Wick (George Bremner): Week 9 – 12 September

“For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground/ And tell sad stories of the death of kings,” as Shakespeare’s Richard II poignantly observed. Of queens, too: for, as you may perhaps have heard, Britain is now officially in mourning for the death of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.

When I was younger I was something of a republican, feeling that a monarchy had no place in a serious, mature, modern democracy. But then I remembered that I lived in a country which had voted to name a scientific research ship “Boaty Mcboatface”; which has an unelected second chamber of Parliament, the House of Lords; and which now has noted climate change sceptic Jacob Rees-Mogg as its *checks notes* minister for climate change. At which point it dawned on me that adjectives like mature, modern and serious are, perhaps, a touch optimistic. (A propos of nothing, someone once labelled Rees-Mogg “The Haunted Pencil”; I don’t know why, but it cheers me up no end whenever I hear his name.)

My only brush with royalty came just over a decade ago, when one of Charles’s brothers, Edward, earl of Wessex, officially opened a new Scottish archive centre. I’d been invited to host the event, and it was something of a revelation. He was amusing, self-deprecating, made time for everyone, spoke to everyone, listened, and made each person feel a little special. And suddenly I got it: it wouldn’t have been the same with a politician (half the room would have voted for the other side) or a celebrity, when it would have been all about them. He made it about us. I was, a little to my own surprise, genuinely impressed.

Stopping for a cuppa

I was also a little surprised to find how touched I was by the passing of Her Majesty: touched by some of the tributes (especially the ones involving Paddington), touched by the grief of the family, and also by the memories it brought back of some of the losses in my own life, especially of my mother and (just recently) her sister. The Queen, God bless her, is dead: long live the King. And if another’s grief ever seems excessive or misplaced, well, maybe we should remember Benedick’s words in Much Ado About Nothing: everyone can master a grief but he that has it.

Waves on the harbour wall

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TECHNICAL STUFF

So, the sleeve. In the original photo, George’s gansey has repeats of the pattern bands all the way down to the cuff. I’m not doing that for a couple of reasons. Firstly, and obviously, because I’m lazy. And secondly, because I don’t particularly like the look of a fully-patterned sleeve on a half-patterned body. It just looks a bit top-heavy to me, like a gansey designed for orcs (I like to think that Aragorn encouraged the surviving orcs to take up fishing for herring after the fall of the Dark Lord). But it’s just a question of personal taste. I cast on 137 stitches round the armhole, and after the gusset am decreasing at a rate of 2 stitches every 5 rows.The sleeve will be about 15.5 inches shoulder to cuff; the cuff will be 6 inches standard k2/p2 ribbing, folded back on itself.

Loch Watten

Now, I don’t know if this is useful or not. When I’m knitting purl rows on straight, double-pointed needles, try as I might I can’t get the stitches an even size across the join from one needle to the next: either they’re too loose, and they sag; or I overcompensate, and they end up tight and tiny. So I’ve got into the habit of just slipping the last 3 or 4 stitches from those on the needle I’ve just done onto my new needle. This means that I start my new needle with 3 or 4 purl stitches already completed, sitting there—i.e., the join/ transition point between needles is now 3 or 4 stitches back, it’s already happened—and I can carry on with my purl row, and the tension is automatically the same in every stitch. It only takes a couple of seconds per needle, and the effect is, well, seamless.