So this is Christmas, as the poet Lennon observed, And what have you done / Three ganseys finished / And a fourth one well begun. Yes, we’re back in a warm, wild and windy Caithness just in time for New Year, which we shall celebrate in the traditional way, i.e., sitting quietly at home, watching other people party on TV—at gunpoint, if the rictuses of forced jollity on the faces of the studio audience are anything to go by.
I’ve never really got the hang of New Year: you force yourself to stay up past your bedtime, feeling wrecked; you count down the hours and minutes to midnight, and then, after you’ve said “Happy New Year!” and “Wa-hey!” a few times, possibly to strangers, and watched the fireworks, that’s about it. Granted you get the excitement of brushing your teeth at about 12.30-1.00am, but is this enough, I hear you ask? I fear not.
On the plus side, living in the far north of Scotland at this time of year you’re unlikely to be woken up by sunlight streaming through the window at some ungodly hour on New Year’s Day: the gods up here don’t wake up till after 9.00am, and even then they’re more likely to just roll over in bed and leave the day to make its own arrangements. No: I’ll take all the Christmas I can get; I’ve never lost the feeling of Christmas as a special, magical, wonderful, cinnamon-spiced, holy time—but New Year for me has all the excitement of watching the car’s milometer turning over.
Sea Stack at Latheronwheel
Ah well, there’s aways knitting. I’ve now divided front and back, and am well embarked on the yoke pattern. And isn’t it splendid? I have to concentrate, and there’s lots of detail to keep track of: but this I think stands the equal of all but the most elaborate Hebridean patterns. Caithness ganseys really deserve to be better known. (More information on the patterns is set out below.)
And now all that remains is to wish you all a very happy New Year, and even, though this is entirely optional, wa-hey!
TECHNICAL STUFF
This gansey makes a change for me, as it’s an attempt to recreate an original gansey as closely as possible. Obviously it’s not possible to do that exactly, as the old knitters, at least in the north-east of Scotland, seem to have knit on finer needles with finer yarn: but as I’m bigger than the average Scottish fisherman of a hundred years ago, using the fine Frangipani yarn it almost works as a like-for-like transcription.
We had to finagle the patterns very slightly to get them to my size (46 inch gansey in the round). To make a gansey in my size, each side of the body has to be 183 stitches. To give me the extra number of stitches I needed, I added one stitch to the moss stitch border on either side (12 stitches rather than 11), and added cables either side of the tree panels (the original just has a purl-knit-purl detail there). With regard to cables, I’m a bit like Slartibartfast from The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy: I tend to add them whether the pattern calls for them or not, as I feel they give a lovely baroque feel to a gansey. But when I added them and found I had almost the exact number of stitches, I felt the hand of destiny on my shoulder…
Another thing to note is the importance of having the yarn-over rows of the central trees happening on an odd, or right-side-facing-forward row. Other, more experienced knitters may feel differently, but I want to do my yarn-overing on a front-facing knit row, not a purl row.
Also, note that the pattern starts below the gussets. This is the case in the original, though mine starts a little earlier to get all the rows in.
I still have no idea if this will work out: whether it will be too wide, too narrow, too short or too tall—or just right. It’s something of an experiment. If nothing else, I can still donate it to the local museum, as was my intention from the start. And speaking of which, many thanks to the Wick Society for giving us access to the high-resolution image of John McLeod in his gansey; and to Margaret for painstakingly charting it out.
‘Twas the night before Christmas, when all throughout Wick Not a creature was stirring, not even a tick. I’d just gone outside to throw rocks at the moon Before falling down drunk in a whisky-soaked swoon, When I saw on the roof in astonished surprise A sleigh and six reindeer, and a fat man likewise. He was dressed all in red and his beard it was white, And his shouting and curses enlivened the night.
“Oi, Rudolph, you halfwit, alas I’m undone! It’s twenty to midnight and we’ve barely begun, You knew a shortcut, you said, not to worry, There’s plenty of time, we can stop for a curry; You blithering imbecile brain-dead crustacean, Next time I’ll adopt satellite navigation!”
