Support Gansey Nation -
Buy Gordon a cuppa!
Many, many thanks to those of you who have already contributed!
|
 My blood pressure has been creeping up, apparently, so on Monday I was fitted with one of those hi-tech ambulatory measuring devices. It consists of a cuff that goes around your bicep, and a tube that runs up your arm, round the back of your neck and down to a battery pack and monitor that sits on your opposite hip. By the time I was wired up I looked and felt like a member of the Borg collective, assuming of course that the Borg have archivists, or even paperwork to file.
 Every 20 minutes or so for eight hours it emitted a series of electronic beeps, like C-3P0 trying to fart discreetly, and then the device on my hip began to buzz and vibrate. The bladder on the cuff would inflate with air, tightening the cuff for about 10 seconds, then after another beep or two deflate with a heavy sigh, as if it had other plans for the day involving banana daiquiris and girls in skimpy beach costumes, and here it was, stuck with me.
 Tank traps at Dunnet I’m told that whenever this happened I stopped talking, my eyes glazed over and my left arm straightened like a very slow party blowout, as though I had briefly been possessed by the ghost of a long-dead soldier and I was fighting to stop my arm from giving a Nazi salute.
Knitting was rather tricky, too. However, despite fate’s best endeavours, as you’ll see from the pictures, I have finished the gansey, and darned in all the ends. All in all, I’d say it took about 900g of five-ply. And, as ever, I’m amazed how much looser I seem to knit when cables aren’t involved.
I was consciously making an effort to knit a little looser this time anyway, but even so I cast on about 400 stitches and it ended up the same size as one of my standard 432-stich ganseys. (It fits me pretty well, in fact.)
Ribes sanguineum So there we are. I have (another rotten) cold, so it’s just a short blog this week. But as spring is almost upon us I thought I’d share with you one of my favourite poems from the great Ted Hughes, about daffodils and the coming of spring, from his collection for children, Season Songs. It’s very short, and is part of a sequence called Spring Nature Notes:
 Daffodils at the Bleaching Ground 3.
A spurt of daffodils, stiff, quivering—
Plumes, blades, creases, Guardsmen
At attention.
Like sentinels at the tomb of a great queen.
(Not like what they are—the advance guard
Of a drunken slovenly army
Which will leave this whole place wrecked.)
 There are many things that have brought joy to my life—well, not that many, in fact if you take away chocolate-related stuff the list becomes vanishingly small—but one of them is the annual Bookseller/Diagram prize for the oddest book title.
This year’s prize was won by “How To Poo On A Date” (though personally I would have voted for “The Origin of Feces”, but that’s just me). One of the runners-up was a book called “Working Class Cats”.
 The prize was started back in 1978, inspired by “Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice”. I first became aware of it in 1995 when it was won by “How To Reuse Old Graves”—if I remember rightly, one of the runners-up that year was “The Baby Jesus Touch and Feel Book”—and I knew I had found my spiritual home.
Of course, some of the titles are deliberately wacky because the books are meant to be humorous or parodies. I don’t really think these should be eligible (we’re talking “Oral Sadism and the Vegetarian Personality” or “Managing a Dental Practice the Genghis Khan Way”, winners in 1986 and 2010 respectively).
No, for maximum impact I think the title should be utterly straight. “Versailles: the View From Sweden” (1988) definitely counts, as does “How To Avoid Large Ships” (1992), and “American Bottom Archaeology” (1993).
But my absolute favourites? Ladies and gentlemen, I give you “The Big Book of Lesbian Horse Stories” (2003)—and “Goblinproofing One’s Chicken Coop” (2012). After which, like Hamlet, the rest really should be silence, I feel.
I am a paltry few inches of plain knitting and a cuff away from finishing the Wick gansey I started in November. I’m decreasing at a rate of 2 stitches every 6 rows, but even so the sleeves are a trifle baggy. (Hmm, I seem to have a knit a gansey for the “bingo wings” generation…)
 Orkney and Stroma from near John o’Groats Speaking of ganseys, Margaret has come across an interesting painting in Orkney museum, “Rest After Toil”, painted in 1885 and showing a weary paterfamilias in his Orkney croft, wearing what appears to be a greenish gansey. Viewing it online you get a suggestion of a pattern, but nothing definite. (If I had a time machine I’d be tempted to go back in time and give the lazy painter a clip round the ear.)
