And now it’s spring, meteorologically and temporally. This weekend the clocks went forward to herald the arrival of summertime (when, incidentally, the living never seems to be as easy as George Gershwin led me to believe). In Wagner’s Die Walküre the hero Siegmund greets the arrival of spring by singing to his sister Sieglinde the aria Winterstürme wichen dem Wonnemond, which one website translates as “Winter storms gave way to the merry moon”; after which, I’m afraid, it all gets a bit mucky. But I can’t help thinking it’s just as well Siegmund and Sieglinde lived in the primeval forests of German mythology and not, as it were, in Caithness; since here the Winterstürme show no sign of wichen, and instead are rattling the windows as though it were still January.
Bursting buds
Few of the classics, of course, would survive translation to Caithness. How successful would Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness be if it involved a journey up Wick River to reveal the ancestral savagery lurking in the human breast (or Watten, as I like to think of it)? Early drafts of the original script for Star Wars has Obi-wan Kenobi announcing, “Mos Eisley Spaceport. You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy… Well, okay, maybe Thurso.” Paddington would still be sitting forlornly at Forsinard station, wondering how on earth he was going to source marmalade in the middle of a peat bog. And if Mary Poppins had tried to visit the Banks family in John O’Groats her feet would never have touched the ground; instead, wafted in the general direction of Scandinavia, she would even now be looking up “a spoonful of sugar” in her Swedish-English dictionary.
High Tide at Full Moon
In gansey news, I am now well embarked on the body. It’s a typical Caithness body pattern, six plain stitches alternating with five purl-and-knit stitches—the purpose being, of course, for the purl stitches to act like ribbing, draw it all together and make for a snug fit. Or failing that, in my case, a built-in corset, as if Captain Kirk had taken up herring fishing after he retired from Starfleet. I’m finding the 6-5-6-5 pattern a hard rhythm to relax into: unless I exercise ceaseless vigilance my fingers keep knitting extra knit stitches, or the five stitches of ribbing become eight or nine. It’s very distinctive; although, because of the drawing-in effect, you won’t really see the pattern to its best advantage till it’s blocked.
Last year’s seedhead
Well, the clocks may have gone forward, but I haven’t. Changes in time always do my head in, and somehow having all of nature fooling about making a rumpus outside your window only seems to make it worse. If Mr Bluebird so much as tried to land on my shoulder this merry morn I’d be reaching for my twelve bore before he was halfway through his first “zip-a-dee-do-dah”. Everything is happening an hour earlier, and I’m just not ready for it. Still, I should focus on the positives: in just six months we all get a proper lie in once again. And let the storms of winter blow then as they might, I think we can all agree an extra hour in bed’s a price worth paying…
As I get older, I find myself occasionally thinking about the afterlife; more specifically, whether I would pass the selection panel for admissions. What sort of questions might they ask? After all, like any interview, it’s as well to be prepared. But if they began by asking me what interested me in their particular afterlife I would, I feel, need a better answer than the only one I’ve thought of so far, which is “the hours”. Still, if I’m asked to name one selfless deed that would admit me to heaven, I think I’m covered: as every week at the supermarket checkout I’d drop a token into one of the buckets to select a charity they’d donate to. (No, don’t thank me: sometimes virtue really is its own reward.)
There are many theologies, of course, from the Great Wheel of Buddhism (rebirth until enlightenment and nirvana) to the more linear approach of Christianity (existence, limbo, eternity). Einstein famously said that “God does not play dice with the universe”, but I think he—and every major religion—are wrong: the universe is in reality a massive game of snakes and ladders, and (my philosophy in a nutshell) some days you just land on a snake.
Pussywillows in the sun
Meanwhile it’s the spring equinox, a time of rebirth and renewal across the land, and what better way to celebrate than with chocolate easter eggs a new gansey? So while the Dunbeath one is pinned out to dry in the sun, I’ve cast on the long-awaited Wick gansey using Frangipani Cordova yarn (supplied by Deb Gillanders of Propagansey). The yarn is a fabulous shade of blue-grey which should show the pattern perfectly. I’ll say more about this in the coming weeks, but suffice to note it’s another distinctive Wick gansey taken from the Johnston Collection of old photographs.
