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Week 13: 22-28 February 2010

There are several ways to tell when a job interview isn’t going well, and in the course of the last few years I think I’ve experienced most of them.

So, for instance, when you find yourself gazing into the eyes of one of the panel from underneath, having tripped on a concealed step on the way into the interview room, staggered across the room like Frankenstein’s monster, lost your balance and swallow-dived into their lap (Leicestershire Record Office).

Or when a member of the panel says, in response to your answer to one of their questions, “Oh! Oh dear! Oh dear!” And stops the interview while they make a laborious note on their assessment form (Guildhall Library, London).

Or when you discover that their laptop is running an older version of PowerPoint so your carefully constructed presentation can’t run, and you hear yourself suggesting that you do it with sock puppets instead, a la Sesame Street or Sooty and Sweep, and proceed to demonstrate how it might work (“What’s that you say, Mr Talking Fist? You think we should start with an information survey leading to business process analysis…?”) (Liverpool Council).

The latest – though by no means so extreme as these examples – came on Thursday, when I went for a job interview in the south of England, and the head of department leaned over the desk and said, “To be honest, what really worries me about you’re saying is…” Which is nature’s way of telling you you’re not on their wavelength. Ah, well – I’d have liked the job, but I also know there’s more fun to be had in the future I’m going to experience now. (Maybe also in retrospect I shouldn’t have proposed, when they explained that the layout of the building was basically triangular, that for the next family history fair they could cover it in green tinfoil and invite people to guess which Quality Street sweet it was supposed to be.)

Modest progress this week, what with interview preparation and then travelling down to the south coast to be put to the question, as the Inquisition used to quaintly describe their charming techniques for getting at the, ahem, truth. But hopefully you can see the yoke pattern in a bit more detail this time (with apologies again for the poor photography). I’m trying to get my head around knitting back-and-forth, which in a pattern of this complexity, as I’ve said before, is a bit like trimming your beard in the mirror. Blood all over the place. (Not that all my readers have that problem, of course.)

You may be wondering how the cat’s been behaving after my complaints last week. Well, after I got up at 4am to get a flight to take me to the interview on Thursday, she got her revenge for being left on her own all day by being sick 4 times the next night – at approximately 2.75 hourly intervals – causing my route to the bathroom the next morning to resemble nothing so much as a game of hopscotch. Anyway, here’s a picture of her in regal mode, in her default nocturnal position: standing on my chest and sneering down at me in a “your ass is mine, puny human” sort of way.

Speaking of job interviews, none of the ones I’ve undergone are quite as bad as the case I witnessed as part of the interview panel one time many years ago. The county archivist studied the candidate’s application form closely before asking, “Would you say you were the sort of person who paid close attention to detail?” The candidate looked as sincere as possible and said, yes, he rather thought he was. Only to be crushed utterly by the county archivist’s follow-up question, “Then can you explain how you came to make an elementary spelling mistake on page 3 of your application form?”

He did not get the job. In fact, he may never have worked again, and I picture him in later life expiating out his sin in a remote Indonesian island, like Conrad’s Lord Jim, forever trying to regain his honour and live down his shame.

Week 12: 15-21 February

First of all, I apologise for the poor quality of the pictures this week. You see, Margaret’s off on another of her jaunts to the States, leaving me to wipe up the cat vomit for once, and has left me without a camera, save for the one in my iPhone. (Actually, there is a camera, but the truth is I just don’t know how to use it. Apparently you have to press buttons and everything, I mean, come on.)

The cat has developed an annoying bleat over the last year, like a cross between a sheep who’s discovered from that her ram’s been unfaithful with other ewes, and a police siren. She’s taken to roaming the flat making this noise – sometimes it’s quite strident, a ma-waaaah!, like a triumphant seagull who’s just made you drop your ice cream; other times it’s utterly forlorn, and you hear it echoing from distant uninhabited rooms, and you imagine a cat who’s lost all hope, alone in a hostile universe, with nothing to do but cry herself to sleep at the inhumanity of man to cat. (She’s been doing it for seven minutes solid, since I started typing this, and my nerves are like shredded tin. Now she’s decided, oh, what the hell, I suppose I could just eat the damn food he put out for me after all, that’ll show him, the bastard.)


Last week I was woken up by that same cry from a distance of about three inches, as she had climbed up onto my pillow as I slept and leaned over my face like a dragon on a church steeple about to consume a town in flame, and let rip. This was at 5.00am. When I my eyes jerked open I found myself looking right up her nose, which isn’t the ideal way to start the day. Plus she could do with trying a different brand of mouthwash.

