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 Just a brief update this week, as I’ve been knocked sideways by the same blasted cold I mentioned last time and so haven’t really got out much, so not much to report.
I almost invented a new art form when I realised that my mucus-filled tissues, when wet, could be formed into interesting patterns, and would keep their shape when dry – but somehow the idea of snot sculptures seemed a bit too gross, even for me, so I offer it here for any contemporary artist who wishes to make a statement about decay, transcience, mortality or the abject failure of the English football team at the World Cup. (But suddenly we are world-beaters at cricket – how did that happen? Is this a consequence of Doctor Who rebooting the universe last week?)
 While I’ve been stuck at home planning my new consultancy venture, I’ve been looking into the new austerity budget and discovered that our new insect overlords in Government have decided to cut costs by – wait for it – ceasing to employ consultants. Timing, as they say, is everything, and on the face of it this doesn’t bode well, does it? But I must admit I like a challenge, and I am currently developing services I can offer to businesses, as well as museums and archives, so hopefully I’ll find some clients come the autumn when it all gets serious.
And, frustrating as being ill can be, it’s given me a good excuse to catch up on my knitting – hence the significant progress down the sleeve. Another week should do it (then I have to work out what to do with it). There’s another bonus to getting this far down the sleeve, too, which is that the rest of the pullover doesn’t have to sit in your lap while you’re knitting; very important when the weather gets hot and sticky, as it is just now. So we open the windows, and chase the faint breeze round the house like sailors on an old-fashioned sailing ship caught in the doldrums.
Still, we’ve passed the longest day – the nights are starting to draw in, and remember: there are just 179 sleeps till Christmas…
 Well, thank the Lord for audiobooks, that’s all I can say.
I’m laid up with a heavy cold just now (the usual symptoms: sore throat, general grottiness and enough mucus to fill the set of Aliens vs. Predators). So I get up and potter about for an hour, feel tired, then crash out, listen to an audiobook and gradually fall asleep, only to repeat the cycle when I wake up. Suddenly I have a vision of what life in the retirement home might be like – and, you know, it’s really not that bad!
The audiobook I’ve been listening to recently is Scottish author Iain Banks’ fantastic science fiction novel, Look To Windward. I don’t know if you’ve come across it, but it’s a funny, sad, elegiac exploration of the effect war can have on people and how they cope with it, with some astonishing environments and a whole bunch of weird and wacky aliens thrown into the mix. It may turn out to be Banks’ best novel, a remarkable balance between levity and profundity. (Some years ago I wrote a piece for Powys County Library Service’s splendid online magazine Shelf Life on Iain Banks, with thumbnail reviews of all his novels published up to 2000, which you can access here, if you’re curious http://www.powys.gov.uk/index.php?id=1114&L=0. Follow the links on the right for the reviewettes.)
 The reason I mention all this is that – unusually – the novel has got me thinking. You see, in Banks’ utopian future, humans can have their personalities “backed up”, so that if they are killed, a clone can be grown and their personality reinstated. But, I can’t help thinking, surely the “me” that had carried on after the last backup was taken – even if it’s only a few hours – would be the real me; the backup wouldn’t be “me”; and if I was killed, the clone still wouldn’t be me. It’d be someone else – wouldn’t it? Even if it was someone else with my memories, looks and personality.
And that in turn got me thinking. Because, here I am, in early middle age, with an unbroken chain of memories stretching back a lifetime; but I’m obviously not “the same person” I was 20 years ago. Or 15. Or 10… In fact, every time I fall asleep (roughly 3 or 4 times day just now), when I wake up I’m in effect being rebooted from scratch with a shedload of downloaded memories, and I carry on from there. So why do I find the thought of being restored from a backup, which is obviously supposed to be consolatory, so troubling? Especially given that it’s not even possible right now!
As you will see from the pictures, in my lucid moments I am still knitting, mostly while watching a bunch of wussy millionaire show ponies cheating their way through the soccer world cup. I’m picking up a head of steam down the sleeve now, and another fortnight should (hopefully) see the gansey finished. I’m onto the main pattern down the sleeve, past the trellis, and am so cocky I almost don’t need the pattern chart – a sure recipe for disaster. As before, I’ve switched from decreasing 1 in 4 on the gusset to 1 in 5 down the sleeve. It looks like this gansey will end up using just over 11 balls of 100g 5-ply; I normally expect to use about 12, so buy 13 just to be on the safe side, but this one is both a little shorter in the body than usual, and the sleeves are definitely narrower, which probably accounts for the difference.
Meanwhile, as TS Eliot almost said in The Waste Land, “Gentile or Jew / O you who turn the wheel and look to windward / Consider Gordon who was once handsome and tall as you…”
 I’ve discovered that when I go for a walk, I’m not really all that aware of my surroundings – basically, a walk is an opportunity for me to think. So I tend to walk with my head down, looking at the ground in front of my feet, but otherwise miles away. Now, it turns out that not everyone takes that approach. Some people actually pay attention to their surroundings; some people – this was actually a surprise – think the purpose of going for a walk in the country is to look at nature and, in effect, inventory it.
