When did the British lose their stiff upper lips? Not that I ever really had one: when exposed to pain—a crushing handshake, say, or the news that a tooth needs a filling—I tend to scream unnervingly like Donald Sutherland at the end of Invasion of the Body Snatchers and display all the bodily self-control of someone stepping on a landmine. But the British as a whole have long been held up as the inheritors of a sort of Roman stoic discipline, and I’ve seen it persuasively argued that this stems from the English Civil War, i.e., that the people of Britain saw where passionate convictions led to, and so decided for the next 350 years not to have any. No longer. Nowadays we don’t so much wear our hearts on our sleeves as take photos of them and post them on Instagram, blood, arteries and all.
Swirl of tulips
This is most obvious in sports commentary. Once upon a time we made tv programmes to laugh at excitable foreigners, now even football commentary sounds like it’s being delivered by a Dalek who’s ingested something dangerously chemical before the match began and it’s just kicking in: “And Scrunt on the outside of the box goes past one defender, goes past another, puts in a high cross and Blotch heads it in! It’s gone in! He’s scored! And OHMYGOD THE COLOURS AND FLASHING LIGHTS! It’s, I can’t believe this, it’s an actual alien mothership, it’s come for me at last to take me home, ohmygodohmygod—no, er, wait, sorry, my mistake, as you were, it’s just the binmen reversing up the street. And, er, meanwhile, the goal was ruled offside…”
Though I still remember when I had my nervous breakdown a few years back, and was talking to the doctor, explaining all the circumstances that as I saw it had led me to my current situation. He heard me out, and asked some probing questions, and then asked me what I wanted at this point. I thought for a moment and then, as is my way, made a joke of what were really some pretty deep anxieties: I’d like, I said, to be able to watch Beauty and the Beast and get to the end without crying. And the wonderful doctor laughed uproariously, pushed his glasses up on top of his head, and said, “Ach, we’d all like to be able to do that! Maybe focus on something more achievable to start with…” And suddenly about 50% of my anxiety vanished.
Parish notices. Firstly, there’s still a couple of weeks left to enter the raffle to win a gansey hand-knitted by me. It’s all in aid of the Caithness Fishermen’s Mission, full details in last week’s post, but you can enter by clicking the “Buy Gordon a cuppa” button and making a contribution. Tickets are £1 for a strip of five tickets. If you leave a note saying it’s for the raffle we’ll email you back to tell you your numbers for the draw. And secondly, I’m giving a talk on ganseys to the Killimster Women’s Institute on Thursday night, which as ever seemed a good idea last summer when it was comfortably six months away…
Interesting clouds
There’s not much to say about the gansey this week, it’s pretty much a case of rinse and repeat. But it shows the value of just sticking at it, even if you don’t seem to be making a lot of progress, for I’m just about at the end of the body ribbing (8 inches from the welt) and in the next few days should start the chevron border that separates the body from the yoke pattern. Time to do some maths!
“Was there ever a winter so cold and so sad/ The river too weary to flood/ The storming wind cut through to my skin/ But she cut through to my blood…” That’s the opening of The Poor Ditching Boy, a song by the great Richard Thompson, an artist who’s probably never going to top the cheerfullest songwriter awards, and (except for the last line, he adds hastily) it’s been playing in my mind on a loop all week. Indeed, the BBC could have given their weather forecasters a holiday and just played the song each night. For winter laid its icy grip on Caithness for a few days, and it came as something of a shock.
Playing in the snow
Snow, ice, sleet, and hail all descended in a sort of wintery bingo jackpot, together with the horsemen of the apocalypse’s little-known nephew, ungritted roads. The first day or so of new snow is always an unexpected treat, when it covers everything and makes everywhere look exciting and new, it’s powdery and scrunches underfoot in a very satisfactory way, and walking sounds like you’re eating perfectly grilled toast, and everyone looks happy, like they’ve stepped out of the last act of The Muppet Christmas Carol. Then it thaws on top, and freezes overnight, and before you know it you’re damning the penguins’ Christmas skating party to blazes as you anxiously navigate the treacherous ice like someone walking a tightrope over Niagara Falls, and watching cars glide sideways down the road.
