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 Winter came early to Scotland this year, with record low temperatures for November and lots of snow. Cars are slithering up the hill, the drivers hunched over the steering wheels, peering like Mr Magoo, and on the pavements people are walking as carefully as if they were crossing a rope bridge over a crocodile pit. Suddenly everyone’s an octogenarian. And it’s cold, well below freezing.
I’ve invented a new temperature index, which takes into account how annoyed I am at the cold and inconvenience, since I don’t find celsius very helpful in this regard. It’s not numerical, but uses Dante’s nine levels of Hell as its model. So, Saturday, when it snowed a bit but I didn’t have to go outside, rated as Level 3, Gluttony (shouldn’t have finished that apple cake). But today, when it snowed a lot and I had to go and get a haircut and stepped in a deep well of slush at the crossing and it’s too cold to get my bread to rise, rates as Level 5, Wrath and Sullenness. (Mostly sullenness, to be honest.)
This coming Wednesday, when I have to finally go and have my dreaded septoplasty operation, will probably be a Level 7, Violence, since at the moment it’s an open question if I’ll be able to drive there easily. Especially if it keeps snowing like this and it freezes, as is forecast.
The first bit of bad news is that I’ll be under a general anaesthetic. Now, given that the last time I had one of those I was still throwing up 2 days later, you’ll understand why I’m not looking forward to it. Then they carefully explained to me what the procedure would involve, with diagrams, and suddenly I understood the serial killer in Silence of the Lambs. Let’s put it this way, if they reattach my face the right way up when they’ve finished I’ll count myself ahead of the game. (Keywords to look out for in next week’s blog: crusting, discharge, blood, swallow, clot, splint, bruising, hypochondria, baby, big, you and girly-man.)
Ever the optimist, I’m assuming I’ll survive, and have ordered the yarn for Margaret’s cardigan gansey – the colour will be sea spray, from Frangipani in Cornwall – in celebratory anticipation. I’m still thinking about the pattern, which will involve some haggling with Margaret, though this can wait a week or two till I’ve finished the welt. So long as it’s got cables in there somewhere I won’t mind.
Here is the next instalment, Part Two of the novel, in which our heroes continue their epic quest into Mordor to destroy the Ring, while Aragorn… No wait. That’s part Three.
Download Part Two as a PDF file here.
Download Part Two as an eBook here.
Finally, after last week’s dismal sourdough (the world’s first sourdough medicine ball) I can report a major breakthrough in my experiments. Basically, I increased the amount of sourdough starter I was using and reduced the amount of flour, et voila! Nous avons le pain au levain shit hot parfait.
 Spare a thought this week for my Dad. Went into hospital to have a pacemaker fitted, a short operation under a local anaesthetic. It’s your basic in-out op… Except in his case, they went in over the heart, and discovered the veins were in the wrong place. So they had to back out, open a new seam over on the other side of his chest, and pull the pacemaker across and into position by wire – all under local anaesthetic. And bear in mind my Dad is in his eighties.
 And then, if that wasn’t bad enough, when we visited last week he insisted on pulling up his shirt and showing me the scars. Just after dinner, too. He looked like a gaffed salmon. (I asked him if it wouldn’t be easier just to get a zip fitted, since he’s already had two bypass operations before this.) He’s already pretty active, so once again I’ve missed my chance to arm-wrestle him for my inheritance.
So here we are at last, the gansey is finished, all the ends have been darned in, and it’s been washed and blocked. (Not that this one took much blocking, since there were no cables to pull it in, or other distorting patterns. Just endless knit 2/purl 2, the knitting equivalent of breaking rocks). And, who knows, with psychiatric help I might even be able to knit purl stitches again one day.
Thoughts are already turning to the next one, not that I have a waiting list exactly. But Margaret has set me the challenge of a gansey cardigan, a terrifying prospect (warning: contents may involve sewing), which sounds like something different to try. But I’ll need something to keep me occupied while listening to the Ashes down under (i.e., test cricket from Australia) over the next few weeks. Mind you, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that “steek” rhymes with “eek!”.