So one day on our recent holiday we went for a walk in the sunny woods and fields of Cape Cod – just Margaret, her sister Gail, the minister’s wife (or “Mrs Rev”, as I like to think of her), and me. It was a shock to not even get out of the car park before the first debate began:
“What’s that flower?”
“Which – the floriliscum herbiborderi?”
“No, the one behind it. Isn’t that a purple-tongued ladykiller?”
“No, they don’t grow in sunlight. That’s a flaxen-haired arglebargle.”
“It can’t be an arglebargle, their leaves are shaped like the sound of emptiness in underground caverns. What you’ve got there is a deathweed.”
“No, deathweeds have all been extinct since the meteorite that wiped out the dinosaurs. Anyway, judging by the stamen I’d say it’s a bottle-nosed bee-catcher.”
“It can’t be a bee-catcher, look, it’s only got 167 hairs on the filament, and bee-catchers have at least 169.”
“Tipsi Vodcerii?”
“A Prince Charles Nose?”
“The common scumbag?”
“You know, just a thought, but it could be a scragwort. Except they live on children’s tears and there just wouldn’t be enough children to sustain them here.”
“It certainly looks like a scragwort, now you come to mention it.”
“Just a minute, let’s look it up. Yup, here we are – scragwort – let’s see, lives on children’s tears… and in alkaline soil has adapted to also survive on disappointed dreams.”
“Oh, that explains it. Yes, the dreams’d do it. Definitely a scragwort.”
 And so on (or something like that – I may have confused some of the technical names) for a goodly mile or more.
Very strange. You see, nature to me is effectively one thing, indivisible, rather like a still photograph. It’s all just “nature” to me. Going for a walk in the company of people who actually understand it has the effect of bringing bits of it into close up, or putting it under the microscope: it’s amazing all the stuff that’s out there. But learning the names of plants and birds is a bit like learning Latin declensions, or the capitols of Europe – it feels like homework, somehow. So I think I’ll continue to let it wash over me, and get my expertise vicariously.
Meanwhile, I’ve slogged my way to the end of the gusset on Sleeve 2 – and it really felt a bit of a slog, too. But it’s speeding up, and the end is now in sight. For those gusset-watchers among you, note that I’ve decreased on the left-hand 2 edge stitches of the gusset, but on the right edge I’ve decreased on the 2nd and 3rd stitches in from the right, leaving the very edge untouched. The purpose of this is to ensure an unbroken edge stitch – if you decrease on the 2 edge stitches on the right, the one on the very edge is always being engulfed by the one to the left of it, like a kitten being swallowed by a python. It just makes a neater effect, that’s all.
Time for a walk…
 After all the excitement of recent weeks, it’s time to put the emphasis back on the gansey – which is, after all (theoretically), the point of the exercise.
I’ve now finished the right sleeve, cuff and all, and made a start on the left. Of course, being me, all it took was a short holiday in the USA to forget everything I did on the right sleeve, and I’m now reduced to trying to piece it together like an archaeologist reconstructing a Roman wine jar from shards. (I can even recall the insouciance with which I breezily thought: “Notes? I won’t need to make any notes. Of course I’ll remember what I’ve done.” Ah, hubris; for some of us it’s a way of life.)
 As I’d consciously made the armhole on this gansey narrower than on others I have knit (c. 8.5 inches, whereas they usually end up 9-10 inches, despite my best intentions), I had to be careful not to decrease it too much as I worked my way down the sleeve. So I kept a careful count, and when I reached 98 stitches in the round I stopped decreasing; the last 2.25 inches to the cuff is knit straight, with no decrease. (One neat, but purely coincidental, effect of all this, has been the reduction of the last 2 tree panels on either side of the seam stitch to 2 half-panels – so, they make one complete tree separated by a seam stitch. Which looks rather cool, and I can pretend in future that it was a deliberate part of the pattern.) There is just over an inch of plain knitting before the cuff, as usual.
I reduced for the cuff by 10%, which is the usual amount the books recommend – as I had 98 stitches I reduced them by 10 to leave me with 88 including the seam stitch (which I incorporated into the final “purl 2″ of the knit 2/purl 2 ribbing). The final number has to be divisible by 4, of course. Then I just kept knitting the ribbing for 6 inches, leaving me with a nice long tube, which can then be folded over on itself for a 3” adjustable cuff. The final cast off row, like the collar, is cast off in the same ribbing pattern (knit 2/purl 2) so it lies flat.
By the way, I’ve found an animal I can totally sympathise with as I watch my hair disappearing like snow in summer (hence the recent adoption of baseball caps to go with my old flat cap!) – a hairless cat. Which is either a thing of wonder and joy, or the sort of thing that you see floating in a test tube in the background of a scene from Alien. Anyway, Margaret took pity on her sister Faith’s hairless cat Gus and knitted him a gansey cat-coat to keep him warm. There may be stranger things out there in the cold depths of infinite space than Gus in a gansey, but somehow I really hope not…
 Finally – apart from stretching my mind trying to remember what I’d done on the other sleeve (the “utmost gaping of brain”, as Ted Hughes so eloquently put it in one of his Crow poems) – I’ve decided what I want to do when I grow up. I’m going to be a consultant, because – like lawyers – there are never enough consultants in this world.