Anyway, in spite of the lousy pictures – which for some reason look like I’ve been dyeing the gansey with pastels (probably sunlight, come to think of it – it’s been so long since I’ve seen the sun I didn’t recognise it at first) – this last week’s seen some real progress. So hopefully you can see the shape of the yoke pattern, and last week’s geometry and algebra lesson begins to make a bit more sense. I’ve been immersing myself in The Count of Monte Cristo as an audiobook, all 50 hours of it, which is ideal for knitting to. (Well, that and all the violent dvds Margaret won’t let me watch usually, like Alien and Apocalypse Now, and The Little Mermaid.) The only problem now is I’ve started to talk with a slight French accent…

 

The cat’s off again – I can hear a despairing wail from the bedroom, as she realises once again that without an opposable thumb it’s a hopeless task to tie the belt on my dressing gown into a noose, plus I’ve taken her shoelaces away. So I’d better go and cheer her up by reading her some Dostoevsky. Or play with a piece of string. Both are good.

Week 11: 8-14 February

Ever noticed how good news always seems to come balanced with a healthy dose of just enough bad news to take the edge off it? Like having Barack Obama in the White House at the same time as the deepest economic crisis for 70 years.

Or, in my case, like finally getting rid of my gum infection (touch wood) with an antiseptic mouthwash, but finding it’s coated my tongue a woad-coloured shade of blue which makes everything I eat or drink taste like spearmint-flavoured marmite.

Or discovering I have an improbable job interview in a couple of weeks, but having to do an online psychometric assessment first. Now, the last time I took one of those my confidence was destroyed by the maths paper – I still wake up at night thinking I’m back at my desk, frantically trying to answer questions about the profitability of acreages of woodland (just the sort of thing you need to know when working with libraries, obviously) with a clock in the corner counting down remorselessly. (Come to think of it, perhaps it’s not such a surprise I didn’t get the job!)

Ah, well. To take my mind off all that I’ve spent a week plotting out the yoke pattern for my Hebridean gansey. So no knitting this week, but lots of graph paper.

I can’t find a way to set out the whole pattern for you – it’s 213 cells wide and 130-odd high in spreadsheet terms – but close your eyes and I’ll try to describe it so you can picture it. OK? Ready?

  • There are 2 seam stitches next to the gusset.
  • Then a ladder (2 rows purl to 4 rows knit), 13 stitches wide inc. a seam stitch.
  • Then one of my standard cables (10 stitches, i.e. p2/k6/p2) cable every 6th row.
  • Then a panel (A) of 31 stitches, with a 3-stitch moss border on each side plus a seam stitch.
  • Then another cable.
  • Then an open chevron with yarn-overs, 15 stitches across.
  • Then another cable.
  • Then a centre panel (B), also 31 stitches, with borders as in panel A.
  • Then another cable.
  • Then another chevron panel with yarn-overs.
  • Then another cable.
  • Then another panel (A).
  • A last cable.
  • Another ladder.
  • Finally, another 2 seam stitches.

Each of the 3 panels is divided into 3 vertical sections. The (A) panels will have an X pattern in the top and bottom sections, with an anchor in the middle. The centre (B) panel will have a purl diamond in the top and bottom sections, and an open diamond with yarn-overs in the middle.

All of which adds up to 213 stitches (I know because I’ve just knit the first row today!) Repeat for the other side.

If this sounds a bit over-the-top, trust me, it’s entirely in the spirit of the originals. These ganseys are supposed to look like a baroque wedding cake, or the web of an anally retentive spider suffering from psychological trauma. If the viewer doesn’t reach for their sunglasses you’ve done it wrong. (At least, that’s my story, and I’m sticking to it!)

I admit there’s a certain irony in me worrying about a maths test after spending a week laying out a pattern this complex, having adapted a combination of sub-patterns to my stitch gauge. But I don’t suppose I can just turn up to the interview with a gansey and expect to get away with it. Or can I…?

Week 10: 1 – 7 February

Many years ago, in the course of a rather undistinguished school career, I developed certain life habits that have stuck with me into adulthood. So, for instance, whenever I am ill, I heat up a tin of Heinz tomato soup for us tea – something I never partake of when I am well – because that’s what my mum used to give me as a lad when I was sick. What else? Well, I developed a healthy aversion to games masters, or indeed anyone large, fat and psychopathic who tried to persuade me to take exercise while they watched on the sidelines with a pistol (“Dance, gringo!” they used to shout, firing bullets between our skipping feet as we fled across the rugby pitch to the sound of their hysterical laughter). That’s stayed with me, unless time has distorted the memory a touch.