He gazed all around as he blasphemed and cussed, “Where the hell is this anyway?” he asked in disgust. “Sir, this is Caithness,” I told him with pride, “It’s just thirty miles long and it’s thirty miles wide.” “Caithness, eh?” he mused. “Then we’re near Sinclair’s Bay, By God! We can do it, let us be on our way, On Grumpy, on Dopey, on Sleepy and Doc, We can still shove these presents down somebody’s sock— On Sneezy, on Rudolf, and most of all, Me, And if time’s too short we can dump them at sea!”
He sprang onto his sled, with a shake of the rein The man and his team became airborne again. But ere he departed he looked down at me, And called out this message, so bold and so free, “People think I’m a nice guy, but I never forgive; Tell no one about this: I know where you live…”
(A very Happy Christmas from Gordon and Margaret)
The Christmas Tree Festival The Decorated Umbrella Procession Decorated for Christmas: Cabin in Dunnet Forest
The far north of Scotland’s been battered by storms this week, winds gusting up to 70 mph while the rest of the country suffered a shedload of ice and snow. The strongest gales started Friday night, carried on all through Saturday and only ended on Sunday morning; the sort of thing that in bygone days would’ve had any Old Testament prophet worth his manna calling for national repentance in fasting and prayer, but which in our fallen times saw instead the Strictly Come Dancing finals on television. I’m not altogether sure this counts as progress.
After the Storm, Nybster
We awoke to an eerie silence on Sunday, as though we’d accidentally slept through the apocalypse and it was just us and the zombies left to fight it out in the frozen food aisle in Tesco’s. (Incidentally, what exactly do the vegetarian undead eat? Perhaps there’s an untapped zombie market for Quorn textured vegetable protein brains? Would a vegetarian vampire be satisfied with a fake-blood beetroot burger? Mind you, I used to wonder why people fighting vampires bothered with the whole complicated stake-through-the-heart-thing. Surely easier by far to just knock their front teeth out and then watch them wander around with a straw trying to get their prey to stand still…)
Waves in the Harbour, Wick
I don’t like the wind so strong for such a long time: all you can do is hunker down and wait for it to go away, hoping against hope that the crash you heard outside was just the wheelie bin falling over. After all, it’s one thing for King Lear to cry, “Blow winds, and crack your cheeks!” when he’s out camping on some blasted heath; but “Blow winds and tear down the trellis the clematis was climbing up so now we have to go out with another piece of string and tie it up again!” is really quite another matter.
Still, one good thing about knitting is you can do it even while you’re hunkering, and the gansey continues to grow. I’ve finished the lower body, the most structurally robust piece of knitting I’ve ever done—honestly, skyscrapers could be built like this—and I’m now embarked on the chevron just below the gussets.
Waves at Ackergill
Progress from here is a little uncertain, as we’re off on our travels this week, to the bright lights of Edinburgh and on to a family Christmas in Northampton. The yoke pattern is, well, if not actually complicated then requiring a certain degree of concentration, so I’m taking a backup project: a new gansey in Wendy yarn with a plain body, so lots of simple plain knitting, which I can do instead. How much of either gets done, if any, remains to be seen. Remember, there’s only eight more sleeps till Christmas (or, if I include nap time, about 24…).
As the poet said:
The wind is merciless, The plum tree’s taking a beating; Clouds scud past – God’s in a hurry today.
I’ve been thinking recently about fantasy, or fantasy literature to be precise. I grew up devouring books about, as Tolkien wonderfully put it in The Hobbit, “dragons and goblins and giants and the rescue of princesses and the unexpected luck of widows’ sons”. It’s a love that’s never left me, and there’s something about this time of year—drawing the curtains against the long, dark, cold nights and settling down in front of a warm fire with a good book—that makes me want to read fantasy; and children’s fantasy at that.
In the Old High Church churchyard, Inverness
Incidentally, speaking of Tolkien, have you ever noticed how little magic there actually is in his books? Sure, there are magical creatures—elves, dwarves, goblins, trees—but hardly anyone actually does what you’d call magic—in fact, there’s probably more magic in an Indiana Jones film. Gandalf is the main wizard in both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, and to be frank most of the time you could get better results with a cheap cigarette lighter than he does with his staff.
But one reason why Tolkien’s works have survived, and which is overlooked by most of his successors, is that the magic isn’t really the point; ultimately the best fantasy, like the best of any genre, takes you back to yourself. G.K. Chesterton said it best: Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.