I imagine one day I’ll forget what it felt like when the tree at the bottom of the garden deposited a wadge of snow down the back of my neck: first there was an icy shock, then a not unpleasant tingling as it melted, then a cold worm of water slithering down my spine; it probably ended up pooling in my socks, though to be honest I rather lost touch with it somewhere around my sixth vertebra. Eventually all the snow and ice melts, of course, and turns to rain, with just a few sad pockets lingering as reminders under north-facing hedges or in the hollows of distant mountains. Still, soon it will be spring, and time to put aside the depressing Richard Thompson songs for something more cheerful. Here’s one: The Beatles singing Here Comes The Sun…
I’ve got a couple of parish notices this week. First of all, the navy blue Wick gansey (named after its original owner, George Bremner) I knit before Christmas in aid of the Caithness Fishermen’s Mission is now being raffled. I’d describe its size as Extra Large (it’s a nice, easy, comfortable fit on me, and I measure about 43 inches round the chest). Tickets are £1 each. If you want to take part, you can buy a ticket by paying us via Paypal. Simply click on the “buy Gordon a cuppa” button on the home page and make your contribution (n.b., please remember to leave a note that it’s for the raffle). We’ll allocate you a ticket number as soon as I get some from Jackie at the Fisherman’s Mission. The raffle will be open till 24 February, so there’s plenty of time. And let me say that I can’t think of a worthier cause for the gansey-appreciating community to support.
Also this week, I’m delighted to say that Penelope has been in touch to share a couple of ganseys she’s knit. Penelope’s been knitting ganseys for some years now, and of the two, one (in Frangipani ocean deep) is a Flamborough design taken from Gladys Thompson, a classic pattern classically realised, and the other (also Frangipani, wine-coloured) is her own design. Many thanks to Penelope for sharing these with us, and many congratulations on two fine-looking ganseys.
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TECHNICAL STUFF
I’m taking my time and working my way slowly up the body. It’s the ribbing that takes the time, of course, and I’ve included the pattern chart so you can see what’s going on; though it all concertinas up as you knit it, and does what ribbing is supposed to do. Once it’s washed and blocked the ribs will open out and reveal themselves. Meanwhile, in the immortal words of Chief Dan George in The Outlaw Josey Wales, I “endeavour to persevere…”
How are your New Year’s resolutions going so far? I made two: to try to learn a few phrases of conversational Japanese, and to squirt salt up my nose—though not, I have discovered after a messy period of trial and error, at the same time.
The Japanese is because we are occasionally visited at the archive where I work by members of their nuclear decommissioning industry, and I’ve often thought that it would be courteous to greet them in their own language. (Or, failing that, for languages are not my strong suit, something vaguely approximating it.) Though, knowing my luck, when the time comes I’ll forget all the lessons and will instead end up saying something I’ve picked up subconsciously from a Kurosawa samurai movie, and before I know it I’ll be whisked away to defend a village from a horde of bandits on horseback.
The salt-squirting thing is on the advice of the hospital consultant as a means of clearing out my nasal cavities, easing my cough, and probably giving her a jolly good laugh whenever she imagines me doing it. The procedure is a simple one. You boil a kettle of water each morning, pour out a jugful and add a certain quantity of salt and baking soda, stir and allow to cool, and then basically inject it up each nostril with a syringe. You do need a light touch, mind: press the plunger too hard and it can explode out of the other nostril like a burst fire hydrant, or even end up down the back of your throat. One time I looked up to find it had mysteriously sprayed across the mirror over the sink, leading me to conclude that either I’d missed the target completely, that my ears are more versatile than I’d imagined, or there’s another orifice in my skull for the ejection of excess fluids. Nobody told me middle age would be this much fun.
