I’ve reached the fun part of writing my novel—the revision. This is where I go through it line by line, making sure the plot adds up, and smoothing out some of the worst bits of prose and dialogue. (Most of my books go through at least half a dozen of these revisions.)
It’s much easier deleting a thousand words when you’ve got 75,000 to play with; far harder right at the start when you only have, say, 2,000. Now I sit back and nonchalantly send wave after wave of paragraphs to annihilation, like a general in the First World War overseeing a campaign; only yesterday I had an entire chapter shot for cowardice.
It’s quite addictive, and in fact I’ve been spending so much time on it I haven’t been doing a lot of knitting this week—just enough to finish the other shoulder of the gansey and make a start on the collar. There’s a lot more knitting in this kind of shoulder strap than the usual ridge and furrow kind, and the constant flipping of the ensemble at the end of each row takes time, as if a bagpiper had to invert his pipes every six bars or so.
You can flip a coin for our weather at the moment: heads it’s horrid, tails it’s beautiful. Sunday we turned up tails, so we took a short trip down to the abandoned harbour of Latheronwheel, about 17 miles south of Wick.
The coast of Caithness is dotted with these derelict harbours, atmospheric ruins of a lost way of life, as remote now as the days before the internet. To get to Latheronwheel you turn off the main road, pass through the village (basically, a long street lined with houses) and go down a narrow road that drops away steeply to the sea.
Well, it’s lovely. I had no idea, and I’ve driven past the turning dozens of times.
The bay is partially enclosed by sheer cliffs, two piers reaching out like a crab’s pincers defining the harbour itself. In the middle of the bay is one of those stacks of rock that seem to defy the laws of physics, jutting up like a broken tooth. There’s a deep burn and an old stone bridge and a trail for hikers through the woods, and even the remains of a lighthouse high up on the cliffs.
Latheronwheel harbour was built in the 1840s, and it’s said that at one time some 50 boats fished out of it. Now it’s just day trippers like us. (While we were there two 4x4s packed with families and dogs turned up; on reflection we probably shouldn’t have laughed quite so much when one of the teens slipped on the slime of a slipway and slid knee-deep into the ocean like a slow-motion replay of a downhill skier at the Winter Olympics. It was pretty funny, though.)
It’s not as secluded and private as Whaligoe, but it is pretty amazing. Sometimes—just sometimes—I almost don’t mind that the nearest Starbucks is 100 miles away.
First, a public service announcement. When applying spray-on underarm deodorant, do not, and this is very important, look in the direction of the spray with your mouth open, especially if your aim is bad. Trust me, you’ll thank me later.
Moving on. Having reached the stage in life that many men come to, when a visit to the barber’s doesn’t so much reveal a tonsure to rival Brother Cadfael’s as the summit of Mount Etna rising above the cloud layer, and a haircut becomes a sort of inverted shoeshine, I decided to invest in a pair of those do-it-yourself electric clippers.
Well, it’s a lot of fun, though my approach really has more to do with sheep shearing than anything you’d recognise as hairdressing. They cut quite short – 15mm is the longest setting – which leaves me looking rather intense, like someone just returned from penal servitude in Botany Bay. I find that if I’m stuck in a long queue in the Post Office all I have to do is let my eyes bulge, dribble some saliva down my chin and growl in a sort of throaty undertone and the line just melts away.
It also has the benefit that I no longer have to bother with barbers’ small talk, which in Caithness consists of the wind, holidays, rain, existential terror, the wind again and how far a hat will travel in a good easterly. (And why do hairdressers have such cold fingers?)
On the gansey, I’ve completed one of the right-angled shoulder straps and begun the other. No videos this time, sorry, because I’m still feeling my way. (I plan to do this same technique on my next gansey, though, and will hopefully do a proper video then.)
Briefly, the technique I’ve settled on goes like this. First, decrease by 25% on the final row of each shoulder, ready for the shoulder strap. This is because you knit more stitches horizontally than you do rows vertically by a ratio of about 4:3; and as you are knitting the shoulder strap at right angles to the body, if you don’t you’ll end up with too many rows relative to the body and your shoulder will ruck up like a switchback.
Now, you’ll have the two needles (back and front sides) ready, with all the shoulder stitches on them for whichever shoulder you’re knitting. Orientate them so the neckline will be the closest point to you and the armhole will be farthest away. It’s like looking down a gorge.
Cast on about 2 inches’ worth of stitches onto the left-hand needle. These stitches will form the foundation of your shoulder strap (for this pattern, I cast on 20: 18 for the pattern and 1 at each side to join to the body). Now you’re ready to get started. (And remember, you only need 2 needles to do this.)