Where was I? Oh, yes, childhood. One of the most significant habits I developed as a child was the ability to put something off until it was needed. So on Friday night through Saturday and into Sunday I could forget the weekend’s homework and watch TV, read books, listen to music and go for walks (the child is father to the man) and plant explosive devices under the games master’s car (ditto). But, with the inevitability of Greek tragedy, would come the time, late on a Sunday, when I had to dig out the textbooks and start figuring out cosines, or translate the gerund, or write an essay on the economics of the Hapsburg empire. And all light and joy was crushed from the universe, not least because even once the work was done I knew the day of reckoning was just round the corner – because, of course, I knew how far short of the mark I had fallen. Kids always know.

So why, you ask, am I sharing with you this trip down a fairly seedy memory lane? It’s because the gansey has, alas, reached the Sunday-evening-homework stage. Here I’ve been, frolicking my way up the welt and body to the gussets, finishing the central panel, heedlessly unthinking of the day when I’d have to get out the slide rule and protractors and work out what on earth to do with the yoke (I knew all that work on cosines would come in handy one day). It’s a bit like daydreaming on your daily commute, only to realise that jolt you felt just then was you driving smartly into a parked police car.

Now the gansey is laid aside, gathering dust in a corner. Moths eye it across the room with greedy eyes. But in front of me lie sheets of graph paper, a calculator, Michael Pearson’s book of patterns, a pencil and – most importantly of all – an eraser. It’s like doing a jigsaw puzzle where all you have is the edge pieces – the rest you have to devise, paint, cut and fit yourself. In fact, it’s rather fun, in the way that my homework never was (and how sad is that? So many wasted years). And at least these days I’m unlikely to get detention if I get it wrong.

I plan to swatch (gulp) the patterns before I deploy them, to make sure they work and I’ve got them right. I hope to show these next time.

Meanwhile, when sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions, as Captain Jean-Luc Picard observed to Dr Who in a recent BBC production of the RSC’s Hamlet. So, not only am I departing my job, but I also have a gum infection (though not, hopefully, an abscess, as initially feared). Cue a trip to the dentist, who asked innocently, as they are probably trained to do, “Does it hurt when I do this?’ as she inserted the pointy end of a nasty looking hooked implement into the swelling, “just to see”. As I started thrashing around like a gaffed salmon it took three strong men to restrain me. “Ah. Thought so,’ she said.

And I thought games masters were bad…

Week 9: 25 – 31 January


Well, there we are. As I mentioned in the comments section last week, I’ve resigned from my job. It would be unprofessional of me to talk about it in a public blog, so I won’t, saving it all for my memoirs (which will cause a few blushes in the world of archives when they’re published, I can tell you). But as a colleague said to me today, “sometimes you just have to walk away with your dignity intact”, and that’s what I’ve done – except for the part about the dignity.

I’ll be here till April as I work out my notice. But everyone knows I’m on borrowed time, and it’s disconcerting to walk the corridors of the National Archives of Scotland and have the cataloguing staff rattling their pencil sharpeners on the bars of their cells shouting, “Dead archivist walking!” all the time. Honestly.

But enough of that – on to more serious matters. Anytime I’m asked about my “guilty pleasures” – those things you secretly like but are ashamed to admit because they’re either totally uncool or you know they’re rubbish but you enjoy them anyway – I usually go for the prog-rock group Genesis in the first category (in their pretentious-ish 1970s incarnations), and the Star Wars Prequels in the second. Genesis I’m not really ashamed of – I’m old enough to remember when they were cool, after all – but I have no excuse when it comes to the Phantom Menace et al.

I know the dialogue is awful, the acting is questionable, the CGI is patchy and the movies are frequently boring – and yet, and yet. (Or, as my American brother in law said once, “Hey, whaddya want? It’s a Star Wars movie!”) But then I came across this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxKtZmQgxrI

It’s a 70-minute deconstruction of The Phantom Menace in 7 YouTube segments, and it’s a blast. Not only does it show you all those niggling details about the plot and characters that you knew were wrong, but couldn’t be bothered to work out because it’s only a movie, it’s also got some brilliant diversions of its own. Trust me. Watch the first 2 before you make up your mind – it’s brilliant, if you don’t mind a bit of swearing.

What with dealing with the emotional and other fallout of resigning, and watching all these YouTube videos, the knitting has taken something of a back seat. But as you can see, the trellis pattern is coming along nicely, and the gussets are shaping up.

Thanks to all of you who’ve been in touch, too – it’s much appreciated. The future, as they say, lies ahead of us… Or something.