April 2013 » Gansey Nation

Filey 2.4: 22 – 28 April

I’d been referred to the eye clinic in Inverness because my optician had spotted a dark patch at the back of my eye – which, as is the way of medical matters, would either prove to be completely harmless (most likely), or potentially very bad (quite unlikely but you never know).

The reverse of the dimple and cable pattern

Well, it turned out to be harmless. No tumour, no detaching retina, no problems at all in fact (so as they say in the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, anything I still can’t cope with is therefore my own problem). Of course, in order to find that out, the doctor had to do the whole anaesthetising and dilating-the-pupils routine which made me look like a surprised barn owl, and shine bright lights into the retina, focusing the beam like a sadistic schoolboy using a magnifying glass to incinerate ants in the back yard. I can still smell a faint trace of smoke even now.

The small broch at Castlehill, with Dunnet Head in the background and slate fences in the foreground

I don’t know if you’ve ever had your eye anaesthetised? They do it to check the pressure, and it’s the weirdest feeling. Your eyeball seems to shrink in its socket and feels like it’s been coated in varnish. When you wipe your eye on a tissue you get a bright yellow smear, as though the anaesthetic is made from pureed canaries.

A Tale of Two Bands

At least no one took my picture when I was all numb and dilated like that. I gave a talk to the good people of Castletown Heritage Society last week, and asked them if they could send me some pictures of the occasion so we could use them for publicity purposes; and they kindly obliged. Goodness, it’s a shock to see yourself taken unawares! (Hear that popping noise? That’s the sound my amour propre makes as it bursts like a soap bubble.) In the best of them I look like I’ve just burst out of a cake; or like Gandalf at Aragorn’s coronation party, if the photographer had pressed the shutter just as a slightly inebriated Galadriel, after one too many “Rivendell slammers”, had decided to give the old wizard the wedgie of a lifetime.

Left-hand band from the front . . .

After all these distractions – hospital appointments, talks, and time spent sobbing in my room – I haven’t done a huge amount of knitting. Though I am making inroads into the second diamond, and the pattern is getting clearer by the day. So by way of distracting you from my own project, Margaret is now going to take you through her progress on de-steeking the cream cardigan.

Which, as you can see, is coming along nicely. The stitches for the left-hand band have been picked up, at a rate of two stitches per three rows. The first row is garter stitch, and then there’s about an inch of seed stitch. Aforesaid stitch is good for bands as it lies flat, but it’s about as much fun to knit as ribbing.

. . . and from the back.

The right-hand band will have horizontal buttonholes. I’ll probably knit them individually, as a series of little tabs, then knit a few rows across the top to join them all together. Think of a comb with its teeth at the edge of the centre front – without so many slits of course.

The facing, once the stitches have been picked up, folds very neatly to the back. When all the knitting is said and done, it’ll be catchstitched down so it has no chance whatsoever to flop about.

The band is bubbling a little, but hopefully a good steam with the iron should sort that out. This is the band the buttons will be sewn to. Alas the chosen buttons are a bit too big; to rest nicely on the band I’d have to knit another half inch or so, and that would make the bands too wide. So it’s off to the local knitting shop or t’interwebs to find better buttons.

Filey 2.3: 15 – 21 April

Spring is advancing like a suspicious fencing master: a few steps forward, a few steps back, a thrust here and a parry there; daffodils in the hedgerows and buds on the trees coupled with blustery wind and cold rain. It’s all up in the air still; you feel it could go either way. The shops, even in Wick, are optimistically full of summer clothes, t-shirts and sunblock, while people, wrapped in coats and scarves, huddle in the doorways out of the wind.

It’s my birthday this week, so I decided to treat myself to a subscription to Major League Baseball – it’s much cheaper than cricket and you can stream games on your computer, tv or iPad.

Watching my first game last night (Red Sox vs. Kansas City) was a bit of a shock. The last time I saw any baseball the players were all different creeds and colours; now they all look like the members of the rock group ZZ Top. They’re big, too: whereas cricketers have slimmed down and go haring round the field like whippets in flannels, some of these guys look like nightclub bouncers running for the bus.