 In response to popular demand (I’m generously assuming two people counts as popular demand) I am posting the novel I’ve been revising on the website. It naturally falls into 3 parts, and will continue over the next 3 weeks. Please do not feel any obligation to read it. It’s a fantasy story, set over one Christmas in Wales, which I think can best be summarised as a blend of Twin Peaks, Stephen King, Alan Garner and Ted Hughes, so you have been warned. (A friend of mine who has read it, while searching for something to say, tentatively offered, “It’s not very cheerful, is it?”) Certainly the tone of whimsical persiflage that permeates this website is disappointingly absent, as is any discussion of knitting in general and ganseys in particular.
If it’s any consolation, Part One is about half the length of the total novel, Part Two (in which hardly anybody dies, honestly) is a relatively short pastoral interlude, and then Part Three rounds things off with a custard pie fight followed by a song. (Caution: your experience may differ.). It’s available in two formats:
as a PDF File: Click here for the PDF file,
but also as an eBook for anyone with an iPad or iPhone and the iBooks application, or equivalent (maybe a Kindle, I don’t know). Click here for the eBook.
[17.11.2014: The Wraiths of Elfael is now available via Amazon: The Wraiths of Elfael (Elfael Trilogy Book 1) , so the above links have been removed.]
If you do read it and want to comment, please feel free to drop me an email or use the comment feature on that page – I think it’s best if this main blog doesn’t get sidetracked too much from knitting…
…and bread, of course. This week’s bread is a sourdough that didn’t quite work, just to prove that I’m not lifting the bread pictures on this blog from books all the time. It didn’t want to rise, even after 3 hours, and when it went in the oven the bottom half stubbornly refused to budge while the top half went up like a bouncy castle. This made for an interesting texture, Terry Pratchett’s dwarf bread on the bottom, cavernous holes in the middle and a sort of roof on top. Very strange.
This week we did something we’ve been meaning to do for some time, and paid a visit to the Anstruther Scottish Fisheries Museum in Anstruther. It was a beautiful day (i.e., the one day of the week when it wasn’t raining), perfect for a trip up the Fife coast.
So off we drove. Anstruther is about an hour and a half north of Edinburgh, over the Forth bridge, and it’s a very pleasant drive, meandering up the coast road. (Of course, you have to be strong and not get sidetracked by the advertisements to go see Scotland’s Secret Bunker and the enticingly named Kingdom of Fun along the way, which requires some willpower.)
 I’ve had a bit of a thing for east coast fishing towns and villages ever since we lived in Lowestoft, and Anstruther is definitely up there. The seafront has lots of restaurants and fish and chip shops, there are quaint back alleys and wynds, and you can walk out along the harbour to the lighthouse, and get a good view of the sea. Of course, there must be a reason why they need a sea wall over six feet high, but I haven’t been able to work it out yet…
 I hate to say it, but we were a little bit disappointed by the museum. Just a bit. Of course, my main interest is ganseys, and I accept that’s not the typical reason for visiting; but despite housing the Moray Ganseys Project temporary exhibition, they didn’t really have much interesting knitwear on display. A couple of the dummies were wearing ganseys, but these were hidden under waistcoats or oilskins; and they had a small glass case dedicated to fishermen’s knitting, but the lights weren’t on in that gallery, and it was impossible to see any detail.
The museum itself is interesting, much larger than it looks from the outside, consisting of several buildings knocked together, and you can tour galleries ranging from the age of sail to the introduction of steam, view a recreated fisherman’s cottage, and walk round the hulk of a real fishing boat, or watch someone working on a sail boat.
