Gansey Nation

First of all, I should apologise for the sudden drop in quality of this week’s pictures and blog generally. This is not, as you would suspect, because we have outsourced the blog to Taiwan; but because Margaret has a court order requiring her to be allowed to go away and enjoy herself at least once a year, which seems only fair, and so she’s off to the Continent for a few weeks.

She’s taken her camera with her, so it’s just me and my iPhone: which is why the gansey looks as if it’s suddenly turned aquamarine overnight, as if cursed by an evil godmother who’s also colour-blind.

After finishing off the first cuff I spent a couple of days in denial, refusing to pick up the stitches around the other armhole like a 12 year-old who won’t get out of bed because there’s a test at school. I’m trying to develop a scale to reflect my reluctance to pick up stitches: at the moment it rates slightly worse than doing the ironing, but better than a trip to the dentist.

How so be it, I finally manned up and of course it wasn’t so bad, and now I’m on the home straight, with the finish line in sight—sometime around the end of August, hopefully.

It’s been a hard old week at work: there’s a room in an empty industrial unit in Wick that’s been used to store old Council records which has to be cleared, so, with my colleague on holiday just now, I’ve been doing an hour there each morning, sorting what I need to keep and carting it to the office, then going home for a shower and a change of clothes, and then back to work again to open up for the public.

I know that, from reading these blogs, you’d think archives was a glamorous, exciting world of fast cars and high living. And, of course, so it is, normally (only with old records in place of the cars). But sometimes, like this week, just me in an abandoned old building, full of dirt and darkness and spiders and strange noises, it’s kind of squalid.

I remember once when we were rescuing some old records from a shed in Wales and another colleague reached up to pull down a box from a shelf, and a spider ran over his hand and disappeared up his sleeve. The results were fascinating to watch, really: first he sort of spasmed, like someone touching an electric fence; and then he began to wriggle, as if showing what a speeded up time-lapse film of a mime artist might look like—all the time making high-pitched squeals like a pig being sucked into space through an airlock very slowly.

Archivists: the unsung heroes. (Where’s my movie, Clint?)

Did I say it was flat up here?

My Victorian murder mystery The Cuckoo’s Nest continues to do pretty well on Amazon, better than any of my other books at the same stage, in fact: I guess crime really does pay, as the saying goes. So thanks to everyone who’s downloaded or bought it. Hope you like it. I’m not going to write a sequel—I think my poor characters have earned the right to an undisturbed happy ending—well, I say happy—but I may write another Victorian mystery if this one continues to do well.

There won’t be a blog next week: as I shall be away myself, feeling that I rather deserve a holiday at this point, and I won’t be taking my knitting. I’m heading south to England, where, like Paul Simon, my heart lies, or, if not my heart, the memory of my youth and full head of hair (“Ou sont les follicles d’antan?”, as François Villon once said). So the next blog will probably be live for 11 August.

See you then!

After our appetites were whetted last week by the sight of puffins up at Duncansby Head, we decided to explore the large puffin colony up the coast a few miles past Dounreay on the Caithness-Sutherland border. This is at a strange and beautiful place called Drumholllistan.

It’s wild country up there, a broad, flat expanse of squishy peat and moss stretching to the coast. You have to leave the car behind and follow a ghost of a track for half a mile or so across the moor, through white cotton grass and flowering purple heather, adders and giant slugs, past the bones of cattle and members of earlier expeditions lying bleaching in the sun—or at least you would, if the sun ever shone in Caithness—until you reach the cliffs, and a deep cleft opens up in the earth, and there’s a hidden cove, and a rocky beach, and there below you is what I like to think of as the Puffinarium.

Snake in the Grass: an adder

There’s a moment where you feel cheated, and say, “But where are all the birds? I thought this was supposed to be Puffin Central!” And then you look more closely and see the grassy slopes frothing like yeast with hundreds of puffins, and all those things you took to be floaters in your eye are really puffins soaring in the breeze like penguins who’ve discovered how to paraglide.

Embiggen for a better view: those little black dots are puffins. Lots of ’em.

We scrabbled about two-thirds down the cleft, stopping only when we remembered we’d have to climb back up, and sat and stared through binoculars at the oblivious puffins, which reminded me of one happy evening I spent back in Edinburgh when the students across the road forgot to close their curtains.

(By the way, have you ever noticed a resemblance between a puffin’s head and the helmet of an Imperial Stormtrooper in Star Wars? Coincidence? I think not.)

