Gansey Nation

  It’s not often that dear old Wick makes the news once in a week, let alone twice; but this has been a rather remarkable few days.

First of all, we were battered by storms and spring tides, culminating on Saturday in one of the biggest storms to hit the north-east coast of Scotland in living memory. (In my case, of course, that’s only just over a year.) Wick, helpfully described by the BBC as “near John o’Groats”, just in case you thought it might be in Cornwall, was pummelled, and the footage of tidal waves engulfing the lighthouse and breaching the sea wall is pretty spectacular, in a terrifying sort of way.

We decided to go up to John o’Groats (the one near Wick, in case you were wondering), which not only had rather good waves but also decent coffee, my prerequisite for facing the awesome power of nature. The harbour was swamped, and anxious fishermen could only watch helplessly as their boats were tossed about like toy ducks in the bath, the water foaming and heaving alarmingly, waves crashing over the walls or exploding in spray like artillery shells.

Wick was also in the news this week because the Nuclear Decommissioning Agency has finally given the green light (if you’ll pardon the expression, which seems a bit glow-in-the-dark-ish for all things nuclear) to build an archive for the records of the whole nuclear industry here. It’s due to open in 2016, by which time you won’t be able to throw a brick in the town without hitting an archivist. It’s good news for us, because the Caithness Archive is going to be housed there too, albeit in much the same way, given our relative sizes, that Jonah was housed by the whale. Suddenly the future exists.

Meanwhile, progress continues on the gansey: I’m almost two-thirds of the way up the back yoke and you can start to see how it’s going to look. (Of course, until it’s blocked you won’t see it properly—the way the stitches pull it out of shape resembles a plastic model of the Millennium Falcon melted in the microwave—but you get the general idea.) I’ll stop when I get to the shoulder strap, so I can knit it from the front and make the join at the back.

I’m down to about 3/4 of one eye now, the right one, which makes knitting and using a computer a little tricky, but still possible. I’m revising the sequel to The Wraiths of Elfael, which is now essentially finished, just a tweak here and there—and preparing my collection of 15 fantasy short stories for publication at Christmas.

Dive! Dive! Dive!

The collection is called “The Dragon of Stroma and Other Tales” after the lead story, and will be launched on Amazon for kindle on Christmas Eve. It will be available for free 24-26 December, along with Inquisition of Demons and Wraiths of Elfael on 25-26 December, in the hopes that people who get kindles for Christmas (or tablets with kindle apps) and who are looking for high quality free stuff to download and read, might be tempted…

My friend David in Edinburgh, for whom I knitted the bright fireman red Filey gansey, has yielded to my incessant nagging and sent me a picture of him wearing it. To my intense relief it seems to fit! (I’ve asked him not to wear it when he eventually visits the National Nuclear Archive, just in case someone mistakes him for a meltdown in the core reactor…)

Finally, don’t forget to check out our Gansey Nation store at Zazzle. Only seven days till Christmas! Think of the childish glee on their faces as they unwrap the present, then watch with malicious amusement as their delight melts away like an ice cream in summer when they find they’ve got a Gansey Nation coffee mug instead of the iPad Mini they were expecting…

It’s December and winter has arrived in Caithness, sub-zero temperatures and ice and snow. Roads and pavements so slippery you see people walking over them as gingerly as if they were balancing on a tightrope with someone twanging the other end. People walking in slow motion, like an army of zombie tai chi practitioners.

With the same degree of common sense that led me once to try to fix a light socket without turning off the electricity first I decided it was probably all right to cut across the car park down by the river to get to work. I got about a third of the way before I realised the scale of my mistake, round about the time I noticed a seagull skating elegantly across the surface of a puddle, finishing with a pirouette and triple Salchow. (Fortunately, a British person’s fear of humiliation is a force strong enough to defy gravity, so I didn’t fall over; but it was touch and go once or twice, and one or two hungry seagulls started following me hopefully, like vultures in the desert.)

This far north, at this time of year the sun doesn’t get all the way up but describes a low, lazy rainbow arc across the sky, like a hungover college student who can’t be bothered to get out of bed. But at least some of the sunrises and sunsets are spectacular, so much so that I have to turn the radio on to make sure the nuclear power plant up the road isn’t getting frisky.

