Gansey Nation

As Shakespeare so memorably observed in one of his Sonnets, ‘I’d walk a million miles for one of your smiles’; but how far would I drive to avoid the Caithness County Show? The answer, it turned out on Saturday, is about 107 miles.

Each year the show alternates between Thurso and Wick, and this year was Wick’s turn. The showground is in the fields across the road from us, and we watched in fascination as within the space of a couple of days a village of marquees appeared, animal pens, a funfair and enough vintage tractors to plough Ohio. It was like the Field of the Cloth of Gold, only instead of jousting matches between Henry VII and François I we had stunt bikes and burger vans.

They are out there

Now, agricultural shows are not altogether my thing, fond as I am in general of sheep and mud (and other stuff that looks at first sight like mud but really isn’t); so we tactfully made our excuses and headed south for Chanonry Point on the beautiful Black Isle. There we braved the cold wind and flurries of rain to watch a pair of dolphins or small whales (‘whalettes’ I believe is the scientific term) fooling about in the Moray Firth, their arched backs as they slipped beneath the surface looking like undulating coils of the Loch Ness Monster.

We took a scenic detour on the way back around the Dornoch Firth, so that by the time we returned home the show was just about over and only the funfair remained, as if life wasn’t sufficiently full of sadness already.

Meanwhile I’ve been working hard on the gansey, helped by the fact that so much of the sleeve is plain knitting and thus relatively quick to knit, and requiring less concentration than a full-length pattern. So I have finished the first sleeve, picked up stitches around the armhole of the second, and am now on the home straight. I should get it finished within the next fortnight, i.e., by the end of the month, if I’m lucky. It’s been a joy to knit.

As I mentioned last week, the St Fergus Gallery next door is using a couple of my ganseys as part of its exhibition of old photographs from the Wick Museum’s Johnston Collection. There’s a much-enlarged photo in the display of a fisherman (Fergus Ferguson) with a very fancy gansey; the image is so clear I think I can chart out the pattern, and if so  I have an idea to try to recreate it for the museum, maybe next summer. Watch this space.

Against my better judgment I posed for a publicity picture next to my ganseys. Here it is, for what it’s worth; though I do rather look as though I’ve just been interrupted while eating the thighbone of a rather plump child, which I’ve hastily hidden just out of camera shot. The things one does for art…

According to the BBC’s weather presenters Britain is experiencing a heatwave just now. Standing in front of a map alarmingly coloured orange and red, they flash their unnaturally white teeth and warn of dehydration, sunstroke and death.

And it’s true. Here in the far north of Scotland the temperature has touched the giddy height of 15ºC, and in the fields hecatombs of sheep and cows lie panting on the parched earth; and lambs, instead of frolicking gaily through the meadows, drag themselves wearily along on their bellies, as though swimming the breaststroke through grass.

Truly no one can survive such temperatures for long, and I fear the worst: soon clothing will be shed, and then where will we be? Only yesterday I saw a Scotsman in shorts walking his dog, and the motion of his bare knees reminded me so strongly of someone juggling a pair of potatoes I had to go and lie down in a darkened room until my pulse returned to normal.

Ha! It’s unfair, isn’t it? England gets a heatwave; we get 15º and the rain stops for a few hours. Not that I’m complaining—not really. I remember one summer in Somerset when it was in the 30s and actually too warm to sit and knit with a gansey in your lap.

Well, there’s no danger of that up here, and so I’ve been knitting away like billy-o. I’ve almost finished the back, just an inch to go and then it’s onto the shoulder straps. The pattern stands out clearly, the chevrons so well defined you could practically grate cheese on them—if it was a hard cheese like parmesan, say.

Haar

I started the pattern a little before the gussets because I wanted to give it room to breathe. If you recall the chart I posted a couple of weeks ago, the gansey is split vertically into two equal halves: 14 inches from the very bottom to the garter ridge, and the same to the top of the shoulders, making 28 inches in length. (That’s the plan, anyway!)

Marsh Orchid. Probably.

In parish notices, Den has sent me some more baby pictures of her Filey gansey, which is coming on apace. I must admit, I’m a big fan of incorporating moss stitch into designs, it gives a jumper a really three-dimensional, tactile quality.

Finally this week, the neighbours are back so their cats no longer need us to serve as mobile back-scratchers. Now they stare at me with an aloof, cold distain and, if I ever get too close, strop their claws on the stone wall in a meaningful sort of way, like a movie gangster playing idly with a flick knife; I half expect to wake up with a severed hamster’s head in the bed next to me, as a warning. (Until, of course, the next time the neighbours go away.)

We’ll be taking a break next week while Margaret is off enjoying herself in France. Gansey Nation will return on Monday 13 July, no doubt laden with joie de vivre and a dash of sophistication, if Margaret can manage to smuggle them through customs…