Quackers: Wigeon at the riverside
But now we have some very exciting news: we feature this month in the January edition of The Knitter magazine. It was a special commission last autumn: Graeme Bethune donated a couple of cones of his “gansey gold” Caithness yarn, I used it to knit a gansey on the sly, and Margaret turned it into a fully written-up pattern. I chose one of my favourite Caithness patterns, the Wick Leaf Pattern, and you can see the final version in all its glory being modelled, together with a Q & A session I did, in this month’s edition. I believe it goes on sale on this week on Thursday 19th, so my advice is to place your order now—or, Ima sugu chūmon suru as we say in Japanese. (Actually I have no idea if that’s accurate—I’m still on lesson one, Konnichiwa, “hello”—and I duly googled it. For all I know I’ve just accidentally volunteered to be a bodyguard to a feudal saki merchant, so just to be on the safe side, if you need me in the meantime I’ll be over at the village blacksmith’s, sharpening my katana…)
On Saturday I paid another visit to Raigmore Hospital in Inverness—a journey our poor old car has made so often that now when I get in, all I have to do is say “Raigmore” and, like some elderly hackney cab horse out of Dickens, the engine starts automatically and it practically drives there itself. This time it was a trip to Dermatology to look at the variety of lumps and bumps that have sprouted upon my face over the last few years like the less hallucinogenic sort of mushrooms.
I’d been referred by my doctor about 14 months back—funnily enough it was about these that I’d gone to see her, and it was only in passing when she questioned me about my cough that I became a “person of interest” (as the FBI charmingly put it) to throat cancer specialists. Just before Christmas I got a text from the NHS inviting me to fill an online form about the referral, which went something like: (a) has the problem gone away on its own in the meantime? (b) have you resolved it yourself, say by means of a YouTube video and a pair of gardening shears? Or, (c) do you really still wish to see a doctor? Nothing daunted, I ticked (c), hence Saturday’s trip to Inverness, and very grateful I was for the opportunity.
Along the path
And while I’m sitting in the waiting room, trying to concentrate on the opening paragraphs of Sir Thomas Brown’s 1658 masterwork, Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial, or, a Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns lately found in Norfolk (what do you mean, you haven’t read it?) let us turn our attention back to knitwear. For Judit has come up with another triumph, this gansey which uses a variety of patterns (diamonds, double moss stitch and others) in bands to very striking effect, and which shows again just how effective combining patterns like this can be. Many congratulations again to Judit, and many thanks to her for sharing it with us.
But now my name is called at the hospital. This was another 5-hour round trip for 10 minutes’ worth of doctoring, but it was totally worth it: basically, all my lesions are age-related, and—two of my favourite words just now—non-cancerous. One of them was, the consultant said, inflamed, so he opted to freeze it with a liquid nitrogen spray (strange how freezing results in such an intense burning sensation: “This may sting a little” he said, which I’ve discovered is the medical term for “This will feel like I’m burning your face off with a blowtorch”). For the rest, well, they’re not pretty, but I can live with that. Suddenly I don’t have anything particular medically to worry about. Suddenly to have a stash of over 20 ganseys’ worth of yarn no longer seems like an indulgence…
Knitted herring at the museum
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TECHNICAL STUFF
This will be a replica of another elaborate Wick gansey found in the Johnston Collection of old photographs. I’ve knit it before, in the same colour (Frangipani Sea Spray) and the finished article has pride of place in Wick Museum’s gansey display. But this is a commission for a friend and the sizing is different, so I’ll need to be a bit creative when I get to the yoke pattern. But sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof, so meanwhile I’ve cast on 384 stitches for the K2-P2 welt, increased to 396 for the body (for a chest size of 49 inches in the round at 8 stitches to the inch), and am about to start the K3—P-K-P-K-P—K3 ribbing for the body. (And if that doesn’t teach me that life is stern and earnest, and we are not put here for pleasure alone, I don’t know what will…)
Well, it’s a brand new year fresh out of the box with its batteries fully charged, so here’s a very warm welcome to 2023. Let’s hope it’s better than the last few years which have felt uncomfortably like the End Times, visited as they were by the rebranded Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: War, Pestilence, Cost of Living Crisis, and Brexit.