Choppy water in the river
And if I dream of an ideal day in paradise I wake up to sunshine, enjoy a leisurely breakfast, stroll over to the celestial library’s manuscripts department where a collection of ancient documents is awaiting my attention, spend a happy morning cataloguing, come home for lunch, then sit in the window listening to Bruckner or Vaughan Williams and knitting a gansey till dinner time—throw in a walk on the cliffs, an evening with family and friends and the Red Sox about to pitch another game, and that doesn’t seem like a bad way to spend eternity. Then, of course, I wake up, only to realise that this is basically my life. (Not that I’m saying living in Wick is exactly paradise—heaven surely involves less wind and fewer migraines.) As for the day of judgment, I’ve mentioned before that I derive great consolation from the words of Lin Yutang: “All I know is that if God loves me only half as much as my mother does, he will not send me to Hell…”
I read with interest this week a review of a new science fiction novel, Radio Life, set in the sort of post-apocalyptic future that is all the rage just now. Apparently the story features “archive runners”, who are despatched to scavenge artefacts surviving from our destroyed civilisation. The author obviously not only has a highly misleading idea of the general standards of archival fitness—most of us, far from running, in reality struggle to climb more than one flight of stairs without oxygen—but of what archivists actually do. But then, he wouldn’t be the first SF writer to get us wrong. David Mitchell in Cloud Atlas famously has an archivist whose role is interviewing human clones in what is also, and I honestly didn’t see this coming, a dystopian future, before they’re executed.
Signs of Spring
Mitchell’s archivist records the clones on an “egg-shaped device”—another schoolboy blunder, since the only eggs most archivists I know are interested in come wrapped in tinfoil and are filled with chocolate buttons. The problem is, novelists always assume that archivists are concerned with the truth; whereas in reality Pontius Pilate is our patron saint, and we approach history not so much like detectives faced with a crime scene, collecting witness statements in the hope of one day bringing a prosecution, but more like stamp collectors. Still, I suppose we should count our blessings: when it comes to fictional portrayals we get off lightly compared with poor old librarians. (I was originally going to be a librarian, but I failed that bit in the practical exam where a handsome man takes off your glasses, loosens your hair, and proceeds to dance a tango with you; I never could master the tango.)
Abstract Willow
I haven’t quite finished the Dunbeath gansey, but am within a gnat’s whisker of doing so, having reached the final cuff. I’ve mentioned before that the only picture we had to go on for the pattern was the small, blurry image in the Moray Firth Gansey Project book. So even if you couldn’t honestly say that this was an exact replica, you couldn’t honestly say it wasn’t. I’m really pleased with it, yarn and pattern both, so much so that I’m going to start saving to buy the yarn to make one for myself. Next week, the start of the long-awaited Wick gansey pattern in Frangipani Cordova yarn.
Roosting Fulmar
And I note that it’s almost a year since the UK first went into lockdown. On Saturday Margaret and I had our first doses of the Oxford/ AstraZeneca vaccine. Both of us had some mild side effects (headache, tiredness, a bit like having a mild cold) but they soon pass. Now I feel rather like a prisoner, who’s been imprisoned for a crime he didn’t commit, on hearing the governor plans to issue a pardon—not free yet, but feeling that freedom, almost for the first time, is imaginable. Outside spring is impatiently ringing the doorbell, calling us to come and play; and while I may never become an archive runner, I can’t tell you how much I’m looking forward to walking rather briskly into whatever the future holds…
I’m in mourning this week. Not, let me hasten to add, for anything serious: but I just discovered that Groucho Marx never actually said “Time flies like an arrow, but fruit flies like a banana”, and a little part of me died. And it got me thinking (again) about time, and what it truly is. I mean, I know that Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity proved that time is money, and they both get spent really fast; but that doesn’t get me very far.
Pendant raindrops
The ancient Greeks had a more nuanced view of time than we do, with two words for it, chronos and kairos.Chronos time is our sort of time, the passing of seconds and minutes and hours, clock time; what the poet Waters meant by “Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day/ You fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way”. Kairos time, on the other hand, is special time, the right time, the time when choosing to act can change the course of your life. This is the sort of time Ecclesiastes is referring to when he says that to every thing there is a season, a time to plant and a time to pluck up that which is planted, etc. Kairos time is deep time, numinous time, the opportune moment, and it’s not measured on any clock. I can’t help thinking it says something about us that we don’t seem to feel the lack of a word for it. (Mind you, the ancient Greeks didn’t have a word for leg-spin bowling so I’m not saying there weren’t things they couldn’t learn from us too.)
