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Scottish Fleet Cardigan: Week 5 – 28 September

“I ‘gin to be aweary of the sun,” Macbeth declares. (This has always struck me as a curious observation from someone who has his castle in Inverness, endless sunshine not exactly being the USP of the north Highlands; but then, Shakespeare put a coastline on Bohemia, the equivalent of giving Iowa a navy, so who knows?) Where was I? Oh yes, the sun: we’ve passed the solstice, and so the world begins its slow descent into darkness, madness and despair, also known as the party conference season.

Other than the solstice, this last week has also marked two of the more bizarre national days: Ghost Hunting Day and Fish Amnesty Day. I’m a supporter of amnesties for fish: even recidivist herring deserve a second chance. Ghost hunting, though, is a little more problematic. The question of bait is easy: if Halloween teaches us anything, it’s that the best thing to attract the undead is chocolate (actually, now think of it, it works on the living too; damn, now I’m hungry). But then, what do you do with all the ghosts once you’ve caught them—release them back into the wild? What happens if they follow you home and decide to move in, haunting your sock drawer? John Donne, a poet with a one-track mind which, as the saying goes, was a dirt track, threatens, “Then shall my ghost come to your bed”; not an appealing thought, unless maybe as a spectral hot water bottle. No, both are safe from me, and every day is fish and ghost amnesty day as far as I’m concerned.

In gansey news, I’m three-quarters up the back with the shoulders in sight. I would have made more progress but I made a schoolboy error with the flags one row a few inches back and Margaret offered to correct the mistake, rather than just rip it out. Well, as the Buddha observed, no good deed goes unpunished: like Brexit it turned out to be rather more complicated than it had first appeared, and by the time the scaffolding eventually came down and the welder put away two full days had passed. Still, I’m on holiday for the next couple of weeks and will hopefully soon make up the time lost.

Sarclet Harbour

I always find autumn is a good season to take stock and evaluate where you are with things. As Gandalf says to Frodo in The Lord of the Rings, “All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us”. Though I was interested to read that Tolkien’s first draft of that scene is a little different to the version that was published:

“All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us. What have you done with yours, for instance?”
Frodo considered. “Well, last year I beat Fredegar Bolger to first prize at the county fair to see how many Doritos you could shove up your nose.”
“That wasn’t exactly what I meant—”
“I got a dozen up there,” Frodo added smugly. “Fatty only got nine. They got wedged in so tight in one nostril he had to go to the hospital.”
“Look, I’m talking about the return of the Dark Lord here!”
“Don’t you want know how they got them out?”
“No, of course I don’t—” Gandalf hesitated. “How did they?”
“Well, apparently you stick a straw up the other nostril and blow really hard, and—”
“Right, that’s it! Never work with children and hobbits my agent said, but would I bloody listen?”
“Still more’n you’d manage,” Frodo muttered.
“What?”
“It’s more than you would manage,” Frodo repeated rebelliously.
“Did I hear that correctly? As you seriously challenging me, Gandalf the Grey, servant of the Secret Fire, wielder of the Flame of Anor, Maia of Valinor, to a competition to see who can cram the most potato chips up their nose?”
“Er, well, when you put it like that—”
“You’re on. Pass that bag!”

In retrospect, maybe the final version is better…

Scottish Fleet Cardigan: Week 4 – 21 September

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; and a time to realise how much more fun the entire literary canon would be if it had been written by PG Wodehouse. Moby-Dick, for instance, might begin, “Call me Catsmeat Potter-Pirbright”, and go on from there; or Kafka’s Metamorphosis: “As Gussie Fink-Nottle awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into an enormous newt”; or even Du Maurier’s Rebecca: “Last night I dreamt I went to Blandings Castle again”—a brooding, gothic mystery of death and jealousy transformed at a stroke into a search for Lord Emsworth’s missing pig.