There are many things that I love about baseball: the incredible skill, the tactics I can’t begin to understand, the family atmosphere – but also the fact that the players don’t habitually bite one another. A footballer, Luis Suarez, made the headlines in the UK this weekend for biting the arm of one the opposition players, and I mention this only because it’s given rise to my new favourite online joke: “the other guy stuck out his arm and Suarez made a meal of it…”

In gansey news the cardigan is in intensive care, surrounded by highly trained medical staff and machines that go “beep”. (I couldn’t bear to watch while Margaret cut the steek, but instead paced back and forth downstairs like an anxious father-to-be in a Victorian novel.) We hope to make next week’s blog a cardigan special but in the meantime here are a couple of “behind the scenes” photos.

Meanwhile the new Filey gansey continues to slowly grow under the needles. It’s about seven inches high now, including the welt, and the pattern is really starting to take shape.

I often find that knitting a gansey is like reading Proust: you start off full of enthusiasm and zonk through the first volume in no time, and find yourself thinking, this isn’t so bad, ha, don’t know what all the fuss is about. Then sometime around the middle of volume 2 it begins to occur to you that there are still another five volumes to go and young blasted Marcel is unbelievably still only a child; despair insinuates itself into your soul like the lingering smell of yesterday’s burnt toast and you find yourself possessed of an urge to re-read Harry Potter books instead. (In fact, now I think of it, I may patent the Gansey Proustometer, a scale to measure knitting progress against based on the great man’s works. On that scale I’m probably a Swann’s Way 7.5 at the moment.)

As I said, it’s my birthday later in the week, and as a special treat I’ll be spending it at the hospital in Inverness getting my eyes examined – which means bright lights, dilated pupils and tears before bedtime: only two of which are in any way unusual for me…

Filey 2.2: 8 – 14 April

I don’t know if your satellite navigation system has a setting called “drunken ant wandering across a carpet”? Ours has, and the dial seems to be stuck on it.

We drove back to Southport this weekend (900 mile round trip, 2 days—but still 3 days shorter than a cricket match) with a view to collecting our now repaired car. On the map the final stage seemed straightforward: down Road A for a mile, then left up Road B for another mile, garage on the left, sorted.

But like one of those fairy will o’ the wisps that lure unsuspecting strangers onto the moors at night, never to be seen again, the sat-nav seduced us onto little known byways, into housing estates, up people’s drives and in one instance, unless I was hallucinating by then, into someone’s front porch. (I couldn’t swear to it, but at one point I thought I heard the computer’s tinny voice sniggering.)

Of course, it’s also possible that Wigan is the secret location of Hogwarts school of witchcraft and wizardry and the roads rearrange themselves when you’re not looking. (I did see some odd-looking people in fancy dress who I naturally took for wizards but, disappointingly, they just turned out to be football supporters.)

In the end we found our way to the Renault garage by the simple expedient of winding down the windows and driving towards the sound of the howls of anguish from the other customers who’d just been presented with their repair bills.

So once again, I’m afraid, we haven’t been able to turn our attention to the cardigan and the ancient ceremony of the Cutting of the Steek—usually done to the accompaniment of a noble bagpipe pibroch—but we’ll do it next week, hopefully. Till then, I’ve been working on and off on my new Filey project, and have now reached the point where I’ve started the pattern.

This is based on Matt Cammish’s gansey recorded in Gladys Thompson on pages 21 and 24 of her book. I’ve always liked the look of it, and the fact that a member of the Cammish family wore it in the Navy in the Second World War gave me an extra reason to want to try it.

The pattern is in two sections: one of a diamond of 13 stitches and the other of ribs flanking a central cable, comprising 28 stitches. I wanted to keep the ribs and cables exactly as they were, so that meant that any tweaking of the pattern to fit would have to be done with the diamonds. In order to fit my total of 210 stitches per side, I ended up with 5 panels of ribs and cables, and 4 panels of 19-stitch diamonds (see charts).

