Gansey Nation

And here we are, the first blog of 2014, which is the blogging equivalent of waking up with a hangover and in someone else’s underwear, and finding you’ve shaved your tongue by mistake. (Actually, I did once brush my teeth with shaving cream when hung over, and I don’t recommend it—apart from the taste, you get this rabid dog/ foaming mouth effect, and it doesn’t half make a mess on the mirror if you sneeze.)

Anyway, a happy New Year to all, and I hope Santa was kind. We spent Christmas week here in Caithness, which meant battening all available hatches and enduring wave after wave of low pressure systems sweeping across the UK, bringing with them storm force winds and floods. Parts of Britain are so wet you might as well start gathering two of every animal and taking up carpentry.

Actually, the winds were pretty severe. I joked elsewhere that it was like having someone rev up the engines of a 747 across the road from you, but there really were times when it felt just like that. We also had a chance to observe God’s version of Pooh Sticks, where He’d select a seagull at random and see how long it took for the wind to deposit it in Greenland (about half an hour, at a conservative estimate).

Then, after Christmas, and braving the elements, we went down to the Midlands for Hogmanay with my family—a 1,200-mile round trip made even more worthwhile by the fact that it gets lighter an hour earlier, and darker an hour later, than in Wick (so it’s not just a social call, it also serves as our yearly anti-rickets boost).

In gansey news, as you’ll see from the pictures, I’ve managed to fit in a fair bit of knitting these last few weeks. I’ve started the pattern and divided front and back. And am a shade over halfway up the back.

The pattern is Donald Angus of Caithness’s gansey, as featured in Rae Compton and Henrietta Munro’s booklet, “They Lived By The Sea”. I’ve adjusted the width of the pattern bands to fit my stitches, but otherwise it’s pretty much the same (I’d normally add cables to a pattern like this, but as I plan to give the finished gansey to Wick museum I figure I should stick to the script, for once).

It’s a striking pattern and, as Rae Compton observes, it’s hard to believe that such a richly textured effect is achieved only by the use of knit and purl stitches. (It’s very easy to knit, too.) It’s quite different to my usual patterns, but I like it a lot.

Now, in our first parish notices of the year, for all of you who asked Gail for pictures of the child’s cardigan she’d made using gansey patterns, she’s sportingly sent us  pictures which you can see here, and dead impressive it is too. Also, Laura has sent a picture of her completed gansey, a splendid combination of patterns in dark navy (but looking much lighter in the photo). Warmest congratulations to both.

So there we are. I’ve already survived my first week back at work, though it left me feeling like I’d been beaten up by orcs—so that’s one down, 51 to go. Now all I have to do is figure out who this underwear belongs to…

There are pros and cons to living this far north in the winter. The biggest con is of course the lack of daylight, with the sun effectively starting to set just after it’s risen (9.00 am at this time of year). On the other hand, we do get some very spectacular sunrises and sunsets. On a clear morning the sunrise can last over half an hour, the sky filled from horizon to horizon with vibrant streaks of red and gold (or “God’s nosebleed”, as I like to think of it).

I was off last week on holiday and a cold promptly invaded me like a barbarian horde, so in fact I spent quite a lot of my time in bed with a chest infection, practicing my wheezing. It felt as though an invisible cat was sleeping on my chest, and I discovered my inner 80 year-old every time I climbed the stairs. (It’s back to work this week, so of course I feel much better.)

Finally finished!

I probably got sick from the weather. In the last week we’ve gone from temperatures of -2º to +10ºC, and from blizzards to blue skies. In fact, the only constant has been the gusts of 70-80mph, and if Mary Poppins ever tried to pay us a visit, odds are she’d end up somewhere over Norway before she could say “spit-spot”. (Out of curiosity I just looked it up the Norwegian for “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious”; apparently it’s “superoptikjempefantafenomenalistisk”. You’re welcome.)

L: How it looks on the pattern leaflet. R: How it looks knitted up. Not happy with the colour difference.

Still, one thing about being ill, but not too ill, is that you can knit and spray yourself with mucus at the same time (I believe it’s called multi-tasking). So I’ve got rather a lot of knitting done in the last few days, as you’ll see from the photographs. The body’s plain as far as the yoke, and plain knitting always goes quickly; I’m trying to knit a little looser than I usually do, but I’m still slightly stunned at how well it’s going. Maybe I should be sick more often?

And it’ll soon be Christmas. We went to get our tree on Saturday, a six-foot monster all the way from Dunnet Forest. Manhandling it into the house felt a bit like teaching a yeti how to waltz, and now it looms in our lounge, massive as a troll from a Harry Potter movie (albeit a very twinkly troll), exuding a scent of pine so strong it’s like living in an air freshener commercial. I think it’s living on woodlice careless enough to venture in reach of its branches.

See you next week for the last blog before the Christmas break—by which time the solstice will have passed, and the nights will already be getting longer (who said I was a pessimist?). Now it’s time to go toss the yule log and go deck someone with a bough of holly, or whatever the damn’ custom is…

 And the moral of the story is, when you’re not feeling well, whatever you do, don’t tell your doctor…

You see, my cold had finally obeyed the laws of gravity and sunk to my chest last week, so I was off work for a couple of days, breathing with a sound like a very old dachshund, or someone letting air slowly out of a balloon.

Sleeve detail

As it happened I had a doctors’ appointment on Thursday afternoon anyway. He listened to my breathing, checked my oxygen (low), frowned a doctorly frown and said he’d like me to pop along to the hospital for a couple of tests then and there, just to be on the safe side. So along I popped, and it was then my Kafkaesque nightmare began: for it turned out that the hospital intended to keep me in for 24-hour observation, and they were already preparing a bed for me.

Somehow “shortness of breath climbing the stairs” had been translated into “severe chest pains”, as though everything I said was being filtered through Google Translate into Japanese and back again. The hospital doctors (no fewer than four of them as the evening wore on) kept telling me that it was for my own good, while nurses (with forearms the size of a be-spinach’d Popeye) cracked their knuckles and kept themselves between me and the exit. The more I protested it was just a cold the more they shook their heads and smiled, like wolves who’ve just been asked the quickest way home by a very naïve sheep.

Caithness sunset

It was like a movie where you’re driving through a strange town, get pulled over for a minor traffic violation, and the next thing you know you’re in a chain gang breaking rocks in the desert (and about to discover, as the song says, that—ahem— “fist can be a verb…”).

At last we cut a deal: I would be taken to A&E for some tests, and if they didn’t turn up anything bad I could go home. As it happened, before I could take all the tests some genuinely sick people turned up in ambulances and everyone kind of lost interest in me. (I have to say, it’s a desperately sad experience sitting in an emergency room pleading to be allowed to take your pathetic little cold home, while from next bed you can hear doctors fighting to save the life of a cardiac arrest patient.)

Finally, some time after 9.00pm, remembering I hadn’t eaten since noon, I decided to discharge myself by the simple expedient of walking out—home for a late-night Thanksgiving supper of ice cream with lashings of self-pity.

Still, as Margaret pointed out to me next morning, at least I wasn’t dead. In fact, I’m determined not to die for the next few days, just so the doctors can’t say at my graveside, We told you so.

Also, the Hebridean Island at the Edgists have been in touch to say that they have (English language) copies of Stella Ruhe’s splendid new book Dutch Traditional Ganseys for sale – see their website for details. (And while you’re there, take a look at some of the stunning photographs on the blog—and try not to break the tenth commandment!)

Oh, and Mrs Laidlaw’s claret gansey is now washed and blocked. Tune in next week to find out what comes next—assuming I don’t run into any doctors in the next few days…