Scarborough / Wick (Donald Murray): Week 6 – 29 April

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.