Nigel has alerted me to the fact that Eyemouth Museum currently has an exhibition on called Casting the Nets, part of which involves a “gathering of the ganseys”—see their website. Eyemouth is a lovely little town, well worth a visit anyway, so if you’re in the vicinity it would be rude not to drop in.

I’d love to go myself, but at the moment I’m frightened that if I programme it into my sat-nav I’ll end up plunging off a cliff into the North Sea, on the grounds that it’s probably slightly quicker to float there…

Filey 2.1: 1 – 7 April

First of all, apologies to those who’ve tuned in to see open-heart surgery on the cardigan (actually I think of it as a sort of sex-change operation, from a gansey to a cardy—each requiring the steady use of a pair of scissors, if the cartoons I watched as a child are to be believed). But owing to one of those random acts of God that come along now and then and cause untold devastation—e.g., a meteorite strike, an earthquake, a Conservative government—I’m afraid we’re a little behind schedule.

Let me explain: we’re back in Wick after our Easter holiday down south—but our car isn’t. Instead, it languishes in a garage 450 miles away, after the steering lock died outside our friends’ house in Southport (in the process lowering the tone of a very decent neighbourhood).

We only found out there was a problem at 8.30am on the day we were set to leave, said automobile having made the journey there with no difficulties whatsoever; but when I inserted the card in the ignition all that resulted was a sort of sad ticking noise, as though the car was clicking its tongue at the futility of our expectations of getting home. Luckily we had roadside assistance cover, but it took 3 RAC patrolmen over 5 hours to decide that we were beyond help. (It was like watching an episode of “House”, but one where by the time the credits rolled he’d given up and gone down the pub instead of solving the mystery at the last minute.)

The stack in Staxigoe

At times the whole experience resembled Baldilocks and the Three Bewildered RAC Patrolmen: the first thought it was the immobiliser; the second thought it was the electrics; and the third thought it was the ignition. (I just thought it was bloody freezing, and I was the only correct one among us.)

At last a trailer came and hauled the carcase away and we were provided with a hire car to get home, a feat we achieved at 12.15am (after a rather scenic twilight drive through the snow-capped Highlands). If the garage can fix it soon, I’ll take another couple of days off work later in the week and we’ll hire another car and repeat the 9-hour drive south to pick it up—and pay the £600+ repair bill.

As Feste the clown sings in Twelfth Night:

“And when I bought myself a car,
With hey ho, the wind and the rain,
It never got me very far,
For the car it breaketh every day…”

Staxigoe harbour

Anyway. Thank you to everyone who downloaded copies of my books when they were on the free promotion over Easter. I’m delighted to report that there were about 2,000 downloads overall, a record for me.

Finally, as the discerning among you will have guessed, I’ve started another gansey. This one is in Frangipani seaspray yarn. My plan is to knit a generic gansey to donate to the crew of the Reaper, the fishing boat the Anstruther Fisheries Museum uses for educational purposes and which came to the Wick Harbour Festival last year (when the captain told me they were always looking for authentic ganseys to wear).

Since I’m fairly generic myself, I’m basing it on my own size: so a 44”-46” chest. I cast on 388 stitches to make a ribbed welt of 97 ribs, and after knitting about 3.5 inches have just increased into the body to bring it to 430 stitches. The pattern will be based on Matt Cammish’s gansey, a Filey pattern recorded in Gladys Thompson’s book (picture on p.21, directions on p.24). I’ve had to change it slightly to fit the number of stitches I have, but it’ll be essentially the same. More on this next week, though.

Meanwhile, spring has come to Wick, in the form of stunning blue skies and crisp sunshine, even if the wind is bitterly cold. In fact it’s so nice we could just jump in the car and go for a dri—

Oh wait.

Gansey Nation

Filey 2.4: 22 – 28 April

Filey 2.3: 15 – 21 April

Filey 2.2: 8 – 14 April

Filey 2.1: 1 – 7 April

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