Gansey Nation

How many trees make a forest?

You know the old adage, It never rains but it pours? Well, leaving aside the fact that it’s missing the crucial words “when Gordon is walking to and from work”, I have conclusive proof of its veracity today.

You see, as if all our network problems weren’t enough, my phone has now decided to do the cell phone equivalent of deciding to forsake the world, and join a religious community, spending the rest of its days in fasting and meditation—all because of a faulty software upgrade. Anyway, because of all this, it’s just a short blog today.

The conversation between my computer and me went roughly as follows:

‘What—you really don’t have any backups at all?’

Mind you, all conversations with my computer end up like that, so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.

Margaret’s away (yet) again, so it’s just me and my stripped-down camera phone once more, I’m afraid. I’m still keeping up my pretty good rate of progress up the body, averaging roughly a tree a week. I’ve just started the gussets, though, which will slow me down a little from now on.

As we’ve said before, apologies for the continued difficulties in accessing the site. When Margaret comes back we’ll start looking into finding a service provider that can actually, well, provide a service. If anyone can recommend such a thing, please let me know.

Wick Harbour Lighthouse

Also—I’m trying to find some grey gansey yarn. Does anyone know a supplier?

Now I’m off to find a hammer and see if I can persuade my computer to see reason…

Well, that could have gone better. I spent part of last week in bed with what I assume was a cold, finally giving in after a couple of weeks of generally feeling like something the cat had brought in and left on the mat for you to discover (usually a fatal couple of seconds after you wished you’d been wearing slippers).

I call it a cold, but if so it was a strange one: I wasn’t congested, or sneezing, just very tired. I simply had no energy at all, and got out of breath doing such strenuous things as brushing my teeth or waking up. It was like being visited by a frugal vampire and having a bit of blood siphoned off each night, like the butler sneaking whisky from the decanter when the master’s back is turned.

Anyway, I knew I was in trouble when I had to stop and set up base camp while climbing the stairs, and hire some local sherpas who knew the terrain to get me to the top. My chest felt like God was gently squeezing it, like someone feeling to see if a tube of toothpaste is empty.

So—in case you were wondering—that explains my absence from the website last week. Apologies to those who posted who didn’t get a response, but thanks to everyone who responded to my question about turning the website into books. My current inclination is to go with the majority opinion and release a gansey book that includes all the how-to information from the website, as well as photos and pattern charts for selected ganseys I’ve knitted, about half a dozen or so. That way, the information will always be available no matter what.

Gordon contemplates life on the edge. The new John o’Groats fingerpost, now free of charge.

That will hopefully be out in time for Christmas. But—I stress—all the information will still remain free of charge here on the website.

And then, sometime next year probably, I’ll go through the archive of blog entries back to the very beginning (or in my favourite legal phrase, to ‘Time whereof the memory of man runneth not to the contrary’) and see if I can edit the more interesting ones into a single anthology. This may, of course, result in a very short book!

One thing about being ill, it means that in your lucid moments you can sit up in bed and knit—and so, I’ve made rather more progress this week than usual. I’m now on my third tree, and the pattern is settling down nicely—and so are the stitches on the needles, which no longer want to curl themselves inside out like a gansey entering a black hole, which can happen in the early stages with plain knitting until the pattern achieves its own rigidity (“Look out: those are load-bearing chevrons!”).

Somewhere over the rainbow . . . lies John o’Groats

Oh, and speaking of vampires, there’s something that’s always intrigued me about them: how do they drink the blood of men with bushy beards? Do they still go for the neck and just accept there’ll be a certain amount of collateral follicle-ness involved, like trying to drink a Bloody Mary through a wire brush; or do they select an alternative spot to bite, such as the wrist, or perhaps an ankle, or even—for a be-kilted Scotsman in a strong wind—a knee?

It’s September, which means autumn has arrived wearing its best Sunday-morning-evangelist clothes and is walking up the drive with a handful of leaflets, preparing to ring the doorbell (though up here in Caithness autumn arrived around the end of June this year, I think to save time)—and schools are back.

This time of year always brings back memories. You see, I went to an old-fashioned English grammar school, and when I think about it now it reads like something out of Dickens. Looking back I marvel that I never complained to my parents at the time, but instead came home each night like a traumatised veteran of the trenches or Vietnam, unable to find the words to describe to the civilians back home the horrors my lacerated soul had witnessed.

You think I’m exaggerating? On our very first day, moon-faced and innocent, aged 11, we were shepherded into a classroom, and introduced to our form master, avuncular, smiling Mr Young. As we sat in stunned silence he produced a coil of electrical flex like an extension cord, and pointed to a long split in the surface of the desk in front of him.

‘See that?’ he demanded. We craned forward to look. ‘That was done when I was flogging one boy with this cord for misbehaving and I missed.’ He brought the flex down on the desk with a sudden crash that made us all jump, and two or three of the weaker boys at the back fainted. ‘I don’t usually miss.’

If he had produced a pistol and casually shot one of us through the head we could not have been more appalled.

First day at school, eh? All Harry Potter had to worry about was Voldemort, Lord of Darkness: we had smiling Mr Young. (Mind you, we should have been prepared; after all, the school motto was ‘Northampton Grammar School: The Living Envy The Dead’.)

Ah, well. Autumn is, as we know, not only the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, which is hard to say with a mouth full of toffee, but also of starting a new gansey. Many years ago—before I’d even started this blog, even before the 21^st century had been invented—I knitted several ganseys I don’t have pictures of, and whose patterns I’d like to revisit.

Foremost among them is Mrs Laidlaw’s pattern from Seahouses (or Eyemouth, depending on which book you read; she lived in both places). This is a classic pattern, very popular (it appears in most of the books), and one of the very best. There are no cables, just panels of trees-of-life interspersed with half diamonds and moss stitches. Although I’ve used the trees in many patterns since, I haven’t returned to the whole pattern; well, now’s my chance. I’m knitting it in Frangipani claret, 380 stitches cast on for the welt, increased after 2.5 inches by 28 to 408.

Meanwhile I watch the children as they go to school, and wonder what their first day will be like. As Shakespeare’s Henry V so eloquently put it:

“He that shall live this day, and see old age,

Will yearly on the vigil turn off his television,

And say ‘To-morrow is the start of term’:

Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars.

And say ‘These wounds I had in Mr Young’s class.

And gentlemen in England now a-bed

Shall tell him to shut up so they can sleep…”