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Week 10: 23 – 29 November

Is there anything more annoying than having to spend a long period of time next to someone with the hiccoughs? Well, yes, actually there is. I am now in a position to confirm that an evening spent in a flat with a defective smoke alarm beats hiccoughs hands down. You see, hiccoughs come and go – the psychological torture is caused by the constant hope that the fit has passed when it hasn’t – but, most importantly, if you wait long enough, they go. A defective smoke alarm, on the other hand, will beep at regular intervals for ever, especially when (as in this case) it is wired into the mains. (Peep! There it goes again. Peep!)

Now, you may be wondering at this point, why don’t I just climb up on a chair with a pair of wire cutters and end the misery with one snip? There are two answers to that – first of all, it’s a rented flat, and I’m pretty sure questions would be asked if anyone were to discover severed electrical cables on the premises – potentially rather embarrassing questions at that, especially if the flat ever caught fire. The other, more pressing reason is, the last time I engaged with anything to do with electricity I thought it would be interesting to insert a screwdriver into a light socket, but – and you’ll laugh when I tell you this – I neglected to turn off the mains electricity first. I think I travelled about six feet before a combination of gravity and a wall intervened to slow me down.

m10einsteinSo, trust me on this, a sleepless night is preferable to death, even if it doesn’t always seem like it at four in the morning. (Plus I no longer have the hair to make it stand on end like Einstein’s.)

After some interesting experiments with swatches, I’ve decided to take a break from them and start the gansey proper. I’ve cast on 392 stitches for the welt, which I’ll increase by about 40 stitches when I’m ready to start the body. So far I’ve just cast on and completed the first couple of rows, which I usually do in purl to give a solid base. Then I’ll start the knit 2/purl 2 ribbing, which is happily mindless, unlike the blasted swatches (“swatches – the devil’s toenail clippings”) which required a little more concentration than I’ve been able to give them. But I’ve got the patterns for the body mostly sorted, all I have to do is rework them and try them out in – gulp – more swatches over the next few weeks, and we should be all set for the Christmas holidays (less than 3 weeks away for some of us… As my iPhone app tells me, there are 25 sleeps to Christmas, or 579 hours, 34,782 minutes, and 20,867,933 seconds. But who’s counting?).

(Peep!)=

Week 9: 16-22 November

m9b

Gordon on the right. Courtesy Highland Council

Apologies once again for the late appearance of this blog – caused not by any major crises this time, but because I’ve been hob-nobbing with royalty, or HRH the Earl of Wessex, to be precise (younger brother of Prince Charles). And not so much hob-nobbing, to be honest, as bellowing a few words in his ear over the crowd noise.

Let me explain. I attended the official opening of the splendid new Highland Archives Centre in Inverness on Monday, along with several hundred other people, it seemed. We were separated into the function rooms downstairs while HRH was given a tour of the building – and as you can imagine, with so many people all bunched together making small talk in an enclosed space, the noise level was pretty high. So much so that I found myself having to shout to make myself heard, and quickly lost my voice, being reduced to making barking noises like a performing seal and waving my flippers to make myself understood.

It only took an hour for the royal party to be running an hour late. Tension mounted. The heat in the room increased. I began to grow concerned, since the last Earl of Wessex I knew about was Godwin, back in the time of Edward the Confessor, who famously died eating a piece of bread, speaking my second-favourite last words, that if he’d had anything to do with the King’s brother’s death, may the piece of bread choke him – whereupon, delightfully, it did. (Spoilsport historians – is there any other kind? – say this is apocryphal, but what do they know?)

Then, at last, the doors swung open, and he was ushered in, dressed in full kilt with all the trimmings. We had been carefully arranged in groups – councillors, architects, funders, and finally workers in the archive salt mines – and the poor earl more or less had to start at one corner of the room and navigate his way around just about everyone. The archive contingent was, inevitably, the last group he came to, and you could tell by the expression on his face that he’d pretty much reached his limit for the day for asking strangers what they did, and how they enjoyed it.

m9cIt was my task to shout a few well-chosen words at him on behalf of the archive community and start him off on the rest of the group. Sadly by then my voice had pretty much disappeared, which meant I sounded like someone tuning an old-fashioned radio set as odd sounds came and went at random from my voice-box interspersed with a sort of white noise – but since I doubt if he could have heard me anyway, no harm was probably done. What I found disarming, and completely unexpected, was the look of sly humour lurking just behind his eyes – as if to say, you know and I know how absurd this is, but of course we wouldn’t dream of saying so.

Then came a couple of speeches, a quick tug of a rope-pull to unveil the plaque (“That’s lucky” noted the earl as he read the inscription, “I’ve come on the right day”) and he was whisked away in a dark car, and it was all over, leaving me with funny kind of respect for the man, doing his job and doing it very well, and also leaving me with a voice more like Beaker’s from Sesame Street than anything human.

Anyway, after all that, here is another of my “recklings”, another runt of the litter of swatches. Not a serious attempt at anything, just playing around with the New Zealand design, and trying not to think of the dark things lurking in the closet that has been work recently.

Week 8: 9 – 15 November

No blog this week owing to what the late, great Hunter S. Thompson would describe as “bad craziness” at work, which has resulted in a certain amount of excrement-fan interaction.

