Support Gansey Nation -


Buy Gordon a cuppa!


Many, many thanks to those of you who have already contributed!





Wick (John Macleod), Week 10: 28 January

A still from the 1930s classic, “The Maltese Gansey”…


I got into an argument the other day with someone—well, I say it was an argument, but this is Britain so we didn’t actually come to blows and I wasn’t left groping around on the floor for fragments of my teeth; but we definitely raised our eyebrows at each other in a meaningful sort of way—about the literary merits or otherwise of the Harry Potter series. My interlocutor took the position that the books were badly written and would not survive, while I respectfully disagreed.

Clouds over Dunnet Beach

Now, I’m happy to argue the toss with anyone over values; but when people say that a work of art won’t last, what they usually mean is that they can see no value in it and they hope it won’t. Anyway, predicting the tastes of the future is a mug’s game. JS Bach went out of favour for a century after his death, and performances of Mahler’s symphonies were rare as hen’s teeth for 50 years after his; now you can’t turn on the radio without hearing them. Walter Scott was the Stephen King of his day—Waverley Station in Edinburgh still remains the only railway station named after a novel—but who now reads his books?

If I’m ever tempted to get out my crystal and try my hand at a spot of ball-gazing, I remember the British music critic James William Davidson (1843-80). He famously opined that Wagner couldn’t write music; that Berlioz was a “vulgar lunatic”; and (my favourite, and one I’m saving up for a special occasion) Liszt was “talentless funghi”. And I console myself with the wise words of Jean Sibelius: no one ever put up a statue to a critic.

(Look, it’s not really this colour, OK…?)

In gansey news, I’m making good progress down the first sleeve. This sort of pattern band appears in the ganseys in several of the Johnston Collection photographs, so it seems to have been something of a Caithness feature. But for some reason I struggled with it: the endless knit two, purl one sequence stubbornly failed to lodge itself in my brain, and I found that unless I concentrated hard I naturally defaulted to a knit two, purl two rhythm, and had to keep going back, unpicking and knitting bits over. But it’s a striking effect, and no doubt I just need more practice.

Sunset at Sarclet Harbour

Finally, the poet WH Auden summed up the attitude of posterity to literary merit. Writing of the controversial French poet and dramatist Paul Claudel, in his poem In Memory of WB Yeats, Auden quipped:

Time that with this strange excuse
Pardoned Kipling and his views,
And will pardon Paul Claudel,
Pardons him for writing well.

[Apologies for the poor quality/ vivid colours of the photos this week – Margaret’s away just now, and my iPhone seems to be set on either “Humphrey Bogart” or “fluorescent blue” – normal service hopefully resumed next week…]

Wick (John Macleod), Week 9: 21 January

As a keen student of contemporary politics on both sides of the Atlantic, you won’t be surprised to learn that I’ve spent most of this last week sobbing into my handkerchief. And I was surprised to discover that the handkerchief as we know it was first invented in the Middle Ages by King Richard II of England (1377-99). Which raises a fascinating question: what did people do before that? (It also raises another question after a few seconds’ nauseated reflection: what on earth took them so long?)

Luckily there are court documents in the National Archives that capture the exact moment of discovery between Richard II and Isabella, his young French bride:

“Oyez, Richard, mon husband, come-toi back to le bed, c’est freezing. Holdez votres chevaux – ou the hell est ma duvet? Et qu’est-ce que tu fais avec mes scissors?”
“Un moment, ma petite cabbage, je suis almost done.” (He holds up a piece of cloth) “Et voila!”
“Que? C’est un petit square de ma bedsheet. Couleur moi unimpressed.”
“Non, regardez! Je honkais mon hootaire comme ça!”
(Demonstrates by blowing his nose on the square.)
“Eurgh! C’est fort unhygienic! Et très gross aussi.”
“Pas du tout, ma petite brassica de choice. C’est preferable au blowing snot rockets tout over le floor. Remembrez last year quand tout le court had colds, et j’ai dit que nous avons un infestation de slugs?”
“Oui?”
“Ils n’étaient pas slugs.”
“Je voudrais return au maison de ma maman first thing demain. Aussi, je sais that nous vivons dans les Middle Ages, but je voudrais un divorce chop-chop tout de suite.”

Fishing boat in Thurso harbour

Sadly, the fragment ends there. Richard is also credited with insisting that spoons be used at court banquets, thus ending the hilarious custom whereby courtiers had to eat soup with a fork. He’s also supposed to have installed the first royal bathhouse. (On reflection, it’s perhaps not surprising that the English deposed him and put him to death a few year years later.)

Frosty morning

But I digress. Back to the subject of John MacLeod’s gansey that I’m recreating just now. I’ve finished front and back and joined the seed stitch shoulders, and completed the collar. (And while I consider myself a rational being I’ve come to realise that I’m reluctant to make my collars 13 rows; I mean, it’s not like I’m short of bad luck, so who exactly do I think I’m fooling?) Just the relatively plain sleeves to go now.