 So why weren’t we more impressed? I suppose it’s because, although each item was displayed and labelled, it didn’t really add up to a coherent narrative. There wasn’t a “wow” factor, nothing to make you stop and think, no real human interest. (Actually, that’s not fair – they have a very effective room like a chapel, with plaques to fishermen lost at sea on the walls.) But I was hoping for more than a bunch of fishing-related stuff in glass cases and some of the world’s least convincing dummies. Hopefully when I go again it will click.
Don’t get me wrong – it’s well worth a visit, though I’d recommend going in summer since they don’t appear to heat the galleries in winter, or turn on all the lights for the displays. (I still plan to donate a couple of my ganseys to them one day, if they’re interested.) And I can recommend the museum cafeteria unreservedly. Agent Cooper from Twin Peaks might have had reservations about their coffee, but not about the coffee cake.
The trip was by way of a celebration, as I’ve finally finished the gansey. I slogged my way down the cuff with all the enthusiasm of the Allies fighting their way up Italy in World War 2, with similarly happy results, though it felt like it took as long in the end. Speaking of ends, I darned them in last night, so all we have to do now is wash it and block it and then feed it to the moths. So the cycle of life continues.
This week’s bread is a sourdough rye bread. Closer textured than normal bread (rye hasn’t got any gluten, or something), I’m not sure how much of the final density is due to my inexperience or if it’s supposed to be that way. I decided to move it off the counter when it started attracting a garlic press and a couple of spoons into close orbit around it…
 Now, I know that not everyone who reads this blog lives in large conurbations, so you may be wondering what it’s like to experience something like fireworks night in a vibrant, exciting, happening city like Edinburgh.
Well, the first part is fun, even on a wet and windy night such as last Thursday. We’re up high enough that we can look out our back window and watch the fireworks going off over Calton Hill, which is pretty cool, especially those really big ones that just open out in great pulses over the city like giant star jellyfish. (And even the small ones that go off out of our line of sight are interesting, because they illuminate the clouds in various colours from underneath, our very own light show – works even better if you watch it while listening to Pink Floyd.)
But, later… ah, that’s another story. In fact, the best way to replicate the rest of the night is as follows. (You can actually do this at home, so pay attention at the back.)
 First, lay in a stock of small paper bags, the kind I used to buy a quarter pound of lemon drops in when I was a kid from the sweet shop on the corner (yes, that’s how old I am – supermarkets hadn’t been invented yet). Crisp packets would do at a pinch. Put these on your bedside table and wait until your partner or child is just falling asleep – anywhere between, say, 11.30 and 12.30 at night. Pick up one of the bags and make an O of your thumb and first finger, grasping the back firmly but not too tightly around the neck.
Blow into the paper bag, inflating it fully, and then close the O of your finger and thumb to seal it. Lean over your innocently sleeping partner, positioning the bulging bag just next to their shell-like ear, and then, when the moment is right, slam your other hand against the bag as hard as you can, bursting it with a loud BANG!
 Lean back and watch them thrash around like an electrocuted salmon, while you make “tut-tut” noises and other insincere expressions of sympathy, happy in the knowledge of a job well done.
Wait till they’ve settled down again and are just falling asleep once more – perhaps a quarter of an hour should suffice – then repeat, until you run out of paper bags, or your better half discovers an interesting new use for that nail gun in the tool cupboard.
I think Edinburgh ran out of fireworks somewhere around two in the morning. Luckily I think they shipped in some more, ready for the next night…
I’ve just decreased for the cuff, so this sleeve, and with it the gansey, is almost completed. I’ve been writing a tender for work, and concentrating on the novel, so I haven’t done a lot of knitting, but even half an hour each evening can produce surprising progress. As before, the last 3 inches of the sleeve don’t involve any decreases, so I was left with 117 stitches decreased down to 108 for the cuff itself. All I have to do now is another 6 inches of ribbing, cast off, and the celebrations can begin. (But not, perhaps, with fireworks.)