Snowdrop Galaxy
Well, somewhere between chronos and kairos for me is knitting ganseys, an activity that rather takes me outside time. In fact, it’s possible that I have replaced the clock as a measure of the passing of time with ganseys. Howsobeit, the current project is well on the way to completion, with the shoulders joined, the collar completed and the first sleeve well underway (ah, the joys of 3-hour Zoom meetings with the camera and microphone switched off). You’ll note, by the way, that the sleeve pattern band is deeper than any of the yoke panels; but as this was the case in the original I’m following, I feel it’s OK.
Lookout on the Lighthouse
“I wasted time, and now doth time waste me”, Shakespeare’s Richard II laments after his deposition, as he waits to be executed. (One of the main reasons I chose archivist as a profession as opposed to, say, monarch, was that the chance of another archivist landing at Milford Haven with an army of mercenaries to overthrow me was, I always felt, slim.) And when I look back on my life, ganseys aside, the words time and waste do seem to seem to cover most of it (it’s actually very similar now, only with the word nuclear replacing time). But then, to quote Pink Floyd’s Time again, “Hanging on in quiet desperation is the Anglo-Scottish-Kiwi way/ The time is gone, the blog is over, thought I’d something more to say…”
Did you know that we archivists have our own patron saint? She’s St Catherine, the Great Martyr; although, as there are only so many saints to go around, we have to share her with a whole bunch of freeloaders such as librarians and teachers and knife grinders. (This probably explains why she never answers my prayers: “You have reached the number of St Catherine of Alexandria, I’m too busy to come to the shrine right now so please leave a message after the world-weary sigh, honestly how hard is it to keep an edge on a blade—”; but by then I’ve usually hung up.) St Catherine’s qualities are said to be beauty, fearlessness, virginity and intelligence, and if that’s not a perfect description of an archivist then I don’t know what is.
Nets on the quay
Catherine is supposed to have lived around 300 AD. She was a famous intellectual (the sort of person our current Prime Minister would probably characterise as a “girly swot”; I’d always thought of the Billy Bunter books as a series of children’s public school stories, instead of, as it turns out, Cabinet Office papers). One time the Emperor Maximian gathered some fifty pagan philosophers to dispute with her. She not only won the argument, she even converted several of them to Christianity (Maximian, a textbook bad loser, promptly had them executed). She was going to be martyred on a burning wheel, but when it shattered at her touch she was beheaded instead. Now she spends her afterlife rushing about helping, among others, potters, hat-makers, theologians, tanners, haberdashers and Greece. And archivists. No wonder my records contain so many mistakes. I can’t help feeling the church needs more saints.
Wick on a sunny day
I was shocked to learn that there isn’t a patron saint of gansey knitters, probably because several centuries of picking up dropped stitches in other people’s knitting would try the patience of—well, of a saint. (Dare I propose St Gladys of Thompson?) Still, even without divine assistance, the body of my gansey is coming along nicely, just the collar and sleeves to go. Incidentally, if you want to see the original pattern we’ve based this gansey on, you can find the photograph on the Wick Society’s Johnston Collection website.
In parish notices, Nigel has sent us pictures of a very splendid gansey he’s made. The yarn is Frangipani Helford blue, with edging in paler blue merino wool. The pattern is Matt Cammish, an absolute classic, and Nigel’s done it full justice here. Many congratulations to him!
Snowdrops catching the sun
And if St Catherine is one of the busiest, which saints have the strangest responsibilities? Could it be St Columbanus, patron saint of motorcyclists? Or perhaps St Balthasar, one of the three wise men, who looks after playing card manufacturers? The saint with the most challenging caseload is probably St Rita, patron saint of the impossible. Then there’s St Drogo, who has charge of unattractive people and, er, coffee houses (still, it’s good to see Frodo Baggins’s father gainfully employed). In fact, I imagine St Catherine saying to St Polycarp of Smyrna, “Look, you take earaches, I’ve got my hands full with all these by-our-lady archivists complaining their pencils need sharpening (and no, St Fotino and St Hypatius of Gangra, and how many times must I say this, that is not a euphemism!)…”
And now it’s spring, meteorologically and temporally. This weekend the clocks went forward to herald the arrival of summertime (when, incidentally, the living never seems to be as easy as George Gershwin led me to believe). In Wagner’s Die Walküre the hero Siegmund greets the arrival of spring by singing to his sister Sieglinde the aria Winterstürme wichen dem Wonnemond, which one website translates as “Winter storms gave way to the merry moon”; after which, I’m afraid, it all gets a bit mucky. But I can’t help thinking it’s just as well Siegmund and Sieglinde lived in the primeval forests of German mythology and not, as it were, in Caithness; since here the Winterstürme show no sign of wichen, and instead are rattling the windows as though it were still January.
