Gansey Nation

The Front

Once more I seem to be participating in a cosmic game of whack-a-mole with fate, fate being the one holding the rubber mallet. For yet again I’m heavy with a cold, and the world feels remote and far away. (Of course, I live in Wick, so the world really is far away, but you know what I mean.) I’ve developed an irritating cough which makes me sound like a Klingon complaining about a parking ticket, and my sneezes resemble the birth of the universe, a parallel universe in which mucus replaces carbon as the basis for life.

As a result, I’ve been reclining and gansifying like nobody’s business, and have finished the back and back shoulder straps. (I followed the traditional rule of thumb by dividing the body into approximate thirds: so as it’s 186 stitches wide, I have 63 stitches for each shoulder and 60 for the central neck portion.)

The Back

You can see the full effect of the pattern now, a purple chequerboard. (If I ever win the lottery I shall bury the gold in a field somewhere and knit another gansey like this with the location woven into the pattern.) To bring the armhole up to the full eight inches I added an extra three purl rows at the top, to mirror the ones at the start of the yoke; these are always nifty ways to make the pattern fit.

In other news, I heard a remarkable story this week from one of the small fishing villages down the coast from us, about a man who was drowned. It’s a sad story, so I won’t mention names or go into detail; and besides, it’s really the sequel that caught my interest.

The Pattern

Well, so the man went into the water and was drowned, and his body wasn’t found after the usual searches. So the local fishermen took a rowing boat, and got a live cockerel and placed it in a wooden cage, and then they rowed up and down the harbour with the cockerel in the bows. The belief was that if the cock crowed, that was where the man’s body lay.

Back and forth they went, but it never made a sound, except once when it made gave a sort of croak. They found the man’s cap, but the body was never discovered.

Isn’t that amazing? Like something out of Thomas Hardy, and yet it dates from the 1930s. The newspaper account said that this practice was common in Scandinavia, but this was the first time it had been tried in the north Highlands. (As I’ve said before, the past really is another country; and it’s name is Caithness.)

Waves at John o’Groats Harbour

Another time I’ll tell the story of the Caithness witches who changed into cats to persecute a local blacksmith—perhaps next Halloween. (Though you’d think it would work better the other way round, wouldn’t you?)

Outside the skies are grey, rain is lashing the windows, the wind is buffeting the house and it’s a full week since we saw the sun—and there’s still a month to the winter solstice. Ah, well. As the soldiers used to say in the First World War: shouldn’t have joined if you can’t take a joke…

And there we are, another Halloween flitting past cackling on a witch’s broom, and no one so much as knocked at our door; for once I was rather disappointed, as I’d come up with a clever plan for lighting the house involving a captive trick-or-treater, a treadmill, a generator and a chocolate orange on a fishing line just out of reach; but then, life is full of disappointments.

I was on holiday last week, but it wasn’t the weather for doing much out of doors; on even the rare fine days the wind made it feel like you were standing slightly too close to a nuclear test site. Other days it rained (if you don’t live in the far north of Scotland, to understand the effect ask a friendly fireman to play his water jet over you next time a warehouse catches fire in a hurricane).

So all things considered, it’s not a surprise that I got a lot of knitting done (I also drank a lot of tea, mind you; I can multitask with the best): I’ve finished the body of the gansey and started the patterned yoke, as well as the gussets. It’s a simple pattern, so simple that even I can keep track of it without notes, yet the plain segments stand out like geometric fields seen from the air. I’m very pleased with the colour, too, which shows up the pattern most effectively.

Incidentally, the pattern appears in Mary Wright’s book and Michael Pearson’s, but is charted differently in each—Michael Pearson has the purl segments comprising solid blocks of purl rows, whereas Mary Wright has alternating purl and knit rows; I’ve decided to follow the latter, as this seems to be closer to the original photographs.

It’s just a short blog this week, as I’m still in holiday hibernation mode (in fact going back to work this morning hit me like a brick wrapped in a gansey knit sock), but there’s just time to offer congratulations to Jane on her splendid Child’s Guernsey Duffle Jacket” from “Traditional Knitting in the British Isles” by Gywn Morgan (published by Ward Lock, London, 1981), which you can view here. And, of course, the bonus of knitting for the very young is that you get to have another go every couple of years!

And now at Reid Towers all we have to do is try to work out what to do with all those piles of chocolates we bought in for Halloween, “just in case”—oh, wait…

And there we have it: the John Knaggs gansey is finished, washed and blocked and ready for the coming of winter. It’s taken just under three months, which may be the fastest gansey I’ve ever knit.

It helps that Derek, the friend it’s intended for, is a trim 38-inch chest. The jumper is blocked to 42 inches in the round, allowing him plenty of room, but as with any gansey involving body-length ridges or furrows it can be expanded quite a bit further if required—if, say, Derek ever acquires a taste for that rare Scottish delicacy, the deep-fried Mars bar.

It’s 25 inches long, and cuff to cuff it measures 51½ inches (though the fold-back cuffs offer further flexibility). If I were ever to knit the pattern again—which, at the moment, seems unlikely—I’d use slightly fewer stitches, or add cables to pull it in. The constant in-and-out of seed stitch and basket stitch does seem to have impacted on my stitch gauge.

Meanwhile, as I’m between ganseys, I decided to try my hand again at bread making this weekend. Alas, both my flour and yeast were past their use-by dates: even after a quarter of an hour of desperate kneading, which looked at though I was trying to administer CPR to a lifeless albino puppy, the dough stubbornly refused to rise. It lay there on the counter, flat and inert, like the brain of a deceased aquatic mammal ready for dissection, and it was pronounced dead at the scene. (I left it out for the seagulls, which explains why I found so many rolling on the ground groaning this morning, too heavy to take off.)

On a calm day . . .

I have another gansey project lined up, one that will take me into the New Year, and it’s another one for me (well, you can never have too many ganseys, can you?). But I’ll say more about that next week; for, you see, we have the remnants of ex-hurricane Gonzalo to deal with first, which is barrelling in towards Wick like a bowling ball aiming for a perfect strike.

Winds of 60-80 m.p.h. are predicted tonight and tomorrow (when they said we’d be blown away by the scenery of Caithness they weren’t kidding). The trees have lost most of their leaves already in the autumn gales; to be honest I’ll be grateful if we still have any trees left by Tuesday night. So forgive the brevity of this weeks’ blog: we’re off to batten down all available hatches and lash ourselves to the cooker, just in case.

And if you look out your window tomorrow morning and see someone in a fisherman’s sweater shooting past like a human cannonball on his way to Iceland, chances are it’ll be me…