So there we are. March so far has come in like a lion, and looks like it’s going out like a lion that’s been eating plenty of gazelles and working out down the gym. The spring equinox has officially sprung, so yesterday we had sunshine, snow, sleet, hail and rain, then more sun, all accompanied by a generous dose of wind.
Still, if it’s too wild to stray outside, you can always relax with a good book—such as “Crocheting Adventures With Hyperbolic Planes”. Or if that doesn’t appeal, there’s always the timeless classic, “Bombproof Your Horse”…
 Let’s be clear: I don’t like Inverness and Inverness doesn’t like me.
I had to go there for a meeting last week, a 200-mile round trip along the Caithness and Sutherland coast and back, crossing a couple of firths on bridges that look as though they’re propped up on giant cotton buds and passing some of the finest supermarkets the Black Isle can offer.
The weather was stunning, clear blue skies and nary a breath of wind, spring flirting like a drunken girl giggling and flashing her skirts. (All deceit, of course. What a change a few days make! Today it’s grey and rainy and the wind’s so strong I feel seasick looking at the waves in my toilet bowl.)
 I don’t know Inverness very well; I’ve memorised the route to the record office, but that’s all. The rest of the town always surrounds me, uncharted and brooding and sinister, like the African jungle in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Well, as I was heading for home, disaster struck. All it took was one yellow sign bearing the fatal words “road closed – diversion” and the next thing I knew I was on an unfamiliar road heading in the wrong direction, towards Loch Ness.
Of course I did what any sensible person in my position would do: I swore quite a bit, before digging out the satellite navigation system and trying to attach it one-handed to the windscreen. A small piece of plastic snapped off the mount and disappeared into the air vent where it began to make a rattling noise like a penny in a washing machine.
 Then, the mount itself gave way and the sat-nav slowly peeled off the windscreen like an elderly octopus abandoning its lunch. It landed in my lap, where it seemed to develop a life of its own, nimbly evading all my attempts to rescue it, slippery as an electronic ferret and muttering to itself sarcastically as junction after junction slid by.
Same subject, different day By the time the sat-nav, the car and I were under what might loosely be called control I was ten miles out of town and Edinburgh was becoming a distinct possibility. The sat-nav did get me back on track, to be fair; though I still maintain it sent me via that hospital car park as punishment.
Ganseys: the other sleeve is now well and truly underway, hurrah, all the stitches picked up, the gusset decreased and the pattern band finished: now all that remains is a couple weeks’ plain knitting and plain sailing and that will be that.
Finally, I know that many of our readers particularly admire Margaret’s photographs. Well, she’s signed up to a site that encourages you to submit a picture a day. They’re pretty impressive so if you’d like to see more of her work, check out her images at Blipfoto and you can see more of what a great place Caithness really is, in all its changing moods, day by day.
But do me a favour: just don’t ask for any pictures of Inverness…
 Some five miles south of Wick lies Sarclet Haven, another of Caithness’s deserted, haunted harbours—once a scene of thriving industry, now just a few ruined buildings, the tussocky grass littered with ankle-turning lumps of stone and rusty bits of cable.
 The whole coast has numerous inlets like this, as though the shoreline of the east Highlands was an unfinished jigsaw that God left lying around while he went to answer the door, and never returned to—or maybe the box was missing a few pieces, I don’t know.
 The remains of the Stevenson breakwater A hundred and fifty years ago the harbour would have been packed with boats in the summer months for the herring fishing. But it was pretty much wrecked by the same terrible storms that finally demolished the Wick breakwater in 1872, and the fishcurers packed up and moved their business the few miles north to town.
On Sunday we parked the car at the top of the cliffs and followed the path, a gentle ramp really, down to the cove. We had it all to ourselves, except for the disapproving Calvinist seabirds, who seemed quite indignant that we were there to disturb them and not in church; and we could hear larks and curlews fooling about in the fields somewhere above the cliffs. The haven is filled with ghosts. There’s a roofless stone building for storing salt and barrels, and a great rusting windlass which was used to winch the boats up onto the shingle, and other human remains.