Incidentally, the word kerchief comes from two French words meaning, literally, a head-cover. So a handkerchief means a head-cover for your hand. This has given me an inordinate amount of pleasure, rivalled only by that moment at school some 45 years ago when I realised that the German for a mitten, Fausthandschuh, meant a hand-shoe for the fist. Aren’t words wonderful?

Wick (John Macleod), Week 8: 14 January

The far north of Scotland is being battered by deep depressions just now. (I mean this in a meteorological sense rather than a spiritual one, of course; since the doctors put me on antidepressant medication I rather feel, to quote The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, that anything I still cannot deal with is therefore my own problem.) But then that’s the price you pay for living here: as the old joke about the BBC weather report goes, “Severe gales are forecast, so viewers in England and Wales are warned to stay indoors and avoid travel; and for viewers in Scotland, you’ll need your coat…”

Top wind speed in Wick last week was 74 mph, which really isn’t a lot of fun. Caravans were blown across the main north-south route through the Highlands, bridges were closed and a convenience store had its roof torn off. The wind blew straight down from the north and in Thurso it lifted the sand up off the beech and on through the town, creating an eerie drifting-fog effect, as though a stray group of Nazis had foolishly decided to open the Ark of the Covenant on Thurso esplanade for a lark.

Confused Daffodils

On the plus side, I’m about two-thirds of the way up the front of John Macleod’s gansey, and have set up base camp preparatory to making the final assault next week. I’m deliberately knitting more slowly with this pattern: it’s easy to make mistakes when I’m tired, and every other row I stop and count the number of stitches in the centre panel to make sure I’ve done all the yarn overs in the right places and still have the correct number of stitches.

Sunset on the riverbank

And shall I tell you something rather impressive? This is actually being knit with two separate dye lots of Frangipani sea spray yarn (two 500g cones). I knew it was a risk, because you can end up with visible lines where the colours don’t-quite-match; but as I had the two cones to hand, and was knitting the pattern as an example, I thought I’d take the chance. But here’s the thing: I can’t see the join, even in our currently elusive daylight. Sometimes fortune favours the casually reckless; and all credit to Frangipani for the consistency of their dyes.

St Fergus’ from the riverside path

As I write this the wind is getting up again, a mere 50 mph this time. So I’m going to finish with four lines by Li Po, the great Chinese poet and drinker. (It’s strange to think Li was writing tranquil poems like this while across the globe the Vikings were just starting to think it might be fun to bring down western civilisation.) In this extract he has come down from Zhongnan mountain; it’s dark and he’s stopped by the farmhouse of a friend for a drink:

We sang to the tune of the wind in the pines;
And we finished our songs as the stars went down,
When I being drunk and my friend more than happy,
Between us we forgot the world.

Wick (John Macleod), Week 7: 7 January

When we travel back and forth to Northampton we usually stay a night or two in Edinburgh to break the journey. It’s almost exactly halfway, in time if not in distance. In the run-up to Christmas, in this dark time of year, it’s doubly welcome—being full of lights, and people, and shops, and the general electric sort of buzz and bustle which is, alas, sorely lacking in Wick in the bleak midwinter.

I’m not much of a lad for crowds, as a rule. But there’s something about Christmastide in the city that brings out the best in people. And an untimely jostle in the German market, that on another occasion might result in a swift left hook to the jaw and more stars than one might see over Bethlehem, merely results in a polite, “Oh I say, I’m most terribly sorry,” and a “Not all, I was just thinking that this gluhwein would work better spilled all down my front anyway”.

Clouds over Dunnet Beach

We perambulated the Christmas market, we frequented coffee shops and we almost climbed Arthur’s Seat, the great volcanic hill that dominates Edinburgh’s skyline (look, we made it as far as the foothills before it occurred to us that Starbucks would be open, okay?). And I was interested to notice a new phenomenon among all the tourist shops along the Royal Mile: shops selling Harry Potter merchandise. They were busy, too, far too crowded to get into; and I found myself wondering, how many Slytherin sweatshirts do they sell?

Looking towards the Pentlands from Arthur’s Seat

Returning to the magical land of ganseys, I have finished the back of John MacLeod’s gansey. Of course, it helps that I only worked two days last week; progress in future will necessarily be a lot slower. It’s a really stunning pattern, and the lace-effect central trees have an almost three-dimensional quality. It pays to know your row gauge, though an element of luck is always involved too: the pattern fits almost exactly as I’d hoped. (The only thing to watch is the seed stitch shoulder strap, making sure that both match the seed stitch panels on the borders.)

Seals at Sarclet

In parish news, Judit has sent through pictures of her revised pink gansey, a very effective combination of chevrons and border panels. She’s also sent another picture, an early contender for this year’s Most Adorable Dog Posing With a Gansey award…

Finally, the local seals have moved away from Sarclet beach, where they came to pup, round the cliffs to a rocky outcrop inclining into the sea. There they haul themselves up for a leisurely bask, and to utter their weird, unearthly cries, which echo strangely off the rocks—not so much like the siren call of a mermaid as of a bass-baritone with an upset tummy. Though now I think of it, I don’t suppose anyone was ever lured to a watery grave by the siren call of a 300-lb whoopee cushion…