Gansey Nation

I was awoken the other day by a seagull, calling from somewhere outside the bedroom window. It sounded, I thought, like the wail of a lost soul in torment. And then the idea slid into my mind that perhaps seagulls really were reincarnated lost souls, and the reason they went after your chips so aggressively was because they still retained some human memories, such as how good chips actually taste. Come to think of it, maybe they’re reincarnated football fans. Then I woke up properly and resolved to not eat cheese for supper again.

The collective noun for a shedload of seagulls is of course a flock, as fans of 80s synth pop will be only too aware. But you can also call them a squabble, which sounds a bit made-up to me. But then I suppose collective nouns, like all words, have to be made up sometime, or we’d still be communicating by means of facial expressions, as in prehistoric times when mime artists roamed the earth.

Galaxy of Gorse

Take a parliament of owls. This appeared first in Chaucer as a parliament of fowls. But CS Lewis in his Narnia books changed it to a parliament of owls only, and such was the popularity of the books it caught on. I know it’s supposed to designate wisdom, but come on, have you watched the debates in the House of Commons lately? It’s not exactly the Jedi Council. (I’m pretty sure I once heard the Chancellor of the Exchequer refute the arguments of the Leader of the Opposition in these terms: “The honourable gentlemen’s fiscal arguments lack all credibility and will lead to rampant inflation. Plus, no one likes him cos he smells of wee.”)

I love collective nouns. A dazzle of zebras, a shrewdness of apes, a skulk of foxes, an incredulity of cuckoos, an exaltation of larks, a superfluity of nuns (but can you ever really have too many?), a murder of crows, a whoop of gorillas and an international flight path of gazelles. (Well, okay, not the last two, which I’ve nicked from an old Alas Smith and Jones sketch.) I don’t think there’s a collective noun for lost souls, though apparently the term for a bunch of ghosts is a fright, which seems like a missed opportunity. Apart from squabble and flock, you can also have a screech of seagulls and a scavenging, which suggests that seagulls need a better press agent. I’d also like to humbly offer a menace of seagulls or, just possibly, “a chipgrabbing…”

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Straw bales

TECHNICAL STUFF

A word on sleeves. I’ve found there are two ways of dealing with the rate of decrease as you work your way down the sleeve: one is to just pick a rate (two stitches every five rows, for example) and see where it leads you; the other is maths. If I’m feeling reckless, I opt for the former. But more often than not I, as it were, grit my teeth and do the math.

The first thing is to check your stitch gauge, which can vary a little when you switch to double-pointed needles. Say it’s 10 rows to the inch (to keep this example simple). How long is your sleeve going to be? Say it’s 17 inches from shoulder to start of cuff. The first thing you do is deduct from the overall total the number of inches it will take to complete your underarm gusset. In my case a half-gusset is always more or less 3 inches, so (because I won’t be decreasing any stitches from the sleeve itself  until I’ve finished the gusset), that equals 17 – 3 = 14 inches from end of gusset to start of cuff. If I knit 10 rows per inch, that equals 14 x 10 = 140 rows to play with.

So, how wide do you want your sleeve to be at the cuff? If it’s going to be, say, 5.25 inches laid flat, or 10.5 inches in the round, and you’re knitting 8 stitches to the inch, then 10.5 x 8 = 84 stitches at the cuff.

How wide is your armhole? Say it’s 9 inches from gusset to top of shoulder laid flat, or 18 inches in the round, 18 x 8 = 144 stitches to cast on at the armhole. This means you have to decrease from 144 to 88 down the sleeve, so 144 – 88 = 56. This means you have to decrease by 56 stitches from end of gusset to start of cuff.

Waves reaching shore

Now, every time you decrease, you decrease by 2 stitches (one stitch either side of the fake seam). So 56 / 2 = 28 decrease moments down the sleeve after the gusset.

