I said last week that spring was in the air, and there are three more infallible signs to show that it must be true. First, and most obvious, in a few days we see the back of February, which has felt less like a month and more like the sorts of tests they put a car through to see how much punishment it can take. Secondly, this is the week I stop using my sunrise wake-up lamp, as it’s finally light enough at seven in the morning to navigate one’s way to the bathroom by sight instead of blindly ricocheting off objects in the hallway like an elderly pinball with arthritis. And thirdly, it’s warm enough that I no longer scream from the shock of applying freezing cold moisturiser to my face. Spring is, I think it’s fair to say, coiled to spring.
Noss Head from Nybster
Take Sunday. It was a simply glorious day: cold—between 3 and 6ºC—but the wind had dropped, the sun was out, and you could see for miles. We went up to Nybster broch, one of our favourite jaunts, just a few miles north of Wick. Nybster, by the way, like Lybster, is one of those Highland place names designed to catch out tourists. The y is long, like the y in “why”, so it’s pronounced Nye-bster. Other notorious places are Guidebest and Leodebest, which I’ve heard pronounced Gidder-best and Lee-odder-best, but I’ve never dared attempt them myself. “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”, as Wittgenstein famously said when someone asked him how to pronounce Loch a’ Mhadaidh Beag.
Being observed by fulmar
Meanwhile, in gansey news I’m making good progress up the back—have nearly finished, in fact, for in about half an inch or so I’ll start the shoulder straps. The overall length of the gansey is to be 24 inches, so I’m making the armhole 8 inches (i.e., 16 inches in the round for the sleeve). In practice this will mean 7 inches plus one inch for the shoulder straps.
Snowdrops by the riverside
Nybster broch is perched on a knobbly outcrop on cliffs overlooking Sinclair’s Bay. Someone’s been busy clearing it over the winter, for it used to be mostly a lumpy, bumpy assortment of hillocks and holes (or “negative features” as archaeologists like to call them), but now the various chambers and passages are open to the sky. It looks like something built, a place where people could actually have lived, and not so much like somewhere colonised in prehistoric times by a now-extinct species of giant mole-rats. We stood there and watched the waves foaming in and the fulmars wheeling below us, and black shaggy-type things skimming over the sun-dappled water in the offing. I expect somewhere time was passing, though not where I was; and it occurred to me, for the first time, that eternity might not perhaps really be so bad, after all…
For a short time there it looked like spring was about to make an entrance, and rather earlier than usual. The days are getting longer, the snowdrops are out and the first green shoots of a crowd (possibly even a host) of golden daffodils are, well, shooting. A few optimistic blackbirds even start the day with a bit of a warble, stubbornly ignoring the fact that this is Caithness and dawn at this time of year usually happens to other people. Spring has definitely been in the air, and in the earth.
The Coast at Sarclet
Then on Friday morning Storm Otto swept in, and all bets were off. I’d had a restless night. Lying awake at 5.30am I heard the wind blowing and thought, pah, call yourself a storm? By 6.15 I thought, okay, that’s definitely windy. By 6.45 it felt like a jumbo jet was revving its engines in our front garden. The whole house was shaking and it seemed the only thing holding it together was the wallpaper. At times like this, all you can do is sit it out and hope. Luckily Otto didn’t hang about. The worst was over by about 8.00am, and an hour later he’d headed off to trash Aberdeenshire. Wick recorded a top wind speed of 78mph—not the worst we’ve had, but bad enough. And then, the aftermath. I always know when a storm’s blown through, the roads are littered with broken branches and twigs; and I suddenly realise why Caithness is so bare of trees.
A Bird in the Bush . . .
As for spring, Shakespeare famously has this jaunty little ditty: “In spring time, the only pretty ring time/ When birds do sing, hey ding a ding, ding/ Sweet lovers love the spring.” Seriously, Bill? Stretching for the rhyme a bit there, mate; I mean, have you ever heard a bird go “ding a ding, ding”? Other than a very confused woodpecker mistaking a church bell for a birch tree, obviously. But then, I suppose, given the alternative (When birds do tweet, tweet tweet tweet tweet tweet/ Sweet lovers love… the sleet? To cheat? A treat? A spreadsheet?) on second thoughts, birds that go “ding ding” are probably fine…
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TECHNICAL STUFF
It’s another landmark week this week, as I place the half-gussets on their holders and divide for front and back. The overall length of the gansey is just 24 inches, so including the two inches of ribbing at the bottom I’ve divided at 16 inches: the plan is to make the armholes seven inches plus one inch for the shoulder strap (16 + 7 + 1 = 24″). Normally this is the point where you really pick up speed, since you’re only knitting half a row at a time, but in this case I’ve got to be careful as the lacy trees in the centre panels with their yarn overs and right- and left-decreases require my full attention.
Here are the pattern charts for the yoke. These charts are for the original gansey in the glass plate negative: please note that in this knitted version I’ve inserted cables to separate the various pattern bands. This is purely to make it wider (to fit the recipient) while leaving the actual pattern elements the same.
In the following charts / = right decrease, \ = left decrease, and 0 = yarn over.
I was thinking the other day about Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings. Gandalf is frequently referred to as a wizard but, as many have observed, he doesn’t really do much in the way of magic. Sure, his wand lights up, but so does my phone; not only that, but it could probably navigate me through Moria using Google Maps, and tell me the best place to get a pizza while I’m down there too. Gandalf doesn’t even produce an egg from the Lord of the Nazgûl’s ear, or saw Galadriel in half. So exactly what kind of a wizard is he?
