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Matt Cammish Week 2: 25 September

26-sep-mainI found a spider in the bathroom the other day. It wasn’t actually threatening me—no suggestion that it was about to drop onto my scalp, paralyse me with a quick jab of venom and lay its eggs in my brain—it just perched in a high corner of the shower, waggling its eyestalks at me suggestively in a hi-there-big-boy sort of way. So naturally one of us had to go.

I have something of a phobia towards spiders. It’s not exactly irrational—when I was a child I awoke one night to find one scuttling across my face. Nightmares involving spiders sealing my eyes and mouth with webs swiftly followed. Of course, I know that British house spiders are harmless, they’re more afraid of us and their natural prey is about the size of a pollen grain—I understand all that. But then again, their looks are against them: they do rather resemble something assembled by Satan on one of his days off from bits of twine and matchsticks and leftover evil he found lying around on his workbench.

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The Stash – plenty of ganseys still to knit…

And it’s not just a question of looks. Take lions, now: they kill creatures for food—cute creatures, too, the kind that appear on greetings cards. And yet there’s a sporting chance when a lion goes after a gazelle that the gazelle might get away; it’s a sort of 200-metre hurdles with the chance of a decent meal instead of a gold medal at the end. (And if you look closely at nature documentaries you can see the lions give a little nod when the prey eludes them, a gesture of respect between equals.)

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The Geo of Sclaites at Duncansby Head in the fog

Not so, spiders: they basically mug their victims in dark alleys, knifing them in the back, then taking their wallets and going off sniggering. If they had any sporting instinct, instead of sneakily weaving webs to trap the unwary, they’d build hang gliders and go after moths and flies in the air. And you never see a spider with its back turned, counting to a hundred under its breath, while its prey runs away and hides, do you? There you are, then: I rest my case.

Meanwhile, one knits. Rather a lot, in fact, so that I might even reach the gussets in the next week. What a great pattern this is: a real classic. (I tell myself it will be big enough when it’s blocked, but the pattern does rather concertina in on itself so that I seem to be knitting the gansey equivalent of a surgical stocking, or a tourniquet.)

As for the spider, of course I didn’t kill it. Most house spiders you see at this time of year are perfectly blameless males26-sep-close-up looking for a mate; and anyway, every spider you see means up to 2,000 fewer bugs in your house each year. No, I trapped him in a jam jar and released him back to the wild, along with some loose change and a caution not to spend it all on drink.

[By the way, Margaret has eluded the guards again and escaped to America for a month. As a result I’m afraid the quality of photos on the website will take a dive, rather, and I won’t be able to add any images to the Readers’ Gallery. Normal service will be resumed just in time for Halloween…]

Matt Cammish: 18 September

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It’s not easy being green

There are, as I think the Prophet Hezekiah first pointed out, three steps to heaven: unfortunately it turns out there are several thousand, or so it seems, to get onto the cliffs overlooking the celebrated Stacks of Duncansby.

I’ve mentioned before that Duncansby Head, a narrow promontory jutting out into the North Sea a mile or so from John O’Groats, is the real north-easterly tip of mainland Scotland. One side looks north towards Orkney and the Skerries (a series of small, uninhabited islands); the other looks out eastward over the open ocean, and it’s here the stacks, a couple of spiked rock formations protruding sharply from the water, are situated.

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Befogged

You have to tramp almost a kilometre over the headland to see them, and then about the same up another steepish track to the top of the cliffs to look down on them. There’s a rocky arch (called Thirle Door), and the stacks proper, which look like the heads of two pointy-headed giants out for a swim. It’s stunningly beautiful.

We made a couple of trips up to Duncansby this week. The first time we were beset by fog, which was at times so thick as to reduce visibility to a few metres. The few tourists we encountered came blundering out of the murk like the zombie apocalypse; I lost my sense of direction completely and started walking round in circles like a one man Blair Witch re-enactment society until Margaret set me right.

I’d taken last week off from work and spent so much time on the couch the police wouldn’t have needed a chalk outline in the event of my murder; my body form was indented into the sofa cushions like a pre-cast mould. I’d intended to do lots of things, go to many places, but instead ended up just reading, listening to music, going for walks and knitting. And, you know, I had a great time.

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Unfogged

Ah, yes: knitting. As you can see, the green Scarborough gansey is washed and blocked and good to go. I couldn’t be happier with it: I love the colour (Frangipani bottle green) and the fit, and find the pattern strangely hypnotic. The only downside so far is people behind me in the queue at the Post Office file their fingernails on it between my shoulder blades.

And I’ve started my next project. Well, I say started—I’m actually a third of the way up the body. (Bruckner symphonies last a long time, what can I say?) As promised it’s an old favourite, the Matt Cammish gansey from Filey in Frangipani pewter yarn. I’ll say more about this next week, and give the pattern chart.

Incidentally, the arch I mentioned, Thirle Door, has a curious name: a thirle means a hole in a wall. So it’s one of those tautologies, like River Avon (“river river”) and Bree Hill (“hill hill”)—this one is “door door”. As for Duncansby, or “Duncan’s Farm”, we have an old map in the record office which gives the name as “Dungsby”—this may just be a record of how it was pronounced; on the other hand, as we can testify, there’s plenty of evidence underfoot, if any were needed, that sheep are not housetrained…

Scarborough: 11 September

sc160912-1Less than ten miles south of Wick lies the extraordinary archaeological landscape of Yarrows, a flattish, undulating, mostly empty moorland covering several square miles of geography and some seven thousand years of history. (Yes, it’s time for another instalment in our occasional series, “A Bunch of Stones Lying in a Field”.)

