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 It’s the end of April, the sun is shining like it means it, the wind has – whisper who dares – dropped, and I’m a whole year older than I was last week. I turned 52, thanks for asking – somewhere there’s a painting of me that stays the same age, pristine and unraddled, while I meanwhile rapidly decay, my once-fine features disintegrating like a Nazi in an Indiana Jones movie.
For my birthday I finally got a Kindle ebook reader, so I spent the weekend doing what all my friends who bought one did, downloading dozens of free books I’ll never read, just because I can. (The complete works of James Joyce, you say? Why, of course! It would be rude not to.) Then there’s the bizarre urge to buy my favourite books all over again as ebooks, even though I already own them in hard copy.
 Dunnet Head But you can at least download the wonderful novels of Thorne Smith for less than £1 each, so it’s already proved worth it for me. If you don’t know Smith’s work, he was an American writer in the 1920s and 30s, and, according to his rather po-faced Wikipedia entry, wrote “comic fantasy fiction involving sex, much drinking and supernatural transformations” – so a man wakes up to find he’s turned into a skeleton (Skin and Bones), another man falls in with a bunch of charmingly crooked ghosts (Topper, and the brilliant Topper Takes A Trip), or a married couple end up in each other’s bodies (Turnabout). If you haven’t read him I strongly urge you to give him a go – he’s absurd, silly, a little bit sad and very, very funny.
Also this week I’ve been contacted by Yasmin of the Hebridean Isles Trading Company on the island of Colonsay, who asked me to mention her website. Yasmin offers wool and fleeces from her own flock, as well as ganseys knit from it and residential knitting courses. Looks well worth supporting.
My own gansey project is continuing apace, albeit slowly. I’ve settled into a steady rhythm, an hour a night (or 2 rows), more at weekends if I can. So far it’s giving me just what I wanted, a relaxing, stress-free knit, and unless my wind wanders all the way to the cliffs and falls over it’s impossible to go far wrong with such a simple, repetitive pattern. As it grows it seems to get redder, and bizarrely it even seems to get warmer, no doubt by association (red = hot). But the time I’ve finished the body I’ll be knitting with oven gloves.
Finally, I decided to celebrate my birthday by baking some rolls – the first baking I’ve done since last summer. Well, it wasn’t a success. For whatever reason – out of practice, old flour, cold kitchen – I ended up with nine leaden lumps (I started out with 10, but one collapsed under its own gravity and became a black hole). I toyed with the idea of using them as paperweights before running into an old fisherman who took them off my hands; he said they’d be perfect for sinking his deep-sea fishing nets.
Next week: I patent the baguette anchor!
It’s always interesting to consider what might have happened in history if certain people hadn’t lived: science without Newton or Einstein, music without Beethoven or Bob Dylan – and fantasy without JRR Tolkien.
Of course, there was fantasy literature before Tolkien – Conan the Barbarian in America, Jules Verne in France, Homer in Greece, the whimsical English fairy tradition. But the whole “high medieval” fantasy of kings and queens, dark lords and dragons, armies of darkness and elves of light, all really stems from Tolkien. Like composers after Beethoven, every fantasy writer since Tolkien has had to either imitate or reject; he casts a very long shadow, even today.
My problem with a lot of this kind of fantasy is that I’m a democrat. I hate the idea of “rightful kings”, of an aristocracy; I want my fantasy world to have equality of the sexes, universal education and suffrage, proper dentistry (I can’t imagine Aragorn, even if he had the hands of a healer, popping round to perform a tricky tooth extraction after office hours). I want to see Aragorn and Sauron standing for election, maybe seeing off Saruman and Elrond in the primaries, facing Obama in a live televised debate.
Anyway, replace Aragorn with Prince Charles and you see the problem with hereditary monarchies at a stroke. Preferably of an axe. (What’s that you say? We get an extra day’s holiday for the Queen’s jubilee? Why no, madam, I was only kidding. Vive la Reine!)
Slightly slower gansey progress this week as I spent a couple of days in Edinburgh for work; and as you still can’t take knitting needles as carry-on I had to leave the poor thing behind, like an abandoned puppy, nose pressed against the window watching me leave, howling inconsolably (“Down, Red!”).
This meant flying from Wick airport, possibly the cutest airport in Britain. There’s something very pleasing about watching your bag being hauled out of the cargo hold, put on a truck, driven the ten metres to the terminal, and unloaded through a hatch directly into the waiting lounge for you to pick up, even if some of the mystique of air travel is lost in the process.
Here at last is the pattern chart – though it’s scarcely a surprise at this stage. The only change I made from the original pattern was to widen the step slightly, from 10 stitches to 12, and of course to increase the number of pattern repeats to fit my stitch gauge. I’m cabling every 6 rows which makes for a nice, tight cable. The wearer will be lucky if he can bend over once it’s on. Heaven help him if he sneezes.
The Humber Keel gansey finally made it to Des, the intended victim, in Edinburgh – here’s a picture to prove it. I thought he wouldn’t get a chance to wear it till the cold weather in autumn, but luckily we’re having a traditional Scottish spring.
Finally, another triumph for Lynne; here’s her Cape Cod gansey, based on the pattern from Alice Starmore’s book. Note the patterned gusset, a nice touch. Congratulations again!
 So, spring has come to Caithness, bringing with it gale force winds, freezing temperatures, and snow flurries. We went for a walk up to Duncansby Head (near John o’ Groats) and the wind threw seagulls at us as if they were being fired from a cannon. The local lochs have whitecaps and, to celebrate the centenary of the Titanic, icebergs. (I don’t know if you’re familiar with the saying, Summer in Scotland is just winter with leaves?)
