Gansey Nation

It’s been blowing a gale here for the best part of four days now—constant gusts upwards of 50 mph rattling the windows and shaking the doors. The trees have given up any thoughts of celebrating the arrival of spring by putting out leaves, and instead are focusing just on not being uprooted. Every now and then a gull sails past the window backwards, driven towards Ireland on an easterly breeze, a puzzled frown on its face as if it can’t quite work out why flapping its wings doesn’t seem to be having the usual effect.

I learned a valuable recycling lesson the other day, viz. that if you want to keep your private life, well, private in these sorts of conditions, it’s best to weigh down the lid of your bin with a heavy stone. It’s not a good look to be caught leaping across your neighbours’ lawn like a Victorian butterfly collector after a heavy night on the laudanum, desperately clutching at fluttering pages ripped from Thong Weekly, or the Pencil of the Month double-page centrefold from What Archivist. (Or—*cough*—so I would imagine—er—according to a friend.)

Confession time. Some not great news this week—I’ve been signed off work after experiencing a recurrence of the symptoms I had last year, when I was diagnosed with an anxiety depression. At least this time I can recognise the signs, and I’m still on the antidepressant medication, so hopefully this will just be a short episode. But I feel a bit like Frodo in the Lord of the Rings, who “was seriously wounded and it will never really heal”—except that I’m a lot taller; and whereas Frodo saved the world, when I was his age I saved loose change; other than that, pretty much identical, I think.

In the short term it will give me more time for knitting, which I’ve found is also a very positive form of therapy. I have finally completed the body, both shoulders and the collar (in knit 2/ purl 2 ribbing, casting off in pattern). I’ve picked up the stitches for the first sleeve and have just decreased the gusset out of existence: now for the rest of the sleeve. [Apologies for the quality of the gansey photo this week—Margaret’s on her travels again. Normal service should be resumed next week.]

When I was ill ask year I couldn’t do any writing, my head was too messed up. But when I began to feel better, I wrote some poems to try to articulate—to myself as much as anyone—what the illness actually felt like, albeit obliquely. Some of the poems are, quite frankly, terrible; some maybe not too bad. But with others their quality was neither here nor there—irrelevant because the poems were, in some sense, true. This one still feels to me like the truest of the lot.

The world is folded lengthways,
Turned at a right angle and folded again,
Then again
And many times again
Until it is too tight to bend—
It is all the god can do to hold it fast.

Then he lets go—
It springs apart, writhing as it opens,
Knotted like a broken flower,
All angle and crease,
Twisted so badly out of shape
It can never lie flat again.

Europe has been socked in with extreme wintry weather all week, and, as Brexit has not officially happened yet, that meant Britain got it too. Of course, living in the farthest of norths, in the Lowland Highlands of Scotland, this is not actually all that unusual. (Or, as Judit of this parish observed, in Britain this was christened “The Beast from the East”; in Finland they called it “Wednesday”.) In any case, Wick has its own microclimate and didn’t get a lot of snow; but the roads to the north and south of us were blocked, and the snow gates were closed in the high passes on the road from Inverness.

By mid-morning on Friday Tesco’s had run out of fresh milk and were having to make up the online orders with baby milk (this raised a number of questions, some of them biological, but I certainly was not the man to ask them). Amid fears of a recurrence of the Great Quinoa Riots of 1969, checkout staff were being sworn in as special constables and undergoing baton training with stale baguettes in the frozen goods aisle. For an afternoon civilisation teetered in the balance, as the population of Caithness faced the prospect of a breakfast of cornflakes soaked in Irn Bru (or as they call it in Scotland, “Sunday”).

Bridge over the Grand Union Canal

Well; it got slightly warmer, the roads reopened, and Caithness was once more a land flowing with milk and honey. And I found myself wondering how I would tell the tale to my grandchildren, supposing I had been careless enough to have any. Somehow, “Come gather round, children, and I’ll tell you the epic story of the great freeze of 2018 that lasted just over three days and Tesco’s almost ran out of milk” doesn’t quite have the ring I feel it ought to…

Ice on the canal

Luckily for me, the gansey is big enough now to serve as a blanket—well, all right, two blankets—so even though the temperatures outside have hovered around -1 to -3ºc I’ve been able to knit to stay warm, an incentive if ever there was one. I am about 8 inches up the front, and it will soon be time to think about dividing for the shaped neck. I am now on my tenth ball of 100g yarn; and I haven’t begun to grow tired of the pattern, which is a good sign.

Finally, Margaret is still 600 miles away away in Northamptonshire with my family. But she’s sent some pictures of the fields and canal near my parents’ house, which are included here. (My favourite song by Neil Young is called “Helpless”. The first stanza goes, “There is a town in North Ontario / Dream comfort memory to spare / And in my mind I still need a place to go / All my changes were there.” Substitute “house” for “town”, and “Northamptonshire” for “North Ontario”, and that’s my childhood. It’s still home. All my changes were there. Damn you, Neil.)

Winter textures

Hi, voice of experience here. I thought I’d start this week with a word of advice. When someone you know is ill—as it might be with a respiratory infection—and has coughed so hard they’ve pulled not one but two muscles in their side and shoulder so that it hurts when they breathe, and are under orders to lie very still; when, as I say, you know someone in this situation, it’s probably not a great idea to send them absurd cat videos from the internet to cheer them up.

Clouds over Stroma

You’d think I’d know better by now, but apparently not. Oh look, a cat video, I’d think, innocently clicking on the link on my iPad. Then there’d come a brief pause while I’d watch with a growing sense of unease, followed by a suppressed snort of laughter, causing my cheeks to bulge like a hamster being inflated with a bicycle pump. The snort, probing for an exit, would find its way into my nose and, after a few seconds of steadily mounting pressure, would explode, taking with it whatever had been blocking my sinuses and distributing it over the sheets like a glistening volcanic ash cloud.

By now I’d be gasping for air, only for this to strain my pulled muscles and cause me to cry out with pain. But I couldn’t stop laughing either, while the now disregarded cat carried on serenely, its video stuck in a loop. So I’d thrash about in the bed like a newly landed halibut, in a loop of my own, making a sort of “Skrrrt—hur—wheeee—arrgghh!—shutsshutsshut” noise, until gradually the fit passed and I was able to close the tab and wait for the world to stop spinning.

Well, I’m delighted to say that the infection is wearing off, and I am almost back to my old self. One sign of this is that I am knitting again, for the first time in several days. It was a bit of a slog at first—it sounds stupid, but I had to recall the mechanics of how to make a stitch, then a purl, and then get back into the pattern. Even then it was as if I was picking up someone else’s knitting. But this passed quickly enough, and I’m almost back in the zone: I’m not so far from finishing the back now.

Also, my brother is out of hospital and convalescing, many thanks for all the expressions of good will last week; and Margaret has gone down to help out for a few weeks, so once again the quality of pictures will drop perforce, for which our apologies.

One good thing about feeling better is that I was finally able to stagger to the bathroom to trim my beard, which was becoming a touch Old Testament prophet-ish round the edges. Or as my old friend Yeats famously put it:

And what rough archivist, his stubble grown long at last,
Slouches towards the bathroom to be shorn?

Hmm. Haven’t coughed for a while. Time for another cat video, I think…