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Inverallochy, Week 13: 26 March

Well, here we are at the end of March already. In a few days it will be Easter, not to mention April, which TS Eliot famously called the cruellest month: the words of a man who never spent a winter in Caithness. (After The Waste Land was published I like to imagine him clapping his palm to his forehead in dismay and crying, “Oh, yeah—January! What was I thinking?”) Of course, the line refers to the way April flatters to deceive, promising spring but frequently bringing snow and gales in place of sunshine and greenery (see also: Britain, May through August); but also the pain of rebirth and reawakening.

Whaligoe

Which brings us to Easter. In the 8th century the Venerable Bede wrote that “Eosturmonath” (Easter month) took its name from the pagan goddess Eostre, “in whose honour feasts were celebrated”. But that’s the only mention of her in all of history; and there’s no detail of any kind—certainly no hares, no eggs, not even, disappointingly, chocolate. Of course, Christianity absorbed local pagan festivals and repurposed them all the time (as with Christmas and the Roman festival of Saturnalia), and I’m fine with that. I’ve mentioned before how I love the way language adds layers of meaning to place names over time; and it’s the same with religion. It’s what humans do: we take a thing and pass it on, and add a little something along the way, until gradually the original meaning becomes lost. It’s history in three dimensions: not just length and breadth, but depth.

Oystercatchers at Crosskirk

So where once there may’ve been the pagan festival of Eostre, now there is the Christian festival of Easter, the death and resurrection of Jesus. Over the years we’ve added spiced buns with a flour-paste cross and chocolate eggs and cards and bunnies; but at the heart of it all, like the snowdrops and daffodils and budding hedgerows, the original idea is eternal, and eternally renewed.

And while we’re on the subject of hope, possibly false, I’m making progress down the first sleeve of the gansey. I’ve finished the pattern band at the top of the sleeve, and am on the plain knitting. Because of the size, and the number of stitches, I’m decreasing at a rate of 2 stitches every fourth row, instead of every fifth, as I usually do. In my rasher moments I imagine I might finish the sleeve this week, but common sense swiftly intervenes.

Easter celebrates resurrection and rebirth and the coming of spring. And whether that’s of Aphrodite, Ishtar, Kali or Jesus son of Joseph of Galilee, or of the early daffodils along the riverbank, we wish you a peaceful and joyous Easter, with just the right amount of chocolate and, if such is your desire, and who are we to judge, rabbits.

Happy Easter from Gordon and Margaret.

Inverallochy, Week 12: 19 March

It’s been blowing a gale here for the best part of four days now—constant gusts upwards of 50 mph rattling the windows and shaking the doors. The trees have given up any thoughts of celebrating the arrival of spring by putting out leaves, and instead are focusing just on not being uprooted. Every now and then a gull sails past the window backwards, driven towards Ireland on an easterly breeze, a puzzled frown on its face as if it can’t quite work out why flapping its wings doesn’t seem to be having the usual effect.

I learned a valuable recycling lesson the other day, viz. that if you want to keep your private life, well, private in these sorts of conditions, it’s best to weigh down the lid of your bin with a heavy stone. It’s not a good look to be caught leaping across your neighbours’ lawn like a Victorian butterfly collector after a heavy night on the laudanum, desperately clutching at fluttering pages ripped from Thong Weekly, or the Pencil of the Month double-page centrefold from What Archivist. (Or—*cough*—so I would imagine—er—according to a friend.)

Confession time. Some not great news this week—I’ve been signed off work after experiencing a recurrence of the symptoms I had last year, when I was diagnosed with an anxiety depression. At least this time I can recognise the signs, and I’m still on the antidepressant medication, so hopefully this will just be a short episode. But I feel a bit like Frodo in the Lord of the Rings, who “was seriously wounded and it will never really heal”—except that I’m a lot taller; and whereas Frodo saved the world, when I was his age I saved loose change; other than that, pretty much identical, I think.

In the short term it will give me more time for knitting, which I’ve found is also a very positive form of therapy. I have finally completed the body, both shoulders and the collar (in knit 2/ purl 2 ribbing, casting off in pattern). I’ve picked up the stitches for the first sleeve and have just decreased the gusset out of existence: now for the rest of the sleeve. [Apologies for the quality of the gansey photo this week—Margaret’s on her travels again. Normal service should be resumed next week.]

When I was ill ask year I couldn’t do any writing, my head was too messed up. But when I began to feel better, I wrote some poems to try to articulate—to myself as much as anyone—what the illness actually felt like, albeit obliquely. Some of the poems are, quite frankly, terrible; some maybe not too bad. But with others their quality was neither here nor there—irrelevant because the poems were, in some sense, true. This one still feels to me like the truest of the lot.

The world is folded lengthways,
Turned at a right angle and folded again,
Then again
And many times again
Until it is too tight to bend—
It is all the god can do to hold it fast.

Then he lets go—
It springs apart, writhing as it opens,
Knotted like a broken flower,
All angle and crease,
Twisted so badly out of shape
It can never lie flat again.

