Gansey Nation

It must be autumn: the leaves here are turning golden, just briefly, before being stripped from the branches by the gales and turned into compost by the rain. It has rained a lot. There’s an old sea shanty whose opening verse is: Oh the rain it rains all day long / Bold Riley-o, Bold Riley / And the northern wind, it blows so strong / Bold Riley-o has gone away. And I can’t help thinking, if Bold Riley had been living in Caithness I’m not altogether surprised.

Trees by the river

Here by the coast at least it’s not too bad. The ness of Caith—the promontory whose tip is at Duncansby Head, near John O’Groats—is a rocky triangle rising sheer out of the North Sea: surplus rain cascades away over the cliffs in waterfalls like water from the scuppers of a ship. But inland it’s another story and the ground is fairly saturated. Every now and then I pass a cow in a field, submerged past its fetlocks in mud, gazing at the passing cars resignedly as if to say, Little help?

Ishmael in Moby-Dick famously went to sea whenever it was a damp, drizzly November in his soul. But what do you do if it’s a damp, drizzly November out of doors—and it’s only October? Well, knitting is part of the answer, clearly.

Loch Stemster, looking towards Achavanich Stones

I have finished the back and am now embarked up the front. So far so good. The secret with knitting this sort of pattern back-and-forth is to ensure that the alternate plain rows are knit on the front-facing side, and the pattern row on the back (or purl) row: I find knitting an entire row a lot easier than purling it. It’s a very straightforward pattern to knit, very relaxing, and just what I needed. It suits the navy yarn, too. But I must admit my thoughts are already straying to my next project: a rather fancy Wick gansey from the Johnston Collection of photographs; a pattern that has, to the best of our knowledge, never been charted before. More on this in December, if everything goes to plan.

Keiss Harbour

Finally this week, few stories have given me as much pleasure as the one about a Coca-Cola vending machine in New Zealand, the land of my birth. In a move that backfired more than a little, the machine apparently displayed a greeting in what the company obviously thought was a disarming blend of te reo Māori (the language of the indigenous population) and English: “Kia ora, Mate,” or “Hello, mate”. Unfortunately, “Mate” in te reo means something quite different; and the message actually given was, “Hello, Death”…

I wandered lonely as a cod
That plumbs the deeps ‘midst hake and eels,
When all at once I saw a pod,
A herd, of fifty swimming seals;
Silent, save a booming cough,
Waiting patiently for the German tourists to bugger off.

It’s not often I compare myself to Wordsworth, but just as the great poet was moved to pen the most famous poem in the English language when he encountered a wide expanse of daffodils on the shores of Lake Ullswater one windy day, so we were utterly stunned to find no fewer than fifty seals gliding through the shallow waters of Sarclet Harbour, just south of Wick, last weekend.

It had been a grey, wet, blustery autumn day, not the kind of weather to lure you outdoors, but late in the afternoon it cleared enough to make remaining inside seem like the cowards’ option. So we drove down to Sarclet to see how the offshore wind farm was coming along: and the answer was, apace. (Soon the horizon will shrink from the rim of the world to just nine miles; and the Wordsworth in my soul can’t help regretting that.) But it was what was happening inshore that took our breath away.

At first it looked like whitecaps in the harbour, incongruously, or dozens of little black buoys. Then we saw the snouts of some fifty seals bobbing in the water. Fifty! I’ve never seen so many seals in one place. Autumn is the time of year when most seals up here give birth, and Sarclet—a small, abandoned, mostly secluded, sheltered harbourette—is one of the places where they come. The water was shallow enough to let you see them swimming underwater. Every now and again one of them would utter a wailing cry, as of a lost soul in torment; not so very tormented, though—more as if a lost soul had realised he hadn’t put enough money into the parking meter.