On the gansey, I’ve divided front and back and progress is once more rapid, if not swift. Or at least it would be if I didn’t keep making mistakes! Part of the trouble is my deteriorating eyesight, which makes it hard to notice if I miss out a couple of pattern rows. Fortunately Margaret is usually able to delve back an astonishing number of rows to fix things for me, like those divers who swim down to the deep ocean depths and come back up with exotic coral. (My only worry now is it’s happening so frequently she’s given me an automated helpline number to call.)

I’m working on the back first, as is my wont, to make sure I get the pattern bedded in properly first. (It doesn’t really matter, but it means that by the time I do the front, the pattern is in my fingers, as it were.) Like all Hebridean patterns, the rich detail is pretty stunning, like a woollen mosaic.

Right. Time for some parish notices. First of all congratulations to Lynne for this rather stunning cardigan. It’s from an old Vogue Knitting magazine, and the original designer is Isaac Mizrahi, though Lynne has freely adapted it. Just in time for winter!

Secondly, we get a number of requests from people looking for someone to knit them a gansey (see Sam’s plea here). I’d like to add a page to the site featuring knitters who take commissions. So if you know of anyone who does this (or you do it yourself), please drop me an email.

Finally, and for Christmas, we’ve decided to develop some Gansey Nation merchandise using designs from the ganseys and Margaret’s photographs—coffee mugs, tote bags, baseball caps and even a gansey-themed Christmas ornament. So watch this space—in the course this week we hope to go live with a modest range. If it works out, who knows? But in the meantime, if you’re looking for that elusive Christmas present for the gansey knitter who has everything…

So there we are, the centre strap is finished, the herringbone picked clean as the cat’s dinner, all two and a half inches of it. Next week, it will be on to the yoke. Meanwhile, I’ve made a start on the underarm gussets, increasing at my usual rate of 2 stitches every four rows.

I was down in Edinburgh at the start of last week (I’m on the board of my professional association, and once a year they take pity on me and meet in Scotland, though Wick is still 250 miles north of Edinburgh). The city was heaving because Scotland were playing New Zealand at rugby—Scotland got thumped, so as an undercover Kiwi I decided it was prudent to keep my head down on the airport bus and not perform a celebratory haka.

We stayed in The Scotsman hotel, just round the corner from Waverley rail station on North Bridge. It’s the old Scotsman newspaper building, all wood panelling and columns and marble, and is really rather swish (I spent one evening fending off chambermaids desperate to turn down the bedspread, and once while one kept me talking at the door another slipped in and folded the toilet paper into what looked like origami cranes so sharp I almost cut my—well, I almost cut myself). The breakfast menu ran to two pages, and when I said I only wanted toast and coffee the disbelieving waiter went off sobbing and had to be consoled by the concierge.

Edinburgh Airport: The departure lounge for Wick

I always lose my bearings in hotels. (Perhaps like migrating geese I need the sun to navigate? But then I get lost outdoors as well, so perhaps not.) The reception staff got so used to seeing me walking past the front desk every ten minutes or so, that by Tuesday morning they’d stopped asking if I needed help and just took me by the arm, gently spun me round, and propelled me in the right direction with a shove between the shoulder blades. Personally, I think it was a hotel built on the same principles as Hogwarts and the stairs rearranged themselves every night.

It was great being back in Edinburgh—the crowds, the bustle, the coffee shops, the homeless beggars, the roadworks. I went on a mission to try to find an iPad Mini, but everywhere had sold out, no more expected till the end of the month. Sales staff had the harassed look of aid officials in an African township, fending off desperate consumers with machine guns fired in the air. I got to play with a demo model at the airport but the assistant asked me to put it down; he said my drool was damaging the finish.

Speaking of drool, I’ve been slowly recovering my pancake mojo, inspired by the need to use up leftover bananas each weekend. There’s something about the acid combination of lemon juice blended with the rich flavour of ripe bananas and the double-shotgun-sweetness-blast of maple syrup that is the taste equivalent of jumping into the ocean on New Year’s Day: potentially fatal, but invigorating. (Thing is, I’m just not sure my left arm’s supposed to feel numb like this…)

Another nifty idea for using up leftover gansey wool from Judit this week (it’s an open question which will run out first—the ideas or the wool!). It’s a very spiffy collar, which you can find over on Judit’s gallery page.

So now I have to sit down, get out the calculator and plan out the yoke—horizontally and vertically. I’ve been toying with a gansey app for iPads and cell phones, and I think what it needs is the functionality to adapt any pattern (a tree, a chevron) or combination of patterns to the number of stitches you need. So you pick which patterns you want to incorporate and it automatically resizes them for you.

Meanwhile, however…