 This week’s bread is another variation on French bread, this time a “spiked” sourdough. (Basically you make some of the bread the day before with your sourdough yeast culture, then make the rest of it the next day using commercial instant yeast. The advantage of this is that you still get the richer flavour of sourdough, but you can make the finished bread in a lot less time on the second day because it ferments in a shorter time. The downside is that sourdough purists look at you reproachfully like a cat who’s had its cream ration replaced by low fat long life milk substitute…)
 In the late, great Alan Plater’s 1994 novel Oliver’s Travels, the characters play a game to pass the time on a long car journey. In the game, you have to talk as if you’re a character in a soap opera (“I sometimes think we’re all running away in this God-forsaken world” “And I guess this is where the running has to stop”). And if you can’t think of anything to say, you can use the line, “What’s that supposed to mean?” because it crops up all the time in tv dialogue to get the writers out of a hole.
I read the book again a short time ago, and here’s the thing: suddenly I hear the phrase “What’s that supposed to mean?” every time I turn on the tv – in the last couple of weeks alone in Star Trek Deep Space Nine, House, Spooks and Castle. If you look out for it, you can’t help noticing it – it’s everywhere. The thing to do is not to let it annoy you, but every time you hear it, have a drink, or eat a chocolate, or buy a new car, or something. (I do the same thing when watching Mythbusters on the Discovery Channel by counting the number of times they say, “that was AWEsome” – or, as they rather charmingly pronounce it, “Ossum”).
 I finished the first major overhaul of my novel at the weekend, reducing it from 135,000 words to 95,000, mostly by cutting out all unnecessary exposition, descriptions and adverbs. I still have my heart set on getting it under 90,000 words, which I’m confident of achieving by Christmas (it may have no literary merit, but by God, it’s going to be brief!). I wrote the very first draft back in 2003, and reading it again after such a long gap was like reading somebody else’s book. This made it much easier to be ruthless, but there were still times when I felt this other person was a better writer than his current editor!
I’ve been taking it easy on the gansey front this week, partly because I haven’t really been in a knitting mood, partly because I haven’t got a project lined up for when I finish this one, so I’m trying to make it last. Lawrence of Arabia claimed to have left his first (handwritten) draft of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom in a railway carriage, and never recovered it, so he had to write the whole thing again from scratch. There are times when I tackle the second sleeve on a gansey that I think I know how he must have felt.
This week’s bread is another ciabatta, using a different (more authentic) recipe. The thing with ciabatta is that the dough is very wet, and you’re advised to use a machine. As I don’t have a machine, I have to do it the hard way and knead it by hand, though knead is really the wrong word – mostly you’re just trying to stop it pouring off the edge of the counter, like someone trying to contain an oil spill. Overall, the experience is not unlike trying to fit diapers on an octopus. (Once the gluten starts to form it becomes very sticky, too, and at times it was hard to know where the dough stopped and I began.) The results are worth it, though – soft crumb inside, a nice crackly crust and lots of holes.
If this was a soap opera, I would now declare that I’m going to start a new life as an octopus wrangler. (And that would be your cue to say, “What’s that supposed to mean?”…)
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Winter came early to Scotland this year, with record low temperatures for November and lots of snow. Cars are slithering up the hill, the drivers hunched over the steering wheels, peering like Mr Magoo, and on the pavements people are walking as carefully as if they were crossing a rope bridge over a crocodile pit. Suddenly everyone’s an octogenarian. And it’s cold, well below freezing.
, so the above links have been removed.]
I’ve had a bit of a thing for east coast fishing towns and villages ever since we lived in Lowestoft, and Anstruther is definitely up there. The seafront has lots of restaurants and fish and chip shops, there are quaint back alleys and wynds, and you can walk out along the harbour to the lighthouse, and get a good view of the sea. Of course, there must be a reason why they need a sea wall over six feet high, but I haven’t been able to work it out yet…
I hate to say it, but we were a little bit disappointed by the museum. Just a bit. Of course, my main interest is ganseys, and I accept that’s not the typical reason for visiting; but despite housing the Moray Ganseys Project temporary exhibition, they didn’t really have much interesting knitwear on display. A couple of the dummies were wearing ganseys, but these were hidden under waistcoats or oilskins; and they had a small glass case dedicated to fishermen’s knitting, but the lights weren’t on in that gallery, and it was impossible to see any detail.