Autumnal Puddles

There were a couple of German tourists down on the beach taking photographs, while fifty seals bobbed in position, staring reproachfully at them, hoping they’d take the hint and go away so the seals could come on land for a bit of a breather. They didn’t, of course; and eventually the disappointed herd swam off in dribs and drabs to try their luck elsewhere. How inconsiderate, we thought. DH Lawrence, as so often, said it best, in the ending of his magnificent poem, Snake:  And so, I missed my chance with one of the lords / Of life. / And I have something to expiate: / A pettiness…

TECHNICAL STUFF

It’s time to reveal the pattern. After a few weeks toying with this one or that, I’ve decided to revisit the classic Vicar of Morwenstow pattern. There are several reasons for this. First of all, I had to abandon my planned Flamborough gansey, as the yarn is just too thick for the sort of detail it demands—it will have to wait its turn with the rather more reliable Frangipani. (Or as I think of it, Wendy’s really let herself go…) So I’d already resolved to knit a more textured gansey, rather than one with lots of different pattern bands and cables.

Then I was going to knit The Lizard pattern, in three bands. But I had to abandon that as well, because 10 rows to the inch wouldn’t give me all the rows I’d need to do it justice. Now, this Morwenstow pattern isn’t banded—it covers the yoke in a single panel like the classic Scarborough basket stitch (another pattern I have in mind for this yarn)—so I don’t have to worry about the yoke being too long or too short: I can stop when it’s the right length.

Also, as I’ve said before, I have at least another gansey’s worth of this particular yarn and dye lot. So this is a good way for me to establish the row and stitch gauge, so I can plan the next one better, whichever pattern I ultimately choose.

I wasn’t satisfied with my previous attempt at this pattern, either. I did it at a time when I was changing my stitch gauge, and it came out far too saggy. The great, if controversial, composer Richard Wagner was never happy with his opera Tannhäuser, and before he died he said he felt he still owed it to the world. I feel the same way about a Morwenstow gansey. It’s time to set things right!

Oh, and my last reason: I really like the pattern and want one in navy…

Here’s a milestone for you: this is my 500th post on this blog. It’s statistics like this that make me feel that it would—if I were, say, an elderly, hard-working sheepdog—be about time for pa, surreptitiously slipping the family shotgun under his coat, to regretfully announce to ma and the kids that it’s time I took a trip to “sheepdog hospital”. (And à propos of nothing, this raises an interesting question: do insomniac sheepdogs count sheep to relax, or is that too much like work?)

Space Stations

Sheep and dogs have been much on my mind this week, ever since I came across an interesting insult in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. Sir Toby Belch—winner of the 1602 BAFTA for Most Subtly Named Character in a Play—exasperated by the uptight steward Malvolio’s arrogant airs and graces, exclaims, “Wouldst thou not be glad to have the niggardly rascally sheep-biter come by some notable shame?” And I thought: you what?

Seaweed and Stones, Nybster

Turns out a sheep-biter refers to a dog that, well, you’re ahead of me already, bites sheep; and by extension, someone who persecutes the innocent. Isn’t that great? For Malvolio is a humourless killjoy, clamping down on the drunken revels of Sir Toby and his cronies; and so “niggardly rascally sheep-biter” manages to be both witty and insulting at the same time. I plan to use it at my next appraisal. English is so versatile, for all that Joseph Conrad once complained that writing in it, compared with French, “was like throwing mud at a wall”. He meant it as an insult; I take it as a compliment.

Noss Head

In gansey news I am well embarked on the body of my navy project. But I’m two balls in and the yarn is still periodically thick and unwieldy, as if someone had misunderstood the idea behind lace knitting and was using the cocoons instead of the thread. Although I cast on my standard number of stitches—336—for the welt, I decided to only increase this by 16 stitches for the body, as I was concerned it would knit up too big. This is starting to look like a good decision; we’re talking seriously chunky here.

And so we leave the world of Shakespearian insults for now. There are so many to chose from: “Would thou wert clean enough to spit upon”; “I’ll beat thee, but I would infect my hands”; and “I scorn you, scurvy companion”, the latter always useful when someone asks for a lift home from work when it’s raining. But that will have to wait for another time.

For now I have a new motto: Gansey Nation: throwing mud at a wall 500 hundred words at a time…