Wait—you mean it’s still only January? Boy, this year’s off to a slow start, huh?
TS Eliot famously summed up the burden of human consciousness and the yearning for a simpler kind of existence in two of the most perfect lines in English poetry: “I should have been a pair of ragged claws/ Scuttling across the floors of silent seas”. And never have I felt more like a quick scuttle than this week, upon reading two science stories in the news—each of which have gone a fair way to boggling what sometimes passes in a dim light for my mind.
Leaf of Grass – double exposure of a hillside
The first of them concerns our old friend, low-level nuclear waste. Apparently scientists are experimenting with extracting carbon-14, a radioactive isotope, from the waste being cleaned from Britain’s nuclear power stations. If you combine this isotope with a special type of diamond that generates an electrical field in the presence of radioactive material, you create a “nuclear powered battery” offering “near infinite power”. And if you encase radioactive material in a diamond there’s no risk of it escaping. It’s early days, so who knows: but wouldn’t it be great if we could turn a problem like nuclear waste into a solution?
To be frank, I don’t really understand this, any more than I understand how a biro works or why ocean liners float—some things man is just not meant to know—so as we now turn to particle physics you should probably have some big pinches of salt ready. Anyway, there’s this big question in physics, namely: why does the universe seem to be expanding faster over time instead of slowing down? The concept of “dark energy” has been suggested to explain this, a mysterious force we haven’t discovered yet. But there is another theory, which is that gravity itself might be driving the expansion of the universe. (No, me neither.) But the bit that stopped me cold was this throwaway comment: The physicist developing the theory “is interested in the speed of gravity, which has never been directly measured and which the theory predicts could in some circumstances be faster than light…” At which point all I can do is take a deep breath, get up, go outside and look at the stars, assuming it’s night, and not cloudy, which is actually pretty rare up here, and wonder how I dare have any opinions at all given how vanishingly small my experience and comprehension of the universe really is.
First snowdrop of Spring
Well, let us avert our gaze from the heavens to something closer to home: a gansey, to keep us warm when stargazing. I’m pushing to get it done now and am making good progress down the first sleeve, helped by my cold finally beginning to shift properly. (No longer do my handkerchiefs resemble what I like to think of as primordial soup and my cough is no more that of an asthmatic sheep being goosed on a frosty morning.) This next week should see the second sleeve begun, and then we really are on the home straight.
Finally this week, just because we can, here are some more British gritter names to cheer us all up. Ready? Gritty Gritty Bang Bang, Gritsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Anti-Slip Machiney, Sir Salter Scott, Spready Mercury and – wait for it – David Plowie. Makes me prouder than a blue passport, honestly…
Back in the Middle Ages people believed that their destiny was watched over and affected by guardian angels or malicious demons. I’m starting to see what they meant. For example, on Saturday I decided to walk up the road to Tesco’s for a loaf of bread and some grapes. I checked the skies for clouds before I set off: nope, nothing. Light breeze, blue skies, crisp snap in the air. Traces of frost on the lawn like the skin on a rice pudding. Perfect. Off I went, possibly even with a merry song on my lips.
Moon Tide
Within four hundred yards the sky was black from horizon to horizon, I was battling a howling gale like Scott of the Antarctic, supposing he had nipped to the supermarket to stock up on some snacks en route, or possibly even en croute, and my face was being shredded by a blizzard of hailstone spicules. In seconds I was soaked to the skin, so I decided I might as well carry on as go back. When I reached Tesco’s, carrying more than my own body weight in melting hailstones, the skies cleared and the sun came out. I trudged wetly around the aisles, a team of shop assistants following me discreetly with a mop and bucket. And when, with a bulging knapsack, I turned to leave, the clouds rolled back in and it pelted down with hail again. At least this time I had a tail wind, though the hail accumulated on my back until I looked as if I was giving one of Frosty the Snowman’s nephews a piggy back. When I got home—well, you’re ahead of me, I see: sunshine and blue skies. And all I can say is, I wish I’d kept the receipt for my guardian angel so I could trade them in for one who doesn’t take quite so many cigarette breaks.
Ribbon of Trees
In gansey news, it’s that moment when it all comes together and it starts to look like a pullover. I’ve finished front and back, joined the shoulders, knit the collar and picked up the stitches around the first armhole. Knitting this one has been a bit of a slog, to be honest. Partly because the yarn—Wendy’s—is so uneven; but mostly because of my cold, which has left me with precious little energy, even for knitting. Thankfully it’s finally starting to wear off, and and as the days get lighter everyone’s mood improves; as though spring might actually one day be a possibility.
Finally this week, an update on our robot vacuum cleaner. So far it’s been a huge success, for all it keeps getting stuck in blind corners, eating the curtains and has to be changed as often as a diarrhetic infant. It’s a truism that British homes are always far more spic and span once we employ cleaners, on the grounds that we’re so appalled at the thought that a stranger might see our homes in a dirty state that we clean them thoroughly before the cleaner arrives. I haven’t quite reached that state with the robovac, though I have caught it regarding a particularly dusty corner with a disapproving tilt of its carapace, and making “tut tut” noises under its breath. I have a sneaking feeling that in a year I’ll be doing the vacuuming while the robot swings lazily in a hammock drinking cocktails…
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Here as promised the much-delayed pattern chart. It’s a very simple pattern, and not the kind of pattern I usually knit, but as so often the simplicity makes for a very effective combination when it’s done.
Right, deep breath: it’s confession time. Here we go. Ready? All right: we treated ourselves to a robot vacuum cleaner in the New Year sales, one of those black discs that randomly trundles across your carpets, hoovering. There, I feel better already. And let’s be honest, anything that can turn vacuuming into a spectator sport has to be a good thing.
