Wick (John More): Week 10 – 19 December

It’s shameless self-promotion time, for I have just self-published a collection of my poems on Amazon. (Or rather, my dear friend Song has formatted and published it for me.) It’s print-on-demand only at the moment, but a Kindle version should be available soon. And why am I launching them on an unsuspecting world? To quote the Old English proverb: Ciggendra gehwelc wile þœt hine man gehere, “Everyone who cries out wants to be heard.”

Snow falling at sunset

Though if you are thinking of buying a copy (and all receipts will go towards running the blog) I should offer a word of caution. You remember The Picture of Dorian Gray? The one where the hero lives a life of carefree debauchery and stays eternally young and debonair, while his portrait ages in his stead and becomes bloated and diseased? Well, if this gansey’s blog is my Dorian Gray, the poems are the equivalent of his portrait. They’re the other side of me, the side that exists so the me who writes this blog can function. They’re just not necessarily what you might call cheerful, so caveat emptor and all that.

Still, just think what a perfect last-minute Christmas present they will make. Imagine the delight on the faces of your children as they go to unwrap that Lego Hogwarts castle they asked for—a little anxious as to the small size of the present, but still hopeful—only to find instead a collection of poetry filled with bleak, existential despair. If that doesn’t set them up nicely for the crushing disappointments of adulthood I don’t know what will. Are the poems any good? The flickers of pain that cross the faces of my poetical friends when they read them suggest not. But they’re out there now, and must take their chance. As the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams said, when asked about his fourth symphony, “I don’t know whether I like it, but it’s what I meant”. Me too, Ralph, me too.

Pancake ice heading out to sea

And now we wish all our readers a very merry, safe and warm Christmas. Next week, join us if you can for the traditional Gansey Nation Christmas singalong.

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TECHNICAL STUFF

Pattern for top of sleeve

It’s amazing how quickly things come together at this stage after such a long haul. So in the last week I’ve finished the front, joined the shoulders, knit the collar, and picked up stitches round the armhole and started the first sleeve. Suddenly it looks like a gansey-to-be.

I picked up 136 stitches around the armhole, or 68 stitches per side. I’ve noticed that my stitch gauge is a little bigger knitting sleeves on double-pointed needles than knitting the body on circular needles. I don’t know why this should be, but it’s not much and it doesn’t bother me enough to experiment with smaller needles. In a pattern with cables, you’d never notice. But in a sleeve like this with plain knitting there’s a risk the top of the sleeve balloons out widely like the puffy sleeves of Hamlet’s shirt. So I cast on slightly fewer stitches—136 instead of 144—and it seems to work out.