Gansey Nation

And so Christmas is over for another year, which is always a sentence tinged with melancholy. I hope you got what you wanted; in my case I got a cold that developed unpleasantly, stopping short of flu but not as far as I’d have liked. (There’s a vile advert on TV at the moment for some cold remedy, in which a wife and mother heroically soldiers on with the benefit of said remedy while her partner selfishly lies in bed succumbing to “man flu” – and the smug, self-righteous smile on her face as she listens to the children pelt the poor bloke with snowballs upstairs in his sickbed is enough to persuade us that yes, indeed, there is such a thing as pure evil and that Satan stalks the earth among us disguised as an advertising executive – and also that some conscienceless women are prepared to act as his handmaidens.)

More positively I also got a wonderful, 37-CD box set of music by one of Britain’s greatest composers, Benjamin Britten, and a talking book of the classic novel Nostromo by Joseph Conrad, or “Mr Chuckles” as he was known to his friends, both of which I’m looking forward to exploring in my new life in Edinburgh next year.

My main treat to myself was finishing the pullover, finally. I didn’t quite manage to get it done by Christmas, but on the Saturday after. (In fact I did cast off the cuff on Christmas Eve, but I have a small confession to make: when I picked up the stitches around the neck, all those weeks ago, I made a mistake – not a big one, hardly noticeable in fact – but I knew it was there and I found that, like Poe’s Tell-tale Heart, it just wouldn’t go away. Plus I always try to follow the rule that I’m only allowed one mistake per gansey, and I’d already used up my allowance. So, with a sigh, out it all had to come, and I re-knit the neck. Looks just the same, doesn’t it? But at least my conscience is clear now.)

The last task before washing and blocking is darning in all the ends – and when I turned it inside out my heart sank: I had no idea there were so many. Nothing fancy here. When I join two balls of wool I knit them together for 4 stitches, using both the end of the old ball and the start of the new ball together. This makes for slightly bulky stitches at first sight, but it disappears when the pullover’s finished. Then I leave 3 or 4 inches from the end of each ball dangling loose and continue with the new ball.

Finally, when it’s all done, I scrounge a needle off Margaret and darn all the loose ends through the backs of adjacent stitches (so they won’t show from the front) – usually for an inch or two, just to prevent any chance of their unravelling – and cut the rest of the end off with scissors. Sometimes I get carried away and darn the ends in zigzags that meander whimsically around the pattern; sometimes – usually around the first couple of stitches of shoulder joins – I find one or two little gaps or holes have appeared because my tension was too slack, so I darn the holes shut at the same time.

It takes about an hour and a half all told, and is about as much fun as doing fractions homework on Saturday morning when you’re twelve, but it’s a great feeling when it’s done and you turn your pullover right side out again and you know that it’s finished – all it needs now is a good wash and a stretch, and who among us can honestly say we’re any different?

Time for some more cold remedy…

Happy New Year!

Steady progress this week as I approach the end of the second sleeve; I’ve finished the pattern and am free-wheeling down the inch or so of plain knitting before the cuff. So only a few more rows to go before I can stop counting altogether. (Although I’ve finished the pattern, and no longer have to worry about cabling on the correct rows, I’m still decreasing by 2 stitches every 5 rows along the seam; hence the need to keep score for a little while longer with the old 5-barred gate technique (see picture in week 19)).

I’m tending to knit in 50-minutes-to-an-hour-long sessions, which is the average length of a romantic symphony, or a Mozart piano concerto and a symphony; and in that time I find I’m knitting 7-10 rows, depending on how cold and sluggish my fingers are. (I used to find this when I played the lute, albeit very badly. One day, my fingers would move without conscious thought, flying over the fretboard, every note in place; next day I’d start again, and it would be as if I’d never held the instrument before – painfully slow, clumsy, laborious. So it is with knitting – some days it’s magic, others I progress with all the grace and celerity of a drunken man having a heart attack while trying to make a cup of tea at midnight during a power cut.)

All things being equal, I’d expect to finish the gansey next week, especially as I’ve started my Christmas holiday early. But I’m going away for the second half of the week to stay with a friend and – exciting, isn’t it? – I’ve got another job interview on Wednesday, in Edinburgh, which is a mere 401.6 miles north of where I live in Somerset. On the face of it, this looks like the job of my dreams, and it’s hard not to get my hopes up, but if I’m honest I must admit it’s a long shot. Still it’s nice to think I’m still in the game, and it would be gratifying to go into Christmas with a great job to look forward to – or any job, come to that – and not have to start making desperate savings just yet (“Chilly isn’t it? Throw another orphan on the fire, Scrunchfist.” “Another orphan it is, sir”).

So I may not get much knitting done.

Meanwhile, thoughts are already turning to the next gansey – I’ve ordered some Frangipani navy blue, which is sitting on the table with a knowing, come-hither look in its eyes, the little minx…

All things considered, I’ve had more entertaining weeks – and as this one involved a migraine, 2 hours’ worth of psychometric tests, and a 2-day business planning meeting in Exeter, I think a little self-pity is justified.

As I’ve mentioned in previous blogs, the body I work for is being wound up at the end of next March, but a handful of people will be retained to carry on the good fight in each region, reporting directly to the head office; I’ve got an interview next week to be one of them, and the tests were a preliminary exercise designed to, I suspect, guarantee the interview panel at least one good laugh on the day.

In fact, the verbal reasoning and personality tests were fine (except that they always make you choose between alternatives, each of which is too extreme: “Who do you most admire? Adolf Hitler or Jesus Christ?” – that kind of thing). The numerical one was another matter, though – I didn’t finish it, and I suspect I got most of the answers wrong. But, I tell myself, if the chances of a museum needing to calculate how many trees per hectare to replace after the existing ones have been cut down are slim: or if they’re not, I’m in the wrong profession. (Well…)

But, I hear you ask, surely if you’re that bad at “numerical reasoning”, how do you manage to count all those rows with nary a mistake? The answer, shameful as it is, can be seen in this week’s photos: I cheat, and use a crib sheet. After each row I pop the top off my trusty felt-tip pen and score a short black line in two columns – one for the cables, so I know which row to cable on, and the other for the decreases along the seam. It’s a bit of a nuisance, and I always feel that if the Knitting Police get to hear of it they’ll come and beat me up with rubber needles (so the bruises don’t show), or at least raise their eyebrows in a marked manner.

As for the knitting itself, progress has been slower with all these distractions, but I’m still hanging in there. This week my interview is on Tuesday, and if I get through that there’s another one on Friday with the Chief Executive himself. Who knows what the future holds? But, as Ted Hughes ended a poem about a fox being hunted yet still alive:

“Or will he
Make a mistake, jump the wrong way, jump right
Into the hound’s mouth? As I write this down
He runs still fresh, with all his chances before him.”

[Fox Hunt, from the collection “Moortown”]

That’s me. Still running fresh – for now.