Gansey Nation

Well, we’re back in Wick after our 1200-mile round trip for my father’s 90th birthday. Cold weather descended on the Highlands for our return: all the moisture was frozen out of the air, the moon rose like the pale ghost of itself and the sky had the thin, clear look a balloonist might observe round about the point when he wished he’d brought more ballast, or failing that an oxygen mask. The A9 twists among the Cairngorm mountains and the peaks had a light dusting of snow through which patches of soil showed brown, so that they looked like the cracked crusts of so many artisan loaves.

It’s still rather cold here, at or below freezing. We had to evict several spiders and a nervous starling when we got home, driving them out into the icy night like villains in a Victorian melodrama foreclosing a mortgage (the reproachful look one spider gave me as I shut the door behind it lies heavily on my conscience still). Now all we have to do is find a way to make the house warmer on the inside than the outside…

We stopped off in Edinburgh en route for a little light shopping and a concert of music by Dvorak and Shostakovich. Alas, the concert was marred, on the one hand, by a man sitting on my right who breathed through his nose with an audible whistling, like someone trying to pump up a bicycle tire with a hole in it.

Then there was the woman diagonally to my left who kept switching on her mobile phone to check emails and take photos of the concert, causing the darkened hall to be illuminated with a sudden brilliance as though she was signalling to an alien spaceship. (I am a man of peace, which is why I merely had a quiet word with her during the interval, and why her midriff does not now light up like a flashlight every time she receives an incoming call.)

With just the cuff to go I laid the Matt Cammish gansey aside and started a new project on the trip (another Wick gansey in cream, about which more next week). I finished the cuff on the Sunday after we got back and darned in the ends. Now the gansey is washed and blocked and drying on its frame. As you can see, the pattern opens out amazingly—it’s no surprise this pattern is so popular, is it? And the Frangipani pewter yarn really shows it off.

By the way, another highlight of our brief stop in Edinburgh was bagging the last unreserved seats at our favourite Mexican restaurant, on Rose Street. The food was, as ever, excellent; and the experience was made all the sweeter as we watched twenty other people being turned away over the next hour and a half—providing a perfect illustration of the truth of Gore Vidal’s celebrated epigram: “It is not enough to succeed—others must fail…”

We went up to John O’Groats on Saturday, as we often do, for to view the fields and to take the air, as my favourite folk song says. There weren’t many fields but there was a lot of air, barrelling down at us at about 45 mph straight from the arctic circle, so we didn’t linger.

We did stay long enough to see the seal in the harbour, or rather its snout poking up from the icy water like a little whiskery buoy. There were a couple of fishing boats moored there, rocking to the waves and the wind, and the seal kept vanishing underwater to see what it could find beneath them; either that, or it was playing hide-and-seek with the other seals out in the Pentland Firth.

I like seals. Their whiskers give them the air of an elderly geography teacher, a sleek aquatic Einstein. They’re like sensible, grown-up dolphins; you can’t imagine dolphins listening to Radio 4 and appreciating Pink Floyd or test cricket, for example—they haven’t the patience and just want to party. Seals, on the other flipper, always look like they’ve just mislaid their pipe tobacco and slippers. If reincarnation is a thing, then dolphins are a good place to start; but seals are born with old souls.

As for the gansey, I’ve finished the first sleeve and am now embarked on the second. I’m amazed at how small it all looks, how shrivelled, like a dehydrated starfish. This is because of all the purl stitches running the length of the body and sleeves, which draws it in. It actually has more stitches in the round than the green Scarborough gansey I knit recently, but at present is at least six inches narrower round the chest. Blocking will sort this, of course; or if not I just have to find a very thin supermodel in need of chunky knitwear.

In parish news, Judit has sent me pictures of a gansey-inspired project, a slipover or sleeveless jumper with a tasteful Scottish fleet half-flag pattern running up the centre. Many congratulations to Judit once again on the project, and for reminding us just how versatile gansey patterns can be.

Looking towards Duncansby Head

I’ve always loved the Scottish legends of the selkie, the seals who take human form. They say that if you find a selkie’s sealskin you can compel them to marry you (I thought I was in luck the other day down on the beach, but no—it was just a bin liner). But how can you tell if your partner is really a selkie—other than the strong smell of fish, of course? Well, the best way is to throw them a herring: if they catch it on the tip of their nose, toss it up in the air and then swallow it whole, the balance of probabilities is they’re a selkie.

N.B., we’ll be away all next week on a trip down to Northampton to celebrate my father’s birthday, so it’ll just be a short bloguette on Monday. (I won’t quite have finished the gansey, as we’ll be travelling most of next weekend.) Normal service will be resumed in a fortnight. See you then!