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 Back to work this week, which helped me realise that taking time off work to move house is not as relaxing as lying on a sunny beach and reading a trashy novel while the waves slip invitingly between your toes. No, it was back to toiling in the dark, sunless archive mines, which resemble the fabled mines of Moria, only we get more trolls.
Highlight of the week was when workmen came to fix the fire escape. We’re upstairs on the first floor, with a rickety metal staircase leading down to the ground outside; and apart from its rather daring instability in strong winds, in the winter it gets very slippery with leaves and moss, so that the unwary fire escapee can find themselves losing their footing and hurtling down on their backside like someone escaping a jet liner on a chute – with the added risk of not stopping at the bottom, but sailing nonchalantly down the hill to the harbour, and so on out to sea, eventually to fetch up in Norway.
 As far I could tell from the other side of the door, the repairs seemed mostly to consist of hitting the stairs with a hammer (or, judging from the periodic episodes of very inventive swearing), each other. There were times when it was closer to working in a metal foundry than an archive. At last they packed up and went home, so we decided to see what they’d done, only to find they’d somehow managed to jam our fire door shut – thus, I suppose, doing away with the need for a fire escape at all, a perfect solution in local government terms.
I’ve included a picture of the view from my office window at work, because it’s lovely. The camera focuses on the trees in the foreground, but it’s easier than it looks to see through them to the river (running through the town from left to right, to the harbour where the waves burst against the stone breakwaters in an effect like a fat man sneezing with a mouthful of milk). There are worse views in the world.
In between unpacking boxes, working, and falling asleep in front of the television (my idea of a rich full life) I’ve also just about managed to keep up with the knitting. I try to manage 45-60 minutes a night, and as I work down the sleeve the decreases are starting to take effect, so each row feels a little shorter than the last.
 Wick being a gansey sort of place I was taken to task by one of our regular researchers, a sprightly young chap in his 80s, who fixed me with an ancient mariner sort of stare and asked me if I knew the origin of the word “gansey”. I gave him the usual spiel of the Elizabethan knitting industry in Guernsey, but he brushed that aside with the ease of a batsman clipping away a legside half-volley. No, he said, Guernsey was too small and insignificant for that. The real origin was from Scandinavia, where they refer to fishermen’s pullovers as “gansers”.
So I was wondering if anyone had any thoughts on that? Is there really a Scandinavian tradition of “gansers” – or is that likely to be a corruption of our word, “gansey”? What do you think?
Finally, there won’t be a blog next week – Margaret is escaping from Caithness to Edinburgh and London (she says she’s got some music event to go to, but I think she’s really off in search of Starbucks) and I have a certain amount of falling asleep in front of the TV to catch up on, so we will be returning on Monday 12th March. Look forward to catching up with you all then.
So here we are, all moved in, and trying to figure out how everything works – the central heating, the hot water, the television, the cooker. Everything’s unfamiliar, everything’s strange (I finally figured out why the croissants kept burning when I realised the dial I was twisting turned on the grill, not the oven. D’oh!). The kitchen cabinets seem to rearrange themselves overnight like the Hogwarts staircases.
The house doesn’t feel like it’s ours yet – and I got so used to living on one level in the Edinburgh flat that it’s hard to get my head around 3 dimensions. We keep losing each other and have taken to carrying our cell phones at all times – not to answer, but because you can tell where the other person is by the ring, like hi-tech Alpine cowherds.
The most surprising feature so far has been the trick toilet seat, which we found out had a broken fitting. You’d sit down, lulled into a false state of relaxation, and enter the usual Buddhist trance appropriate to the situation, when suddenly bang!, the seat would shift and you’d be jerked sideways like a crash test dummy, the warm and fleshy underparts of your thigh making startling contact with the cold porcelain rim of the bowl; and you’d be left wondering if that red face cloth over there could possibly be your tongue, bitten off and propelled across the room in the catastrophe.
After so much hauling and unpacking my hands are no longer the soft, pampered hands of a gentleman: the nails are cracked and split, the knuckles bruised and cut; whenever I venture outdoors I am forced to wear gloves lest someone mistakes me for a bare knuckle fighter and challenges me to a bout (trust me, it sounds glamorous, but gets tedious after a while). After unpacking over 30 boxes of books, I am reluctantly forced to ask myself whether we own too many… (The answer, of course, is no.)
The movers were fine, taking in their stride, as it were, the 57 stairs up to the flat on the one hand, and the 41-metre path to the front door too narrow to get the van up (and the 3 floors) on the other. Of course it rained and blew a gale. Of course it snowed; this is Caithness, after all. But we’re here now. And we have the rest of our lives to unpack.
So, not much time for knitting, and in any case my fingertips were just too tender for a couple of days. But I’ve finished the pattern on the sleeve, and now it’s just plain sailing, more or less, all the way to the cuff.
Apologies to all who posted or emailed this last week. It took a while to get our internet connection sorted out, and our computers unpacked. But hopefully life will now slowly return to normal – after which, as Douglas Adams said, anything we still can’t cope with is therefore our own problem…
If you open your window late one night, when the traffic has died down, the bars have closed and the midnight drunks have run out of passers-by to abuse (you can tell I used to live in Edinburgh, can’t you?), if you stick your head out and listen very closely you might just hear a faint whisper, like a breath of wind, or a very old ghost whose lottery numbers still haven’t come up: that will be me, sighing in relief at having finished one cuff and successfully picked up the stitches around the other armhole without mishap.
