Gansey Nation

I’ve mentioned before that I’ve been suffering from one of these long-lasting colds. It’s nothing serious, just a cold, but it’s come and gone for many weeks now, not changing very much; to quote one of my favourite examples of bad verse (attributed to the former poet laureate Alfred Austin): “O’er the wires the electric message came / He is no better; he is much the same”.

(This is not the best example of bad verse I’ve come across: that honour must go to James Grainger for his immortal line, “Come, muse, let us sing of rats”. Though Wordsworth deserves a mention for this wonderfully trite couplet: “I’ve measured it from side to side / Tis three feet long and two feet wide”.)

Poetic licence aside, last week the cold did get a little worse, obliging me to take some time off work. I didn’t feel so bad sitting down, but when I stood up I was at once in touch with my inner 85 year-old and started wheezing a curiously high-pitched squeak, like someone inflating a bicycle tyre by rhythmically squeezing a mouse. I keep hoping spring will come and get rid of all this nonsense, but since it was just 4ºC over the weekend with snow and hail—a Caithness heat wave—and today the winds are 50-60mph, that may take a while.

Still, lots of knitting. You may remember a while back I highlighted some superb old photographs from the Johnston Collection of Wick fishermen wearing ganseys. Frustratingly, you can’t see them just now as the website is down; but one of them featured a man called Fergus Ferguson and his highly decorated gansey—a superb example, in some ways resembling a sort of missing link between the Scottish mainland ganseys and those of the Hebrides, and not recorded elsewhere.

I can’t show you the original here for copyright reasons (hopefully the collection will be back online soon) but Fergus’s is the gansey I’ve chosen to try next, this time for Margaret in Frangipani damson. We can’t recreate the pattern exactly, as the sizing and stitch gauge are necessarily different, but after poring over the image we think this is a reasonably close approximation (the chart shown is for the body; I’ll post the yoke pattern next week.)

In parish notices, Judit has sent me a picture of her latest gansey, splendidly modelled by her brother, for whom it was a gift. As ever I am impressed—and not a little envious—of both the execution and fit. Many congratulations once again.

Finally, I leave you with these affecting lines written by the poet George Wither, which I came across in The Book of Heroic Failures, and which have stayed with me ever since. They’re from his tragic poem “I Loved A Lass”:

She would me ‘Honey’ call,
She’d—O she’d kiss me too.
But now alas! She’s left me
Falero, lero, lero.

I’m writing this with my feet in a basin of hot water, a mustard poultice wrapped around my head, bathed in such a quantity of steam and towels I look like Lawrence of Arabia climbing into a Turkish bath. For alas! my cold has returned. In fact, we’re both suffering just now. The neighbours have told us to paint a large cross on the door and only come out when—or if—we survive.

I may say, however, and without hyperbole, that like Pheidippides, who ran 26 miles to bring the news of the victory over the Persians at Marathon to Athens and then expired, I managed to last long enough to complete the gansey before succumbing to my cold. And here it is.

Blocking has opened up the trellis panels so you can see the moss stitches underneath, and I must say this makes for a very pleasing combination of patterns, the patterns themselves showing nicely through the colour of the yarn. I’m not saying I’d be in a hurry to knit it again anytime soon, but I’m glad I did: it’s very effective.

The past, they say, is another country. In this case it turned out to be another county, viz., Sutherland. We visited the ruined broch of Cârn Liath the other day, a stony mound on an exposed stretch of the Moray Firth south of Brora. It was a cold, grey, blustery day with rain in the air (or “spring” as we like to call it), and I must admit I didn’t have high hopes—it lies beside the A9 and I’d driven past it any number of times, just another lump in a landscape of lumps.

Cârn Liath

Well, I couldn’t have been more wrong: it was dark, brooding, full of Iron Age shadows and atmosphere. Although the roof and most of the walls have gone—it now stands 12 feet high, but once was three times as tall—you can still go inside and get a feel for what it was like. Brochs are circular towers with two concentric walls and a space between them for stairs, and would once have had several levels divided by wooden floors. Standing at ground level in the central space, enclosed by the massive stone walls, even open to the sky as this was, you felt cut off, enclosed, secure.

Cârn Liath stairwell, seen at right in above pic

The lintels and ceilings are all very low, the guard chambers beside the doorway tall enough for a child of 13 to stand upright in; all of which of course lends support to the current archaeological theory that Iron Age Scotland was colonised by dwarves from the Lonely Mountain after the dragon destroyed their home. Archaeologists are even now digging for evidence, and no doubt singing the hi-ho song to keep their spirits up.

Dunnet Beach

We archivists are always a bit jealous of archaeologists, who get to grow their hair long and go on tv looking manly (or womanly, as the case may be) and rugged; but on the other hand we don’t get through quite so many pairs of trousers, so it all evens out, I expect. (As they used to warn young archaeology students: better to die on your feet than live on your knees…)

Finally this week, congratulations to Margaret, no less than four of whose photographs have been included in the Photoion Photography Awards 2015 book. Regular readers of the blog and Margaret’s Blipfoto feed will know what a remarkably good photographer she is: but why should we keep it to ourselves?

Nationalism is something of an alien concept to me: as someone born in New Zealand of English and Scottish parents, with an American wife, who has lived most of his adult life in England, Wales and Scotland I have, it’s fair to say, divided loyalties. (Except of course when it comes to rugby and movies involving hobbits, two areas in which my homeland leads the world.)

But I’ve been feeling obscurely proud to be British this week. I’ve been reading up on the Second World War, and—apart from the obvious heroism and sacrifice of so many people from all countries—I’ve been struck at the way the British character keeps revealing itself. I mean, would any other nation’s soldiers on capturing a town in Normandy stop and, before putting up any defences or establishing picket lines, sit down for a cup of tea, as the 7th Armoured Division did at Villers-Bocage?

Stephen Ambrose (author of “Band of Brothers”) recounts how when the British and Germans were fighting in Tunisia in 1943 the commanders of each side came to a civilised agreement: they would radio each other with the names of any prisoners taken that day so the families could be notified; and no fighting would take place after 5 pm.

River foam

One day the German commander discovered that his men had captured a British supply truck after the 5 pm watershed. He ordered them to return it, but it was too late: the goods had vanished. Knowing his enemy he hastily contacted Rommel and cunningly suggested that his unit be sent on a reconnaissance mission at once. Rommel agreed: sure enough, the next night the unit that had replaced his in the line had two of their supply trucks stolen by the British…

We had a tree removed this week

Well. I’ve been cracking on with the gansey this week, and have, somewhat to my surprise, finished the first sleeve. It’s about 19 inches in length, 96 stitches at the cuff, and I’ve made the cuff 5 inches long so that the recipient can adjust it to suit, i.e., just in case I got the measurements wrong (paranoid much?). I just have to—sigh—pick up the stitches around the other armhole, and then it should just be a matter of 3 more weeks’ knitting, a week to wash and block it, and we are outta here.

Incidentally I do have another reason to feel the sin of pride in my adopted country this week. The Natural Environment Research Council has invited the public to vote on a name for its new £200 million research vessel. Usually these ships are named after famous explorers or naturalists—the David Attenborough, say, or the Henry Worsley—but the current frontrunner name is, I am delighted to say, the rather wonderful “RSS Boaty McBoatface”… Isn’t that great? Vote early and vote often is my advice.

We’re taking a break next week for Easter (and to get over the shock of the clocks going forward)—our next post will be on Monday 4th April. See you then!