 It’s very beautiful, and lonely, and sad. Sometimes I think if I win the lottery I shall hire a bunch of actors to recreate the fishing boom each summer for tourists in a place like Sarclet—a bit like Plimoth Plantation in Massachusetts but with added fish guts. Other times, I think I’ll just move somewhere warm, where the wind doesn’t strip trees like a nuclear blast and winter means maybe wearing long trousers, or any trousers come to that, and shall spend my days in a hammock on the beach sipping drinks I can’t pronounce and telling a spellbound audience tall tales about archives.
I’ve finished the first sleeve of the gansey: one down, one to go. The sleeve is just under 18 inches long, and the cuff is three inches; and I decreased down from 117 stitches to 96 for the cuff. So, now all I have to do is knuckle down and knit the other sleeve, which is good for the soul and reminds us that we are not put here on Earth for pleasure alone. If I can apply myself I might finish it by the end of the month.
Hopefully spring will have established itself properly by then. I was perhaps premature last week in my vernal celebrations – spring may’ve gone 2-0 up by half time, but winter has since equalised and it looks like we’re heading for penalties…
 On Thursday night the Northern Lights lit up the skies across eastern Britain, as if the Earth had been visited by a giant space cuttlefish that communicated in rippling bands of colour. The whole country was affected, from John O’Groats to Kent, and the internet has been lit up like a tacky 1970s disco with pictures ever since.
 John o’Groats from a different angle We nearly missed it completely, and we didn’t get to see any colours. But we did see something uniquely strange instead: a black-and-white display of shimmering flecks against the clouds. It was pretty faint, like someone shining a torch behind a distant fog bank; at times it looked as though colonies of bats had learned to fly in formation, or as if God was drawing a magnet behind the clouds, arranging the magnetic particles like iron filings.
But next time we’ll hang the expense, pay extra and get the full colour version.
 The North Baths and South Head, Wick By the way, I mentioned last week that my eyes had their annual service and MOT: apparently my dry eye condition hasn’t improved, and so now I have to spend 10 minutes every night with my head over a bowl full of boiling water, draped in a towel to catch the steam (think Lawrence of Arabia with a bad cold).
It’s a very peculiar sensation; the steam prickles my face as though it was being pawed by baby Ewoks, and it’s quite unnerving not being able to see anything under the towel. (I mean, it’s not like I seriously expect a bunch of clowns to burst in through the door behind me armed with custard pies or anything, but still…) On the other hand, it’s doing wonders for my complexion, and my face no longer looks like something a bush ranger would kill and skin and wear to keep his trousers up.
 Weathervane, John o’Groats Hotel On the gansey, I’m freewheelin’ down the sleeve like I was Bob Dylan and it was 1963 all over again. One advantage to plain knitting is that I can do it and watch tv at the same time; if I tried doing that with a pattern I’d end up with something that looked like the Book of Job in Braille. It’s always great when you start to pick up speed down a sleeve—and, of course, when you start the other sleeve, it feels like you’ve stepped on a rake.
And it’s March! Practically spring! I no longer need a torch to find my pyjamas in the morning. The cats next door have started hanging around the drive, giving me hello-big-boy looks, hoping for a scrag on the warm gravel. I even heard a lark today—though to be fair, it was more of a despairing scream than a song as the wind caught it on top of its rise and catapulted it in the direction of the North Pole. Next thing you know I’ll be ready to cut away the bearskin I stitched myself into for winter and maybe even think about having a bath…
|
|
My blood pressure has been creeping up, apparently, so on Monday I was fitted with one of those hi-tech ambulatory measuring devices. It consists of a cuff that goes around your bicep, and a tube that runs up your arm, round the back of your neck and down to a battery pack and monitor that sits on your opposite hip. By the time I was wired up I looked and felt like a member of the Borg collective, assuming of course that the Borg have archivists, or even paperwork to file.
Every 20 minutes or so for eight hours it emitted a series of electronic beeps, like C-3P0 trying to fart discreetly, and then the device on my hip began to buzz and vibrate. The bladder on the cuff would inflate with air, tightening the cuff for about 10 seconds, then after another beep or two deflate with a heavy sigh, as if it had other plans for the day involving banana daiquiris and girls in skimpy beach costumes, and here it was, stuck with me.
