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!
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…
So here it is, as the poet said, merry Christmas, everybody’s having fun. (Disclaimer: your experience may differ.) I’m on holiday now till the feast of the Epiphany and I feel a bit like a prisoner released after decades in confinement: all this free time, and I’m not sure how to fill it. (Still, it’s nice not having to slop out anymore.)
I don’t know when Christmas really starts for you: for me it always used to be when the BBC broadcasts the service of Nine Lessons and Carols from King’s College, Cambridge at 3pm on Christmas Eve. (Although, if I’m honest, the arrangements of the carols are so etiolated, so refined and tasteful, they might as well be served on a china plate with cucumber sandwiches.)
The festive Wick-John o’Groats Airport runway lights
But lately we’ve adopted a much more festive and jolly tradition to kick-start Christmas, which of course means watching The Nightmare Before Christmas and The Muppet Christmas Carol on dvd (and singing along with the songs “there’s only one more sleep till Ch-r-i-i-st-mas”).
I was going to regale you with a lengthy review of the year, but what with the whole memory loss thing the past is not so much another country as an alternate universe requiring a whole new type of physics to access. So instead I’ll just raise a glass and ask you to join me in a toast to the coming year.
The flight arrives from Edinburgh – perhaps with Santa?
There’s an old Peanuts cartoon which has Lucy flinging the bedclothes off Linus’s bed and crying, “Time to flinch from another day!”. Well, that’s how I usually feel about years. But not this time. I feel—how shall I describe it? Cautious optimism? Well, let’s not get carried away. Less dread? Hmm, I don’t know, a toast to a “less dreadful” year sounds more than a little defeatist.
Never mind—here’s to 2014 anyway. May your yarn be free of knots and never tangle, and may your circular needles never snap spilling dozens of stitches into the empty air like parachutists jumping out of a plane over occupied France (you listening up there, knitting gods?).
Gansey Nation is taking a break over the festive season, and will return on 13 January 2014. So till then have a happy Christmas, a great New Year, and we’ll see you on the other side…
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…
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.