Foggy Dew

After Kafka, Dostoevsky and Hardy are probably the writers most in need of cheering up. I’m sure we all feel that what Jude the Obscure needed to snap him out of his gloom was for Sue to paint a pig with phosphorous and release it into his bedroom; no doubt they’d both have had a good laugh, then set out armed with a knitting needle to puncture Alec D’Urbeville’s hot water bottle and jolly well serve him right. Crime and Punishment could have been dispensed with as a short story (“Will you be dining in tonight, sir?” “No Jeeves, I rather fancy popping round and giving that moneylender and her sister the old what-ho with a bally big axe. After which I’ll probably go to the Drones Club for a bread roll fight.” “Very good, sir, I shall press the creases out of the rubber apron directly”).

In gansey news, I continue to make steady, if not spectacular progress: I’m just about to divide for the front and back, the demi-gussets almost complete. And as I wonder with every gansey I knit: why don’t I knit this pattern in this shade all the time? This has been an unusual year in so many ways; curious to relate, I’ve exclusively knit ganseys for family and friends, four of them in fact. Here’s a picture of the last three being heroically modelled by their new owners.

Strange Finds

In other news, I was reading CV Wedgwood’s classic history of the Thirty Years’ War this week and came across this devastating assessment of the Emperor Ferdinand III: “He was too clever to be happy, but not clever enough to be successful.” This was so close to my last annual appraisal as to give me chills; I fear it may end up on my tombstone. So to cheer myself up I’ve been thinking of ways of improving the works of Dostoevsky by combining them with movies. So far I’ve got Band of Brothers Karamazov, in which four brothers are parachuted behind German lines in World War 2 but fail in their mission when they realise God may not exist; Animal House of the Dead, in which a frat party gets out of hand and the students are sent to a Siberian labour camp; and (my current favourite), an exuberant musical of existential despair, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers Karamazov, which honestly writes itself…

Scottish Fleet Cardigan: Week 3 – 14 September

There’s a cartoon doing the rounds just now, by the New Yorker cartoonist David Sipress: a couple are walking down the street and she says, “My desire to be well-informed is currently at odds with my desire to stay sane”. As this is the week when the British Government modelled its approach to international law on the moral philosophy of Edmund Blackadder (“Sir Thomas More for instance, burnt alive for refusing to recant his Catholicism, must have been kicking himself as the flames licked higher, that it never occurred to him to say: ‘I recant my Catholicism…'”), I kinda know how she feels. So let us temporarily avert our gaze from the ghastly present, and focus on the distantish past.

Statue at top of Mervyn’s Tower

During lockdown I promised I’d say more about the stone building at Nybster, the rather grandly named Mervyn Tower. There’s an Iron Age broch at Nybster built on a spur of land overlooking the broad sweep of coast between Wick and Duncansby. A few yards back from the broch stands this strange tower. If you risk the rather unsteady steps leading up, you get a superb view over the broch and the bay. The tower was built around 1900, when the site was first excavated by Sir Francis Tress Barry (and is named after his nephew). Barry’s foreman was the local farmer and artist John Nicolson, and he it was who made the tower and carvings using stone spoil from the excavations. (The modern archaeologist might raise an eyebrow at this, though when you consider the German archaeologist Schliemann used dynamite to blow away nine levels of history at Troy to get to the period he was interested in, maybe not.) The tower was originally erected right in the middle of the broch site—in your face, history!—but was relocated to a more respectful distance in the 1980s. One of the statues is of a youth, and stap me vitals if it ain’t a gansey he’s wearing—the classic Staithes pattern, by the look of it—disarmingly appropriate to the time and place.

Autumn colours by the riverside

Speaking of ganseys, I’m making good, steady progress on my latest project. I’m almost to the gussets, in fact: I just need to make sure I’ve got the balance right so the trees finish naturally at the shoulders. (I did my calculations of the number of rows I’d need based on an average of the last few ganseys, but of course each batch of yarn varies in thickness, and you have to account for the actual tension you’re knitting at, wind speed, etc.) I’m very happy with the overall effect; it’s nice to combine two separate patterns and get more than the sum of the parts.

