The clocks in the UK went forward last night for Daylight Saving Time, and of course I’m wrecked. It’s like having seasonal jet lag. Every year I find myself wondering if even summer is worth all this grief (this being what my old Latin grammar teacher called ‘a question expecting the answer “no”’). Experience teaches me that for the next couple of weeks I shall greet each day like Frankenstein’s monster on the slab, while Margaret stands over me with electrodes, waiting for a lightning storm and shouting “Give my creature life!”
The Last Snowdrops of Spring
The time change isn’t the only reason I’m knackered just now, though. I was down in Cumbria on a business trip last week, a wearying 800-mile round trip. Highlight of the journey was a visit to Sellafield, Europe’s oldest and largest nuclear site, some 650 acres on the beautiful Cumbrian coast. It doesn’t generate power any more and is used primarily for reprocessing and storage, as redundant buildings and plant are gradually being decommissioned. It’s big in three dimensions, some of the silos tall as cathedrals.
The church from across the river
It’s big in the fourth dimension, too. My profession is cultural heritage, and already places like Sellafield seem to belong to Britain’s past, like those ruined abbeys from the Reformation, crumbling monuments to a faith which once dominated the world and which now seem unimaginably out of reach. “History is now, and England” as TS Eliot said, even if it looked like the future just a few short years ago.
Budding hydrangea
But then, lack of sleep always tends to send me into philosopher mode. There’s no real cure but to wait till my body clock adjusts, tempting though it is to set the alarm for about an hour before the dawn chorus, then go out and shout at the trees to see how the birds like being woken up early for a change. Meanwhile, an urgent question: how exactly shall I spend all this daylight time I’ve saved…?
“Well, now that we have seen each other,” said the Unicorn, “If you’ll believe in me, I’ll believe in you. Is that a bargain?” (Lewis Carroll, Alice Through the Looking-Glass)
We watched the classic 1951 Disney version of Alice in Wonderland the other day. It was a bit disappointing, to be honest, and so (as often happens) it sent me back again to the books. And the main thing I noticed was how gratuitously rude all the creatures are, especially to Alice. It’s utterly delightful. Among the choicest insults are: “You don’t know much, and that’s a fact” (the Duchess); “Really, you are very dull” (the Mock Turtle); “I never saw anybody that looked stupider” (the Violet); “It’s my opinion that you never think at all” (the Rose); and, the best of all, “You’re so exactly like other people” (Humpty Dumpty – ouch).
Retro Snowdrops
Of course, plenty of other children’s books feature rude characters. Gandalf is splendidly tetchy (“Fool of a Took!”) in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, leading to this eulogy from Faramir: “Many are my names in many countries, he said. Mithrandir among the Elves, Tharkûn to the Dwarves; Olórin I was in my youth in the West that is forgotten, and in the South, Mister Grumpy-pants…”
St Fergus’ Church
Of course, the main thing about the Alice books is the sheer strangeness of it all, and the dream logic that obtains throughout (you can’t answer a door unless it says something first, for example). It’s an endlessly quotable book, even occasionally drifting into eastern mysticism and the illusion of the self: “I can’t go back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.” Anyway, I’ll leave you with my favourite passage of all. Alice is talking with the Cheshire Cat, who’s telling her about the Mad Hatter and the equally mad March Hare:
“But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.
“Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”
“How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice.
“You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.”
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TECHNICAL STUFF
I’m taking my time with the sleeves, now that the hard yards of the yoke are behind me. The Caithness style was to have a run of plain knitting at the top of the sleeve, followed by a moss stitchy-type band, and then it’s plain knitting again down to the cuff (which was usually a little fancier than just knit 2/ purl 2). The sleeves will only be 16 inches from the top of the shoulder to the bottom of the cuff, I.e., not very long, so I’m decreasing by two stitches every fourth and fifth rows alternately.
It’s been a funny old week, weather-wise. Arctic air came sweeping down last Sunday, dropping a couple of inches of snow on us and then freezing it solid. Each day would dawn in blue skies and sunshine, just warm enough to melt the top layer of snow ready for it to freeze overnight, when it would also snow again, and so on all week. Come morning it was so treacherous underfoot I could’ve slid gently all the way to work with just a single push at my doorstep. The layers of compacted snow and ice were like varnishing done by Jack Frost. Scenic, yes, I grant you, but when every step you take resembles someone wearing roller skates for the first time it’s a little more hazardous than I could wish.
