidson (1843-80). He famously opined that Wagner couldn’t write music; that Berlioz was a “vulgar lunatic”; and (my favourite, and one I’m saving up for a special occasion) Liszt was “talentless funghi”. And I console myself with the wise words of Jean Sibelius: no one ever put up a statue to a critic.

(Look, it’s not really this colour, OK…?)

In gansey news, I’m making good progress down the first sleeve. This sort of pattern band appears in the ganseys in several of the Johnston Collection photographs, so it seems to have been something of a Caithness feature. But for some reason I struggled with it: the endless knit two, purl one sequence stubbornly failed to lodge itself in my brain, and I found that unless I concentrated hard I naturally defaulted to a knit two, purl two rhythm, and had to keep going back, unpicking and knitting bits over. But it’s a striking effect, and no doubt I just need more practice.

Sunset at Sarclet Harbour

Finally, the poet WH Auden summed up the attitude of posterity to literary merit. Writing of the controversial French poet and dramatist Paul Claudel, in his poem In Memory of WB Yeats, Auden quipped:

Time that with this strange excuse
Pardoned Kipling and his views,
And will pardon Paul Claudel,
Pardons him for writing well.

[Apologies for the poor quality/ vivid colours of the photos this week – Margaret’s away just now, and my iPhone seems to be set on either “Humphrey Bogart” or “fluorescent blue” – normal service hopefully resumed next week…]

The far north of Scotland is being battered by deep depressions just now. (I mean this in a meteorological sense rather than a spiritual one, of course; since the doctors put me on antidepressant medication I rather feel, to quote The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, that anything I still cannot deal with is therefore my own problem.) But then that’s the price you pay for living here: as the old joke about the BBC weather report goes, “Severe gales are forecast, so viewers in England and Wales are warned to stay indoors and avoid travel; and for viewers in Scotland, you’ll need your coat…”

Top wind speed in Wick last week was 74 mph, which really isn’t a lot of fun. Caravans were blown across the main north-south route through the Highlands, bridges were closed and a convenience store had its roof torn off. The wind blew straight down from the north and in Thurso it lifted the sand up off the beech and on through the town, creating an eerie drifting-fog effect, as though a stray group of Nazis had foolishly decided to open the Ark of the Covenant on Thurso esplanade for a lark.

Confused Daffodils

On the plus side, I’m about two-thirds of the way up the front of John Macleod’s gansey, and have set up base camp preparatory to making the final assault next week. I’m deliberately knitting more slowly with this pattern: it’s easy to make mistakes when I’m tired, and every other row I stop and count the number of stitches in the centre panel to make sure I’ve done all the yarn overs in the right places and still have the correct number of stitches.

Sunset on the riverbank

And shall I tell you something rather impressive? This is actually being knit with two separate dye lots of Frangipani sea spray yarn (two 500g cones). I knew it was a risk, because you can end up with visible lines where the colours don’t-quite-match; but as I had the two cones to hand, and was knitting the pattern as an example, I thought I’d take the chance. But here’s the thing: I can’t see the join, even in our currently elusive daylight. Sometimes fortune favours the casually reckless; and all credit to Frangipani for the consistency of their dyes.

St Fergus’ from the riverside path

As I write this the wind is getting up again, a mere 50 mph this time. So I’m going to finish with four lines by Li Po, the great Chinese poet and drinker. (It’s strange to think Li was writing tranquil poems like this while across the globe the Vikings were just starting to think it might be fun to bring down western civilisation.) In this extract he has come down from Zhongnan mountain; it’s dark and he’s stopped by the farmhouse of a friend for a drink:

We sang to the tune of the wind in the pines;
And we finished our songs as the stars went down,
When I being drunk and my friend more than happy,
Between us we forgot the world.