I have a new book out, just published on Amazon kindle. It’s called The Cuckoo’s Nest, and it’s a Victorian murder mystery (not fantasy this time), set during the building of the Elan Valley dams in Radnorshire in the 1890s. I wrote the first draft 10 years ago, and have been honing it on and off ever since. It’s probably the book I’m most proud of, my love letter to my beloved Mid Wales, and if you’re curious it will be on a free promotion this week, ending Friday.

In gansey news, I’m making good progress down the first sleeve. Now I’m past the gusset I’m decreasing 2 stitches on every 7th row, the decrease rows aligned with the cable rows. And as ever, I’m anxious that the sleeve isn’t too wide and baggy, or too narrow and tight. I plan to maintain the pattern for 5 diamonds, or about 15 inches, and leave the rest of the sleeve plain to the cuff.

Finally, you remember I mentioned our superabundance of spiders the other week? Yesterday I opened the cupboard to find a great black spider next to the jar of peanut butter: for a few moments we were both too surprised to react—the spider assuming the nonchalant air of one sent by other spiders just to see what sort of additives Tesco were putting in their peanut butter nowadays—before I remembered which of us was the 6-foot mammal, and evicted the blighter.

Well, Margaret has decided to fight back and has knitted her own giant cobweb. At least, I assume that’s what it is: she did say something about it being a shawl; but when she’s on holiday I plan to stretch it over the kitchen cupboards, smear it with glue and give the little beggars a taste of their own medicine…

It’s the beginning of spider season here in Caithness, so I’ve just been down to the Post Office to get my official hunting permit, and to stock up on a few necessaries (safety goggles, pith helmet, cartridges).

The little devils are everywhere just now: we have high ceilings and you can see them lurking up there, cocooned in grey webs, pooling in the corners like cigarette smoke. The house now has so many webs that a simple trip to the bathroom resembles Indiana Jones unearthing a lost temple.

And then there’s the matter of, ahem, spider spoor. (We had a visit at work from our conservator recently. He was examining an old ledger of 19th century parish accounts for insect infestation; at one point he gripped it by both side edges and banged the bottom edge down hard on the table – when he lifted it, grains of black dust lay in a heap. “Ah, frass,” he said, in the tone of Sherlock Holmes decrypting a cipher. “What’s that?” I asked, trying to place the word. He smiled: “Insect poo.”)

I’ve had a bit of a thing about spiders ever since I woke up once as a child with one crawling across my cheek. (We lived out in the country, and our walls were about as porous as the US-Mexico border.) I’m not afraid of them, as such: but opening your eyes to find a little hairy face regarding you with a sort of detached curiosity, as if wondering which Tantalising Nostril of Mystery to explore first before laying its eggs in your brain, certainly teaches you that we are not put on earth for pleasure alone. (Well, that, and not to sleep with your mouth open.)

Spectacular gansey progress this week, with the front completed, the shoulder straps joined, the collar done and dusted, and the stitches around the first sleeve picked up. Of course, this is the fun bit of knitting a gansey, where there are lots of short tasks that can be knocked off in short order, giving you a real sense of achievement.

While I was on a roll, I picked up the stitches around the first sleeve too. As regular readers will know, generally I find this about as much fun as hacking off my little toe with a tomato knife, but it has to be done. (The trickiest part for me is keeping the stitches even along the entire length, and not leaving myself too much, or too little space, at the end; it’s hard to judge it right since I knit 12 rows vertically to c.9 stitches horizontally, so if I’m not careful I end up picking up one stitch per row, resulting in 25% too many stitches.)The collar is 1.25 inches high, or 15 rows, and the neckline at the front is indented by 9 stitches, or 18 rows (decreasing every second row), about 1.5 inches. (I know indented necklines weren’t traditional, but this way I don’t feel like I’m being slowly strangled by a giant hairy caterpillar.)

For a change, I thought I’d try Lynne’s technique of using two circular needles, instead of four dpns. It worked a charm on the pick-up row, though because I wasn’t using stitch markers I kept having to recount the stitches.

But perhaps I’ve been going about all this the wrong way. I’ve been thinking of breeding an army of tame spiders to pick up the stitches for me; or, why stop there, to knit entire ganseys out of spider thread. Initial tests have been discouraging, however, as they have a tendency to kill and eat anything they wrap in silk – not really a successful business model (this never happened to Snow White). But I’m determined to persevere: we’re in a recession after all, so the little beggars can jolly well work for their rent.