March came in like a lion, and it’s going out like a lion too; a bad-tempered lion who’s lost his car keys and has just learned his favourite TV nature documentary series has been cancelled. (And I can’t help thinking that sooner or later evolution is going to produce a lion savvy enough to sign his own contract and demand royalties from David Attenborough; after all, it worked for the Pink Panther.)
It’s been a wild week outdoors, rain and hail and gusts over 50mph, with just enough passages of glorious sunshine to keep you off balance. All the daffodils had come out early, lured by the unseasonable warmth, and now they obviously regret it, hunkered down with an unwilling, miserable air. I took a holiday last week, just to potter about. Pretty much every time I ventured outside I got soaked, no matter how clear the sky looked when I started: it was like living in a Roadrunner cartoon. On Saturday I got rained on horizontally, and the nearest cloud I could see in any direction was about fifty miles away in Sutherland; if I hadn’t got in the way I expect the wind would have carried the rain all the way to Sweden.
Waiting, St Giles Cathedral, Edinburgh
Well, with Margaret being away just now, I’ve had lots of time to myself, which means plenty of knitting and listening to audiobooks. I’ve decided to start two ganseys at once; and no, despite the rumours, I’m not knitting one with my hands and the other with my prehensile toes. The first, in Wendy navy, will be the popular Scarborough pattern (one of my favourites), and I’ll be knitting this one in the hours of daylight (mostly weekends). The other, in Frangipani Cornish Fudge (a new colour to me, and one I’ve always wanted to try), is another pattern from the Johnston Collection of old photographs held by The Wick Society; this one I’ll be knitting in the evenings. I’ll see how I get on.
Scott Monument from Advocates’ Close, Edinburgh
To keep myself company I’ve been listening to an unabridged recording of Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo, all 45 hours of it. It’s a cheerful little tale of injustice, revenge, suicide and death, but one phrase made me laugh. The Count is impersonating an Englishman: “And he laughed too, but he laughed as the English do, at the end of his teeth.” Isn’t that great? A more perfect way of describing a sort of insincere snicker, a laugh that isn’t really a laugh, I cannot imagine.
Mind you, the French have always trolled the British. And they do it so well. My favourite story this week—in a week not exactly full of good news—concerned the French Europe Minister, who’s decided to call her cat “Brexit”. She said she’s done this because he always miaows loudly to be let out, but when she opens the door he just stands there, and when she puts him out he gives her an evil look…
Doors on Advocates’ Close, Edinburgh
I’m laughing. But I’m laughing as the English do, at the end of my teeth.
Well, first things first: the gansey is finished, washed and blocked and drying in the (intermittent) sunshine. And as always, there’s that moment when it’s stretched into shape and the pattern reveals itself in its right proportions, like one of those origami puzzles that seem at first just a scrunched-up piece of paper but which, with a twist and a slide, turn out to be an elegant paper swan. I’ve said before how much I like the colour; it sets off the pattern perfectly, and this pattern really is one of the best.
Nybster Harbour
As TS Eliot said, these fragments I have shored against my ruins. Here are a couple more fragments I came across this week. The first concerns the D-Day landings and subsequent campaign. Apparently as they pushed inland, Allied ground forces marked their positions with signal flares—smoke canisters that showed their positions so the air forces wouldn’t bomb them by mistake. Well, one of these flares went off accidentally inside a British tank. The crew all scrambled out unhurt, choking and coughing, and no harm was done … except that the commander was so deeply saturated that not only his clothes, but also his skin and hair, eyebrows and moustache were dyed a deep, rich hue, like the Jolly Green Giant; and they stayed that way until the pigment gradually grew out…
Rainbow & St Fergus’ Church
The second is a quote from Somerset Maugham’s downbeat World War One spy novel Ashenden. I may have it inscribed over my bathtub. The hero, dishevelled and dirty from travel, has just lowered himself into a scalding hot bath, in which he luxuriates in a very British way: ‘”Really”, he reflected, “there are moments in life when all this to-do that has led from the primeval slime to myself seems almost worth while…”‘
Next week: another gansey from the Johnston Collection. But which one?
Salvation Army Hall, Wick
Our thoughts inevitably go out this week to all those affected by the horrendous events in Christchurch. I read that a group of expat Kiwis had gathered in London for a vigil the day the news broke, and they sang the hauntingly beautiful Māori song “Pokarekare Ana”. There are many recordings of this song available on the internet, but here’s one to which someone has added a montage of pictures of the Land of the Long White Cloud. I like to think of this as a single candle, lit against the darkness of our times.
E kore te aroha e maroke i te rā Mākūkū tonu i aku roimata e.
(My love will never be dried by the sun, it will be forever moistened by my tears.)
I mentioned last year that my right eye has developed a condition called myopic macular degeneration. Basically this means that I’m so shortsighted—before I had cataract surgery my eyes were -11.00 and -12.00 dioptres respectively—that my retinas are stretched so thinly they’re liable to become damaged. And what this means is that in my right eye I’ve developed a blind spot right in the centre of my vision.
