Gansey Nation

Last weekend we went off to look at something old. (Though it occurs to me now that in future I could achieve the same result just by staying at home and staring at my reflection in the mirror…)

Just up the coast between Thurso and Dounreay lie the ruins of St Mary’s Chapel, set back from cliffs overlooking the Pentland Firth. It’s about a mile’s walk from the road: you go along a track and then slither down a steep path to the valley floor where a river tumbles over rocks before spilling into the sea. You cross the river by a footbridge and clamber up onto the cliffs on the other side. At the top the land falls away and you see the whole vast heaving ocean spread out before you.

It’s a stunning location, and you’d get a real feeling of isolation and atmosphere if someone hadn’t carelessly plonked a bloody great technology park next to it. Still, you can always turn your back on the future and lose yourself in the past—it’s what I do for a living, after all.

It’s the oldest building in the north Highlands, though no one knows how old: maybe 12th century, maybe 9th. Only the nave survives from the original chapel, as it was substantially rebuilt in 1871. In other words, it keeps its mysteries: and that feels entirely appropriate. To walk there now under the burnished sun, hearing the crash of the waves on the rocks far below, gulls riding the wind as through straining to an invisible leash, at the wrong end of God’s microscope, it doesn’t just seem right that there’s a place of worship here: it feels inevitable.

Meanwhile, as you’ll have noticed, the gansey marches on: I have joined the shoulders and knit the collar, leaving a neck width of about a third the width of the jumper, as was traditional. And as I sometimes do, I’ve picked up the stitches round both armholes, and left one on some holding yarn while I finish the other sleeve; the shameful reason is simply that I don’t enjoy picking up stitches, and it’s good to get all the bad things out of the way in one go…

In parish notices, the ganseys keep on coming: this week I’ve been sent pictures by Elisabeth of a splendid and unusual gansey featuring cables and a lattice pattern (more photos on her Ravelry project page). Congratulations to Elisabeth on a striking and original design!

Finally this week, I attended a job fair for the nuclear archive and got talking to a gentleman who used to work at Dounreay, the nuclear facility just up the coast from the chapel. He told me a great story. One time, a team of four or five guys were tasked with cleaning out an installation; it was a totally enclosed space, so they had to wear ear protectors, which also served as headphones. One of the guys discovered they could all be hooked up to a walkman, so they could all listen to the same music at the same time. So they put on a tape of Jeff Wayne’s classic album of The War of the Worlds and got to work, singing along.

The supervisor came in unnoticed at the point on the album when the Martian war machines utter their famous war cry, “Ulla! Ulla!”—whereupon the guys all joined in, shouting, “Ulla! Ulla!”—totally freaking out the supervisor, who of course was unable to hear the music. All he saw was a bunch of busy guys suddenly pausing in their work as if at some signal, raising their heads, and shouting this strange cry in unison. And all this in a nuclear research establishment, too; he must have felt he’d stepped straight into an episode of Doctor Who…!

I celebrated my 56th birthday last week—though now I come to think about it, perhaps “celebrated” isn’t exactly the word. (Commiserated? Maudlined? Whining-self-pitied?) Anyway, as a treat, Margaret offered to bake me a cake of my choosing.

After detailed internet searches involving algorithms, spreadsheets and an army of trained field mice (it’s great—they work for crumbs), I finally came up with the chocolate cake of my dreams, a platonic ideal of an ur-cake, so dark and rich and moist we’ve already been approached by several Texans asking if they can sink an exploratory well. It’s dense enough to have its own event horizon, and it’s possible that we may have discovered simultaneously both dark matter and the fact that it goes nicely with chocolate frosting.

Even a small quantity can be lethal. We’re eating it in centimetre cubes, and even then it sort of sinks to the bottom of your stomach where it slowly expands. (In my darker moments I’ve sometimes wondered what it must feel like to have the creature from Alien gestating inside you; now I have a pretty good idea.)

Under these circumstances any kind of activity, such as standing up, is out of the question, so it’s lucky that knitting is the kind of hobby that one can do while paralysed from the stomach downwards. Reader, I have finished the back, and you can now see the pattern in all its damson glory.

Fergus Ferguson (detail)
from the Johnston Collection

Couple of things to note: first of all, as in the original, there aren’t shoulder straps as such—the pattern just goes all the way to the top of the shoulder, where front and back will be joined. This wasn’t common practice, as far as I can tell, but it’s not unknown—the photos in Gladys Thompson for the Patrington & Withernsea gansey, for example, are similar.

I’d hoped that the Johnston Collection (to which the original photo belongs) would be back online by now, but I understand that might take a while yet. And as the whole point of doing this pattern was so you could see how our re-creation matches the original, it’s a bit frustrating! Now, no one respects copyright law more than I—it’s my job, after all—but under the circumstances I hope no one will mind if we show a partial image of the original yoke here for comparison. (And as soon as the collection is back online I’ll post a link to it.)

Spring finally arrives

As I said last week, we can’t match the original exactly—the stitch and row gauge on that were far too fine—but on the whole we’re rather pleased with it.

Returning to the question of being old: for my birthday last week, not only did I get a cake, I got my biennial bowel screening test kit from NHS Scotland. Reading the instructions, I’m glad to see that it’s moving with the times. Whereas two years ago the advice was to try to catch enough matter to use as a sample as it exited the body (on a bad day not unlike grouse shooting on the Scottish moors in a blizzard); now one is advised to place a container in the bottom of the toilet bowl and aim in its general direction, like the crew of a Lancaster bomber trying to destroy a dam in the Ruhr.

As for me, I’ve decided to adopt the technique recommended by Sigourney Weaver in Aliens when faced with a similar situation: “I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure…”

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.