Gansey Nation

The world turns, as Michael Tippett so memorably said in his great oratorio A Child of Our Time, on its dark side. And this is certainly true in Caithness, where it’s dark, and cold, and wet. (On Saturday the Met Office forecast was for 9º, but “feels like 7º”.) Summer, which seems to have lasted from about 3.00pm to 4.30pm on August 17th, is well and truly over.

John O’Groats, in 35-mph gusts and horizontal rain, resembled nothing so much as the heaving deck of one of those Deadliest Catch fishing trawlers in a storm (Deadliest Groats, coming soon to a Discovery Channel near you). One by one cars would pull up. After a few minutes a couple would get out, run up to the famous signpost, stand hunched miserably in the rain for as long as it took to have their pictures taken, and then run back to their cars and drive away.

But there were rainbows!

While there we met a very soggy Australian couple: he was in shorts, and she was just a voice of misery hidden under about seventeen layers of gore-tex. She looked around, taking it all in, and then said simply: “This a bad place. Let’s get back to the car.” And, I have to say, she had a point.

Well, and so to ganseys. Here at last is the big reveal, the pattern emerging from the plain knitting of the body like a newly-hatched chick from its shell. You won’t be able to see it properly for another week, of course, but there’s enough to get the idea. It consists of diamond panels alternating with betty martin and cables: it makes for a nicely chunky effect, quilted like Robin Hood’s archer’s jacket. I like it a lot, and it’s not surprising it’s been recorded more than once (there’s also a version from Whitby that has moss stitch diamonds instead).

It also has the advantage of being very regular, and thus easy to keep track of. Every two rows are identical, both for the diamonds and the betty martin, so you always know where you are—indeed, once you’ve laid the foundations, the pattern chart’s not necessary. I’m cabling every 7th row, though, so I do need to keep track of that.

An apology to Suzanne, and to anyone who wanted to comment on her gansey pics last week—a technical glitch shifted things around and wouldn’t let anyone post on her page. Anyway, it’s sorted now.

Finally, on Saturday we dodged the showers and visited the wonderful Neolithic Camster Cairns, hunched and brooding on the secluded hillside. There were a few other visitors there, and some of them were getting down on hands and knees and crawling in for a look at the dark, enclosed interior chambers. As we left we heard one of them call out cheerfully to another of the party who’d just disappeared inside, “Look out! There’s a ghost in this one…!”

On Saturday I was walking along the south cliffs overlooking the harbour when I passed two women, and as I walked by I overheard what they were saying.

The younger said, ‘It was in the bar. This guy walked over to me and said, you don’t sweat much for a fat girl, do you?’

‘That’s what he said?’

‘That was his chat-up line.’

‘Ooh, what a charmer.’

And then they were out of earshot, but the sound of their raucous laughter followed me all the way along the cliffs. I’m not sure why, but it cheered me up enormously.

Meanwhile, Margaret’s off on her travels again; this week, she’s slipped the surly bonds of Wick and gone to Romania on laughter-silvered wings, unless I’m thinking of a different airline, so I apologise for the sudden drop in quality of pictures.

The gansey is nearly ten inches long already, and because it’s a narrower chest than the last few I’ve knitted I can just about manage three rows an hour instead of my usual two. At this rate I’ll be able to start thinking about the yoke pattern in a week or two. (N.B., the photos are making it look blue—it’s really not, it’s seaspray.)

Someone at Forsinard Nature Reserve has a sense of humour…

Do people still write poetry? I don’t mean the professionals, I mean ordinary coves like you and me; back in the 1980s and 1990s it seemed that everyone I met wrote terribly serious poems about Life in their spare time—as a friend of mine once remarked, more people were writing it than ever found time to actually read it.

Wick Harbour on a sunny day

But you don’t come across it so much anymore outside of schools. Maybe the growth of self-publishing ebooks has killed off the amateur poet – seems everyone’s writing novels and fanfiction nowadays. (Or maybe the poets just got fed up with trying to find a rhyme for “width” or “orange”?)

Anyway, I’ve been going through my old papers and the other day I came across some poems I wrote in my university days (I also found an old photo of me with hair down to my shoulders, but I don’t think the world is quite ready for that yet). Here’s my favourite, a cheerful piece of nonsense written over 30 years ago in Manchester’s Marie Louise Gardens, when I should have been revising:

Upon the grass before me / A springing squirrel bounds, / His furry feet are quite petite, / He’s making squirrel sounds.

With flashing grace he leaps his haste, / His billowed tail trailing; / He’s flexed his knee and climbed a tree / And hopped over the railing.

‘Yet man,’ as Eliphaz the Temanite observes in the Book of Job, speaking of things that are inevitable, ‘is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward’; and in much the same way, no sooner has the Thurso gansey been completed than another has appeared on my needles to take its place. (I’m not entirely sure how it happens: basically, I go to bed and when I come down next morning there they are, apparently cast on by the gansey fairies in the night. Or else it’s the woodlice.)

This is going to be another of those generic Scottish Fleet patterns that can’t be pinned down to a particular place – it appears in Sabine Domnick’s book as “between Hull and Edinburgh”, and a variant was also recorded in Whitby. (N.B. – not much hope of identifying a drowned fisherman wearing this pattern, hmm?)

I’ll post the pattern when I get to it, but this is going to be another plain body / patterned yoke design, like the Thurso one. (It’s being knitted in Frangipani seaspray; but my iPhone seems to think it would look better in light blue, so that’s how the photo came out, god rot its shrivelled metal soul.)

Dunnet Beach and Dunnet Head (archive photograph – your summer may vary)

Now, I’ve been threatening for a while to post some archive pictures of myself Morris dancing, and this seems as good a time as any. They were taken about 25 years ago when I was with the Brackley Morris Men—a time when I could still see my toes, let alone touch them, and waists weren’t just something that happened to other people. Morris dancing is a ritual folk dance dating back to who knows when (“time whereof memory of man runneth not to the contrary”, as my favourite legal saying puts it) and somehow it’s survived the industrial revolution, the First World War and the supplanting of Christianity by football as the national religion of these islands.

Gordon (right, front) leads formation surrendering

Why is that important? I don’t know, but it is. It’s like knowing that Wednesday was Woden’s Day, or that Thurso was the town on Thor’s River; that Caithness derives its name from being the headland (ness) of the Catt People, a Pictish tribe. The echoes resonate down the centuries even if the meaning is lost.

Some enchanted evening… Gordon dances a solo jig while Margaret plays pipe and tabor

Well. It’s many a year since I last shook a bell in anger and my hair, unlike Mr Eliphaz’s sparks, has fallen like the autumn leaves; but I could probably manage a step or two yet. What’s that? Well, if you insist…

There’s one thing more needing mention / The dances we’ve danced all in fun / So now that you’ve heard our intention / We’ll play on to the beat of the drum…