How was your Easter? Good, I hope, and filled with oodles of chocolate (or did the Easter Bunny die in vain?). We drove the 12-hour, 600-mile journey to visit my parents in Northampton, after which I was so tired you could have scraped me off the pavement with a shovel.
 My parents live in this lovely old canalside former public house, where I grew up – in the words of Neil Young, all my changes were there. I used to spend hours walking along the towpath, enjoying the silence, staring into the slow-flowing water and seeing visions, as you do when you’re young. Well, we went for a walk along the canal towpath on Easter Sunday, and it was sad to see how crowded it’s become: narrow boats moored nose to tail, not for the night but permanent residences with satellite tv; suspicious men with dreadlocks and weathered faces, wearing army surplus fatigues, smoking rollups and brewing up over camp fires; and barking big black dogs with far too many teeth lurking round every corner.
 AND we repainted the lounge: Before  After |
As Yeats says, tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
Ah well. Closing for a moment the albums marked “nostalgia” and “sentimentality”, it will not have escaped your notice from the photos that I have started the pattern – Filey V from Gladys Thompson (page 28 in my edition). I said before that because I’m using Wendy’s yarn, which is a little fluffier than Frangipani, I’m not entirely sure what my stitch gauge will be; so I wanted a pattern with lots of cables to draw it in a bit, just in case. And this one has cables the way Wick has seagulls.
I also wanted a pattern that would be easy to keep track of. I’ve struggled with some of my recent projects, which have been pretty intricate – always a high-risk strategy for someone with my attention sp… Oh look! A seagull!
Where was I? Oh, yes, the pattern. Although the really fancy patterns are wonderful, I’ve always had a soft spot for the simpler designs, which in their own way are just as effective. But since I started this blog I’ve felt a stupid sort of pressure to keep on with the complicated ones – as if the simpler patterns won’t be interesting enough for my discerning readership. (I told you it was stupid.) So anyway. Here’s a really simple pattern – just steps and cables, ad infinitum. A project I don’t have to think about, but can just relax to. My knitting equivalent of the slowly flowing muddy brown water of the canals of my youth…
In truth, I’ve always fancied this pattern. Its chunky texture reminds me of a Native American traditional breastplate, which I find really cool. And I’m delighted at how well the red yarn shows both the texture and the pattern. In fact, I think when it’s finished it’ll look like Space Marine body armour (bright red).
 I’ve included my victim’s initials on this one, one either side of the seam. It’s always a bit of a gamble. If I’ve got the gauge wrong, or if he puts on weight, well, eBay here we come. I used the templates from Rae Compton’s Batsford book, page 60.
Finally, many congratulations to Barbara from British Columbia for finishing her splendid “Point Holmes” gansey, which she has kindly agreed to let us display in the gallery here. It just goes to show how effective combinations of gansey patterns can be – and it’s hard to beat a navy gansey on a sunny day!
How windy is it in Caithness just now? Take a small to medium sized family car – something like a Ford Ka, say, or a Renault Clio – position it on level ground, put it in neutral and take the handbrake off. Go round the back and give it a push. As it eases into motion, that’s about how hard it is to force your way against the wind right now. I’m actually getting tired muscles from walking into the wind. Everything is tilted to 45 degrees, people lean at crazy angles like Charlie Chaplin with his boots nailed to the floor. Even my coffee has whitecaps.
Caithness: Don't bother combing your hair Still, after the glimpse of summer we had last week, suddenly it no longer seems quite so counter-intuitive to be knitting ganseys. I’m past the ribbing, and have increased (from 388 to 432, an increase of 44 stitches or about 10%). The gansey at this stage resembles a muffin – or the sort of creature archaeologists have found fossils of in the Burgess Shale, and I imagine it roaming across the shallow bottom of prehistoric oceans, illuminated by shafts of sunlight, hunting for krill.
As I said last week, the gansey is going to be the same size as the previous Humber Star gansey, i.e., 46 inches in the round. But – I should have said this last time – I’m using Wendy yarn instead of Frangipani, for a change. (I expect it to take between 11 and 12 100 gram balls, but I got 13 just to be on the safe side; when I finally decide to call it a day, the last gansey I knit will be a multi-coloured, migraine-inducing spectacular, using up all the leftover yarn from previous projects.)
Now, Wendy is a slightly fluffier yarn than Frangipani, and my stitch gauge naturally tends to change when I knit with fluffier wool, with fewer stitches to the inch. So the risk is, by keeping to the same number of stitches, I end up with a gansey tent, not a jumper; but if I reduce them, I might make it too small, and end up with more of a corset.
So in the end I decided to stick with the same number as last time, but pick a pattern with lots of cables. The pattern will be “Filey V” from Gladys Thompson’s book – I’ll chart it out for next time, when I start the detail). It’s a simple pattern, but very effective, and the cables should draw it in a bit, while allowing room for expansion in the blocking stage if need be. It’s all a bit “rule of thumb” but it should work out OK.
It’s not getting any less red as it grows, I notice. Maybe I could start a new line in hand-knitted Chinese lanterns?
No blog next week, as we’ll be away over Easter visiting my parents in Northampton, a distance of some 598.1 miles. They don’t have an internet connection, so it’ll be a complete break from the stresses of the modern world (other stresses may, of course, be involved – not least the promise of snow this week, which should make life interesting).
Margaret and I would like to wish all our readers a very happy, wind-free Easter, and we’ll see you again on Monday 16th April.
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It’s the end of April, the sun is shining like it means it, the wind has – whisper who dares – dropped, and I’m a whole year older than I was last week. I turned 52, thanks for asking – somewhere there’s a painting of me that stays the same age, pristine and unraddled, while I meanwhile rapidly decay, my once-fine features disintegrating like a Nazi in an Indiana Jones movie.