Now, let me say immediately that (a) there are many people worse off than me, and (b) most of the time I hardly notice it. My left eye is my leading eye, and that’s holding up fine so far. Most of the time I’m only aware of a slight blurring, which you can replicate at home by keeping both eyes open and holding a piece of clear plastic up in front of one eye: you get the peculiar sensation of things being both in and out of focus at the same time, but it’s no big deal.
It’s straight lines that do my head in. Any series of vertical or horizontal lines—park railings, for instance, or a spreadsheet—bend and distort around the blind spot, as my peripheral vision compensates. It’s as if I’m living my life in an Open University lecture on how black holes warp the light from distant stars. There’s a chart called the Amsler Grid that measures this effect; the scientific term for which is, I believe, “bloody weird”.
Amsler Grid
Well. My (left) eyesight might never deteriorate from here, in which case it’s just a minor inconvenience. But it’s hard not to feel on borrowed time, to an extent: which is why I want to make the most of being able to see as well as I do and knit the ganseys I still have on my to-do list. (There’s only about 20 or so…) This current project is for me, and I plan to wear it a lot. I love the colour, which like all ganseys changes with the ambient light, from bright sky blue to something much darker. With a fair wind behind me I might even finish it this week. (Next up: another Caithness gansey from the Johnston Collection.)
Part of Wick on a sunny day
In parish news, Lynne has sent me photos of a stunning jumper she’s made based on the “Buckie” pattern I knitted for my friend George Bethune a few years ago. Lynne modified the sleeve to an inset sleeve, and used Merino yarn, which just goes to show how well gansey patterns and style can be adapted to suit. Many congratulations to Lynne for a splendid result.
Incidentally, when I said above that other people had it worse than me, this wasn’t false modesty (or any kind of modesty, come to that). I met a man last year with age-related macular degeneration who could no longer read text, and he bore his condition admirably. But, he said, that wasn’t the worst part. Oh really, I said innocently, what’s that? Hallucinations, he said. Out of the corner of his eye he keeps seeing a dwarf climbing in through the window. Of course he knows it’s not real, but that doesn’t stop him seeing it. At which point I thought: a blind spot and a few skewed lines? I’ll settle for that…
Every now and then I’m driven by a desire to try to understand something of the world around me, and so I open my well-thumbed copy of The Big Boys’ Colouring-In Book of Quantum Mechanics, wrap a damp towel around my head, and dive in. This is, of course, as likely to succeed as a dachshund trying to learn to play the banjo, but still I persevere. And then I read something to the effect that a thrown ball will fall to earth in a curved trajectory because time passes more quickly for it the higher it rises, and my only option is to open a box of cheap chocolates and start eating until the pain goes away.
Limpets on the rocks at Sandside
I know that physics teaches us that reality is very different from what we perceive it to be. This table I am leaning on as I type is not a solid thing of hard brown wood, but is instead mostly empty space in which wee particle thingies sort of whizz about, generating an electrical charge at just the right height to support my elbows. The colour is also an illusion, there being no such thing as “brown”, just photons of light of a low frequency falling on my retinas which my brain helpfully converts into colours, probably because it knows I’m rubbish at maths.
Trees & Snowdrops by the river
Buddhists have taught for centuries that the material world is an illusion, an approach that I think of as similar to quantum mechanics, only with fewer equations. And I know I’m not yet ready to break free of the cycle of death and rebirth because I still find this world full of wonders: I have an uncomfortable feeling that if I met the Buddha upon the road I’d hear him out with reverent humility, then try to interest him in this amazing new app I’ve got on my phone.
Late afternoon at Dunnet Beach
Well, Wendy’s Atlantic Blue may be an illusion (particles of light travelling at a wavelength in the region of 380-500 nanometers) but, to misquote Woody Allen, as illusions go it’s definitely one of the best. I’m approaching the endgame of this gansey now, being well on the way to finishing the first sleeve. Confession time: this jumper, like the last one, is also being knit from wool of two separate dye lots; but unlike John Macleod’s gansey, on this one you can see the join. (And does this bother me? Not a photon!)
I guess I’m living proof that a lifetime isn’t enough to fully explore the range of all the gansey patterns out there. Not that I’m especially keen on the idea of reincarnation. In this, as in so much else, I follow the wisdom of Bender, the robot from the cartoon series Futurama: “Afterlife? If I thought I had to live another life, I’d kill myself right now!”
March came in like a lion, and it’s going out like a lion too; a bad-tempered lion who’s lost his car keys and has just learned his favourite TV nature documentary series has been cancelled. (And I can’t help thinking that sooner or later evolution is going to produce a lion savvy enough to sign his own contract and demand royalties from David Attenborough; after all, it worked for the Pink Panther.)
Waiting, St Giles Cathedral, Edinburgh
Scott Monument from Advocates’ Close, Edinburgh
Doors on Advocates’ Close, Edinburgh
