Gansey Nation

The neighbours have a new dog, a big, boisterous, friendly pointer, and their cats are not amused. One of them coolly dealt with the situation in much the same way my brother handled my arrival as the newest member of the Reid family, by swatting it on the nose and then slamming its head repeatedly in the fridge door until it accepted who was boss.

The other feline, however, obviously abhors violence and prefers simply to keep out of the way. In other words, it haunts us much like the three spirits haunted Scrooge. It lurks in the bushes for you to open the front door and then all you see is a grey streak, like the starship Enterprise going into warp, as it shoots past you and whizzes up the stairs, and you have to go find it—as if life was one long game of hide-and-seek.

Or else it rolls around on its back on the warm gravel, waving its legs in the air like antennae, as though the other cat had stuck a rude notice on its back, and it was trying to get it off. It knows a soft touch when it sees one, and it’s obviously seen one in me; it collapses as soon as it sees me now, like one of those bendy toys held up by elastic, and waits.

I have to be careful though: I got the two cats mixed up once, and tried to pat the bully in an absent-minded moment. It wrapped itself around my fist like the creature from Alien attaching itself to John Hurt’s face and began to flay my hand like someone going for the world record parmesan-grating championship. I shook it off eventually—my last sight of it was a flying ball of spitting teeth and claws sailing over the neighbours’ hedge with a long-drawn-out r-r-r-o-o-o-w-w-w-l-l-l, like an ambulance siren vanishing in the distance—and ever since then I’ve carried an oven glove, just in case.

Meanwhile, I realise I’ve become a sort of chain-smoking gansey knitter: I start a new one from the embers of the old. (Am I addicted? Could I really, as I tell myself and my counsellor, give it up any time I liked? Of course I can—I just don’t choose to, that’s all.)

So, yes, I’ve already started the next one. It’s in Frangipani denim-coloured yarn, but we won’t fall out if you call it sky blue. It’s going to be for me, and will hopefully be ready for the autumn, where I have a feeling I’m going to need it. I’ve cast on 388 stitches for the welt, and have just increased by 32 stitches to 420 for the body. I’ll reveal the pattern next week.

And it’s really spring! Or nearly. Yesterday I almost loosened my scarf, which is as good a sign as hearing the first cuckoo. Before you know it I’ll be down to just the one pair of long johns…

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…