Knit the first row of your pattern, right to left, transferring the stitches onto your right-hand needle as you go, in the usual way. When you get to the last of your cast-on stitches, knit it together with the first body stitch (they’re both on the same needle so it’s easy to knit the two together). You now have a thin line of stitches bridging the two needles like a rope ladder across a gorge – that’s your first full shoulder row.
Turn the jumper over so the underside, or reverse side, is facing you. (It’s upside down now.) Slip the stitch you just decreased onto your new right-hand needle without any further knitting (each of the end stitches are purely there to join the shoulder with the body). Knit another row of your pattern, but as a purl row this time because it’s inverted – i.e., standard front-and-back knitting. At the end, join the last shoulder stitch and the next shoulder stitch together with a purl two together decrease, as before.
Turn it right way up again. Slip the first stitch onto your right-hand needle. Knit a regular knit row. At the end, decrease/join another two stitches. Turn it over. Slip the first stitch. Knit a purl row. Decrease/join another two stitches, turn it right way up again. And, as they say, so on.
As ever, it’s easier to do than to describe. Which you’d have to say, is lucky for all of us…
And all of a sudden it’s February, and we’re one-twelfth of the way through 2014, the days are getting longer and next Christmas no longer seems quite so far away.
It’s been a wet and windy, dreary winter, with January hanging on a week too long. Even the seagulls down by the harbour have stopped hassling passers-by for scraps, but just wearily stick out a webbed foot at you as you go by like a Edinburgh beggar with a tin cup, and looking for smaller birds to mug.
And then, on Saturday, the sun came out, which was something of a shock—for a minute I thought the bedroom was on fire. So we went up to John O’Groats.
As we drove up the coast road we went through a phenomenon new to me. It looked like a great cloud of smoke, or low cloud, but turned out to be sea spray blown in by the strong east wind coming in off the ocean, so that for a time the air and water seemed equally filled with salt. If only I’d had some chips and vinegar.
It was high tide at John O’Groats, and the waves were churned to a heavy swell, so that there was a good chance that in future the place might end up twinned with Atlantis. The waves poured over the harbour walls and drenched the place so that the women who runs the “most northerly gift shop in the UK” at times seemed to be peering through the window of a submersible in a car wash.
When we got back we took a detour to see what Wick Bay looked like. The police had closed off the North Shore road to traffic—what with it being underwater and all—so we drove up onto cliffs on the south. Well, it was humbling. Wave after wave was rolling in, blown by the wind, filling the width of the bay, crashing over the harbour walls and drenching the lighthouse. The scale looked all wrong, like a model, tiny structures dwarfed by towering breakers.
Down in the inner harbour there are a series of vents that run along the quayside. Now they were putting on their own show, as the waves smashed into the quay, disappeared underneath it and then shot out of the vents like a poor man’s version of the Las Vegas hotel fountains. It was as if a dozen whales had been lured under the quay and then trained to spout in turn, a new sport of synchronised spouting.
I’m still hanging in there with the gansey, doing about 45 minutes each night, or three rows. Which shows how things can mount up even if you’re not in the mood, as I’m just about to divide for the neck. If I’m lucky, and not washed away (“all that we found was this circular needle”) I should finish the front this week, and maybe even join a shoulder or two.
And it’s February. The sun has shone once—it may even do so again. I’ve been sending out a dove every week since winter began. Last night it returned with an olive leaf in its beak. (Today it hasn’t come back—I think the gulls have got him…)
Saturday surf at JoG
Surf’s up . . . and over
Synchronised spouting in Wick
Wick lighthouse
. . . and Sunday’s surf at JoG. Move over Bellagio
It’s been a horrible few days here in Caithness, just horrible, gale force winds and driving rain. The best way to imagine what it’s been like is go find a trailer for one of those “Deadliest Catch” programmes showing lobstermen on a heaving deck somewhere of Newfoundland, drenched by icy spray and buried under waves the size of sperm whales—well, it’s been just like that, only with slightly more lobsters.
On top of that, we can’t get a television signal—the wind’s blown the dish out of alignment (though to be fair we’re probably ahead of the game still having a roof). I had a vision of several windblown seagulls and crows all impaled on the satellite dish’s spike and dragging it down, creating a “dish kebab”—but no; it’s just the wind.
Now, here’s the thing. I know we live in kind of an out-of-the-way place, a little off the beaten track; but there are over 14,000 people in Wick and Thurso, and a lot of them have satellite dishes. So guess how many tv aerial repair guys there are up here? (Clue: you won’t need more than one finger on one hand – seriously—look it up!) And he’s understandably a little busy right now; his waiting time is a week.
It’s a strange thing being without television. We don’t watch a whole lot, mostly reruns of old SF shows and the odd documentary, so it’s not exactly a hardship—but the thing I miss most is the news and weather. I feel oddly cut off from the world, even though the information can all be accessed online. Ah well; just a few more days and I can go back to watching reruns of Star Trek.
