Gansey Nation

Here’s a useful tip for all spectacle wearers. If you’re suffering from, as it might be, a touch of migraine, and you wish to freshen up with a hearty splash of water to the eyes, don’t forget to remove your glasses first. Trust me on this. You’ll thank me later.

We have some records from Thurso poorhouse in our archive, and a researcher brought to my attention an extraordinary series of letters written by the overseer to the chairman in the 1880s, concerning the matron. He writes, “the Mischieff arises wholly from the Matron’s dissipated habits when in Liquor. She rails upon them, the inmates retaliate & tell her of her drunkenness and it follows then that she has little control over them”.

Still standing . . .

A month later matters reach a crisis. “I am sorry to inform you that the Matron was outrageously drunk at dinner hour to day, it took the Porter & 3 of the women (inmates) to force her out of the dining hall while the inmates were at dinner, her language was horrible. I sent the Porter for the Policeman who was not at home & now she is ranging through the house striking the doors with violence.”

Unsurprisingly a new Matron was appointed, and in another letter the overseer says he made her predecessor open her suitcases before she left, only to find “4 pairs of blankets with house mark, 2 pairs of sheets, 3 pillow cases, 1 pillow, 6 yards of scouring cloth, 2 dozen patent firewood and 4 cravats” belonging to the poorhouse. (Which makes me think, hang on a minute: firewood?) Honestly, where’s Charles Dickens when you need him?

Spotted in a charity shop

Meanwhile in the wonderful world of ganseys I have at last finished the body of the Wick pattern and am just embarked on the yoke. (This must be what it’s like to have children, putting up with unremitting toil in the hopes that one day they’ll become interesting.) The original gansey has a diamond border separating the yoke from the body, but the whole garment is too finely knit to be replicated by me, even with Frangipani’s fine yarn. So I’m omitting the border (not all Wick ganseys had them) as I want to focus here on replicating the yoke pattern. And the Scarborough gansey grows apace, with back and front finished, shoulders joined, collar completed and the first sleeve begun.

Snow & Gorse on the way to Inverness

Finally I thought I’d share with you a joke. (I understand it’s an old joke, and applies to many cultures, but I was told it this week by a Highlander.) There was a Highland fisherman who returned home from his day’s fishing and unloaded his catch on the harbour quay. A bucket was filled with crabs, and one of them was climbing up the inside until it nearly reached the top. A tourist who was nearby alerted the fisherman to the fact that one of his catch was on the verge of escaping. “Oh, don’t worry,” said the fisherman, “these are Highland crabs: as soon as it looks like one of them might escape all the others will grab hold of him and drag him back down…”

I turned 59 last week, which was a bit of a shock. Not the fact of the birthday as such, which I’ve rather got the hang of by now; but the total. I seem to have lost a decade along the way somewhere, as though my memory has done the equivalent of plastic surgery on my life, to tidy it up—a nip here, say, or a tuck there. And yet, if I add up the years they’re all accounted for; at least they are if I involve a couple of friends, and we all take our shoes and socks off.

Of course, the symptoms of ageing are universal, and every generation has to go through them. (One of Jefferson’s early drafts of the Declaration of Independence began: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that modern music sucks and no one writes proper tunes any more, and the edgy new sitcoms of today just aren’t funny, fact.”) I just can’t help feeling I made a crucial mistake in my pact with Mephistopheles all those years ago: and somewhere there’s a youthful painting of me in an attic that isn’t ageing at all, while here I am in real life…

Primroses at Nybster

In gansey news, I am almost to the shoulders of the back of the Scarborough gansey. I think one of the reasons I’ve always liked this pattern is because it’s essentially one block of one pattern. So many gansey patterns rely on detail for their effect—and very effective it is too, of course. But there’s still a lot to be said for simplicity. Meanwhile I’m still inching (centimetring?) my way up the body of the Wick gansey. The yoke pattern will be the polar opposite of the Scarborough one, and we should reach it in another month or so.

. . . and Primroses at Castle Sinclair Girnigoe

Finally, as it’s May this week, and even in Caithness Spring has definitely sprung, I thought I’d share with you two of my own poems. This time last year I was possessed by the spirit of a Chinese zen poet, albeit one remarkably fluent in contemporary English, and found myself writing a bunch of poems in the old style. Here are two of my favourites:

Hawthorns heavy with blossom,
Shaggy as sheep—
Waiting for the wind to shear them.

*

Full moon in spring—
Only a dog’s solitary bark
Tells me I’m alive.

So there I was, innocently flossing between two of my back teeth, when the floss snagged on something. I wiggled it back and forth to free it and, with a crack resembling part of the Greenland ice sheet giving way, a chunk of tooth broke free, leaving a jagged hole about the size of the cave the dwarves took shelter in in The Hobbit.

I duly betook myself to the dentist, who took a chin-stroking sort of x-ray. Turns out the tooth had an old filling, and decay had taken place underneath the filling, like a sapper tunnelling away invisibly below the enemy’s walls. I didn’t know they could do that! I feel like those characters in Doctor Who, who, evading a Dalek by running upstairs, are just congratulating themselves on a lucky escape when they see the little blighter fire up the rockets and come floating up after them. It hardly seems fair. I shall draw a veil over the next half hour in the dentist’s chair: suffice to say that more than one nerve was removed (“Aha! I see by the way you flinched that that one isn’t dead!”), with the promise—if all goes well—of a root canal to come.

Dunnet Bay from the edge of the forest

It’s lucky I have knitting to console me, while I partake of my dinners through a straw. The Wick gansey continues to grow at about the same rate as the average oak tree, but a time-lapse of previous photographs will reveal a geological sort of progress (at 2 rows a night). The Scarborough—playing the hare to the Wick gansey’s tortoise—on the other hand has moved on to the point that I’ve started the pattern, and the gussets.

Rook

Meanwhile in parish news, Judit has sent pictures of another gansey she has knit, this time in brown. It’s a variant of the classic Staithes pattern, still one of my favourites. The very first jumper I knit was a Staithes gansey-inspired pattern, my entry drug for a lifetime’s addiction now I come to think of it—and it still has a place next next to my heart. (Well, literally, of course, that being the pattern for the yoke, but you know what I mean.) Congratulations again to Judit! The classics are classics for a reason—and doesn’t brown suit it well?

Primroses at Castletown

Meanwhile Easter has arrived. The grass is greener and the sky—on those rare occasions when it isn’t grey—is bluer. As the Song of Solomon says, “The flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land”—though if our land is Caithness, what the turtles are mostly saying is, “Windy, ain’t it?” and, “Got any lettuce?”

So however you like your chocolate eggs (milk or dark, vegan, or, in my case, ground to a fine paste) may your Easter be all your heart and your dentist desires. A very happy time to all.