Gansey Nation

I wonder if Noah ever passed through Edinburgh during his travels? If so, he’d have felt right at home. And I’m not talking about the drunkenness and nudity, though there is that to consider. No, but when it comes to raining for 40 days and 40 nights, Edinburgh seems to be your town. Last week it go so bad I started building an Ark on Arthur’s Seat, but I didn’t have planning permission so the Council made me take it down. Old Testament prophets never had this problem.

In between dodging thunderstorms and lightning strikes I’ve been knitting. As you’ll see, I’ve reached the point of dividing front and back. So the gussets are on holders (spare lengths of old yarn, i.e.) and I’m knitting back-and-forth on a second pair of circular needles. As usual, it’s a bit of a shock to the system to be alternating recto and verso, as it were, so I’m making a few mistakes which have to be painstakingly corrected as I go, dammit, and I have to take care to keep the stitches as even as possible – though it will all even out in the wash, so I’m not worried.

I really like the feel of the needle I’m using – a “Knit Picks Classic Circular Knitting Needle”. It’s got a nice, sharp nose like Concorde (most dpns have the nose of a jumbo jet) and the metal tip doesn’t have a coating to flake off, like many do. I tried another pair first – a “Susan Bates Quicksilver”, which I liked the sound of (one of my favourite Neal Stephenson novels has the same name). But I had a couple of problems with it: firstly, it was 73.5cm, not 80cm, and felt a bit tight; and secondly, I knit so tightly my stitches constantly snagged on the lip where the needle joins the plastic holder part. So I regretfully had to abandon it.

Heigh ho. I’ve sent out my manuscript to 30 literary agents so far. 20 have already rejected it; the other 10 are currently working out how to let me down gently. But then, I tell myself, if it was easy, any old tat would make it into print. (What’s that you say? Oh.) Perseverance is the key, though it’s hard not to feel just a smidgeon discouraged.

By way of consolation, I’ve been baking bread with sugar in. This is a sandwich bread, made with oil, milk and egg, so it’s very soft and very dense – and did I mention the sugar? It’s like a hot cross bun without the fruit, the cross, or the heat, and a little goes a long way. Next time I plan to add some cinnamon and raisins and see what happens. (Death by hardened arteries, probably.)

Finally a heads-up, there won’t be a blog next week. Margaret’s going away on what I like to call a holiday, though she describes it as a trial separation, so I plan to take a break from writing of all kinds. The fact that I find the blog software too complicated to use has absolutely nothing to do with it…

Now I’m off to write a letter to the Press Complaints Commission. Turns out I’m the only person in Britain whose phone wasn’t hacked by Rupert Murdoch’s News International, and I want to know why.

As I write this the sun is shining on Edinburgh, birds are singing, and little boys are skateboarding down the hill outside and causing multiple accidents as they collide with oncoming traffic at the bottom. A typical summer’s day, you might say. And – what follows is a bit shocking, so those of you of a nervous disposition may choose to skip to the next paragraph – with the extreme daring of a Victorian bather I have taken my socks off and rolled up my trouser legs an inch or two. If this keeps up we’re talking shorts, and to hell with the neighbours’ blood pressure, say I.

It was so nice last week, in fact, that we went for an excursion in the four-wheeler, down the coast to Eyemouth (which always makes me think it should be twinned with Earnose, or something). I’m trying to visit all the old fishing towns and villages I can, places where gansey patterns have been collected, without getting all obsessive about it.

Eyemouth is a lovely little town of some 3,400 inhabitants, and has the feel of a real fishing port, not a tourist recreation, which is the fate of so much of Britain’s heritage. Eyemouth is the genuine article, with battered old working fishing boats tied up in the harbour, heaps of lobster pots drying in the sun, a working shipyard, a fish market and a strong smell of fish. I loved it. There wasn’t much activity on a sleepy sunny June morning, nor, of course, any ganseys in this day and age, just a few dog walkers and employees of the main fish merchants in town in their rubber aprons and wellies, ready for a hard day’s gaffing, and a couple of men working on a boat in the shipyard.

We parked on the sea front and wandered up the beach, picking our way through sand, shingle, jellyfish and dog poo, trying to decide if the lumps on the rocks out at sea were seals or, er, lumps of rock. (They probably wondered the same about us.) In fact, the beach was strewn with glistening, blobby, beached purple jellyfish, looking as if Shrek had a cold but had forgotten his handkerchief. We heard on the news later that Torness nuclear power station just up the coast had to shut down both its reactors when this swarm of jellyfish clogged their cooling water filters. (None of the jellyfish I saw looked to be associated with Greenpeace, but you never know.)

The harbour is a deep gash like a narrow V in the coastline, the point where the River Eye bleeds into the ocean, and we walked down one side, then up the other, in full Old Salt mode, trying to work out where all the boats came from by their registrations (one was from Exeter, nearly as far from home as we were). One of these days I’m going to apply for an Arts Council Grant and go round these wonderful old places with a bunch of ganseys and some hired extras and recreate the famous old photographs of fishermen by Sutcliffe et al.

Speaking of ganseys, I’m still making good progress. This is going to be quite a long one – 27/28 inches – so I still haven’t reached the gussets. (The basic dimensions will be as follows. Body: 15/16 inches. Gussets: 4 inches. Armhole & shoulder: 8 inches.) Not far to go before I start the gussets.

Finally, I decided it was time to move my bread baking up a notch and try my hand at croissants. This is the first time I’ve ever made them, and they’re really not as troublesome as I’d been led to believe. (In fact, if it wasn’t for the 368g of butter per batch, I’d probably make them all the time now!) They take a long time, since you have to let the dough rest between each fold, but you can freeze them – we now have a freezer full. Next time I’ll roll the dough out thinner and make them a bit smaller, and the shaping could be better, but really they’re not bad for a first go. And they taste great with fresh coffee…

And you’ll be relieved to know that since I started writing this, it has clouded over (changeable or what?). Summer is temporarily put on hold, and the shorts remain in the drawer, like a faithful old sheepdog who’s never lost hope that it might be taken out for one last round-up of the flock…