Gansey Nation

It’s only July and already I’m longing for autumn. It’s weeks since it rained. Caithness ground is usually as waterlogged as a sponge, and I’m used to that mossy, springy feel you get as your boot sinks through the surface grass into the squelching, sucky embrace of the underlying peat; now I keep jarring my spine on literal terra firma. Very strange. The other day I thought I saw several sheep busy contracting an archimedes screw to get at underground water, but as soon as they saw me they broke up and started sauntering about eating grass and bleating innocently. I wan’t fooled, though.

It’s hot, too—well, hot for Caithness. Temperatures keep sneaking up into the low twenties (what is this, California?). So on Saturday, driven half-mad by the unforgiving heat of 23º, and determined to avoid England winning the football on TV, we took a trip to the Grey Cairns of Camster.

As regular readers will know, this is one of my favourite places in Caithness (and the world). It consists of two great stone cairns erected some 5,000 years ago on a hillside a few miles south of Wick. They’ve been reconstructed—unless Neolithic Caithnesians were ahead of their time in glass skylight technology—and you can crawl inside and stand in the central chambers. The cairns were disturbed long before modern archaeology, but burnt bones and the remains of skeletons were found inside. Why were they built? What did people do here? Whose bones are they? We’ll never know.

All of which is fine by me: in fact, these are the wrong questions. Modern archaeologists have decided that Neolithic beliefs centred around a form of ancestor worship, but you only have to substitute the word “relative” for “ancestor”, and think back to that last Christmas party, with great-uncle Albert dad-dancing to Slade and great-aunt Phoebe necking Baileys from the bottle, to see how misguided this idea is. No, the past is wonderfully undiscoverable. All we leave is physical remains; the bit between our ears—the bit that really matters—we take with us when we go.

In parish news, Lois has come up on the inside track with a stunner, another Flamborough gansey (different pattern) in cheerful cherry red. You can read more about it on her gallery page—and note the saddle shoulder strap with the cable running down the sleeve. Many congratulations to Lois!

My own Flamborough is nearly finished—I’m on the final cuff and should finish it in a day or so. (The weather’s so hot, mind you, I can’t promise I’ll be modelling it anytime soon.) I still can’t recall a gansey I’ve enjoyed so much to knit. The colour seems to suit the pattern perfectly, too. In fact my only concern now is that all the cables and purl rows continue to pull it in after blocking, so I end up inadvertently inventing the world’s first gansey surgical bodystocking…

Well, that’s midsummer over with. The spinning top of time has passed its zenith and already a wobble, imperceptible but there all the same, has crept into the rotation of the Earth. The nights draw in and the sun rises a minute or two later every couple of days. Meanwhile summer continues to frolic innocently, like a child playing in the park whose mother’s just snuck a first glance at her watch. My phone tells me there are only 184 sleeps till Christmas.

Time’s been on my mind recently, prompted by the news that Who Framed Roger Rabbit is 30 years old. 30 years! Sleeping Beauty must have felt like this when she woke up from her long slumber. (“Wait—Sergeant Pepper was how many years ago now? Seriously? What about Dark Side of the Moon? No way! By the way, honestly, I’d love to stop for another kiss but does this castle have a bathroom?”) I find myself trying to see if I’ve overlooked a decade of my life somewhere, maybe in my forties when I wasn’t paying close enough attention. But they all seem to be accounted for: it’s just the years and months and days that’re a bit hazy.

I was on a training course last week. There was a stunned silence when I revealed that not only had personal computers not been invented when I was at university, I can remember when pocket calculators came in. The first portable cassette players appeared at our school in 1971, and I can remember sitting hunched by the radio, fingers hovering over the “play” and “record” keys, to pirate songs off the Sunday night Top 20 countdown; listening as carefully as a safecracker for the infinitesimal pause when the DJ stopped talking before the music began. Now I can hear a song, look it up on my phone, download a copy, then stream it through my hifi, all by just flexing one thumb.

[/caption]In gansey news I’ve finished the collar and started on the first sleeve. There are 151 stitches in the sleeve, slightly more than I usually have, to compensate for the way the pattern pulls in. (This is a result both of the cables, and all the purl columns.) After the gusset, I’m decreasing at a rate of 2 stitches every 5th row. The more eagle-eyed among you will already have spotted that the diamonds are two stitches narrower than on the body (an aesthetic choice—but it was also not unusual for sleeve patterns to be smaller than body patterns).

And so I carry a jumble of memories inside me, a certain mindset, invisible as tree rings, but which date me just as certainly: such as looking at the track listing on an album and instinctively breaking the songs into Side A and Side B. On the plus side, I’m old enough not to feel the need to understand hip-hop, or modern opera. On the down side (or Side B, as I like to think of it), I fear I shall carry the lyrics of “Donald Where’s Your Troosers” with me to the grave…

Middle age affects us all differently. Some people develop a hitherto unexpected interest in radio programmes about gardening; while others, usually of the chappish persuasion, splurge out on sports cars or motorcycles. In my own case, however, I find I am afflicted with braces.

A word on terminology. I’m talking about those elasticky thingies that go over your shoulders and hold your trousers up, not the metal attachments to straighten teeth, nor the lacy bits that enable young ladies (in old films and on websites dedicated to particular tastes, or so I’m told, not that I’d know from personal experience of course, especially during work time after the unpleasantness) to keep their stockings up.

I first started wearing braces a year or so back when my various mental health issues saw my weight fluctuate by over half a stone in a few months. My profile resembled an animation of the phases of the moon, waxing and waning with the pull of the tides. At my heaviest you could have lain me on my stomach, put a magnet in my socks, given me a hearty spin and used me for a compass; at my lightest someone from work, when I refused a piece of cake on the grounds that it was full of calories, glanced at my waistline and said disgustedly, “I’ve seen more fat on a chip!” No belt could stand the strain.

Along the way I discovered that braces used to be considered underwear, and were discreetly hidden under the waistcoat; only when waistcoats went out of fashion was it acceptable for braces to be visible (a sensible development, I feel, given the alternative was the potentially more shocking sight of men shuffling about with their trousers round their ankles). The belt didn’t really take over until World War Two, when it was used in army uniforms, and then in the low-slung jeans look of the 1950s and 60s.

All other considerations aside, I prefer to model my style on that of the Soggy Bottom Boys in the film O Brother, Where Art Thou? The height of sartorial perfection, one feels.

Now, every now and again, when knitting a gansey, the gansey fairies (another web search I don’t recommend you to make at work) smile on you and things just click. I decided when I started this gansey that I wouldn’t try to calculate the number of diamonds I could exactly fit on a side: I’ve tried this before and it never works out. This time I thought I’d take it as it comes, and if that meant I was left with a half- or quarter-diamond, then so be it. But lo! Imagine my pleasure when I reached the top of the back and found that, give or take a quarter of an inch or so, I have exactly eight diamonds. So my heartfelt thanks to the gansey fairies (Cable, Purl and Gusset, good names for cats now I think of it) and it’s on to the front.

Finally this week, the phrase “belt and braces” of course refers to a safety-first approach, leaving nothing to chance. Leaving aside the fact that, in braces etiquette (who knew?), one should never wear a belt with braces, the last word on this was surely said by Henry Ford: “How can you trust a man that wears both a belt and suspenders? The man can’t even trust his own pants.”