I know as you get older everything seems to happen faster—time passes more quickly, and seasons can flash by before you’ve had time to get used to them—but I seem to remember spring lasting more than a week. And even then it was usually followed by summer, or what we laughingly call summer here in the far north of Scotland, and then autumn; not by winter. But tempora mutantur and all that, and winter is what we’ve got, after a teasing glimpse of spring the other day: sleet, snow, ice and temperatures hovering around zero. As I leave for work in the morning sparrows glare reproachfully at me as I pass, as if this is somehow my fault, coughing piteously and swearing darkly in birdish under their breath.
I sometimes think that birdsong would probably be a lot less appealing if we could understand it. Mostly I think of it as just a pleasant string of meaningless sounds, the avian equivalent of Italian, but of course to other birds it’s how they communicate, unless they’ve developed a form of semaphore yet to cracked by ornithologists. I suppose the ethereal, delicate beauty of a nightingale singing in the garden at evening would be diminished rather if you knew it meant, “Oi! Turn that bloody light off, some of us are trying to sleep out here, you know!”
To match the weather, here’s a chilly little poem by the Japanese master, Bashō: These cold winter days On horseback— Even my shadow is frozen.
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TECHNICAL STUFF
This is always the point where the magic happens and everything comes together. It’s also the time when I put a bit of a shunt in to get things finished. So this week I’ve finished the front, joined the shoulders, knit the collar (13 rows of k2/P2, or just about an inch), and picked up stitches round the armhole (124 stitches in total, excluding the gusset, for roughly 16 inches in total). The sleeves won’t be very long—only 16 inches in total—but now I can settle down to the next few weeks of mostly plain knitting, quite a relief after concentrating on such a detailed yoke pattern.
I came across a great Winston Churchill story this week. Churchill was famously informal, and frequently turned up to meetings in a silk dressing gown embroidered with dragons or his famous boiler suit “onesie”. He used to dictate letters in the bath and once speculated that President Roosevelt was the only head of state who’d seen him naked (at which I expect the President, a literate, naval man, exclaimed, like the Sea Captain in The Simpsons, “Yar! That’s going to replace the whale in my nightmares!”) Well, one day after breakfast he was sitting in bed having a lengthy telephone conversation with Field Marshal Alan Brooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, concerning weighty matters of strategy. To one side was his secretary, Grace Hamblin, listening in and making notes. And on the bed was his cat, Smokey. Grace herself tells the story:
Backyard snowdrops
“The prime Minister’s telephone conversation with the C.I.G.S. was long and anxious; his thoughts were far away; his toes wiggled under the blankets. I saw Smokey’s tail switch as he watched, and wondered what was going to happen. Suddenly he pounced on the toes and bit hard. It must have hurt, for Mr. Churchill, startled, kicked him right into the corner of the room shouting “Get off, you fool” into the telephone. Then he remembered. “Oh,” he said, “I didn’t mean you,” and then seeing Smokey looking somewhat dazed in the corner, “Poor little thing.” Confusion was complete, the C.I.G.S. hung up hastily and telephoned the Private Secretary to know what was happening…”
Wick Harbourside
In parish notices, we’ve got two splendid ganseys to share with you this week. The first comes courtesy of Sigrid, who has used the Wick Fergus Ferguson pattern to create a very fetching blue cardigan with a stand-up collar. She’s amended the pattern creatively with narrower plain stripes between the zigzag lines, small braids of 2 in the yoke and another small zigzag at the end of the sleeves. As Sigrid points out, you can only see the big tree of life at the back because of the V-neck, but that’s par for the course with modern shaped collars, you lose the top of the centre panel (it’s a price worth paying for me as I don’t prefer loose necklines).
Choppy sea
The other gansey comes from Rose, who’s also been creative with a very impressive blend of Grimsby, Humber and east coast patterns. It’s for her husband (who stylishly models it in the photos; note the initials above the welt), and is also knit in blue, in 4-ply yarn. Many congratulations to Sigrid and Rose, and many thanks to both for sharing.
As for Churchill, he had another cat which he named Nelson. One day during an air raid the cat, frightened by the siren, fled under the bed. Churchill knelt down to remonstrate with it: “Think of your namesake,” he told it. “No one named Nelson slinks under a bed in a time of crisis!” Though in my experience, most cats are so unheroic you might as well name them Brave Sir Robin and be done with it…
The clocks in the UK went forward last night for Daylight Saving Time, and of course I’m wrecked. It’s like having seasonal jet lag. Every year I find myself wondering if even summer is worth all this grief (this being what my old Latin grammar teacher called ‘a question expecting the answer “no”’). Experience teaches me that for the next couple of weeks I shall greet each day like Frankenstein’s monster on the slab, while Margaret stands over me with electrodes, waiting for a lightning storm and shouting “Give my creature life!”