So great is my relief that it will continue to resonate through the universe of time and space, like the background radiation from the Big Bang, and in the coming centuries puzzled scientists will wonder what is interfering with their instruments.
Just a short blog this week, as starting Monday we’re finally moving in to our new house in Wick; so all our possessions, including computers, are packed in boxes and shoved in the back of a lorry – so we’ll probably be offline for a few days. Meanwhile, lots to do.
But there’s time for a couple of parish notices. First of all, many thanks once again to Judit for sending us another one of her splendid ganseys to display in the Gallery. It’s the light blue gansey with horizontal bands, based on patterns from Beth Brown-Reinsel’s book.
Secondly, thanks to Mary Morrison and Catherine Mathieson (hope I’ve got your name right, Catherine – I haven’t got access to my emails up here) for bringing my attention to “They Lived By The Sea”, a little 32-page booklet by Henrietta Munro and Rae Compton on Caithness fishermen and their ganseys. The book’s long out of print, but Margaret was able to turn up a second-hand copy.
As it happens, Henrietta (“Hetty”) Munro was a keen local historian from Thurso and her notes and papers are on deposit with our archive – so the book has an extra meaning for me. And how lucky is this? The book came with a letter from her dated 1984 tucked inside the cover, to the person who bought the copy, in which he’s obviously asking if he can get a gansey knitted. Hetty replies, “I can easily have a gansey knitted for you and a pair of hose. BUT it would have to be in one of the patterns in the book. Otherwise it wouldn’t be a gansey.” (Ha! In your face, Cornwall…)
Finally, after my haiku triumph in the comments last week, I’m now thinking of renaming the blog “Another Fine Mesh”. What do you think?
I was asked a few weeks ago if I could say something about what being an archivist is all about. The short answer is, an archivist looks after written documents, the way a museum curator looks after historical objects, or a Star Wars fan his limited edition collectible Jar Jar Binks action figurines.
If you’ve seen The Lord of the Rings, your impression of archives may be slightly skewed; I’m thinking here of the scene early on where Gandalf goes to Minas Tirith to look up the history of the Ring. For instance, most archives don’t have piles of parchment manuscripts lying around, alas, and they certainly don’t let you browse them with a naked candle flame in your hand. (If Gandalf tried that in Caithness he’d have his reader’s ticket revoked pretty damn smartish, I can tell you; from the look of him, he should have washed his hands first, too.) I was sobbing so loudly after that scene they had to ask me to leave the cinema.
Before any documents can be looked at, they have to be catalogued. So most of my time is spent reading and listing old manuscripts, papers and books, and arranging them into a coherent sequence. Currently I’m working through 150 boxes of legal papers from one of the largest solicitors’ firms in Caithness, the older ones in Latin. My favourite new word? The old Scottish legal term for an extension to property, which sounds like something the Simpsons would say, was “biggings”; isn’t that great?
Anyway, if you ever had occasion to think, “Archivist, eh? That must be interesting”, just remember me and my 150 boxes of title deeds – and bear in mind that a famous writer, whenever he was on a long train journey and didn’t want to be bothered with tiresome conversation, always used to tell his fellow passengers that he was an archivist… Strangely, they always left him alone.
Moray Firth from Helmsdale On the gansey front, I’ve almost finished the first sleeve. I’ve been decreasing at a rate of 2 stitches every 7th row, and having started with 159 stitches, by the time I reached the cuffs (just under 19 inches later) I had 110. I decreased by 10 to give me exactly 100 stitches for the cuff, and am now just over 4 inches along. (As usual, I’m knitting a 6-inch cuff so that the wearer can roll the cuff back to suit.) Should finish it this week, and then we get to do it all again on the other sleeve.
Can I draw your attention to a query from Sylvia Sawatzky on the Books page? She’s trying to track down a particular book on ganseys that had a memorable photograph in it. As I don’t have my library up here yet, I wonder if anyone else has any suggestions as to which it might be?
Ah, well. I suppose I’d better get back to cataloguing my boxes of title deeds; after all I’m 9 down, only 141 to go…
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Back to work this week, which helped me realise that taking time off work to move house is not as relaxing as lying on a sunny beach and reading a trashy novel while the waves slip invitingly between your toes. No, it was back to toiling in the dark, sunless archive mines, which resemble the fabled mines of Moria, only we get more trolls.
As far I could tell from the other side of the door, the repairs seemed mostly to consist of hitting the stairs with a hammer (or, judging from the periodic episodes of very inventive swearing), each other. There were times when it was closer to working in a metal foundry than an archive. At last they packed up and went home, so we decided to see what they’d done, only to find they’d somehow managed to jam our fire door shut – thus, I suppose, doing away with the need for a fire escape at all, a perfect solution in local government terms.
Wick being a gansey sort of place I was taken to task by one of our regular researchers, a sprightly young chap in his 80s, who fixed me with an ancient mariner sort of stare and asked me if I knew the origin of the word “gansey”. I gave him the usual spiel of the Elizabethan knitting industry in Guernsey, but he brushed that aside with the ease of a batsman clipping away a legside half-volley. No, he said, Guernsey was too small and insignificant for that. The real origin was from Scandinavia, where they refer to fishermen’s pullovers as “gansers”.