So there we are. We have 14 inches or 140 rows to make 28 decreases. The calculation now is a simple one: 140 / 28 = 5. Therefore if we decrease 2 stitches every 5 rows from the end of the gusset, we should have the exact number of stitches we need for the cuff (84 stitches equals 7 x 4-stitch ribs of k2/p2).

Of course, you can play around with this to suit your own gauge and preferred lengths. A shorter sleeve will mean a narrower (less deep) armhole with fewer stitches. A longer one will require a slower rate of decrease: sometimes I decrease at a rate of 4 stitches every 11 rows, or one decrease on the 5th row alternating with another decrease on the 6th row. You may prefer to have a few more stitches at the end of the sleeve than in my example, so that the first row of the cuff involves several decreases, making for a snugger fit at the wrist and a more pronounced change from sleeve to cuff, It’s entirely up to you.

“For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground/ And tell sad stories of the death of kings,” as Shakespeare’s Richard II poignantly observed. Of queens, too: for, as you may perhaps have heard, Britain is now officially in mourning for the death of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.

When I was younger I was something of a republican, feeling that a monarchy had no place in a serious, mature, modern democracy. But then I remembered that I lived in a country which had voted to name a scientific research ship “Boaty Mcboatface”; which has an unelected second chamber of Parliament, the House of Lords; and which now has noted climate change sceptic Jacob Rees-Mogg as its *checks notes* minister for climate change. At which point it dawned on me that adjectives like mature, modern and serious are, perhaps, a touch optimistic. (A propos of nothing, someone once labelled Rees-Mogg “The Haunted Pencil”; I don’t know why, but it cheers me up no end whenever I hear his name.)

My only brush with royalty came just over a decade ago, when one of Charles’s brothers, Edward, earl of Wessex, officially opened a new Scottish archive centre. I’d been invited to host the event, and it was something of a revelation. He was amusing, self-deprecating, made time for everyone, spoke to everyone, listened, and made each person feel a little special. And suddenly I got it: it wouldn’t have been the same with a politician (half the room would have voted for the other side) or a celebrity, when it would have been all about them. He made it about us. I was, a little to my own surprise, genuinely impressed.

Stopping for a cuppa

I was also a little surprised to find how touched I was by the passing of Her Majesty: touched by some of the tributes (especially the ones involving Paddington), touched by the grief of the family, and also by the memories it brought back of some of the losses in my own life, especially of my mother and (just recently) her sister. The Queen, God bless her, is dead: long live the King. And if another’s grief ever seems excessive or misplaced, well, maybe we should remember Benedick’s words in Much Ado About Nothing: everyone can master a grief but he that has it.

Waves on the harbour wall

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TECHNICAL STUFF

So, the sleeve. In the original photo, George’s gansey has repeats of the pattern bands all the way down to the cuff. I’m not doing that for a couple of reasons. Firstly, and obviously, because I’m lazy. And secondly, because I don’t particularly like the look of a fully-patterned sleeve on a half-patterned body. It just looks a bit top-heavy to me, like a gansey designed for orcs (I like to think that Aragorn encouraged the surviving orcs to take up fishing for herring after the fall of the Dark Lord). But it’s just a question of personal taste. I cast on 137 stitches round the armhole, and after the gusset am decreasing at a rate of 2 stitches every 5 rows.The sleeve will be about 15.5 inches shoulder to cuff; the cuff will be 6 inches standard k2/p2 ribbing, folded back on itself.

Loch Watten

Now, I don’t know if this is useful or not. When I’m knitting purl rows on straight, double-pointed needles, try as I might I can’t get the stitches an even size across the join from one needle to the next: either they’re too loose, and they sag; or I overcompensate, and they end up tight and tiny. So I’ve got into the habit of just slipping the last 3 or 4 stitches from those on the needle I’ve just done onto my new needle. This means that I start my new needle with 3 or 4 purl stitches already completed, sitting there—i.e., the join/ transition point between needles is now 3 or 4 stitches back, it’s already happened—and I can carry on with my purl row, and the tension is automatically the same in every stitch. It only takes a couple of seconds per needle, and the effect is, well, seamless.