Waves & Wind: sand and water at Dunnet Beach
Meanwhile, in gansey news, I’m making good progress up the body. The ribs pull it in, though, so it’s still hard to see the pattern at this stage (I hope the final blocking sorts this out or I’ll have to see how far I can get by only breathing in, as exhaling is unlikely to be an option). Sometime this week I should move on to the border panel; for this gansey is unusual in having the border positioned below the gussets, instead of roughly adjacent.
Inside St Fergus’ Church: the Christmas Tree Festival
And now I’m going to cheat and end with a quote by Terry Pratchett—I was going to say a great quote, but that’s a tautology as far as he’s concerned: “Fantasy is an exercise bicycle for the mind. It might not take you anywhere, but it tones up the muscles that can. Of course, I could be wrong”.
Actually, I was going to end it there; but then I came across this, another gem from Terry, which stopped me in my tracks: “If you don’t turn your life into a story, you just become a part of someone else’s story.” (Hmm. Hope it’s got a happy ending…)
Keep your distance, everyone: I’ve caught a cold. Luckily it’s not the dreaded “man flu”, which scientists now recognise as the most deadly ailment mankind can endure (huggymanlove.com is a reputable, peer-reviewed science journal, right?); and luckily it’s already getting better. But it’s got into my chest, and I’ve developed a sort of cyclical whooping hack of a cough. On hearing me on the street last week two respectably-dressed ladies pressed shillings into my hand, urging me not to spend it all on drink; I sound like someone letting the water out of a bathtub while tickling a hyperventilating donkey.
On the plus side it’s December, which means that it’s practically compulsory to lose oneself in classic winter’s tales of childhood. My personal favourites include Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising, John Gordon’s The Giant Under the Snow, and John Masefield’s The Box of Delights; even Ratty and Mole getting trapped in the wild wood, and spending Christmas Eve in Mole’s old burrow in The Wind in the Willows; and, of course, the daddy of them all, The Muppet Christmas Carol.
It was rather windy last Wednesday
I’ve only to hear certain phrases—”The wolves are running”, “The Walker is abroad”, or “Why, it’s Fozziwig’s rubber chicken factory!”—and I’m there, in a frozen pagan landscape, stamping my feet in the snow beside the stone circle, waiting for the antlered horseman to appear and the wild hunt to begin. Mind you, there was a time one phrase from The Dark is Rising—“This night will be bad, and tomorrow will be beyond imagining”—seemed to sum up my situation at work so well I virtually adopted it as a motto.
Ganseys. I’m slowly making my way up the body of the new gansey. My brain seems to be fighting the pattern—blocks of three knit, followed by purl-knit-purl-knit-purl, and repeat—so it’s not coming automatically, and I have to keep counting and stopping and checking. I’m sure some of this is down to the cold, and the general sense that gravity must’ve increased when I wasn’t paying attention. Plus the ribbed effect draws in the stitches on the needles, so I have to work a little harder to move them round as I go. But it’s making a very pleasing effect, I must say: as if I was knitting one of those cakes with sponge fingers laid upright around the sides.
Reflections of Trees
Finally this week, a story that’s cheered me up immeasurably. I read that a few years ago Aberdeen was voted Britain’s most miserable city, or some such, so a national newspaper sent a reporter up to interview the locals. The first person the reporter spoke to was an old man at a bus stop. He asked him what he thought about the story. The old man threw away his cigarette, glared at the reporter and said, “**** off”.
As the old saw goes, It’s not the cough that carries you off/ It’s the coffin they carry you off in…
So this is Christmas, as the poet Lennon observed, And what have you done / Three ganseys finished / And a fourth one well begun. Yes, we’re back in a warm, wild and windy Caithness just in time for New Year, which we shall celebrate in the traditional way, i.e., sitting quietly at home, watching other people party on TV—at gunpoint, if the rictuses of forced jollity on the faces of the studio audience are anything to go by.
This gansey makes a change for me, as it’s an attempt to recreate an original gansey as closely as possible. Obviously it’s not possible to do that exactly, as the old knitters, at least in the north-east of Scotland, seem to have knit on finer needles with finer yarn: but as I’m bigger than the average Scottish fisherman of a hundred years ago, using the fine Frangipani yarn it almost works as a like-for-like transcription.
Also, note that the pattern starts below the gussets. This is the case in the original, though mine starts a little earlier to get all the rows in.
