Gansey Nation

There are many things that have brought joy to my life—well, not that many, in fact if you take away chocolate-related stuff the list becomes vanishingly small—but one of them is the annual Bookseller/Diagram prize for the oddest book title.

This year’s prize was won by “How To Poo On A Date” (though personally I would have voted for “The Origin of Feces”, but that’s just me). One of the runners-up was a book called “Working Class Cats”.

The prize was started back in 1978, inspired by “Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice”. I first became aware of it in 1995 when it was won by “How To Reuse Old Graves”—if I remember rightly, one of the runners-up that year was “The Baby Jesus Touch and Feel Book”—and I knew I had found my spiritual home.

Of course, some of the titles are deliberately wacky because the books are meant to be humorous or parodies. I don’t really think these should be eligible (we’re talking “Oral Sadism and the Vegetarian Personality” or “Managing a Dental Practice the Genghis Khan Way”, winners in 1986 and 2010 respectively).

No, for maximum impact I think the title should be utterly straight. “Versailles: the View From Sweden” (1988) definitely counts, as does “How To Avoid Large Ships” (1992), and “American Bottom Archaeology” (1993).

But my absolute favourites? Ladies and gentlemen, I give you “The Big Book of Lesbian Horse Stories” (2003)—and “Goblinproofing One’s Chicken Coop” (2012). After which, like Hamlet, the rest really should be silence, I feel.

I am a paltry few inches of plain knitting and a cuff away from finishing the Wick gansey I started in November. I’m decreasing at a rate of 2 stitches every 6 rows, but even so the sleeves are a trifle baggy. (Hmm, I seem to have a knit a gansey for the “bingo wings” generation…)

Orkney and Stroma from near John o’Groats

Speaking of ganseys, Margaret has come across an interesting painting in Orkney museum, “Rest After Toil”, painted in 1885 and showing a weary paterfamilias in his Orkney croft, wearing what appears to be a greenish gansey. Viewing it online you get a suggestion of a pattern, but nothing definite. (If I had a time machine I’d be tempted to go back in time and give the lazy painter a clip round the ear.)

So there we are. March so far has come in like a lion, and looks like it’s going out like a lion that’s been eating plenty of gazelles and working out down the gym. The spring equinox has officially sprung, so yesterday we had sunshine, snow, sleet, hail and rain, then more sun, all accompanied by a generous dose of wind.

Still, if it’s too wild to stray outside, you can always relax with a good book—such as “Crocheting Adventures With Hyperbolic Planes”. Or if that doesn’t appeal, there’s always the timeless classic, “Bombproof Your Horse”…

Some five miles south of Wick lies Sarclet Haven, another of Caithness’s deserted, haunted harbours—once a scene of thriving industry, now just a few ruined buildings, the tussocky grass littered with ankle-turning lumps of stone and rusty bits of cable.

The whole coast has numerous inlets like this, as though the shoreline of the east Highlands was an unfinished jigsaw that God left lying around while he went to answer the door, and never returned to—or maybe the box was missing a few pieces, I don’t know.

The remains of the Stevenson breakwater

A hundred and fifty years ago the harbour would have been packed with boats in the summer months for the herring fishing. But it was pretty much wrecked by the same terrible storms that finally demolished the Wick breakwater in 1872, and the fishcurers packed up and moved their business the few miles north to town.

On Sunday we parked the car at the top of the cliffs and followed the path, a gentle ramp really, down to the cove. We had it all to ourselves, except for the disapproving Calvinist seabirds, who seemed quite indignant that we were there to disturb them and not in church; and we could hear larks and curlews fooling about in the fields somewhere above the cliffs. The haven is filled with ghosts. There’s a roofless stone building for storing salt and barrels, and a great rusting windlass which was used to winch the boats up onto the shingle, and other human remains.

It’s very beautiful, and lonely, and sad. Sometimes I think if I win the lottery I shall hire a bunch of actors to recreate the fishing boom each summer for tourists in a place like Sarclet—a bit like Plimoth Plantation in Massachusetts but with added fish guts. Other times, I think I’ll just move somewhere warm, where the wind doesn’t strip trees like a nuclear blast and winter means maybe wearing long trousers, or any trousers come to that, and shall spend my days in a hammock on the beach sipping drinks I can’t pronounce and telling a spellbound audience tall tales about archives.

I’ve finished the first sleeve of the gansey: one down, one to go. The sleeve is just under 18 inches long, and the cuff is three inches; and I decreased down from 117 stitches to 96 for the cuff. So, now all I have to do is knuckle down and knit the other sleeve, which is good for the soul and reminds us that we are not put here on Earth for pleasure alone. If I can apply myself I might finish it by the end of the month.

Hopefully spring will have established itself properly by then. I was perhaps premature last week in my vernal celebrations – spring may’ve gone 2-0 up by half time, but winter has since equalised and it looks like we’re heading for penalties…

There are many things to dread about getting old, the worst of which is probably the delusion that the rest of the world is an idiot, and that everyone from President Obama to JK Rowling could have saved themselves no end of time if only they’d thought of calling you up and asking your advice first. (I mean, it’s just a phone call, Barack; how hard can it be?)

But now I’ve found two more. Top of the list is NHS Scotland’s lifesaving policy of do-it-yourself bowel cancer testing every two years—or, as I like to think of it, for those familiar with the great game of cricket, “slip fielding for poo”. (They’ve even done a delightful little video, with a catchy song called Test Your Poo. My favourite line? “Don’t be snobby, test your jobby”—see http://thepoosong.com.)

The Lifeboat House

But glaucoma tests as part of a trip to the optician aren’t that far behind. It all starts when the optician puts the anaesthetic in your eyes; it doesn’t actually hurt, but really gums them up, like using peanut butter and honey eyedrops. (It doesn’t help either that when you wipe it afterwards the hanky comes away bright yellow, as though you were crying saffron.)

Then they test peripheral vision. This means putting your head up against a machine shaped like a pair of buttocks and staring at a pinprick of light (some people pay good money in private clubs for experiences not dissimilar to this); when other flashes of light appear at random intervals, you have to press a clicker.

Actually, they call it a test for peripheral vision, but its real purpose is obviously a Catatonic Migraine Inducer. And in this it is very successful: I was seeing random flashes of light all the way home, and on into my sleep. Next day the world was at right angles to reality. (You can get the same effect, and much cheaper, by asking a friend to slam your head in the fridge door for a quarter of an hour.)

And what of the gansey? Well, I’ve finished the collar and started on the sleeve and have just decreased the gusset out of existence, which is the knitting equivalent of paying off the mortgage. Now comes the steady haul down the sleeve, which will involve a decrease rate of two stitches every 6 rows.

Turnstones by the river

Purists, look away now: for I have a confession to make. If you look closely, you’ll notice that the centre panel on the body is a chevron; but on the sleeve it’s a purl heapy thingy. I did this deliberately, as the heapy panel was just the right size for the shoulder strap (and whatever pattern is on the shoulder ends up in the centre of the sleeve). But it does mean that the body and the sleeves won’t mirror each other exactly. Do we care? A little, perhaps. But I won’t tell if you don’t.

And now it seems as if spring is almost upon us. The snowdrops are blooming, birds are roosting in the trees, and the temperature in Wick went off the scale at 10ºC on Sunday. If it wasn’t for the wind auditioning to understudy the typhoon in The Wizard of Oz it would be positively tropical. I should go outside and enjoy it—it’s just that I’m waiting for this phone call from Barack Obama…