I’m now officially too old to stay up and see in the new year: it disrupts my sleep pattern and I always wake up with a splitting headache, which rather takes the gloss off things. Besides, I’m a New Zealander, so I can celebrate an antipodean new year at the more civilised time of noon and get it over early. But life always finds a way, as the man said, and this year my plans sadly ganged aft a-gley.
Snow on the skylight
Usually by 11.00pm on New Year’s Eve I’m nestled all snug in my bed/ While visions of Hawaiian dancing girls sugar-plums dance in my head. This worked fine during the pandemic, but of course the world has now reopened and I was rudely awakened before midnight by the sound of the Wick Hogmanay Street Party—possibly the four saddest words in the English language—blasting out live music and someone shouting “Woo-hoo” over loudspeakers till 1.00am. It took me hours to get back to sleep; and so, yes, I welcomed in the new year with a headache. The best way to describe what it feels like is to quote the great Ford Prefect in Douglas Adams’s Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy: “It’s unpleasantly like being drunk.” “What’s so unpleasant about being drunk?” “You ask a glass of water…”
Dusting of Snow
But do I begrudge the revellers their revels? Never in life: for it’s a poor heart that never rejoices, and once a year I’m happy to take one for the team. So, in the spirit of one lighting a candle instead of cursing the darkness, let us raise a glass of orange juice and a couple of aspirin and wish a very happy New Year to all our readers: happy knitting, and may our stitches and our spirits never drop!
Winter on the marsh
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TECHNICAL STUFF
I wanted to finish the gansey in time for New Year, just to keep things neat, which meant quite a lot of knitting over the festive season (luckily I was helped by some wretched weather, which discouraged much venturing out of doors). So I’m delighted to draw a line under 2022 with this completed gansey, washed, blocked and with the ends darned in. It’s another stunner from the Johnston Collection of old photographs, simple but detailed, and I look forward to taking it out for a spin once it’s properly dried. Next up I’m starting 2023 by revisiting another Wick pattern, one of the really fancy ones, and I hope you’ll join us as we embark on another exciting adventure next week.
When did the British lose their stiff upper lips? Not that I ever really had one: when exposed to pain—a crushing handshake, say, or the news that a tooth needs a filling—I tend to scream unnervingly like Donald Sutherland at the end of Invasion of the Body Snatchers and display all the bodily self-control of someone stepping on a landmine. But the British as a whole have long been held up as the inheritors of a sort of Roman stoic discipline, and I’ve seen it persuasively argued that this stems from the English Civil War, i.e., that the people of Britain saw where passionate convictions led to, and so decided for the next 350 years not to have any. No longer. Nowadays we don’t so much wear our hearts on our sleeves as take photos of them and post them on Instagram, blood, arteries and all.
Though I still remember when I had my nervous breakdown a few years back, and was talking to the doctor, explaining all the circumstances that as I saw it had led me to my current situation. He heard me out, and asked some probing questions, and then asked me what I wanted at this point. I thought for a moment and then, as is my way, made a joke of what were really some pretty deep anxieties: I’d like, I said, to be able to watch Beauty and the Beast and get to the end without crying. And the wonderful doctor laughed uproariously, pushed his glasses up on top of his head, and said, “Ach, we’d all like to be able to do that! Maybe focus on something more achievable to start with…” And suddenly about 50% of my anxiety vanished.
Parish notices. Firstly, there’s still a couple of weeks left to enter the raffle to win a gansey hand-knitted by me. It’s all in aid of the Caithness Fishermen’s Mission, full details in last week’s post, but you can enter by clicking the “Buy Gordon a cuppa” button and making a contribution. Tickets are £1 for a strip of five tickets. If you leave a note saying it’s for the raffle we’ll email you back to tell you your numbers for the draw. And secondly, I’m giving a talk on ganseys to the Killimster Women’s Institute on Thursday night, which as ever seemed a good idea last summer when it was comfortably six months away…