It takes a bit of getting used to: it’s quite big, with brushes that behave disconcertingly like feelers, so it’s not unlike having a robot trilobite patrolling your carpets searching for prey. It has sensors that stop it banging into chairs or tumbling down stairs. It seems to have a grudge against net curtains and trailing wires, though, and tries to hoover them up, leaving it gorged and choked and paralysed, like the last time I tried to eat a whole naan bread at an Indian restaurant. It beeps when in distress, and it’s rather touching to watch it limp brokenly back to its charging base when low on power, like a student crawling home to bed after a particularly rough night.
Rising Moon
It’s surprisingly quiet, though I’m starting to worry that not only is it smarter than I am—I don’t have sensors that stop me walking into table legs or falling down stairs—but that all the vacuuming is a blind while it secretly cases the house for hidden jewels, or failing that, loose change. (On the plus side, our house has never been cleaner; on the downside, we just received an unexpected Amazon delivery of bags with “swag” embroidered on the sides; honestly, this could go either way.) Now we just need one with a built in jetpack so it can take care of all the dusting and change the duvet cover. Hmm. Every day I learn a little more about myself. A few years ago, faced with a robot enslavement of humanity I’d definitely have joined the resistance; now I think, vacuuming you say? Dusting you say? Let’s talk.
Sunset on the river
In gansey news I still have my cold, so I still haven’t really made the progress I’d have liked to. I’m definitely miles better, unrecognisable from the horizontal me of New Year’s Eve, but it’s still been a bit of a slog. It’s easy to make mistakes when most of your energy is devoted to closing your mouth instead of letting it hang open like the exit ramp of a landing craft; so unpicking and redoing has been rather a thing lately. All the same, I’m halfway up the front and expect to join the shoulders sometime this week. I will post the charts soon, I promise: it’s just that my vacuum cleaner says it now wants weekends off plus sick pay, and I’ve got a meeting with its union rep at three.
Finally, it’s very easy these days to take a gloomy view of my country for reasons that hardly need to be stated. However, Manchester Council recently held a competition to name the council’s new fleet of winter road salt spreaders. The best names (as reported on national news)? Gritty Gritty Bang Bang, Snowbi-Gone Kenobi, and the fantastic—are you ready?—Gritter Thunberg. You know, I think there may be hope for us yet…
It’s Twelfth Night, so I guess Christmas is officially over for another year. Christmas traditionally ends with the feast of Epiphany, celebrating the visit of “we three kings of orient are” to the Nativity; my own personal moment of epiphany comes from the realisation that the sun will rise here at 8.59am on Monday, the first time in over a fortnight that it’s risen before 9.00am. (Time to nip to the chemist’s for some sun cream, then.)
Riverside at Dusk
But alas, within a day of returning home after our travels I came down with a cold which has afflicted me all week: it’s just a cold, not flu, but a bad one all the same. It’s knocked me sideways, and there are times when even holding a knitting needle feels like too much effort. I read once that we all produce about a pint and a half of mucus every day, which we just swallow without noticing. Well, I seem to be producing about a gallon and, trust me, I notice. The best way to visualise my handkerchiefs after use would be to round up about twenty garden slugs and pop them in a blender, and—OK, OK, you get the idea, I’ll stop there. My only consolation is that I’m probably immune to vampires while it lasts, as mucus is so much part of my constitution I bet it’s gradually displacing my blood.
All this means I haven’t done as much knitting as I’d hoped this week, though the back is almost complete. But I have, ahahaha, somewhat miscalculated the number of rows I’ll need to get an even distribution of patterns. My initial plan of three bands (two zigzags and a herringbone) has left me about an inch short of the shoulder. I’d like to be able to blame this on the cold, but no: it’s just a combination of stupidity, poor maths and a sort of breezy insouciance that everything would work out in the end. (Which it will, of course: it’s really very hard to irretrievably screw up a gansey.) I should be able to fix it by adding another herringbone and turning it into the shoulder straps: viz., half a herringbone on the back and half on the front with the cast-off row and a bit of rig’ and fur’ as the centre of the pattern. If it works I can pretend it was a deliberate strategy all along and no one will ever be able to tell. (So long as no one ever reads this. What? Oh.)
Five of the ganseys on display in the Wick Heritage Museum’s Fishing Hall
By the way, I donated eight of my completed ganseys to Wick Museum before Christmas, including the ones replicating those in old photographs from the Johnston Collection. The Museum had an open day on 2 January (a public holiday in Scotland, on the sensible principle that everyone will be too hungover from celebrating Hogmanay to be expected to work) and they were kind enough to make a feature of the ganseys. You can read more about the day here, including the ganseys, along with all the other fun things they organised to welcome in the New Year.
Meanwhile we wish all our readers a very happy 2020, and remember: there’s only 354 sleeps to Christmas…
Apologies for the delay in posting; there were technical problems over which we had no control.
Wait—you mean it’s still only January? Boy, this year’s off to a slow start, huh?
To be frank, I don’t really understand this, any more than I understand how a biro works or why ocean liners float—some things man is just not meant to know—so as we now turn to particle physics you should probably have some big pinches of salt ready. Anyway, there’s this big question in physics, namely: why does the universe seem to be expanding faster over time instead of slowing down? The concept of “dark energy” has been suggested to explain this, a mysterious force we haven’t discovered yet. But there is another theory, which is that gravity itself might be driving the expansion of the universe. (No, me neither.) But the bit that stopped me cold was this throwaway comment: The physicist developing the theory “is interested in the speed of gravity, which has never been directly measured and which the theory predicts could in some circumstances be faster than light…” At which point all I can do is take a deep breath, get up, go outside and look at the stars, assuming it’s night, and not cloudy, which is actually pretty rare up here, and wonder how I dare have any opinions at all given how vanishingly small my experience and comprehension of the universe really is.
