Wick (John More): Week 12 – 3 January

Well, it’s a brand new year fresh out of the box with its batteries fully charged, so here’s a very warm welcome to 2023. Let’s hope it’s better than the last few years which have felt uncomfortably like the End Times, visited as they were by the rebranded Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: War, Pestilence, Cost of Living Crisis, and Brexit. 

I’m now officially too old to stay up and see in the new year: it disrupts my sleep pattern and I always wake up with a splitting headache, which rather takes the gloss off things. Besides, I’m a New Zealander, so I can celebrate an antipodean new year at the more civilised time of noon and get it over early. But life always finds a way, as the man said, and this year my plans sadly ganged aft a-gley.

Snow on the skylight

Usually by 11.00pm on New Year’s Eve I’m nestled all snug in my bed/ While visions of Hawaiian dancing girls sugar-plums dance in my head. This worked fine during the pandemic, but of course the world has now reopened and I was rudely awakened before midnight by the sound of the Wick Hogmanay Street Party—possibly the four saddest words in the English language—blasting out live music and someone shouting “Woo-hoo” over loudspeakers till 1.00am. It took me hours to get back to sleep; and so, yes, I welcomed in the new year with a headache. The best way to describe what it feels like is to quote the great Ford Prefect in Douglas Adams’s Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy:
“It’s unpleasantly like being drunk.”
“What’s so unpleasant about being drunk?”
“You ask a glass of water…”

Dusting of Snow

But do I begrudge the revellers their revels? Never in life: for it’s a poor heart that never rejoices, and once a year I’m happy to take one for the team. So, in the spirit of one lighting a candle instead of cursing the darkness, let us raise a glass of orange juice and a couple of aspirin and wish a very happy New Year to all our readers: happy knitting, and may our stitches and our spirits never drop!

Winter on the marsh

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TECHNICAL STUFF

I wanted to finish the gansey in time for New Year, just to keep things neat, which meant quite a lot of knitting over the festive season (luckily I was helped by some wretched weather, which discouraged much venturing out of doors). So I’m delighted to draw a line under 2022 with this completed gansey, washed, blocked and with the ends darned in. It’s another stunner from the Johnston Collection of old photographs, simple but detailed, and I look forward to taking it out for a spin once it’s properly dried. Next up I’m starting 2023 by revisiting another Wick pattern, one of the really fancy ones, and I hope you’ll join us as we embark on another exciting adventure next week.