Wick at Sunset
The word derives from the Old English wys, meaning of course “wise”: so a wizard was originally just a wise person. It’s the same sort of word as drunkard (a person who gets drunk), sluggard (the technical term for a botanist specialising in molluscs) and buzzard (a hawk that hums to itself to pass the time). It only seems to’ve taken on its modern meaning of a sorcerer in late medieval/ early modern times. Tolkien the philologist knew all this from the inside, which is doubtless why Gandalf is as much a counsellor as as he is a wizard. As for how he got started in life, I expect he went to Hogwarts like all the other magical children of his day (“You’re a wizard, Gandalf!”) where he was put in Gryffindor House (Saruman being a born Slytherin). Then on to Discworld’s Unseen University where he majored in making rings disappear.
(More) Snowdrops
After that it all gets a bit vague, though judging by many of the album covers of my youth I assume he started a prog rock band with Merlin and made it big in Germany for a while. The -alf ending in Gandalf, by the way, simply means “elf”. It’s the same root word that appears in Alfred (elf-ræd, or “elf counsel”, i.e., wise) and Alvin (elf-wine or elf friend). Still, however he started out, I like to think of Gandalf keeping up the party’s spirits on their quest to the Dark Lands with a few simple illusions, and of him sitting round the campfire of an evening inviting Boromir to pick a card, any card…
I’ve lost my arm!
TECHNICAL STUFF
Two milestones to note this week: first of all, I’ve started the yoke pattern, and I’ve just started the gussets. A word on the yoke. In order for it to fit, I’ve had to tweak the pattern to something shorter and wider than the original. As the lady is fond of cables I’ve inserted a few to act as borders between the various pattern banks—this way I can keep the proportion of the patterns to each other the same, and still extend the width of the jumper. Making it shorter is more challenging, because fewer rows in height inevitably leads to fewer stitches in width. However, as the original already truncates the centre pattern slightly for the collar, I’m going to follow suit; and will just knit the pattern until I reach the desired height and then stop, and hope it looks okay. (Fingers crossed…)
Finally this week, we’ve been sent photos of a very stylish gansey knitted by Sigrid in Germany. It’s a cardigan based on a Cornish knit-frock design, with moss stitch diamonds among other patterns. It looks great (and note the buttons, a nice touch); many congratulations to Sigrid and many thanks to her for sharing it with us!
It hardly seems fair, does it, that you slog your way through January, only to wake up one morning to find you’ve still got to negotiate February. It’s like seeing your numbers come up on the national lottery, and realising that you’re looking at last week’s ticket and you forgot to buy a new one. But still, there are sheep in the field at the end of the lane this week, and the Council are using up the roads budget by filling in a few of the worst potholes, two infallible signs that spring must be on its way.
Back in the day, the Romans didn’t bother with months during winter, and you can understand why: it’s all a bit samey, grey, dark, and cold. You might as well call the winter months Grim-months One, Two and Three and be done with it. Still, eventually they cracked and King Numa Pompilius invented February around 713 BC. The month takes its name from the festival of Februa, a time when people were ritually washed, and I still honour this ritual to this day: I take a bath once a year, whether I need one or not. (I think old King Numa probably first made that joke, probably at the same time as announcing he’d created the month.)
Fishing boat next to the Herring Mart
The Anglo-Saxons had their own name for it, Solmōnaþ (Sol-monath). The “sol” element could mean sun, mud or cakes baked in the hearth, all of which are possible: February is notoriously muddy, and the Anglo-Saxons did bake cakes, although the wonders of a Victoria sponge still lay in the distant future (n.b., here’s an idea for a short-lived tv show: The Great Anglo-Saxon Bake-Off, using only ingredients available in 800 AD). Historians usually breezily dismiss the “sun” option, though, because England isn’t known for its sunshine at this time of year, but I’m not so sure. It’s about now that I start to notice the days really getting longer, so maybe they named it that in a spirit of hope, of “Don’t give up now, lads, we’re nearly there”. Incidentally, another Old English name for February was Kale-monath, or “cabbage month”, which our local Indian takeaway sadly seems to have adopted as a default for all its vegetarian options.
Incidentally, one of my favourite John Lennon anecdotes comes from this time of year. The Beatles had just returned on 5th February 1964 from a series of concerts in Paris, and had to face the usual barrage of inane questions from the press. One of the more jaw-dropping related to the University of Detroit adopting a Stamp Out The Beatles movement: “They say your haircuts are un-American”. To which Lennon replied with faultless logic, “Well, it was very observant of them because we aren’t American, actually…”
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TECHNICAL STUFF
Milestone number one: I’ve reached the top of the body ribbing and am now footling about with the border chevron, a sort of amuse-bouche before we start the main course of the yoke pattern. As this gansey is for a lady who is not as tall as I, I’ve had to make some adjustments to the length of the various pattern elements. So I’ve made the body ribbing and chevron a little narrower, and will hopefully still be able to fit in most of the yoke.
Finally, a big thank you to the charming ladies of Killimster Women’s Institute for making Margaret and me so welcome last week when I gave a talk on ganseys and the herring fishing, and for braving the horrible weather—the rain was drumming so hard on the roof at one point I found myself wondering if it was too late to start rounding up animals two by two. My only regret—and this is true of life as a whole, not just last Thursday night—is that I had to leave so many of the amazing cakes they’d prepared untasted…
I said last week that spring was in the air, and there are three more infallible signs to show that it must be true. First, and most obvious, in a few days we see the back of February, which has felt less like a month and more like the sorts of tests they put a car through to see how much punishment it can take. Secondly, this is the week I stop using my sunrise wake-up lamp, as it’s finally light enough at seven in the morning to navigate one’s way to the bathroom by sight instead of blindly ricocheting off objects in the hallway like an elderly pinball with arthritis. And thirdly, it’s warm enough that I no longer scream from the shock of applying freezing cold moisturiser to my face. Spring is, I think it’s fair to say, coiled to spring.