Inverallochy, Week 11: 12 March

As regular readers of this blog will be aware, I have all the discrimination of a magpie when it comes to Caithness history—if it’s shiny, glitters in the sunlight and grabs my attention, I scoop it up to line my metaphorical nest, along with a quantity of twigs and some rather unsavoury half-eaten bits of (soya protein-imitation) rabbit.

But today we leave history behind and enter the murky world of myth. There is a famous reference to Caithness in Njal’s Saga, the great Viking epic full of betrayal, blood feuds and vengeance (a sort of 13th century Icelandic Lion King). Tucked inside the saga is the Darraðarljóð, or “Song of Dorrud”, and it’s a weird and creepy and rather wonderful poem.

Snow in the Cairngorms

In 1014 the Earl of Orkney took a force of men from Orkney and Caithness to go and fight in Ireland, as you do. But the Battle of Clontarf was a defeat and most of them were killed, including the earl. The poem describes how the Valkyries, the warrior handmaidens of Odin, selected who would die in the battle. Did they cast lots? Throw dice? Did they draw up a list, set up a subcommittee and have a debate? No, no, no, no (and no). The verses say that a man called Dorrud saw them enter a house in Caithness; when he followed and looked inside, he discovered that they had set up a loom with a view:

The warp is made/ Of human entrails/ Human heads/ Are used as weights/ The heddle-rods/ Are blood-wet spears/ The shafts are iron-bound/ And arrows are the shuttles/ With swords we will weave/ This web of battle.”

Dunnet Head and Castletown harbour from Dunnet Beach

Isn’t that great? (Batshit crazy for sure, but great.) Though it seems a little impractical; not to mention a tad messy. (I wouldn’t have thought entrails would make great warp threads either, given their elastic nature; tennis rackets or banjo strings, yes—though the thought of Valkyries taking a break to play mixed doubles, or sing close harmony Appalachian folksongs, is perhaps something of a stretch.)

Anyway, the warrior maidens finished their song, broke up their loom, took their strands and went away to claim the souls of the dead. And we’re left with a glimpse of a worldview utterly alien to us. (Though I sometimes think if cats wrote bardic poetry they might produce something close to the Viking sagas—albeit with epic heroes called Tippytoes and Mr Fluffy instead of Erik Bloodaxe or Thorfinn Skull-Splitter.) We can reenact historical events; but the minds of the people who lived them are ultimately, I think, as unknowable as yours or mine.

In gansey news, it’s time to celebrate another landmark: I have finished the front, and joined the shoulders with a traditional ridge and furrow shoulder strap. In keeping with the extra large size of the jumper I have knitted eight ridges per shoulder (plus bind-off ridge) instead of my usual six. Next step is the collar, and then it’ll be time to think about picking up stitches around the (*gulp*) 12/13-inch armhole…

Inverallochy, Week 10: 5 March

Europe has been socked in with extreme wintry weather all week, and, as Brexit has not officially happened yet, that meant Britain got it too. Of course, living in the farthest of norths, in the Lowland Highlands of Scotland, this is not actually all that unusual. (Or, as Judit of this parish observed, in Britain this was christened “The Beast from the East”; in Finland they called it “Wednesday”.) In any case, Wick has its own microclimate and didn’t get a lot of snow; but the roads to the north and south of us were blocked, and the snow gates were closed in the high passes on the road from Inverness.

By mid-morning on Friday Tesco’s had run out of fresh milk and were having to make up the online orders with baby milk (this raised a number of questions, some of them biological, but I certainly was not the man to ask them). Amid fears of a recurrence of the Great Quinoa Riots of 1969, checkout staff were being sworn in as special constables and undergoing baton training with stale baguettes in the frozen goods aisle. For an afternoon civilisation teetered in the balance, as the population of Caithness faced the prospect of a breakfast of cornflakes soaked in Irn Bru (or as they call it in Scotland, “Sunday”).

Bridge over the Grand Union Canal

Well; it got slightly warmer, the roads reopened, and Caithness was once more a land flowing with milk and honey. And I found myself wondering how I would tell the tale to my grandchildren, supposing I had been careless enough to have any. Somehow, “Come gather round, children, and I’ll tell you the epic story of the great freeze of 2018 that lasted just over three days and Tesco’s almost ran out of milk” doesn’t quite have the ring I feel it ought to…

Ice on the canal

Luckily for me, the gansey is big enough now to serve as a blanket—well, all right, two blankets—so even though the temperatures outside have hovered around -1 to -3ºc I’ve been able to knit to stay warm, an incentive if ever there was one. I am about 8 inches up the front, and it will soon be time to think about dividing for the shaped neck. I am now on my tenth ball of 100g yarn; and I haven’t begun to grow tired of the pattern, which is a good sign.

Finally, Margaret is still 600 miles away away in Northamptonshire with my family. But she’s sent some pictures of the fields and canal near my parents’ house, which are included here. (My favourite song by Neil Young is called “Helpless”. The first stanza goes, “There is a town in North Ontario / Dream comfort memory to spare / And in my mind I still need a place to go / All my changes were there.” Substitute “house” for “town”, and “Northamptonshire” for “North Ontario”, and that’s my childhood. It’s still home. All my changes were there. Damn you, Neil.)

Winter textures