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The broch & Loch Yarrows

People have been living here since the Stone Age, c.5,000 BC, and there are cairns and hut circles and even a standing stone, a narrow blade that sticks up like the gnomon on a sundial. On Saturday we just went down to Loch Yarrows to look at the wonderfully atmospheric Iron Age broch overlooking the loch.

This was our second visit. The first time we were defeated by the world’s most spectacularly useless information board: a study in abstract art, it depicts the trail without reference to actual landmarks, or even what you might expect to see. (It’s probably a hangover from the war, when it was originally put up to obfuscate invading Nazi archaeologists.)

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Huh?

The way to the broch lies across several fields occupied by a stud farm, where ponies cluster as thick as midges; they have a strategy based on Jurassic Park’s velociraptors where one distracts you to the front, and while you stroke its forehead another two go through your pockets looking for apples, or failing that your wallet.

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Abandoned buildings, Loch Brickigoe

It’s a stunning location, desolate and wild, and so flat you can see across Loch Yarrows, over Loch Hempriggs, and all the way to the sea beyond. The broch is ruined now, little more than foundations and an overgrown mound of stone. You have to watch your step, too—I mistook a grass-covered watery ditch for solid ground and next thing I knew I was about three feet shorter, with a cold, wet sensation spreading upwards from the region of my socks.

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Riverside path at sunset, Wick

And the Scarborough gansey is finished, my fifth completed this year, with just the washing and blocking to go. I’m particularly pleased with the sleeves (18.5 inches plus 3-inch cuffs of 84 stitches), which seem to be a good fit around the forearms and wrists. It’s interesting that there are so few gansey patterns like this where the yoke isn’t divided horizontally or vertically into panels or bands. I wonder why that is? It’s certainly very effective.

As for the broch, it’s strange to think that people were living there when Jesus was alive. They don’t seem to have been knitting, though: I always tend to think of knitting as something that must have started about the time the first humans wondered what to do with all the leftover bits from mutton, but apparently not. Knitting as we know it dates from several centuries later, which raises the question: what did on earth they do in the long Caithness winter evenings?

Scarborough: 4 September

Sc160905-1As we inch our way slowly into autumn, Caithness is experiencing something of an Indian summer—always assuming the Indians enjoyed mostly cloudy summers of about 16ºc. But some days, like today (Sunday), are really rather beautiful: the wind drops, the sea turns flat calm, the clouds vanish and the astonishing blue sky goes all the way to the top.

In odd moments—and most of my moments are odd, now I come to think of it—I like to play the game of imagining what records I’d save from our archive if there was a fire. (Not that it’s likely—besides, I’m not allowed matches after The Unpleasantness.) And I think out of all our thousands of documents I’d dive into the smoke to rescue the log books of the Wick harbourmasters.

They form a daily record of events in the harbour—the weather (cold, wet), the wind (cold, windy) and the fishing. All human life is there. Let me give you two examples—one a tragedy, the other not so much.

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Under those trees somewhere . . .

The first is from January 1858 relating to a fisherman who drowned just round the coast from here: “A small yawl boat with two fishermen left this harbour in the afternoon on purpose to go a-fishing to the southward of the South Head. The inhabitants of Old Wick heard cries about 7 P.M. as of people in distress, but nothing more was heard of them.”

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The Lighthouse

Next day there is another entry: “The small boat reported yesterday as a-missing was found this morning driven ashore by the Old Man of Wick without oars or any appearance of the two men … [who] have doubtless met with a watery grave.”

Sure enough, the body of one of the men, William Miller, was washed up at Old Wick a month later; the other, as far as I know, was never recovered. William’s grave is somewhere in the parish churchyard but when Margaret and I went to look for it we found the graves overgrown and the headstones illegible.

It’s a melancholy tale, and I’ve been thinking about it quite a lot. William Miller was a living, breathing person who walked the streets of Wick; we know he had a wife (Catherine) and four children—and now he’s almost disappeared from history, first in life and now in death. Except for the record in the log book.

Sc160905-2Well; I said it was tragic. Meanwhile, as well as brooding on the fragility of human life, I’ve been knitting—this counts as multitasking for me—and I’ve finished the first sleeve and started the second. I picked up 144 stitches around the armhole and gradually decreased them until I had 84 at the cuff. The rate of decrease worked out at 2 stitches every 5.5 rows, so as an experiment I decreased alternately every fifth row and every sixth down the sleeve. I’m delighted to say that it all worked out exactly—though whether it will fit, only time will tell.

As for my second example from the harbourmasters’ log books, it’s from June 1855, when gas lighting was just being installed in the town: “The supply of gas to the Light House being very little this few nights past, the Light Keeper called upon the Gas Man and they went together to see what was wrong. As the Gas Man was unscrewing a portion of the meter the escaping gas came in contact with a lighted candle when a sudden explosion took place, burst the pipe and singed the Gas Man’s whiskers.”

History, alas, doesn’t record if the gas man’s name was Mr Laurel or Mr Hardy…