I’m going into partnership with a very good friend of mine, also an archivist, as cultural heritage and information management specialists. It’s a long-time dream of mine, but I’ve never quite had the courage to go for it ’til now – and I really think it’s now or never. It’s not without its risks in the current climate, however. Do you remember the old quip about the change of ministers of religion in the English Civil War (“new presbyter is but old priest writ large)?” Well, there’s a real risk that “new information consultant is but old unemployed layabout with delusions of grandeur”!
I shall, of course, be able to chart my descent into poverty, destitution, madness, knitting and death on this blog, as a warning to posterity (“Well, officer, it was hard to make them out, he was so far gone with laudanum, but I think his last words were something like “Argh! Not the three needle bind-off! Then ‘a babbled of swatches, but to be honest it sounded more like cursing to me. After that the end came mercifully quick. He’s cast off good and proper now, I tell ‘ee.”)
I can hardly wait…
 National Seashore, P'town  Nobska Light So here we are, back in the UK after 10 days in sunny – and unseasonably hot – Massachusetts. I’m told that Britain experienced a (brief) heat wave too while we were away, but there was little sign of it when we got back: so after sweltering in the high 80s we’ve plunged back to the mid to low 50s; from finding it too hot to wear long trousers, suddenly we’re back to scarves and sweaters. And ground frosts! In June! I ask you: is this fair?
But somehow the vista of unrelieved grey seems appropriate. After all, we have a new austerity government here in the UK, a rather strange coalition of the liberal and conservative parties, which as I understand it means that the conservatives have promised to be less beastly than they’d like. Actually, the coalition isn’t as strange as it looks: after all, the key players all seem to have been at public school together, or had the same nannies, or something – and besides, 18 out of 23 of the new cabinet are millionaires. So naturally their response to the huge debt caused by the financial sector is to blame the public sector and cut public spending. It’s like coming home to find the country’s been invaded by aliens while we were away, and we’re now all slaves of Zarg the Destroyer, or something.
 Ah, well. This could just be the jet lag talking, of course. At least we got away – how lucky was that? Edinburgh airport was closed for the ash cloud until 1pm, but as our flight was at 1.45pm, it was one of the first to take off. And the British Airways strike didn’t start till the next day – so the gods were on our side. Hurrah!
 P'town Harbor So we had a great time in Cape Cod – many thanks to Gail and Bill for their hospitality, and for all the driving (and Nat for the audiobooks). The highlight of the trip would probably be the visit to Provincetown in the blistering sunshine, where the Village People look is never out of fashion – run a close second by the opportunity to buy a Red Sox baseball cap. Well, that and the ice cream. Oh yes, and the cider. And the beaches. Plus the coffee. In fact, there were many highlights, many of them subtly hedonistic (i.e., I kept my shirt on, but spilt things on it).
 In my previous post I mentioned some big news about my career plans. Well, big tease that I am, I’m going to save that till next time, as this blog has been delayed too long already, and feels like it’s past my bedtime, even though it’s just after noon (so no change there).
I didn’t take the knitting with me to the States – it would have been too hot to have it on my lap, anyway. But in between bouts of falling asleep and awakening with the sensation of having eaten library paste in my sleep, since i got back I’ve finished the pattern on the sleeve. All that remains is the inch or so of plain knitting and the cuff, before trying to remember what the hell I did so I can repeat it on the other sleeve. The sooner I get it finished, the better – if summer doesn’t arrive soon, I may need it…
 Ladyslipper |
 Lathyrus japonicus |
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Just a brief update this week, as I’ve been knocked sideways by the same blasted cold I mentioned last time and so haven’t really got out much, so not much to report.
While I’ve been stuck at home planning my new consultancy venture, I’ve been looking into the new austerity budget and discovered that our new insect overlords in Government have decided to cut costs by – wait for it – ceasing to employ consultants. Timing, as they say, is everything, and on the face of it this doesn’t bode well, does it? But I must admit I like a challenge, and I am currently developing services I can offer to businesses, as well as museums and archives, so hopefully I’ll find some clients come the autumn when it all gets serious.
Well, thank the Lord for audiobooks, that’s all I can say.
The reason I mention all this is that – unusually – the novel has got me thinking. You see, in Banks’ utopian future, humans can have their personalities “backed up”, so that if they are killed, a clone can be grown and their personality reinstated. But, I can’t help thinking, surely the “me” that had carried on after the last backup was taken – even if it’s only a few hours – would be the real me; the backup wouldn’t be “me”; and if I was killed, the clone still wouldn’t be me. It’d be someone else – wouldn’t it? Even if it was someone else with my memories, looks and personality.