Normal service will (hopefully) be resumed next week.

In the meantime, here is one of my favourite poems by Ted Hughes, from his strange late collection of poems called “Gaudete”. Arising out of a screenplay (never filmed) it tells the story of a repressed northern clergyman abducted to another world to heal a wounded earth-goddess, while meanwhile a nature spirit is sent to take his place in this world. The nature spirit acts true to itself and gets several local women pregnant until it is hunted down and killed by the men of the village. In the epilogue the original clergyman returns transformed in Ireland, and leaves behind a collection of poems. These poems are the heart of the book, frequently incomprehensible, ugly and tender, violent and beautiful, concerned with the man’s new-found dedication to discovering a relationship with nature, and – or – the goddess. Only someone who was a master of his craft could write with such deceptive simplicity, I think. There’s no title.

Every day the world gets simply
Bigger and bigger

And smaller and smaller

Every day the world gets more
And more beautiful

And uglier and uglier.

Your comings get closer
Your goings get worse.

Week 7: 2 – 8 November

m7nz001What a week! One of those that makes you wonder if God wasn’t on to something when he thought of Noah’s flood, and you kind of wish he’d seen the job through. Come to think of it, one of the wilder theories about the universe suggests that time constantly runs forwards and backwards, never ending, so we live our lives forwards (to the last syllable of recorded time, as the poet said), and then all over again but in reverse – then forwards again – etc. This is hard to believe, and not just because it’s stupid, but also because anything that would cause me to relive the last week at work has to be unthinkable.

(If I say that the best thing to happen last week was a flat battery in my car, resulting in a visit by a friendly RAC patrol man and a hefty bill for a new battery, you’ll get the idea.)

The end of October and the beginning of November is always fireworks time in Britain, so in a city like Edinburgh you just get used to the whiz and bang of various high explosives being let off in the small hours, and try to look like you enjoy it. Actually, there are two advantages to living on the top floor: first of all, you get an excellent view of the displays on Calton Hill (which happen so frequently we scarcely even bother to open the curtains, so jaded are our palates); and secondly no Trick-or-Treaters would have the stamina to climb all 55 stairs, even if we released the door.

nzchartI heard a great – though nasty – trick to play on Trick-or-Treat practitioners the other day. Get some small, raw brussels sprouts, and wrap them in the gold tinfoil that normally holds those Ferraro Rocher chocolate truffles. Put the cunningly disguised sprouts back in the original packaging and hand them over, and await results with confidence.

It seems pretty clear to me, what with things at work being the way they were, that emigration was at the forefront of my subconscious mind. Hence the decision to switch from the rigid linear pattern I showed you last week to a representation of the land of my birth, the land of the long white cloud itself, New Zealand (pattern courtesy of Margaret, since I was preoccupied with dodging the guards and tunnelling out of the National Archives of Scotland to able to concentrate on charting knitting patterns).

It doesn’t quite work – of course – but it’s not that bad a first attempt. I’m going to play around with other combinations to find one that stands out (this will probably form a panel on the yoke) so if anyone has any suggestions I’d like to hear them – just bearing in mind that it’s all in one colour, and it’s relatively small, so I’m limited in what I can do.

Week 6: 26 October – 1 November

stepswk6So there I was, walking down Queen Street, Cardiff’s main shopping street, minding my own business, avoiding the crowds, musing on the king my brother’s wreck, and on the king my father’s death before him, when I was jostled slightly by a small man in a leather jacket and an insinuating manner; a dapper man in his middle thirties, of middle eastern origin, walking beside me, floral tie and polished shoes. He smiled, and somehow we got into conversation as we walked.

He said he was over here to study, a mature student at the university, but hadn’t made many friends, though he wanted to talk to me. Well, I thought, it’s always nice to meet a fan, and I naturally assumed he was a regular follower of this blog with a close interest in the techniques of gansey knitting. But then he started asking, “Are you nice man? Are you nice man? You look like nice man,” and I began to perceive my mistake. I think I got as far as “Er…”, which perhaps didn’t clarify my position on niceness in general as much as I’d hoped. Next thing I knew, he’d slipped his fingers into mine and, looking up at me with eyes like the wolf’s drawing back the coverlet for Little Red Riding Hood, said, “You be my friend, yes? You nice man.”

I disabused him gently, and managed to extricate myself with poise and grace (“Sir, I am honoured by your attentions, but yet…”) while pointing out that if he didn’t let go of my hand I’d break his fingers. But of course it occurred to me that according to the many-worlds theory of parallel universes, somewhere in another universe another me and another he… But no. Even in other universes I can’t imagine a me that would be seduced by anyone wearing a tie like that.

Back on the sweater front, I’ve decided I’ve had enough of swatching for now, so I’ve started casting on for the new gansey. In the meantime, Margaret has been helping me chart a pattern for the next New Zealand motif I want to play around with, but which I can’t get right on graph paper – so she has solved the problem with the might of an Excel spreadsheet. So I’ll play around with this in between casting on the ribbing.

But I find myself wondering about my new friend in Cardiff, and how desperate he must be to try to pick up the likes of me on a busy street – until the rather uncomfortable thought occurs to me: how desperate must I have looked to him…?