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Week 7: 16 – 22 February

9how7aNow, I’m not saying I’m proud of it, but every now and again I seem to shed some forty of my almost fifty years, and revert to my inner eight-year-old. It happened again recently when I picked up a copy of Thomas Hardy’s early novel “A Pair of Blue Eyes” and discovered that chapter 18 is entitled “He Heard Her Musical Pants”. This has cheered me up through some difficult days recently, and has popped into my mind at odd moments – when I’ve been introduced to the Keeper of the National Archives of Scotland, say – and the thought of what sounds they made has made stuff come out of my nose at the most inappropriate times.

9how7bAh well. You’ll see from this week’s pictures that progress is still slow. I spent most of last week in Edinburgh, right enough, and a fair portion of it was spent in my hotel room, listening to the streets below being dug up in preparation for a new tramway for the city. But I didn’t get as much done as I’d hoped, partly because I had homework to do most nights (and how unfair is that?) but also because I was usually just too tired. In fact, some nights it was as much as I could do to slump on the bed and watch the cricket test match between England and the West Indies unfold (5 days and it still ended in a draw – what a great game cricket is!).

This is, once again, the time in the life of a gansey when I run the risk of putting it down and finding several months have elapsed before I take it up again. Of course, writing this blog helps enormously, as I now have an incentive to keep going or look like, to quote someone else I met from the National Archives of Scotland in a different context, a “namby-pamby Southern jessie”. (I’m not exactly sure what that means, but from the context it didn’t sound like something I wanted to be…) But I aim to do at least a row a night at the very least, usually more, and it’s accruing like a stromatolyte pillar in Australia (I’m now thinking in geological timescales, you’ll notice).

The good news is, I’ve found us a flat to rent in Edinburgh. Of course, being close to the centre it costs as much as the gross domestic product of Denmark each month, but that’s a small price to pay for being able to walk to work, I feel. One step forward…

Week 6: 9 – 15 February

9how6aI keep having to remind myself that I’m really making progress, since the body with its garter-stitch welt has started to lose its resemblance to the sort of hats worn by the English soldiers who burned Joan of Arc – progress of a sort, I guess.

I spent part of the week clearing my desk at work, as we’re getting ready to evacuate the building next month before we close down – all very depressing. Yellow Post-it notes are blooming on the backs of chairs like early daffodils, as people who’ve found jobs with the “new” MLA are claiming furniture for their futures, when they’ll be working from home. And I doubt there’s been so much paper shredded in an organisation since the days of Oliver North.

9how6bWe had one fun day last week, arising from our imminent closure. We’ve put a sum of money into an arts programme (“New Expressions”), and got some Arts Council money to match it, so we’re funding 10 museums to employ a contemporary artist to use something in their galleries as inspiration, and produce a new work of art. On Wednesday, we all got together in Taunton, and the artists showed us what they’d come up with.

Well, speaking as someone who is, let’s be honest, on the sceptical side when it comes to modern art, it was both interesting and fun. Sure, there were some projects that reinforce the old prejudices (the artist who is inspired by seeing museum objects in storage mostly obscured by tissue paper, who’s arranging T-shirts in a pile of tissue paper so only a few words of the logo can be seen, enigmatically peeping out, for instance!) but others were really creative. So Porthcurno Telegraph Museum is using an artist who’s taking her inspiration from their galvanometer to create a sculpture you can stand inside that will stand outside and reflect the sun onto a contoured wall (what do you mean, you don’t know what a galvanometer is?).

9how6cAnd Plymouth Museum’s artist is creating a circular display based on all the little cardboard labels from their natural history collection, each one taken from a species that is now extinct. (We joked that they should add a label for us too…) But the best of all is from the wonderful Falmouth Art Gallery, who’ve employed a surrealist painter to create a surrealist frame for one of his pictures! If you’re ever in the vicinity, you really should look it up.

And now I’m off to Edinburgh for a week, to try to find somewhere to live during the coming months, and to move things along with the new job. Four nights on my own in a hotel, eh? Sounds like fun. But at least I’m taking the knitting (not as hand luggage!), so I can be bored creatively.

Week 5: 2 – 8 February

9how5a
It’s been a hectic week, what with one thing and another (and weather – what’s that all about?), so apologies for the delay in getting this week’s blog up. It’s bad enough having to alternate between the real world and the imaginary one I spend a lot of time in, but when you throw Scotland into the mix it all gets a bit much. I’m creating parallel universes in my head, and that’s bound to muck up the time-line sooner or later.