Blowing in the wind

And as for Sir Thomas More, there’s a great quote from A Man for All Seasons that’s been in my mind this week. In the play Sir Thomas says he’d give the Devil himself the benefit of law. Indignantly his son-in-law, William Roper, declares that he’d cut down every law in England to get at the Devil. And More devastatingly replies, “Oh? And, when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you – where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat?” For without the rule of law, to once more quote Edmund Blackadder, “We’re in the stickiest situation since Sticky the Stick Insect got stuck on a sticky bun…”

Scottish Fleet Cardigan: Week 2 – 7 September


Some 35 minutes’ drive south of Wick, just inside the Caithness-Sutherland border, lies the small village of Berriedale. You can’t miss it: the road, which has till then been footling along the clifftops overlooking the German Ocean, suddenly plunges down into a deep gorge where the Berriedale and Langwell rivers meet before merging their waters with the sea. Indeed, “Berriedale Braes” has been a notorious black spot for many years, especially in winter, with hairpin bends and precipitous inclines. I was once trapped there for nearly an hour some years back while a huge articulated lorry, which had got itself stuck, defied the laws of physics inch by painful inch around the sharpest bend; an experience not at all improved by the burning summer heat and the overpowering smell emanating from the meat wagon parked ahead of me.

Berriedale beach & one of the Candles

It’s a beautiful spot. Apart from a church at the very top of the brae—what fun Sunday mornings must have been, back in the day—there are just a few houses down in the gorge, a studio and the River Bothy cafe. To be honest, forget the scenery: it’s worth going there just for the cakes. (In The Lord of the Rings, Galadriel the elf-queen laments leaving the beauties of middle earth for the afterlife, “But if there are mallorn-trees beyond the Great Sea, none have reported it”; I feel much the same about mars bar tray bakes.) After stocking up on essentials to keep your blood sugar and spirits high, you cross the river and the road and follow the path down past the Wellbeck Estate offices to the harbour.

The latest ganseys modelled by their recipients

The harbour is sheltered by a projecting spur of land which curves out into the sea like a one-armed crab’s pincer. There’s nothing left of it now, but in medieval times there was a castle built on top of this spur, commanding both the seaward and landward approaches to Caithness. There’s a suspension footbridge leading to the north side of the river, where you will find the pebble beach, some old fishermen’s cottages, a handful of caves hollowed out under the cliffs, and the ocean. The footbridge is sturdy but has a noticeable wobble, designed by an engineer who clearly wanted to combine a bridge with a bouncy castle. There are two crenellated turrets perched high on the cliffs, originally built by the Duke of Portland for lights to guide fishermen to the river mouth and known, rather delightfully, as the Duke’s Candlesticks.

We slithered along the beach, peered into the only cave accessible at highish tide, stared man- and womanfully out to sea, and then it was time to go back across the only footbridge I know that suffers from turbulence. Luckily we’d parked the car at the cafe, and—what’s that you say? Another tray bake for the road? Well, now you mention it, maybe just a quick one…

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TECHNICAL STUFF

This gansey is being knit in Frangipani Moonlight yarn. The chest size is 22 inches, which equates to c. 359 stitches in the round, plus 20 for the steek of the cardigan. I cast on 336 + 20 = 356 stitches for the welt and steek and increased by 23 for the body pattern. On each side, front and back, there are 3 tree panels @ 33 stitches wide, alternating with four cable bands @ 20 stitches wide. The central tree panel on the front is broken down the middle for the steek.

Autumn colour in the marsh

I only made one slight alteration to the tree pattern. In the original, the flags on either side of each tree are seven stitches deep. Now, the tree panels, which were 33 stitches wide, fit my required number of stitches perfectly. But the cable panels always start and end with a purl stitch: If I just fit the two patterns together as they were, I’d have had the cable purl stitches running up against the tree panels’ flag purl stitches. I felt that this would be messy, and wouldn’t give me the clean edges I felt these patterns required. So I converted the first and last purl stitches of the tree panels’ flags into knit stitches, which gave me a nice, sharp knit column to separate the trees and cables. In order to keep the flag pattern looking similar to the original, I adjusted each flag so that it still abutted the ones above and below, to reflect the fact that they are now six stitches wide, not seven.