So why weren’t we more impressed? I suppose it’s because, although each item was displayed and labelled, it didn’t really add up to a coherent narrative. There wasn’t a “wow” factor, nothing to make you stop and think, no real human interest. (Actually, that’s not fair – they have a very effective room like a chapel, with plaques to fishermen lost at sea on the walls.) But I was hoping for more than a bunch of fishing-related stuff in glass cases and some of the world’s least convincing dummies. Hopefully when I go again it will click.
Now, I know that not everyone who reads this blog lives in large conurbations, so you may be wondering what it’s like to experience something like fireworks night in a vibrant, exciting, happening city like Edinburgh.
First, lay in a stock of small paper bags, the kind I used to buy a quarter pound of lemon drops in when I was a kid from the sweet shop on the corner (yes, that’s how old I am – supermarkets hadn’t been invented yet). Crisp packets would do at a pinch. Put these on your bedside table and wait until your partner or child is just falling asleep – anywhere between, say, 11.30 and 12.30 at night. Pick up one of the bags and make an O of your thumb and first finger, grasping the back firmly but not too tightly around the neck.
Lean back and watch them thrash around like an electrocuted salmon, while you make “tut-tut” noises and other insincere expressions of sympathy, happy in the knowledge of a job well done.
This week’s bread is another variation on French bread, this time a “spiked” sourdough. (Basically you make some of the bread the day before with your sourdough yeast culture, then make the rest of it the next day using commercial instant yeast. The advantage of this is that you still get the richer flavour of sourdough, but you can make the finished bread in a lot less time on the second day because it ferments in a shorter time. The downside is that sourdough purists look at you reproachfully like a cat who’s had its cream ration replaced by low fat long life milk substitute…)
In the late, great Alan Plater’s 1994 novel Oliver’s Travels, the characters play a game to pass the time on a long car journey. In the game, you have to talk as if you’re a character in a soap opera (“I sometimes think we’re all running away in this God-forsaken world” “And I guess this is where the running has to stop”). And if you can’t think of anything to say, you can use the line, “What’s that supposed to mean?” because it crops up all the time in tv dialogue to get the writers out of a hole.
I finished the first major overhaul of my novel at the weekend, reducing it from 135,000 words to 95,000, mostly by cutting out all unnecessary exposition, descriptions and adverbs. I still have my heart set on getting it under 90,000 words, which I’m confident of achieving by Christmas (it may have no literary merit, but by God, it’s going to be brief!). I wrote the very first draft back in 2003, and reading it again after such a long gap was like reading somebody else’s book. This made it much easier to be ruthless, but there were still times when I felt this other person was a better writer than his current editor!
I’ve been taking it easy on the gansey front this week, partly because I haven’t really been in a knitting mood, partly because I haven’t got a project lined up for when I finish this one, so I’m trying to make it last. Lawrence of Arabia claimed to have left his first (handwritten) draft of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom in a railway carriage, and never recovered it, so he had to write the whole thing again from scratch. There are times when I tackle the second sleeve on a gansey that I think I know how he must have felt.
This week’s bread is another ciabatta, using a different (more authentic) recipe. The thing with ciabatta is that the dough is very wet, and you’re advised to use a machine. As I don’t have a machine, I have to do it the hard way and knead it by hand, though knead is really the wrong word – mostly you’re just trying to stop it pouring off the edge of the counter, like someone trying to contain an oil spill. Overall, the experience is not unlike trying to fit diapers on an octopus. (Once the gluten starts to form it becomes very sticky, too, and at times it was hard to know where the dough stopped and I began.) The results are worth it, though – soft crumb inside, a nice crackly crust and lots of holes.