A view of the harbour lighthouse from the dry cleaner’s car park.
The eagle-eyed among you will see that I’ve not made a lot of progress on the gansey this week. Well, it had to come to an end sometime and, to be honest, I’ve just run out of steam. (That, and the fact that’s been so cold I can hardly hold a needle without my hand shaking so badly it ends up doing reconstructive nasal surgery.) But one of the nice things about this pattern is that it doesn’t take much concentration, so I can still keep plugging away even when I’m not in the mood.
I have instead been writing again, trying to finish a novel I started last summer, another Victorian murder mystery, just a bit of fun really. I hope to get the rough first draft completed this week. Then the fun starts: deleting it and rewriting the whole damn thing from scratch…
Still, at least I’m not distracted by wanting to sneak downstairs and watch television. But what does irk me is the thought that I wasted a whole £1.50 on a listings magazine I can’t use. Hey, look: Deadliest Catch is on—oh wait…
I was going to complain about the heavy fogs we’ve been getting lately, but last night I realised that this was in fact salt spray which had dried and crusted on the windows.
Then I was going to complain about the winds and driving rain—but today the sun’s shining from a clear blue sky—so clear I even caught a glimpse of God getting out of the shower, unless it was merely a lesser archangel—and it’s really rather wonderful. (And even the gales gave us some pretty spectacular waves in the harbour – see video links below.)
I mentioned last week that we drove down to my parents’ for a quiet New Year in rural Northamptonshire. Back when I was growing up there were a lot of Scots who lived nearby, who’d come down to work in the steelworks at Corby. My parents used to have big Hogmanay parties, and so I naturally came to associate New Year’s Eve with crowds of drunken expatriate Scotsmen singing along to “Donald Where’s Your Trousers”—and even now, despite all the medication and psychoanalysis, those memories come back to haunt me.
If I am ever recruited by military intelligence and sent on a dangerous mission, and am captured by the enemy and interrogated, the scene will probably play out like this:
Interrogator: So, Mr Reid, your fingernails have been pulled out, your skin flayed, you’ve been deprived of sleep and yet you still refuse to talk?
Me: I’ll never betray my country! Never!
Interrogator: We even attached electrodes to your dangly bits—though we had to stop when you started enjoying it too much… So there is nothing we can do to loosen your tongue?
Me: Nothing! I’ll take my secrets to the grave.
Interrogator: Hmm. Do you know what this is, Mr Reid?
Me: I can’t see anything. You plucked out my eyeballs, remember?
Interrogator: Oh, yes, sorry. Let me describe it, then. It’s an LP, entitled “Andy Stewart’s Greatest Hits”.
Me: (nervously): Er…
Interrogator: Let me see. Side One, Campbeltown Loch, The Muckin’ O’ Geordie’s Byre, and—what’s this?—Donald Where’s Yer Troosers?
Me: No! Anything but that!
Interrogator: Let’s just give it a spin, shall we?
[Pause of 5 seconds while record plays]
Me: So, what would you like to know?
Turning to the gansey, I’ve now finished the back and just made a start on the front.The armhole is about 7 1/2 inches from gusset to the start of the shoulder strap (and interestingly took just under 100 grams of wool to knit).
Because it’s a Scottish gansey I’ve decided to do a traditional Scottish shoulder, by knitting the strap at right angles to the body and continuing it down the sleeve. The pattern will be the central chevron from the body; the tricky part is binding off at each edge as you work along the shoulder.
The point to remember is that you knit more rows to the inch than stitches—in my case, a ratio of 12:9. So I need 25% fewer stitches along the edge of my shoulder, or else the shoulder will ridge up like a switchback by the time it’s finished. (I’ll say more about this in a few weeks when we get to it, but for now I’ve decreased each of my shoulders by 25% on the final row.)
Oh, and I’ve also remembered what looking through my windows reminds me of—it’s just like having cataracts all over again!
I’ve reached the fun part of writing my novel—the revision. This is where I go through it line by line, making sure the plot adds up, and smoothing out some of the worst bits of prose and dialogue. (Most of my books go through at least half a dozen of these revisions.)
You can flip a coin for our weather at the moment: heads it’s horrid, tails it’s beautiful. Sunday we turned up tails, so we took a short trip down to the abandoned harbour of Latheronwheel, about 17 miles south of Wick.
Well, it’s lovely. I had no idea, and I’ve driven past the turning dozens of times.
Latheronwheel harbour was built in the 1840s, and it’s said that at one time some 50 boats fished out of it. Now it’s just day trippers like us. (While we were there two 4x4s packed with families and dogs turned up; on reflection we probably shouldn’t have laughed quite so much when one of the teens slipped on the slime of a slipway and slid knee-deep into the ocean like a slow-motion replay of a downhill skier at the Winter Olympics. It was pretty funny, though.)