So I thought I’d devote this week’s blog to something I’ve been saving for a snowy day, namely being rude about the clergy. Well, all right, not the entire clergy – fine body of men and women, on the whole, I expect – but just one: Richard Rutt, former bishop of Leicester, author of “A History of Hand Knitting” originally published by Batsford in 1987.

9how5bNow what, I hear you ask, annoys me so much about the bish? Well, for an answer I suggest you pick up a copy of his history and turn to pages 129-134. Here, in a section titled “Fisherman’s Knitting” he turns his episcopal attention to the place of ganseys in the history of knitting. Now, of course, it’s important to bear in mind that he’s writing a history, the first of its kind apparently, so he’s naturally inclined to take an academic approach; but it’s a shame he isn’t more generous to his sources.

How patronising is this? “Some of these books, notably Rae Compton’s The Complete Book of Traditional Guernsey and Jersey Knitting (1985), have shown a sense of history, but only Mary Wright, in Cornish Guernseys and Knitfrocks (1979) has tackled the history of the subject seriously. Like Michael Pearson in various publications that culminated in his Traditional Knitting (1984), all these writers have concentrated on the technique of knitting the fisherman’s jersey and on collecting patterns…” (p.129)

9how5cNow, speaking as an historian (author, I’ll have you know, of the best-selling Radnorshire in Old Photographs which briefly topped the best-seller lists for books about, er, Radnorshire in old photographs) if there’s one thing history teaches us, it is that interpretations of history are a matter of fleeting opinion. It’s all a point of view, and every generation comes along and reinterprets what their parents thought was true (remember when the British Empire was regarded as a Good Thing?).

So, for myself, I’m delighted that Gladys Thompson and her successors devoted their time to collecting patterns and not “tackling the history of the subject seriously”. Who cares? Which would you rather have? A history book about a dying art, or an instruction manual on how to recreate it, and renew it? That’s the difference between history and craft, and only a historian like Bishop Rutt would say the history of a craft is more important than the craft itself.

And here’s a challenge for all of us: “Though Gladys Thompson and others already mentioned … have stimulated a limited revival of handknitted jerseys, one rarely sees a garment of the quality worn 50 or 60 years ago…” (p.134). To arms, citizens! (Aux armes, citoyens!) Or to needles at least (“Aux aiguilles a tricoter citoyens!”).

Mind you, the rest of the book’s pretty good…

Week 4: 26 January – 1 February

9how4aNot much progress to report this week, caused partly by a mid-week trip to the fair city of Glasgow, as I start to get my head around the new job in Scotland. The good news is that Britain is shivering under the heaviest snowfall since, oh I don’t know, the reign of William the Conqueror (or so you’d think listening to the news), or at least in that wonderful old legal phrase, “time whereof memory of man runneth not to the contrary” – all of which has given me the perfect opportunity to get the new one out and wear it again and remind myself of just how warm these garments are.

9how4bAs for the trip to Glasgow, I decided not to take my knitting, as I only had carry-on luggage for the flight and I thought it would be asking for trouble explaining it to airport security; but then I absent-mindedly left my nail scissors in my toiletries bag and set off all sorts of exciting alarms, and experienced the most intimate body search outside of an Armenian prison. And then – how petty is this? – they confiscated my sinus medication because it wasn’t in a plastic bag. (How do you go about commandeering an aeroplane with a steroid nasal spray anyway?)

9how4cI’ve come to the conclusion that airports are where the Dementors from the Harry Potter books spend their free afternoons, spreading hopelessness and despair and, cunningly disguised as attractive blondes, offering raffle tickets to expensive cars no one will ever win. Even the coffee is thin and watery, which seems like kicking a good man when he’s down. And because you can’t reserve your seat in advance you get the unedifying sight of a bunch of city directors and civil servants jumping the queue and pushing to the front like it’s everything half price at the tuck shop. (What’s the big deal about a window seat? It’s not like they’ll run out of chairs or anything so you have to stand. And anyway, the flight only lasts an hour, 55 minutes of which are spent above the cloud layer, which can only be of interest to cloud scientists – and how many of them regularly fly between Bristol and Scotland?)

Meanwhile the gansey slowly begins to take shape, and how relaxing it is not to worry about a complicated pattern after the last one, or even about counting rows. Like the knitting equivalent of a back rub.